The Beginner's Guide to Fostering a Culture of Accountability in Your Business Today

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. I'm your host, Lars Hedenborg, founder of Real Estate B School. And I'm almost a decade into coaching in this specific niche, real estate team building. And what I found over that decade and hundreds of real estate teams, taking them from the grind of, you know, a hundred deals and just losing their mind to multiple hundred deals per year where they're running a profitable sale. Systems driven, the right economic model, culturally sound, high cadence, high performing real estate team. I found that a lot of the real estate teams out there are driven by egos and it's all these big top line numbers and nobody really knows what profits look like or how many hours those team leaders are working and how much stress they're enduring. So I believe if you want to profitably scale your real estate team without working crazy hours, enduring unhealthy levels of stress, or coming up short at home, then thinking like a business owner, building sustainable systems and empowering your team are absolute musts. And on the podcast you will not find any smoke and mirrors or hype, just the real, real world tools, systems and strategies that are working. So if you're struggling to sort of build this business and scale a real estate business and succeed in the areas of life that matter most, you are in the right place. And today's episode I'm going to dive into, deep into. We did a podcast with John Mikish who is running his real estate team from Bozeman, Montana. And his real estate team is here in my market, Charlotte, North Carolina. We had the pleasure of working together for three years where he came in, you know, just like I said, that 100 deal or so Mark, where it was consuming him. He was in production, running the team, managing overhead, you know, spending a lot of money on leads. And he built this into a business that now runs itself. He's 90 minutes a week time he spends in that business. So we got into agent accountability. He spoke about the seven things that he tracks. How do you structure a weekly accountability meeting with your agents and what do those one on ones look like? And it's definitely worth going back and consuming that entire episode. Today I want to spend a little bit of time on what I call accountability is love. And I want to go into the mindset and the nuts and bolts implementation of accountability in your real estate team. So the first thing I want to talk about is personal leadership. And we covered this a little bit with Chris Craddock, which was a couple episodes ago. Personal leadership. And are you showing up yourself as someone that is willing to be held accountable. And a lot of times we build these businesses on the base of having enough discipline and holding ourselves accountable to the point where we can generate 50, 60 sides and then we need to hire an admin and bring in a buyer agent so we can get out of the buyer side. But just check yourself on. No matter where you are in the real estate team building journey, are you still engaged at the level that's appropriate for you? And, and before I forget, I do want you to grab a copy of the Real Estate Business Growth Navigator. I actually detail all the six stages of growth to go from starting in the business start to becoming a true owner, which is the sixth stage of real estate business growth, which we call the own stage. So I refer to that quite a bit here in the podcast. So it's worth grabbing a copy of that. It's real estate business growth.com real estate business growth.com so and it's this trajectory of I do it, we do it and they do it. And the mistake I see a lot of times as a team leader or let's say a real estate agent gets busy enough where they start building a team, they go from I do it to they do it in terms of the necessary tasks that a real estate agent must do to be successful. And, and it's centered around new business development. And that's no different if you're a solo agent, you want to be massively successful or if you've scaled a real estate team. Right. I see a lot of team leaders step out of that cadence of tracking set met, signed and meaningful contacts and all of the data that really matters that John went deep into all of those metrics. So really check yourself. Have you skipped the step of being in that cadence of accountability? And the accountability is 80%. Now there are some cultural things that we need to hold our agents accountable to and our team members accountable to. For the most part. This is new business development and lead follow up. And the activities of a sales organization are centered around sales and the activities to generate new business, you know, consults and to sit down with buyers and sellers for the first time. So personal leadership, this second thing I want to cover a little bit here is mindset. You know, what's the mindset required for you to go from? Let's say you have a small real estate team and you're still eyeballs deep in production. Now you have overhead and you have people and administrators, salespeople and administrators that are sort of clamoring for your time. What's the mindset that you have towards your business. And I want to talk about specifically a mindset of systems. When it comes to accountability, you need to have a mindset that, and this is what we teach at real estate B school, is that your business is a system of systems, but accountability is simply a system. And so let's take the example of, you know, you haven't hired your first agent yet and it's just you, you need to understand and build the system around accountability. So even though you don't have that first agent on your team, you better make sure that you have the systems in place. Whether it's, it's how you time block or how you track your numbers, or how you take care of your database or your lead follow up system or whatever the system is that needs to be so strong. Ideally before you scale your team, that system has to be so strong. So when you bring people into your world, you're not trying to figure out like how do I hold these agents accountable? You never held yourself accountable. You never actually took time to build the system. So you had clarity on how to best coach agents. Right. John covered that like, the only way to coach anyone is to know where they're spending their time. And the only way to know where they're spending their time is to have actual data to show you where they spent their time and how successful they are. And so build this system, have a mindset that your business is a system of systems and then the system does the heavy lifting. So when you bring someone onto your team, you must set proper expectations in terms of the amount of time and what's required to succeed in this business. A lot of times we see team leaders that they think accountability like it's, I can't ask my agents to time block, I can't ask them to track their numbers. I can't. Like it does, it feels uncomfortable for me. They will fail in real estate if you don't teach them these things. And then you can say, well, I didn't really do it, you know, I'm 20 years in the business and I got to the point where, yeah, but you're 20 years in the business. It's unlikely someone joining Your team has 20 years in the business. And they get business just from their database, even if you're not working your database properly, right? So proper expectations, the system is built, you have proper expectations and then it's not all that complicated. And then when you bring someone onto your team, you can see real quickly if they're going to be able to do the things necessary to be successful, the mistakes I see most often now I covered a little bit here in the beginning is that you'll have a very successful top agent start a team and they hire their administrator. Typically they'll have an administrator, but then they hire, you know, two or three buyer agents. And those buyer agents are more like, you know, that visual of the baby bird in the nest where they're just kind of, they put their heads up and they're kind of waiting to be fed. And that level of dysfunction permeates throughout the business growth journey. Where you can have a big business, yet it's marginally profitable, there's no tracking in place. Agents are not held accountable at all. They're not taught that it's a numbers game. Which sales is a numbers game? Any sales position at any company in any industry is a sales game. And there has to be tracking in place. So the biggest, that's the biggest mistake that I see is that it's this loose collection of salespeople that aren't tracking their numbers. And as a result the team is not profitable. When you extract out the efforts of the team leader and even the business that that team leader hands out, if you take that away from the business, you'll see that there's not a lot of money being made. And the business, I've seen a lot of real estate teams. If you take out the team leaders, production, there is no profit in the business. And that's because of this exact conversation around accountability. Accountability isn't something you do to someone, it's something you do for someone. High achieving people and salespeople in particular, they need accountability. They are desperate for accountability. Take the analogy of a coach. There is that visual, you may have seen it of Michael, I think there is one of Larry Bird, there is one of Charles Barkley, there is one of Michael Jordan. All these guys that were like the top of the top of their game in their sport. And then you can see them, you know, 15, 20 years after they're, you know, 50 pounds overweight, they have a big gut and they're not being pushed at the level that they were when they were in the game. Right? Sales. When you're in the game of sales, you need someone there to of course encourage you and come alongside you when you're having some tough times. Most of the effort though, in terms of what we provide to people that come onto our team is that of a high level coach. And it's hey, these are the rules of the game to be, to perform in this Industry, real estate sales. These are the expectations and that happens before they start your team. These are the metrics we need to track. Here's the tool we use to track them, here's how we report them and, and here's the cadence that we, here's how we time like our calendar and here's the cadence that we follow to stay in touch and for me to see if you're on track or off track with the goals that we're going to set with each other. And that's the whole thing right there. So many team leaders are afraid to have those conversations and enter into this relationship where, like where you're basically asking someone do I have permission to hold you accountable to the goals we're going to set together? Right. Are you sitting down with your agents and actually setting goals together? Hey, if you want to take home $150,000 here and we have a system in place, an agent achievement system in place at real estate B school that we teach our team leaders. Basically you're sitting down with your agents when they start on the team, but also every year to go from where they want to be financially and break that down into what activities needs to happen at a. If they're on the team, you can see their historical conversion rates. If they're new to the team, you can have an idea of how many conversations, meaningful conversations turn into a buyer consult, how many of those buyer consults actually show up and how many they sign. You can base that on actual data and if you don't have that data, you're not even in the game of being a high performing real estate team. You're just not in the game. If you're not managing the business by data and holding your salespeople accountable. And once you get permission to hold them accountable, it's a different level, it's a different relationship. You know, and this is a good question. When you're starting a relationship with, with, with an agent is, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, a couple things. One, you're not serious about your goals. Ten, you'll do anything that you need to do to achieve your goals. Where are you on that spectrum? Okay, you're a nine. If they're like a seven or less, you have to ask them what would it do to take to take to get you to a 10. The follow up question is that on a scale of 1 to 10, 1, you know you're not comfortable with accountability. 10, you know you need accountability and you're, you're going to lean in, into this relationship we're making with each other, where are you on that spectrum? Like, I don't love accountability, but I know I need it. You know, okay, I'm a nine. What would it take? Or I'm a seven, what would it take to get you to a ten? You know, and those two questions will tell a lot about somebody. And then you have this documented conversation where you now have permission to enter into someone's life and hold them to a standard that they would not hold themselves to. And it's not a complicated conversation. That's the whole conversation. That's the script for it right there. Yet most of the time, teams that are posting these crazy numbers, there is no accountability. There is not a lot of profit. There is no system for achieving and getting the most out of a lead source or getting the most out of. Out of the people on the team. And generally, there's missed opportunity, not just for the team leader, but there's so much missed opportunity for being on a team that is a loose collection of agents that doesn't. It's not driven by systems. And there definitely is not a whole lot of accountability. You have agents on a team like that making 60 to 70 thousand dollars, where with the same exact resources, the same exact leads, the same exact. They can make double or triple the income as you tighten things up. So I'll end with this. If you're at the point where you're running a real estate team and, you know you need to make the shift into more of this. Accountability is love versus accountability is this icky, uncomfortable thing. It just takes some conversations with your agents where you have to sit them down and essentially apologize. Say, you know, lars, I have to apologize. You know, we have been working together for 18 months, and I have not been doing a good job of, you know, getting clear on where you want to be financially and what your goals look like, I have not done a good job of getting permission to help you and to maybe push you a little bit to achieve your goals or to coach you better. I have to apologize for not putting a system in place that will allow you to achieve your goals with a higher degree of certainty. And lastly, I have to apologize, and I am going to make it right. I have not done a great job of leading you. And so here is what I would ask of you. Would you be open to. Let's get together. This is a quick conversation. Let's get together for a half hour or so where we will set your goals. Um, we'll talk about, you know, what the. What the numbers need to look like. And another thing, you need to apologize. Yeah, I think I said that, that, you know, you didn't have tracking systems in place. Um, you know, so we'll take the tracking system, we'll talk about that and we'll talk about, you know, maybe some of the challenges you're having around your time and time blocking and what that might look like. And then you just kind of take it from there and then you just, you kind of draw a line in the sand where you're now willing to come alongside them and go shoulder to shoulder. And over time, your business will be more profitable because your agents are treating this like a profession versus a hobby. Most agents on teams, they don't have to hardly do anything to make a moderate income. And most agents on teams don't share a core value of wanting to perform at a very high level. Chances are though, if you're a high performing person in general, you want to be surrounded by high performing people and those are the kind of people that you will go to battle with and you will want to fight for. So make sure that it's a whole nother conversation on core values and how to align yourself with people that are worth fighting for. Definitely a whole different conversation that I'm sure we'll get to here in the podcast. And we've covered it in, you know, we're 400 plus episodes in at this point. So we've covered culture and picking the right agents many, many times. So that's what I've got for you. The shift from accountability is this icky, uncomfortable thing that you do to somebody to accountability is true love and it is something you do with somebody and for somebody. It is a gift to be in a world where you can be held accountable and think of that in your own journey. Do you have someone that can help you chart a course in your business, come alongside you, show you what to do, and then hold you accountable to those commitments. And if you do not have someone like to that, like that, and you're on this journey of building a real estate business versus just kind of haphazardly going about your business. And we definitely want to have a conversation with you. You can go to realestatebschool.com there's an orange button on there. Apply now for a business growth strategy session. It's simply a conversation about your business. So go to real estate business school, realestatebschool.com rather and just start to make this mental shift about and spend some time thinking about where might you have gone wrong. Where might you be off right now in your journey and is accountability a part of it? Either you are not being held accountable to doing the things necessary to achieve the goals you want in the areas of life that are important to you and business, or are you in a position where you have people that are are looking toward you to provide that accountability and you're not showing up the way that you should? Either way, it's okay and we'll get through it. But go to realestate b school.com click on the apply now or book a call button there and we'll take it from there. Be well.