The Good, Bad & Ugly: Hiring & Recruiting Mistakes for Team Leaders to Avoid

All right, welcome back, Business Freedom podcast listeners.

Welcome to a good Bad, ugly edition of the podcast. This is where I share my stories of failure and triumph with respect to building a real estate team and founder of Real Estate B School and co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Today I feel highly qualified and confident.

That I can talk about the fatal.

Mistakes of building a real estate team and specifically when it comes to people and the mistakes I've seen made in.

My journey with the large group.

Some of the mistakes I think we've made with high performance real estate advisors and also the things that we've done right, but also coach over 100 teams across the country at this point so we get a view into their businesses and their good, bad, ugliness and failures as leaders and managers and all of that.

So I'm super excited to share with all of you and I want to share. I'm going to keep it real. I want to go high level, but I also want to keep it tactical. So hopefully I can deliver on both fronts. Gary Vaynerchuk says, you know, you've got to have your head in the clouds to be able to build a business and go out there and fight the good fight and then you got to be able to get in the dirt to get the real work done. So we're gonna go clouds and dirt here. So value proposition is, how are you different than any other sort of general brokerage out there? The days of sharing leads with folks and that's the value you provide. Those days are long gone. You know, that was like 2008. When I picked up my Boomtown platform in 2008, it was like a cool thing and I could pay for some traffic and get a lender to sort of lead share back then. And that was like a unique, that was a real tangible value proposition. And the conversion rates on those leads were decent. Real people, it felt like, were registering on the website and, and so there were some real value proposition. But if that's your only value proposition.

Now as a team leader, you are sorely, I mean, you are just mistaken to think that you're going to attract.

Real talent and be able to offer.

Them enough value to stay long term and help you build this thing.

So getting others to help you sort.

Of achieve your vision and to sort of have a shared vision for the growth of your business is not an easy thing.

And if you don't have a value.

Proposition, and so I really urge you, in real estate B school, we have a whole list of things that our team leaders should be able to offer to their teams and we help them set up systems, marketing systems, sales systems, backstage operation systems to make transactions easier.

And all of that.

But what's your value proposition? What are you really going to bring.

To the market that will want, that.

Will have agents want to work with you?

The good news is that teams aren't going away, right?

Increasingly with competitive threats, changing business models, technology, consumer shifting, just the economic shift. I mean, there's so much stuff that's going on that's going to help teams, teams that build themselves the right ways are going to be just fine. So your value proposition, we have a whole sheet of like 30 things that we go through with potential recruits on what our value proposition is. So what is your value proposition? I'm not going to spend time going through. This is one of my favorite case studies. Tripled their business, got out of production in six months and was able to exit with the seven figure valuation. Stacy Peterson. All right, so number two is dismissing culture.

This is the easiest thing to blow off.

I will say it's the easiest thing to blow off.

You read an article on culture, you come up with some core values and you know that's it. And you feel like you checked the box on culture. It goes way deeper than that, you know. So for hprea, we have six core values. We hustle and work hard, we embrace accountability and discipline, we have a growth mindset, we're team players, we do the right thing and we have a positive attitude. And all of those translate into our recruiting, how we attract potential recruits, how we interview them, how we sift and sort through them, and how we talk to them before they're hired. Once you get on the team, your first eight weeks is an intense sort of boot camp like training where we're evaluating you again on those six core values. And then every quarter we're having conversations about core values. And if you don't make it on our team, it's likely a core value issue. So what are you doing to first of all decide who you want to surround yourself with and then do your core values mean something? Are they not only written, but are they used to evaluate? We have something called a people analyzer where we run everyone through each of our six core values to ask ourselves, you know, honestly, is this person exhibiting this core value more often than not? And it's a simple, simple question, right? And if your core values are meaningful and they're not, sort of esoteric jargon, you could answer that question pretty easily. And then that Defines right person. Then we talk about right seat, which is, do they really get the position they were hired for? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity to actually do it? So this is key. This is everything. If I could go back and do one thing different, when I hired my.

First agent, it would be this.

Well, not so much my first agent because by happenstance, I think he was 80 to 90% fit on core values, because nobody is 100%. It was like the next 12 hires that I didn't have this in place. And I was like, whoa, what was I thinking with that one? Some of them just total common sense deals. One, I'm taking some of this out of a webinar I did. And one of our members that is like crystal clear on who she wants to surround herself with and the type of business she wants to build is an agent that I coach about a million. Well, she'll do about 50 million this year, so about a $1.5 million business. She takes Fridays off and Saturdays and Sundays and works one evening a week.

Which is super cool.

She surrounds herself with just folks that are very closely aligned to people that she wants to associate with and to feed into. And that's the flip side of it too, is that if you don't have your core values straight, you'll let people into your world that you don't want to invest in and go back to value proposition. Probably the biggest value proposition that someone has to join your team is the fact that they'll get to spend time with you and learn from you. So you have to make sure that you want to spend time with them. Right. That should be like the baseline requirement of your hiring process. And Christina does this at a really, really high level. I think the third fatal mistake, and I'm saying this, not preaching a number one value proposition. I think I had that in the early days and I think I continued to add on that over the years. Number two was dismissing culture. I definitely missed that and I definitely missed not having a system for hiring. And I liken this to your how you generate buyers and sellers. If you put as much focus on attracting talent as you do attracting buyers and sellers or worrying about where your next commission check is going to come from. Let's say that, let's use that analogy. Most real estate agents, top producers and team leaders, they do worry about where their next commission checks and come from. Are you worried about where your next prospect is going to come from? Do you have a system for generating high quality talent into your world? Right. And it's a sift and sort and it's probably the same conversion rates as.

Home search leads these days I would say the average is about 1% conversion to closing and some of the best are 3 to 4%.

So if you got really good marketing around recruiting, you may be able to sift and sort people out before they even apply for a position on your team. So your conversion rates may be higher because they're higher quality prospects. And so we've got, you know, in real estate B school we offer all the ads and how we market and the system we use and we do workshops and meet and greets and it's a very, very much a content marketing approach. But then we manage the whole thing out of a recruiting CRM. Super low cost and it's not for everybody. Depending on where you are in your journey, if you need to hire one admin and two buyer agents in the next 12 months, probably this all in system is not the one. But I would say if you need to hire an admin that's going to help you build this thing, you want to build a system out before you do it.

Exactly.

What's the ad need to say to discourage folks from applying? You'll get 400 applicants to an assistant ad that you put out there. How can you get the 300 that are just, they suck at life and they don't want to help you build something to not even apply. And then with the hundred that do end up applying, you know, what's your process? It probably makes sense to do a meet and greet, you know, have them come into the office and you can do a group interview. You can present what you're about, the vision and and then really find out whose eyes perk up and who wants to continue to the next process. So 100 goes down to 20 for the meet and greet goes down to 3 to 5 that continue in the process. And then you start your interview process. That is so much easier than interviewing 100 people or 25 people. And so just think, and this is how we think about people and talent. And this doesn't even really cover what you do with them once you hire them, you know. So we have an eight week, very detailed day by day, four eight weeks agent incubator program we call it, where you basically earn your spot on the roster. You need to set enough appointments for our outside sales to meet 12 of them in a three week period within your eight weeks. And that's what we coach to. So you qualify to be on the team, which is super bad to the bone and it's changed our business. That's one thing that we think we have done really, really right. So you know, so my question to you is, you know what, what are your struggles in these areas? And if you, here's what I will say without a doubt, hands down is that if you have, if you haven't started building a team yet, it's likely you either need to start doing it or there's nothing wrong with working for a really good team. So in greater Charlotte, if you're listening to this, we are absolutely hiring. Think our HighPerformanceRealEstateCareers.com is where you can go and check us out.

I think that URL still works.

But if you're. Yeah, so if you haven't started this journey, you need to start it. If you don't want to work for another team, you know, there are plenty.

Of good teams out there where you can do the thing you're really good at and make. On our team you could make 40 grand.

You know, as a runner you can make 60 grand.

As a showing agent you can make 100 to 120. As a buyer's agent you make 200 plus as a listing agent. And then we have backstage positions where you can make in management you can make 100 to 150. So we just have something for everybody. So if we find somebody that's the.

Right culture fit, they match our core.

Values, we have a position for them. And so the question to ask yourself.

Really, if you're thinking about building a.

Team, where do you think you're going to struggle? First of all, you need to make sure that you have your own production down. You can't really sell eight homes a year and decide to build a team. Need to focus on dollar productive activities in real estate. B school. That's why our undergrad program exists. It's a group coaching program to get you to the point where you're busy enough to hire your first part time assistant. Only 15% of our industry even has an assistant.

And so you need to get to.

The point where you're selling three, four homes a month consistently. So the cash flow is coming in. You build some baseline systems and then.

You can, you know, really take your.

Business to the next level and you can accelerate the journey and add three.

Four buyer agents under a recruiting platform like this. So it's really all I've got for you to think about this area of your business as probably the most important systems that you'll ever build out in your business. When it comes to people and think about your value proposition. Think about your core values and what you stand for. Think about what's going to be your system for attracting. You know, it's like marketing. Do you have a marketing for people approach in your business? Is your mind even carving out you.

As the team leader, the visionary?

Are you even carving out a little bit of your brain to think about.

That part of your business? So that's the challenge for you. Until next time. Much love and respect for doing this work. We'll talk to you soon.

Bye bye.