Leigh Thomas Brown discusses scaling a real estate business by hiring senior leadership and stepping back from daily operations. He built tech integrations between platforms like Ylopo and Boomtown to address a critical gap: brokerages have onboarding and training but lack an enforcement loop to actually reduce agent churn.
And so I looked around and as we were kind of growing, we started having all these challenges, like you outgrow a lot of your systems and there weren't a lot of solutions that existed. And what I mean is as your business gets bigger, you have to have a lot more systems in place, like lead gen systems, CRM, transaction management. And so technology became a pretty big hindrance to us to continue growing. I got to a point revenue-wise where I could afford to hire people a lot smarter than me. So I put in place a director of marketing, director of sales, director of operations. I hired a president from the private equity world and I've been fairly disconnected from the business for several years. We use something called the EOS framework, Entrepreneurial Operating Systems, and we do our level 10 meetings. And I look at those summaries and I look at the P&Ls and all that. I'm not completely absent, but I've spent the last 6 years on this tech venture trying to help the real estate industry kind of evolve. A lot of people don't even know that I'm, I have been involved, but like companies like Ylopo, Boomtown, Sisu, structurally, Sierra Interactive, I can go down the list. We basically created in cyberspace the bridges technologically between all these platforms and we got thousands of teams on it or whatever. And that was cool and all, but it wasn't really having that big of an impact on the teams that I was a part of and the teams I was helping, like basically us facilitating all these integrations. And so I kind of went down this rabbit hole of like, how can I figure out how to help decrease the churn in the industry because like so many ate, chewed up and spit out. So I started just like thinking about like, what does this learning adaptation loop look like? What I mean by that is like, and I think most brokerages do a great job no matter which one it is, but most companies do a great job of onboarding and then they do training like in a classroom, right? And then they have some continuing education, but there's this one final component of this, like call it learning adaptation. This is something I read in a book, so I'm not that smart. I just, I read in this book about how important it is to understand this loop around creating learning adaptation. So anyways, brokerages already do a great job of onboarding, training, some continuing education, right? But there's this one part of the loop missing and it's what's known as the enforcement loop. It's been the most like The biggest epiphany, I think, of my last 20 years, realizing that the industry doesn't have this in place.
