As a real estate agent, you have something in common with every single business owner in your community. Everybody from carpet cleaners, to candy store operators, to toy store owners, to clothing store owners — every one of you has something in common.

Here’s what you have in common: you all want to do more business.

As a small business operator, what you can do is tap into that. What I would suggest to you is you go through your entire sphere of influence today and you take a yellow highlighter out — maybe print it out — and put a highlight next to all the small business owners that you know. You know more than you think.

When you have that highlighter out and you highlight all those folks, the next step is to call them, reach out to them, text them, or stop by their business if it’s convenient and appropriate, and say this:

“Hey, you know what? I want to support a local business every single week, and I’d love to do a collab with you if you’re interested.”

A collab — what’s a co...

It happened, you were able to set a recruiting appointment.

Now what do you do when you’re going to meet someone for the first time at coffee or lunch? Do you immediately launch into your pitch?

That’s the worst thing you could possibly do in your first meeting with a potential recruit.

The first thing you need to do is build rapport and trust. One of the best ways to do that is by understanding who you’re talking to — doing a deep dive and some intelligence research on the agent before the meeting.

What does that look like?

Obviously, you can Google them. You can look at their social media accounts. You can talk to other people in your office about what they might know.

But here’s an easy strategy most recruiters miss: dive into their current inventory.

Look at their listings. See how long they’ve been on the market. Look at their price points. Where are they focusing? Go back and look at the trajectory of their business. Are they up or down compared to last year at this time?

Hey guys, when’s the last time you put an in-search-of ad out on social media? We’ll call it an ISO.

An ISO ad could be as simple as saying, “Hey guys, I have a buyer looking for a home in the Jacksonville area. Three bedroom, two bath, up to $600,000. They’re looking in this school district. If you hear of anybody thinking about selling, please send them my way.”

This has so many benefits you don’t even realize.

You might say, “That’ll never work. I’m not actually going to get somebody who says they’re interested in selling. That’s a waste of time.”

That’s not the point.

The point is that you’re telling everybody in your sphere, everybody in your social media audience, that you are a busy REALTOR and that you will leave no stone unturned in finding homes for your clients.

They’re going to say, not only is Jim busy, he’s actually going the extra mile for his client.

If you do this consistently, you’re helping people see you through a different lens.

Some of you have a problem w...

Hey guys, for brokerage owners and team leaders out there, sometimes you hear that you should be recruiting nonstop every day, really intensely.

As a company that focuses on recruiting and coaching, we will tell you yes — you need to invest at least one hour a day in active recruiting if you want a real trajectory change in your business and to take it to the next level.

But here’s the thing:

What’s more important than the intensity of what you’re doing is the consistency of what you’re doing.

Consistency beats intensity every day of the week. The fortune is in the follow-up.

I want you to think about the runway for the top agents in your community. Maybe you moved companies at some point in your career. How long did it take you to work up to that decision?

As an experienced agent, it probably didn’t happen overnight. It likely took weeks, maybe months, maybe even years to pull the trigger.

What we have to understand is that it’s not about our timing — it’s about the timing of t...

Hey guys, I want to talk to you about a unique way of going after for sale by owners and expired listings, and that is cold texting. Today, we’re going to focus on FSBOs.

With for sale by owners, we know that 92% of these folks are eventually going to work with a REALTOR.

The question is:

Will it be you or your competitor?

If you never reach out, never make contact, and never make an effort, you’re never going to have a shot at getting these listings. You never get what we call an “at bat.”

So how do you get an at bat? You make contact. You build a relationship. You’re never going to close them on the first appointment. Usually it takes several appointments and several conversations to get them to come to you.

Remember, FSBOs typically have a four-to-six-week incubation period. From the time they plant the sign in the yard or post on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, within four to six weeks, 92% of them will have worked with or decided to work with a REALTOR.

So what’s our co...

One thing I hear a lot this time of year from brokerage owners and team leaders is, “I’m looking at my budget and cutting costs to increase profit.”

Here’s my message to you: that’s fine. It’s good to be a controller. You don’t want expenses out of control.

But you can’t cut your way to profitability. You just can’t.

What happens is you start cutting services, cutting staff, cutting tools, and cutting resources. If there’s some fat to cut, great. But most of the time, you end up cutting things agents actually like.

You get so focused on creating profit for yourself that you create a whirlpool effect—a downward spiral—for the entire company.

Agents see services being cut, team members gone, staffing reduced, and tools taken away, and they think, “I’m going somewhere else.”

You lose an agent, and your profitability gets worse. Then another agent leaves. Then another. Pretty soon you think you need to cut even more.

You can see where this goes:

You cut yourself right out of busine...

Almost every week I have a new agent come to me and say, “Hey, I want to tackle a new area of the market.” Maybe it’s for sale by owner, maybe it’s expired listings, maybe it’s farming— all very valid areas to market to.

But my first question is always, “Let’s talk about your sphere of influence first. Tell me about that.”

A lot of times they’ll say, “Well, I don’t really have a good number on that.” That’s how I know they’re not really dialed in on their sphere. I’ll ask, “How many people are in your sphere?” And they’ll say, “It’s like 100… it’s like 200.”

They can’t tell me a specific number because they’re not actually in control of their business.

So the number one thing we have to do—before we chase rabbits, before we look for other business, before we search for something else—is get our sphere of influence dialed in.

Why? Because 70–80% of your business is going to come from this source. We have no business spending time, resources, money, and energy elsewhere when we have...

Hey guys, if you’re a brokerage owner or team leader, one thing we tend to do this time of year is say, “Okay, what are our production goals for 2026?”

And you should do this. You should know what you’re shooting for in terms of Gross Commission Income (GCI) and closed volume.

But one thing we often forget is what’s actually going to produce those goals—those transactions closed, that volume closed, that GCI. What is it going to take to create that?

Often, we get lost in this idea that all we need to do is motivate our current crew enough for them to create the production goals we’ve set for the team or the company.

But the reality is, that almost never works.

As someone who coaches brokerage owners, franchises, and team leaders across the country at the highest levels, I can tell you that almost never works.

Why?

Because what’s going to create higher production and higher GCI isn’t motivating your current team to produce more. Now, we want to do that—that’s absolutely a goal.

Hey guys, I want to give you a really easy equation for your business, and it starts with understanding something very fundamental.

Every single listing you take and every single transaction you create will be the result of a conversation you’ve had in the last two weeks.

Hear that: every single listing and every single transaction you create will be the result of a conversation you’ve had in the last two weeks.

By nature, that means if we have more conversations, we’ll have more closings.

That’s the big challenge for many agents out there. They don’t really put numbers to this.

The path is in the math.

When it comes to sales, we often want to think it’s an art form, but it’s not. It comes down to hard work and actually doing the work necessary.

So let’s put some numbers to this.

In our training and coaching, we’ve found that for every 30 conversations you have, you’ll average one closed sale.

So we can really plug some math in here and say, if I want to close 30 transactions ...

As a brokerage owner or team leader, one thing we often do—and we see agents do this a lot—is run into what’s called “The Einstein Problem.”

The Einstein Problem is this: we’re introduced to a new idea or concept, and we say, “You know what? I’ve heard that before. I’ve tried that before. It didn’t work for me, so I’m not going to do it again.” We stop listening to that idea, concept, tool, technique, or strategy. We say it doesn’t work in our market.

We’ve all heard agents do this, and we’ve done it ourselves. Let’s be honest.

One of the areas we commonly say this about is recruiting.

We’ll say, “I’ve tried recruiting. It doesn’t work in my market. I’ve tried going after top agents. They never come.”

Or, “I’ve tried experienced agent recruiting. I’ve emailed, texted, called, taken them to lunch, and it just doesn’t go anywhere, so I’m going to stop.”

But here’s The Einstein Problem behind that attitude—and this is true for your agents with lead generation as well.

I want you to...