How To Stop "Got A Minute Meetings" As A Real Estate Team Leader

Welcome back, Business Freedom podcast listeners. On today's episode, we are going to talk about how to stop, quote, unquote, got a minute? Meetings. So as a real estate team leader, if you're making that transition from busy, top producing agent, you hired an administrator, maybe part time, they went to full time. You brought in a few buyer agents and you got them up and running. They're productive now maybe they're selling two to three homes a month. You've got this small team going. You're still doing production, you're doing like four to five homes a month. You're managing all of the backstage of the business. You're answering all their questions, you're holding them accountable, like your life is actually not a whole lot easier than it was before you started a team. So you're in that messy and mushy middle, as we call it. One thing that will kill you, it'll kill your life spirit, it'll kill your productivity, it will crush your dreams, is the fact that when you surround yourself with people, the likelihood that they want you, the got a minute meeting. It's like, hey, you got a minute? You know, I have this thing, you got a minute. You got a minute, you got a minute. It increases dramatically. And there's some, some real. I want to kind of go, go big picture here first. And then I'm going to get tactile and give you some real, some strategies to have this not happen. And it's going to come down to the cadence, the monthly, weekly, daily cadence that you follow on your team. First, I want to talk about, you know, when you build a team, it adds complexity in terms of communication. So if you go from one person where you communicate just in your head, there's no, well, theoretically there could be. You could misunderstand yourself if you're bipolar. And most team leaders and entrepreneurs, business owners, are sort of crazy in their head many times. But let's say you add one person. So one person. There's only one line of communication. I have a direct conversation with my administrator. And if I have any inkling that they may have misunderstood what I said, I can say, just repeat that back to me so I can make sure that we're on the same page. Or you can make sure that you say the same thing, you know, multiple times as you really need to do to any team member for them to really understand that this thing is really important, that it gets done this way, or this is a high priority thing. So one line of communication, let's say you, you have an administrator and two buyer agents. So there's four people on the team. When you have four people on a team, there are six lines of communication. There's one with each of the people. So that's 1, 2, 3. So you as the team leader, your Administrator, Buyer Agent 1, Buyer Agent 2, Buyer Agent 1, and Buyer Agent 2 can talk, and each buyer agent can talk to the administrator separately. So there's six lines of communication when you have four people. When you go to seven people, and I won't do the whole how it works, there are 21 lines of communication. So you say thing something to one person, there's 21 lines of communication. Or even if you. If you say something at a team meeting where all other six people are there and you make sure that they understood it the right way. Are there any questions? Let's hash this out. It's really important. Get to that in a second. That's the only way to minimize these got a minute meetings. And then structurally, we'll talk about, you know, office hours for your agents here in a second. But just think about seven people. There are 20, 21 lines of communication. If you double that to 14, let's say you're a larger real estate team. Right now my real estate team is, I guess, with ownership, it's 14, but there's 12 sort of players. We have five salespeople right now, seven administrators, two runners out of the seven administrators. So really five admin, five sales and two runners. We'll do like 3.4, 3.5 million this year. Really productive group of people. But there's 14 people. There's 91 lines of communication on a. And that's a really small business. It's only 14 people, you know, three and a half million. So three to four million of top line revenue. And there's 91 lines of communication with 14 people. And so this got a minute thing, we have new agents doing got a minutes with more tenured agents. We have ISAs. Well, we only have one ISA, but we'll have an ISA doing a got a minute with an agent. We'll have an agent doing a got a minute with the transaction coordinator. Transaction coordinator doing a got a minute like it is insanity. And so here is the solve to it. And it comes down to cadence and a cadence of communication that will have your team consistently on the same page. And then the things that are truly got a minutes will minimize as you train your agents to solve their own problems. And then structurally, you'll have time in your schedule as the team leader. If you're the one that needs to get with them on a deal issue or whatnot. It'll have to be during office hours and those are just posted. Office hours is just a time block in your calendar where you're available for the got a minute meetings. But you have now consolidated a 10 hour day of got a minute meetings into 30 minutes where you're just catching up on email and people are coming in for got a minutes and they just, you know, they know that you're available during that time. So let's talk about a cadence, a communication communication cadence on a real estate team. Let me start in the weekly. So yeah, let me start. Well, let me, let me frame this as monthly. So every agent on our team, twice a month they get a business review where essentially we're sitting down with them and we're giving them a coaching session. We're doing a review of their business. Everything from the amount of leads they got to the appointments that they set versus inside sales setting for them. You know, their conversion rates set to met met to signed, you know, any price improvement conversations that need to have happen, any you know, productivity issues, if they're out of their time blocks, you know, what's going on for them personally. What's, how's the home life? It's a full on coaching conversation. Those are scheduled in there twice a month. And I would really recommend, you know, if you're running lean on time, you could get away with once a month. That's the minimum. You know, if you're really providing a value to that agent that's joining your team, it has to be there has to be at least once a month. We do it twice a month and weekly we do weekly we do a team meeting. So everyone on the team gets together. So leadership has the opportunity to communicate with every person on team at the same time. So everyone's on the same page. Once a week on, and that's on Tuesdays. Once a week on Mondays we have a sales meeting and an operations meeting. So the company divides in half. There's sales and there's operations. Front stage and backstage they have a meeting where they discuss sort of functional issues with sales or with operations. So operations is all about making the client experience better, taking as much off of the agent's plates as they can. And then sales is all about how do I set more appointments, meet more buyers and sellers, have more consultations that are successful that lead to a new client and any of the issues that get in the way of that they script and all of that. Then, then let's break it down to the daily. So we talked about coaching sessions with your agents. Weekly functional backstage frontstage meeting, weekly team meeting where everyone's at the, at the same meeting, posted office hours. So once a day for 30 minutes you have to have a posted office hours. This is just a time where you're going to get together with anyone that has a question about anything about a deal issue. And then on a daily basis, it depends how your cadence is daily, daily is. And it's not so much, I guess. Yeah, I'll go into protected time. Protected time is 8 to 11 every day. So it's 3 hour time block every day where operations, our backstage is head down in files and our sales is head down and finding new business. That cadence in and of itself will allow both sales and operations to get enough work done in the morning where they can, if a got a minute does pop up, they can actually handle it. And so that sacred time in the morning would also helps eliminate got a minute meetings. Because everyone understands that they have that time to work on their business, to get their head in a file that needs to be moved along without questions, without being interrupted on the operations side. On the sales side, they're generating new business. They're intentional about their time in the morning. They're making their contacts. So I know I put a lot into this. And when you look at your time, the question is, are you really making the best use of your time? Are got a minute meetings eating into all of your productive, your high dollar productive activities? DPAs, our got a minute meetings eating into all of that. And then you're ending up having to catch up on email at night. You're doing things when you should be with your family because you didn't have a structure or cadence in place to handle the goddamn things during the day. So hopefully there's value in this. I know it was not a very sexy podcast episode. Oftentimes the non sexy, the most tactical stuff is the most valuable. So this is really, really important that you get this cadence right. The one thing I'll add, so I went monthly, I went weekly, I went daily. We also do a quarterly and that's we do quarterly conversations with our team members. So with everyone on your team, you have a 45 to 60 minute conversation about what's working, what's not working, and open, honest conversation from their perspective, from your perspective. That's the one thing I'll add in here that will eliminate, you know, any sort of uncertainty about how they're doing in their position where they're going in their position, you know, for them to know that they're adding value in the way that you see it, see their position, adding the most value. So not sure if it's exactly into got a minute Meetings. All of this structure and cadence though, is what we teach in real estate B school. If all of this is a little bit like, I don't really get it and I know I need it and I have these levels of complexity and I have people in my world now that I'm not entirely sure if I'm honoring them or serving them the way that I should. And I'm a little insecure about it. Just reach out. All we have to offer is a conversation about where your business is, where you want it to be, what's holding you back. We call it our business growth strategy session. We also have a 30 day program called our pilot program and we help you build out a three year picture, a one year plan, 90 days, break it down to week, to the day, pick rocks and choose measurables. We do a whole plan with you in a 30 day period and it's a free program to those that qualify. So go to realestatebschool.com, click on Book A free business growth strategy session. It's an obnoxious orange bar on the top of the website and we'll see you over there.