Team Value Proposition: Play To Your Strengths

It is not a step back in your career. When you join a team as an

individual agent, you're doing all the jobs. The buck stops with you 24 7.

How can I augment their performance so that they can do money making activities all day long?

You're not using the team as a fallback. You're using a team so that you can grow a business.

Is the split more important to you or the money in your bank account at the end of the year? And that's just the facts, it's just economics.

If running a business is not what you want to do, and selling houses is what you want to do, then I would look at a team.

No matter where your business is today

or where you want to take it,

you'll get there faster and more profitably

with an operating system.

Welcome to Team os, your guide to

starting, growing and optimizing real estate team.

Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

A solo real estate agent isn't giving up or waving the white flag or taking a step back when they choose to join a team. They're committing to their own growth. And very often it's to a more profitable and productive way to grow than if they continued on on their own. Learn about the leverage that a team puts behind an agent and how that leverage allows the agent to play to their strengths and live in their strengths of connecting with clients, winning listings, building their database, and consistently exceeding the growing demands of today's market. Hear from nine different leaders about why new agents and experienced agents alike are joining teams today. And we'll start with Lori Finkelstein, Reader.

I think a single agent feels like they're waving the white flag and they're caving in and giving in because they joined a team. And I see it the opposite, right? I see it that, hey, I'm an entrepreneur. I want to serve my consumer at the highest level. I want to run 50 transactions or 100 transactions. I want to make a million dollars a year. You're not using the team as a fallback. You're using a team so that you can grow a business. It's not because you suck as a single agent. It's because you want more for your consumer. You want more for your clients. You want client events, you want listing management, transaction management, marketing, hr. I mean, you know, we got a department for everything.

By surrounding yourself with specialists at every position, you're putting yourself in a position of strength and you're putting the client first. Next up we have Chris Heller, who, among a variety of other things in his remarkable career was a true team pioneer, starting his team more than 30 years ago. He was also president and CEO of Keller Williams. And here he shares two big ideas about why agents should consider joining a team, while acknowledging, of course, that not every agent should, and while acknowledging, of course, that the split is going to be different. But pay attention here to how Chris builds on what Lori just shared.

The concept of being on a team really encompasses two or three things that are primary. One is being able to do more transactions than you're doing. Yes, you're going to end up with a smaller amount of the commission, because when you're an individual agent, you're getting all of it. When you're on a team, you're getting part of it. But it's not the commissions you earn on transactions. It's really the number of transactions you do. And at the end of the day, you know what puts more money in your pocket? Is it doing 30 or 40 transactions on a team or 10 transactions as an individual agent? So that's one. The other is time. As an individual agent, you're doing all the jobs. The buck stops with you 24. 7. You're the one that has to deal with whatever's happening. We're on a team. In most teams, you're going to have structures and people in place that you're not having to do 100% of the tasks. You're not playing 100% of the roles, and you're not the one that has to deal with all the things that come up. There's other people that have those specialties to do that. So being able to specialize or focus on a smaller set of the activities and then being able to do more than you're able to do on your own are the reasons why, for many agents, a team is the best way to go.

What's the consequence of the buck always having to stop with you, no matter what? Exhaustion. And you'll hear that here as Veronica Figueroa shares one of the main reasons she's having more conversations and more fruitful conversations with very experienced agents about joining her team.

It is not a step back in your career when you join a team. Oftentimes it could be a step in the, you know, right direction towards a new future. What I think is really cool is a lot of them are saying, partnerships matter, community matters. I don't want to do this alone. And those are the conversations I'm having a lot more with top agents who are saying, I'm tired. I don't want to do this alone. So it's really interesting to see, I believe, more top agents or agents partnering with teams.

So often a solo agent simply cannot reach their goals. They cannot get to where they want to go by going it alone. There just aren't enough hours in the day or hours in the week. There's not enough energy to do everything that needs to be done to reach their highest potential and their highest productivity. Or an agent may not want to do it alone. And the good news is, you don't have to. These are some of the reasons that teams exist. Next up, we have Carrie Shull, who speaks very specifically and in detail to a new agent and then to an experienced agent. This is the longest clip in this episode. To the new agent she speaks to splits and GCI and some of these other considerations. To the experienced agent she speaks to. This idea of playing to your strengths and making sure that the team leader understands your strengths and your goals and has a plan to help get you there. Here's Keri Shull.

The way I would talk to somebody would vary depending on their level of success, right? So I think if you're somebody that is getting started in your real estate career, there's no reason you wouldn't join a team. I think that the split only matters if you're doing transactions. And there's a reason 90% of agents fail. You need to be in an environment where you learn how to create the right relationships to generate business on your own and to continue growing and expanding your sphere of influence to be successful. Right. And if you're trying to figure it out on your own, it's extremely difficult. So that's what I would say to someone just starting out. I always say, is the split more important to you or the money in your bank account at the end of the year? And that's just the facts. Like, if you're thinking the split's more important, then you're not going to be very successful in speaking to sellers about commission either, because your mindset is just broken. Right? Then the agent who's successful. I think that there's different levels of success. And so one of the avatars that we focus on is the agent that is starting to be really burnt out because they don't know how to hire. They don't know how to put structure around their sales process to be able to make it duplicatable for someone else. So there's a lot of very talented salespeople that are unicorns, right? They're winging it every day, and they happen to be amazing at connecting with People, but that gets exhausting because some of them have tried to hire an assistant or tried to hire a transaction coordinator or tried to. And they, they say to me when I coach them, like, am I just not a good leader? Well, you haven't figured out how to take what you're doing and systemize it right? So someone like that might benefit from joining a team, especially a team that's focused on growing them to what their goal is. So, so my focus now is when I'm talking to people like that avatar that are really successful, but they're getting burnt out. Okay, how do we put the right people around you? That's a permanent solution to this so you can continue to grow and evolve. And what I mean by permanent, people aren't permanent. You can't rely on that. But systems can be right as long as you're evolving them. So if we want to harness what someone's doing really well, like Casey Anderson is one of the agents that is responsible for a tremendous amount, amount of our growth in Florida. How she approaches her business is very different than how I approach my business. So my mindset isn't. There's one way to do it. My mindset is let's evaluate your core strengths. If I had listened to my coach, my coach wanted me to be the ISA last, I would have never built a team because I guarantee if I were sitting at that desk all day, I wouldn't have been in my core strength. So I think finding alignment with a leader that's going to focus on your strengths and, and build it around you is important while systemizing it so it scales.

Hey, important detail for you here. Of course, every one of these clips comes from a full length conversation with these guests. You can find them at realestateteamos.com you can find them at Real Estate team OS in YouTube, real estate team OS in Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's an audio podcast as well and of course it's a social feed. Real Estate Team OS at Instagram and TikTok. Check these conversations out. They're loaded. We cover a lot of different topics and a lot of different ground. Next up though, we have Barry Jenkins in a portion of his conversation with me on episode three of Real Estate Team OS where he's sharing his perspective as a team leader in how he designed their structure in order to put each agent in their position of strength and to have them doing more money making activities more often while enjoying a better lifestyle. Here's Barry Jenkins.

I experienced extreme levels of success in my market to the detriment of the quality of life that I enjoyed. And so when I began to roll out the kind of the new realm of services and automation for my agents from 2016 through 2019, my focus was how can I augment their performance so that they can do money making activities all day long. And so for me, I was able to find this sweet spot, much like a cyborg with the humans running, but they maybe have augmented legs, right? That was kind of my vision for my sales team because now they take time off, they go on vacations, they're able to turn their phones off. I hold them accountable to what they said they were going to do that week, but as long as they get it in during that week, they take time off. I encouraged taking a day off on the weekend. To not apologize for being at your kids baseball games, right? Like to not apologize for not having your phone when your kid's sick. You know, standard quality of life boundary setting. Because I really wanted to play the long game. I wanted to find people that were going to kind of journey with me and create revenue that's bigger than just, you know, me getting rich. It was about empowerment and an empowerment culture. And so for me, it was a real big picture moment.

I feel like that is very, very difficult to do for most solo agents.

Oh, totally. Because you're doing everything. You're your transaction manager, you're your sales team, you're divisive, your relationship nurtures, you're doing it all yourself, which can be done, but it's a different kind of person that does it all by themselves. It really is. And I admire them.

You don't have to do it all. You can rely on your teammates and you can rely on the system and the structures and the procedures and the accountability to help you get things done with more support and more leverage behind you. Next up, we have Jenny Wiemer. And two things that Jenny and Barry have in common. Both of them were highly productive solo agents who opted to surround themselves with other agents and other staff members to create more leverage so they could be more productive, more successful, and yes, more profitable. Second, they both operate team ridges, entire brokerages that operate in the team structure. Here's Jenny Weimert again on playing to your strengths and designing a system that allows agents to do that

as a brokerage, as a team. I guess we try to keep everybody in their highest talent areas. So our agents are just focused on being agents. We have leverage behind them in transaction management and listing directors. So every listing that goes out is like our Billboard and we're proud of it. And then we just try to keep our agents, you know, working with their clients, hunting for inventory, winning deals, and then keeping up with their database that they build over time with us. And, and it seems to be a formula that works for us.

If you like selling houses more than you like designing, building and optimizing a business, joining a team may be for you. I'm not just summarizing what Jenny Weimer just said. I'm actually setting up exactly what Tiffany Galzenis is about to communicate with you. She, of course, does it in more detail. Here's Tiffany Galzenis.

The first thing I would tell them to do is to really evaluate the parts of the business that they enjoy. If they really enjoy selling real estate and being client facing and they don't enjoy, you know, figuring out what the best lead sources are or looking at how to do, how to increase efficiency on a transaction to close process or. I mean, there's so many other things, but if they enjoy the actual sales function, the client facing part, then that they're probably a good candidate to be on a team. You don't have time to do it or you do it half heartedly and maybe you make a decision that's not the right one and then you never go back and look at it again. And maybe you've been spending a thousand dollars a month on something that you're not even using, you know, or whatever it is, because you just click that button and said, okay, this is done, it'll work. But, but you don't have that system that, that business structure in place that is so important. So if running a business is not what you want to do and selling houses is what you want to do, then I would look at a team.

A team allows an agent to play to their strengths and to live in their strengths and to live in their passions and to make a lot of money doing so. Next up, I want to pull back a little bit. We're going to hear from Jim Remy, who's a true team pioneer, a lot like Chris Heller near the top of this episode. He started a team more than 30 years ago at age 23. He partnered up, created a team and it grew to 17 offices across Oregon. Later, he joined a 30 agent team and grew it to 250 agents. In this clip, you'll hear him define a team at a high level. Again, specialists at every position is the theme to watch and listen for. In addition though, he makes a prediction about the share of GCI that will come from Agents inside teams versus agents who are solo. Here's Jim Reme.

You've seen over the last 10 or 20 years where the team has become essentially a mini brokerage within a brokerage. And so what's happened now is now each of the team members has a very specific role and the most effective teams really have broken down those roles. So it kind of McDonaldized it if you want to take it there. So you got a tc, a transaction coordinator handling just transactions. You've got a listing coordinator, you've got buyer's agents, you've got admin people that are running the, you know, the marketing. You might have a social media expert on staff. So there's. Everybody's got their little niche that they're specializing in and they're working in. I see the most successful teams are, are niched that way. I see some, some team leaders are like, all my people do everything. And I'm always like, well then you really just have a brokerage. And they're just, you know, it's a little bit, it's not really a team structure then, so. And the reason why you want to get really niche with it is that those people become really, really good at their job and they get really to the place of being an expert in their little niche, their little fiefdom, and that's where you want them to be. Where do I see teams going is an interesting question. I think teams are absolutely going to be the dominant players. I think right now I see teams growing to 60 to 70% of the overall GCI in the country. I think that's where we're headed. It could go to 80%. I see that it's going to be very difficult for individual solo agents to compete with them at scale. Not that you won't see people doing 20, 30 to 50 transactions very, very successfully, but people getting higher than that without a team would be very difficult.

So why will teams dominate GCI at scale? Because of specialists at every position. And it's not just because specialists at every position help the agent play to and live in their positions of strength, which it does. It's because this is what consumers are demanding. They want seamlessness. They want friction free. They want specialists to help them at every stage of the transaction. We heard from Lori Finkelstein, reader, right off the top of this episode and we'll hear from her again. Here's Laurie on specialists at every position.

What I'm seeing, and I've been seeing it for about two years now, and I think we're going to see it more and more and more is that the consumer is pretty much demanding that their real estate agent have access to everything, right? They want this seamless transaction, right? I have, we have to have like a specialist in every piece of the transaction. And as a single agent, that can get really cost, that can be, that can really cost you a lot of.

You can seek out and hire and bring alongside you each of these people and pay them, or you can plug into a situation that has all these specialists and proven systems and processes and just start growing. They're both perfectly viable options. The goal on Real Estate Team os, not just this episode, but on the show overall, is to provoke you, to give you stories, ideas, examples, strategies, tactics to help you make the best decision for you to take the next right step to continue growing your real estate business. It can look a lot of different ways. And by the way, there are two companion episodes to this one on joining a team. One is called just plug in. The other one is called find your best fit. You can learn more about those and check them out through the links right down below. I've got one more clip from Gary Ashton, but you're going to want to check those out because they take on other aspects. It goes deeper into the splits, it goes deeper into things to look for and how to interview a team and a team leader to find your best fit, whether you want to join a team or whether you want to join a team in order to start a team, which you heard a little bit from Kerry Schull about earlier in this episode. Last up though, again is Gary Ashton. He is the founder of the number one ReMax team in the world and he speaks here to the economies of scale, the partnerships, the ecosystem that come when you join a real estate team as an agent. Here's Gary.

At the end of the day, this is a cliche, but you want to provide the best possible experience for your client. So to do that, you're probably going to need some peripheral support. And the way that I always look at this is that the title company, the mortgage, the mover, the insurance, it's just economics that we get better service. Because when we say, hey, we need somebody to call this person back, can you get them set up? Well, we're providing X number of clients a month and then little Ethan over here has got one client. Hey, can you, can you call my client? Who, which client are going to call first? They're probably going to call mine because they want to reestablish or reinforce that relationship, the level of service. Because the agent is the gatekeeper, really. So they want to make sure that we're happy. How do we make sure that I'm happy? Well, we want to make sure that my clients are happy. So they're going to jump on looking after our clients and then we'll get to you. But they might be. I'll do that tomorrow. And then. So you're not offering the best level of service to your clients, not because you're not a good agent. It's just because you don't have that support network in place. So that's why I think the teams leverage all that. It's economies of scale. You've got economies of lead generation that you probably couldn't have yourself. I don't think there's anything wrong with being a single agent utilizing your own network. But if you want to grow your business, I mean, I'm obviously biased. I think that there's more opportunities to do that with a team.

And there we are. Gary takes us full circle. If you want to learn more about the team structure and other reasons that agents are looking at teams again, there are two more companion episodes. They're linked right down below. Just plug in and find your best fit. I hope you enjoy them. Thank you so much for watching and I wish you continued success in profitably growing your real estate business.

Thanks for checking out this episode of Team OS. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up at realestateteamos.com.