[MINISODE] Who Is The Right First Hire for Your Real Estate Team?

Welcome to the first ever minisode here on Real Estate Team os. The main idea of a minisode is to give you a quick dive into one question or topic from multiple expert perspectives, all in under 10 minutes. In this case, the question is who is the right first hire on your team building journey? And the people you'll hear from are Renee Funk of the Funk Collection, Matt Smith of Matt Smith Real Estate Group, Katie Day of Move Me to Texas, and Emily Smith of Wiemert Group. Minisodes are very visual episodes and you can watch them on the real estate team os YouTube channel. We'll be releasing about eight or 10 minisodes each year, so be sure to sign up for free of course, for episode release alerts and subscriber only episodes@realestateteamos.com subscribe that's realestateteamos.com subscribe now. Who's the right first hire? With Emily, Katie, Matt and Renee, your first minisode here on Real Estate Team OS. At what point in that journey did you start thinking about I need to or I want to bring some people alongside me?

And that's where a lot of team leaders get stuck because it's a very tough growth path.

If you are going that way, it doesn't mean you can't be successful. It just means it's going to probably take you a little bit longer and you're going to have some scraped knees.

If you've ever thought about starting your first team, you've likely thought, I should hire someone. But who is that someone? Welcome to a new Real Estate Team OS series, Minisodes. Each minisode is a collection of concise, actionable insights from previous guests on one specific topic. Organized to help you achieve better results. This minisode is going to cover exactly who the right first hire is. You're about to hear the mistakes and successes of four guests who all had the same question. Who should I bring on first?

I've got all kinds of mistakes I.

Can share for sure that is the right first hire and of course that is not what I did.

What do we know now and what would we do differently? I did it wrong first and that's that. You get so excited. You probably have a number of inbound customer opportunities, AKA leads that you can no longer handle at scale. And so many times teams will say, let me go ahead and get my first buyer's agent.

This is likely your first thought too. Too many leads means too many phone calls, too many appointments, too many presentations, too many showings, too many so the best option seems to be hiring another me.

It's actually the wrong way to go about it. And if you are going that way, it doesn't mean you can't be successful. It just means it's going to probably take you a little bit longer and you're going to have some scraped knees. So we hired our first buyer's agent and started to grow a team. With agents before support staff originally, what do we know now and what would we do differently? Is one of the best first steps is make sure your operations team members behind the scenes, you know the true glue, like our support team is the most important part of the team.

Nearly every team leader agrees with Renee. You don't want to hire agents first, but why? Well, you'll eventually run into the same or similar problems, but now with more agents, the bottlenecks we're trying to prevent are on the back end. Even though the too many leads problem seems like a front end problem no matter where you are on your team building journey. Matt Smith's advice here on when to hire will serve you well.

But mistakes that I've made in growth from a staff standpoint, hire when they're at 80%, not when they're at 120% because training takes forever and it is such an integral part and process of growing and scaling. You have to have people that are cross trained, cross cohesion and you want to make sure they're trained properly. And so when a transaction coordinator as an example is at 80% capacity, it's time to hire your next one and then shadow and train so that when they're at 100% capacity, they can just pass the torch. And it's not waiting till they're at 120% capacity. They're already overloaded, they're overworked, they're stressed, and now you're going to throw in someone else to train. That's where things go haywire. And I've done that over and over and over again and it's taken me a long time to learn that lesson.

So that's a really smart go at when. Now, here's Matt's recommendation on who. Who is the right first hire.

The normal trajectory that I have seen is you hire admin support, then you hire buyer's agents and you become the listing agent. And then till you replace yourself and you continue to grow that way. And then you have transaction coordination, listing coordination, maybe some marketing support. But then the compound effect comes into play and as you grow, maybe you can have three or four to one meeting Three or four agents to one staff. Because once you have your processes and systems in place for transaction coordination, as an example, that transaction coordinator can work with more agents because of the complexities of scale.

So the right first hire is an admin, but what exactly that role entails depends on you. Your strengths, your weaknesses, your preferences, your daily tasks.

Did you hire an admin and that was your right first hire and that is the right first hire. And of course that is not what I did. I think that it's important to understand what you need to do, right? And as you said, like my first hire, I was like, okay, like this is what you're doing. And it's basically just like everything that I was doing in, in like an admin sense, I was trying to put onto this person, right? And so often what people will say is like you know, for a week or two weeks or however long of a time period, maybe like write down everything you do in like 15 or 30 minute increments and then start to highlight them, right? Of things you like, things you don't like. But I would, I would kind of go a step further and like categorize them into like, what are your admin tasks, specifically in the CRM, what are your, what are your maintenance of your listing tasks, what are your listing launch tasks and kind of start to what common themes there are. And from that then you can start to create job descriptions, having kind of the tasks laid out of what you need help with and then really digging deeper on what people are saying when you're interviewing to understand what your goals are and how I can be a part of helping you to achieve those goals.

Admin is crucial for day to day operations, potentially supporting your marketing tasks, listing management, TC checklists, CRM maintenance, and more. Because of this, it's important to clearly define which tasks and processes they'll own and what their success looks like. Going a step further, think about task orientation versus vision implementation here. Emily Smith defines the difference between these two.

Went straight from marketing Director to COO of the organization. I think in that gap I was taking those titles without taking those titles. So I was first doing the tasks as marketer or grabbing the extra hat and doing the task or saying who else should be doing the task, do we need to hire this out or do I need to bring somebody in on the team to help with this? And again all with Jenny Wiemer or Mike Wiemer. And then eventually it became a lot more of like the three of us in sharing the vision, crafting the vision, creating the vision. And now we're trying to bring other people up into those roles with us, but in the world that we live in, in real estate, I see administrative assistant, I see executive assistant, I see director of operations and I separate those things a little bit as like executive assistant, administrative assistant or task oriented positions. And those could be even TCs sometimes depending on how they're structured. But I think that more task oriented position versus Director of Ops or coo, where again, you're starting to collaborate on the vision or you're starting to help even be the one that's casting vision to the team alongside of your leadership.

Emily naturally evolved to become coo and with the right personality, intelligence, drive and support, your first hire could do the same thing.

Jenny Wiemer and I for the first two and a half years sat next to each other and my job really had nothing. I mean I was running marketing for her team, but I was listening to every phone call she was making. I was hearing her problem solve with every agent that called in with a question. And my vocabulary and my understanding of real estate and how it all connected moved so much faster because of her willingness to just let me sit near her in the office and hear her. So if you are someone with an executive assistant or an administrative assistant, you're like oh no, they just checked my email. Or oh no, they just, you know, manage our office calendar. I would challenge you to ask yourself, is there more this person could do if I were willing to invest the time in just sitting next to them and help build their knowledge bank or help grow them into that next level level of person that I'm going to need. If you want someone to think like you, speak like you, that is the fastest way that you can get someone to share a vision with you is for them just to be able to observe and be a part of learning your language.

Hiring is always a learning experience, especially the first time. And your first hire might not even work out on the first try. That's perfectly normal. The goal of this minisode was to share with you some hard learned lessons and wisdom from a few of our guests to help you think through your options and make better decisions. Let us know which team themes, problems, questions and opportunities you're curious about. Reach out to us@realestateteamos.com we'd be happy to make a minisode just for you. Thank you so much for watching. Hope you found this helpful. See what your contacts are doing on Zillow. Monday, December 8th join follow up Boss for a sneak peek webinar where you'll be among the first to see how to get Zillow searching, browsing and saving insights for the contacts in your database directly inside. Follow up boss. So when a past client of yours gets that late night and extra bedroom would be really great right now. Kind of feeling, you'll know before anyone else who's showing high intent to buy or sell insights about what's happening right now so you can deliver a personalized touch at scale. See what your contacts are doing on Zillow. Monday, December 8th at 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific. Learn more and sign up through the link in the description below. You're in your podcast app. Check out the description of this episode right down below. It's the first line and the first link. Now back to the conversation.