Robert Friedman ended a 35-year solo real estate career in 2015 to build a team with partner Greg Gottelman. With consultant Lars helping systematize operations across four websites, he plans to grow from five people to 18 within 12 months and create a business that runs without him.
I'm Robert Friedman and I'm from Manhattan Beach, California. Just started a team this year after being in the real estate business for 35 years on my own. I had not team members but I had employees that worked for me as part of that. But this is the first time I've actually stopped to run a generated team. About a year ago I got together with a person who's now my business partner, Greg Gottelman. We sort of brought different things to the table. I'd had a lot of experience many many years in the trenches, very high end, top producer in the area for most of those years and he brought a lot of technology thoughts and concepts to the table that I was interested in but really didn't want to spend the time doing even though I knew they were important. So we got together and started formulating this team the latter part of last year. Officially we started the beginning of 2015. We now have four team members. One inside salesperson who's part time and then one clerical person who does our administrative work. In addition to that I have a long term assistant that's been with me who's starting to phase out of the business herself who happens to be my mother in law so she can stay as long as she likes. And over time that's going to be the way our team is going to be formulated is just two admins and probably going to grow to about 18 members in the next 12 months. We've been working with Lars now for about better part of six months. I want to say maybe it's a little less than that. Greg leaned on to him from another agent who'd been using the technology. I was pretty much ready to tag along with anything that got us faster to the point that we wanted to be. Neither one of us knowing much about the team concept and me being confused about it for many, many years. Both from this concept of how do you build a team and mostly how do you run it like a business from which you could walk away. We have a team meeting that's regular. We counsel and coach our team members. Pretty consistent basis. Two of them were brand new, two of them were already working in the field. Greg had a very strong lead generation technique before we got. We now have four websites generating leads. We just designed a new website that's the main website, freemangodlin.com all of those sites feed into it. We spent a lot of time and energy at the very beginning of the year hiring a company to do branding and imagery for us. And it helped us define who we Wanted to be as a team, as a partnership, and it was really very valuable to us. So now we're looking at ways to systematize that and that's what we're using Lars for. The thing that's really different about an event of this nature is that the quality of the agents that are involved here is just a step above. They all have question marks, they all have doubts about the things they're doing. They're all trying stuff that's not working. But fundamentally they are so far ahead of everybody else that's attempting to do what it is that they're doing. It's just mind boggling. It's mind boggling. Look at these people who have these doubts about what they're doing. They're all very highly educated and very good at what they do, and yet they don't rate themselves out of 10 on anything. Pretty much they are still working it out. And the ideas that flow from table to table and from agent to agent are just pretty overwhelming. In 10 years for me, I hope to be phased out of the active part of the business. So this plan for me, finally, after this many years of doing it on my own while, was to create something that had a legacy attached to it, that had relevance after I've stepped back from the business and stepped away from the business. So right now I still do a lot of business. It's a pretty large individual brokerage that I've created. And as I start to look for ways to hand that off in a way that my clients, my ex clients, past clients, I should say, are being well taken care of and well managed by whomever it is that I drop them off to, that they know that they've been trained to be like me, even if they can't be me. And there'll be a time in the not too distant future where clients are just not going to want to be with the old elder statesman realtor, even though I have a lot more knowledge than many of the agents they're going to speak with. So I like to step back, take a mentor role. And I've started doing that already. And that will give me the concept of being able to cross the bridge into getting away from actor production and at the end of the day creating, create a business that can operate without me in it, where I can still get some kind of an annuity income from it and eventually make it valuable enough to sell.
