A talk advising real estate teams to separate four core business functions—marketing, sales, operations, and finance—and assign distinct roles for scalability. The speaker emphasizes hiring or reallocating team members (e.g., moving a sales person into marketing, outsourcing bookkeeping) so leaders can focus on higher-value work and the business can scale even when small.
Yeah, but my challenge is to think about it this way. Just earlier, like, we had a conversation with Smitty and Dave and you know, they're like, oh, we don't have leads. And I'm like, who's spending. Are there any hours being spent in the marketing? Like, they don't have a marketing person, which is understandable. Like, most of us aren't going to have a full time, like, true marketing person. Not an admin that just coordinates the crap you come up with, but someone that actually has marketing experience. There are people in this world that could come into our real estate teams and just create a whole other level than the stuff that we know or we learned. And it's just a huge awareness for me. There's not a lot of leads coming in, right? I'm like, and you're trying to. And I know your market's a hot market. So is this market. But it's because nobody's spending any hours in the marketing position. And Jeff is good at marketing and he needs to get his hands out of sales. Let Dave live or die or sink or swim in sales and just spend some time in marketing. And so if you're doing all four of these, it's very tricky, right? But this is when I was up at 2am and I was like figuring out expired letters and mailing and post stamping and all that stuff. So someone's got to spend time in all these and you've got to have distinct roles and responsibilities for all these functions. And then someone's got to count the money. You shouldn't be doing your own books at any point. Even if you're not selling the amount of homes that you want to sell, someone else should be doing your books. It's just not worth it for you to do those because they're not going to get done. You're not going to look at them. If you're doing it on a Saturday, I've had some of you, like, be like, it's totally cool. I just, I do it once a week on a Saturday. I'm like, you really think you're serving your family by spending two hours every Saturday doing in QuickBooks when you can hire someone at 30 bucks an hour to do it. Like, oh, yeah, okay, right. So imagine if you're sitting in this room and you have nobody on your team. It doesn't necessarily. So someone's going to serve as the team leader, right? So that's either the. An integrator is like a COO or general manager or CEO. That person has responsibility for running, running the ship. You may or may not be a visionary, so don't get caught so much up in the top position, but you have to be spending time in marketing. Your name may be in every bucket, but just to look at this and like, do you have a true sales lead? If not, like, if you're spending time there and Andrew, who's your listing agent, is covering some of the buyer agents, but he's, you know, it's just dysfunctional and it's not going to work. It's not scalable. A good example is, yes, say you have buyer agents on your team and you're the listing agent. So you'd be a listing agent. You could still be the sales lead, but then you have buyer agents and a listing agent under you. So someone has to be responsible for. And you will have like your, your first admin is going to probably be the marketing lead for lack of anyone better because you can't afford it. And the operations lead and maybe even the finance HR lead. But you've got to just deal with the fact that there are multiple things that have to happen in a healthy business, even if you're small, even if you're not selling 500 homes. The takeaway here is that you've just got to think about the four functions, okay? And you've got to check in with this. Once you can fill the seats, you're building this function out. But this is how a healthy business functions, even if you don't have the people for it.
