A real estate business needs clear structure to grow. The speaker breaks down four essential functions: marketing, sales, operations, and finance. Each needs its own owner and leadership style, or your team stays stuck.
There are people in this room that don't have teams or small teams or people that are running big teams. This is a big shift for us in our team and we always had all these things going, but we didn't structure our team this way. Big miss on my part because I come from a business background and just a functional way to set up a business. This process is about if you have one buyer, agent and one admin and you, you still need to have set up your business functionally. So you still need to be able to look at your business holistically and see what's wrong with your business. And right people, right seats. So every business has to have four functions. Every real estate company, so it's marketing, sales, operations and finance. Hr, IT and then depending on if you're a visionary or an integrator, if you're more of a CEO type leader or if you're a visionary, that's that book Rocket Fuel. I think all entrepreneurs want to think of themselves as visionaries, but not all entrepreneurs are visionaries. So if you read that book Rocket Fuel and your team is big enough, you'll know if you're a visionary or an integrator. Integrator is just the person that runs your business, the visionary. If they ran their business, they just make bad decisions over and over again. Kendra is the CEO of Real Estate B School. So I do, I make emotional decisions and I'm not a very good CEO. I mean there are parts of it that I could have to, that I do if I have to. But she's the CEO of the business. So she keeps me, shields me away from messing up all this other stuff. So you've got to look at your business. If you don't have enough leads to generate, you know, and you're just frustrated that your agents aren't, you know, you look back, is anyone spending time in a marketing position? So even if you don't have a full time marketing person, is anyone spending any hours fulfilling the roles and responsibilities of marketing for your, your business? This was a huge aha for me and my team. It's just like we're fine, we're selling lots of homes, but we don't have a dedicated person. I had a part time local virtual person splitting her time between marketing, coordinating all the ideas I came up with. So the visionary, I happened to be a visionary communicating with a marketing coordinator. So she has no marketing background. She's just doing all the stuff I tell her to do. Luckily we have the margin to do it, but it's A very dysfunctional thing that was going on. So we're now our big rock for this quarter is to hire someone who lives and breathes marketing. So we have to have a marketing lead, someone that's going to really just crush that for us. And then sales, we set up sales very dysfunctionally. We had half of our sales team reporting to an operations person and half of our sales team reporting to another person that we called sales manager. And it's just so dysfunctional. There was a divide in the company. There was no unity among sort of goals and achievement of goals and all that. So we brought that into one. You know, there's the same person as the sales manager right now and the operations manager right now. But they're two distinct silos and they're two distinct meetings that happen. Operations is from the point when someone decides to do business with you, a buyer or seller says, yes, I want you to represent me to purchase a home or to list a home that falls into operations and making sure they're getting a really good experience. Buyers, even though buyers are serviced by sales, they now sit in operations. And so we're sending out the brownies to buyers and they're loving them. We're getting them on our 60 Touch program, we're getting their home address, we're treating them like it's. And we're going to be doing check in phone calls from person to buyers that even their agents don't know are happening.
