As a brokerage owner or leader, are you treating your current agents as your own personal SOI—your sphere of influence?

As an agent, you were trained to do this. You’ve heard it repeatedly from gurus, speakers, and podcasters: work your sphere. You need 20 to 50 contacts per year with your sphere to generate referrals.

But are you applying that same principle to your own agents?

Most brokerage owners and team leaders don’t. Then they wonder why recruiting is so hard. Recruiting feels difficult because they’re not getting referrals from their own agents.

The number one recruiting strategy for every brokerage owner in America should be this: your agents are so impressed, enthusiastic, and in love with what you do that they’re shouting from the rooftops, telling every agent in the market to work for you.

If that’s not happening, it’s because you’re not treating your agents with the same intensity and intentionality as your SOI.

So let’s change that. Treat them with the same respect ...

If you're a real estate broker, I want you to do something the next time you're in a grocery store. Look at the shelves and notice how many products say new and improved.

Now apply that to your own real estate company. Ask yourself: What about my company, what I'm offering to agents in this market, is new and improved?

If you can’t think of anything, neither can your current agents—and certainly no one outside your company can either. But this is the secret sauce.

We often think recruiting is all about commission splits. It’s not. If the lowest split was all that mattered, then the operator with the lowest split in your market would have every agent working for them—and we know that’s not true.

So what is attracting agents to join one company over another? It’s the tools, the technology, the services, the support, and most importantly—which company they believe can help them close more transactions at the end of the day.

Here’s the challenge: What can you roll out every quarter th...

As a recruiting coach, one of the things I hear most often is, “Jim, I’d love to recruit experienced agents every day like you recommend, but I just don’t have the time. My schedule is already stretched too thin.”

I get it. As brokerage owners and team leaders, we’re all busy. But here’s the truth: We can’t control time. If we could add two hours to the day, that’d be great. But since we can’t, the real focus has to be on self-management, not time management.

And self-management comes down to priority management.

The number one priority for every brokerage owner in America should be recruiting experienced agents every single day. Until you gain control of that, your company won’t grow.

Here’s the magic of self-management: if you want to start doing something important—like dedicating one hour a day to recruiting—that means you have to stop doing something else.

So the real question is: what are you willing to stop doing that isn’t leading to results?

Recruiting daily is the singl...

Brokerage owners and team leaders — I have a question for you: What problem are you solving for agents?

If you're not solving a problem for them, there's no reason for them to come work for you.

The number one problem you can solve is helping them unlock the door to more transactions. Most agents are struggling here, so giving them a roadmap, tools, strategies, and techniques to close more deals should be your top priority.

But there are other problems we often overlook. Maybe they’re struggling with time management, technology, client management, building out a CRM, or having a reliable way to evaluate potential listings.

Agents have many challenges, and if we’re not addressing them, we’re giving them no reason to join our company.

All great businesses — especially industry disruptors — solve problems.

Think about the great companies you do business with today. They’ve solved a problem.

You need to be the problem solver.

Take a moment to reflect on your market. What are four o...

Hey, brokerage owners and team leaders. I’m going to do a quick role play with you right now.

Let’s pretend you’re an agent who just had a failed transaction with one of my agents. I’m going to call you—not text you, but call—and say:

"Hey Jim, I just wanted to reach out. I know you had a transaction with Bob that didn’t come together this morning. I got the bad news, but Bob told me you were an absolute pro throughout the process. This has nothing to do with you or your client—sometimes things just happen. I just wanted to say thank you for your professionalism. We look forward to working with you again in the future. And if there’s ever anything I can do to help, I’m here."

Now, imagine making that kind of call after every failed transaction where the other agent handled things well. What do you think is going to happen on the other end of the call?

Do you think that agent will appreciate it? Absolutely. No other broker is making that kind of call.

What you’re doing is laying a ...

If I asked you—as a brokerage owner or team leader—what are your top five differentiation points, could you answer clearly?

What makes your company different from every other company in the marketplace? In other words, what’s your value proposition?

If you can’t answer that, no one else in your market can either.

Some of you might rush to say, “Well, we have the lowest commission plan in the market.” But that’s a terrible value proposition.

If a commission plan were all it took to recruit agents, then the brokerage with the lowest commission would have the most agents. But that’s rarely true.

Why?

Because commission plans are not the single greatest motivator for agents.

The #1 motivator for an agent to join your office is this: Will you help them grow their transaction count?

If your value proposition doesn’t clearly communicate how you’ll help agents do more deals, you’re going to lose—every single day—to competitors who can.

So here’s my challenge to you:

Take some time to...

If you own a brokerage or you're a team leader, I’ve got a question for you:

How much of your time each day is spent recruiting? And why is recruiting such a high priority for the top offices and team leaders in America?

The reason is simple: top leaders understand that at the end of the day, we don’t actually sell real estate—the agents who work with us do. What we do is provide the environment, support, administrative resources, marketing, and tools necessary for agents to succeed.

We don’t sell real estate—we help people who sell real estate.

That leads to a big mindset shift. If we’re not serving buyers and sellers directly, who are our customers?

Our customers are the agents.

When you reframe your business like that, it changes how you grow. Just like your agents grow by serving more buyers and sellers, you grow by serving more agents. That means recruiting more agents is how you scale your business.

One of the biggest mistakes office leaders make is this: They think that i...

One of the jobs we often overlook as managers, broker-owners, or team leaders is the important fundamental of setting macro and micro level goals for your organization.

What do I mean by that?

A macro goal is the big picture—being able to say to your team this is our goal for the company this month.

It might be:

• “We want to take 25 listings.”
• “We want to generate 25 transactions.”

(Or maybe it’s 50. Maybe it’s 100. Pick your numbers.)

But we have to set a clear expectation for what we’re trying to achieve. That’s how we build a culture of performance.

When we don’t set those expectations, there’s no strategy, no sense of direction. No one knows what we’re aiming for—and as a result, it never happens.

We wonder why we can't break through certain barriers. It's because we don't set goals.
You can't hit targets you don’t set.

So set a target for your organization. Say it out loud. Proclaim it. Make it something your team is excited to shoot for.

And when you’re getting close...

Let me tell you the number one mistake rookie recruiters make when they're first released into the field. They've just been given the job of becoming a recruiter, and they think, “Okay, I better get out there and start making things happen.”

So they go to a REALTOR event—could be an MLS meeting, a board meeting, maybe a training or education event—and they jump into full-on “mayor mode.” They’re shaking hands, kissing babies, acting like the VP, president, or CEO. They’re working the room.

And then they make the classic rookie error:

They start trying to recruit in public.

Professional, high-level recruiters never recruit in public. Ever.

We build relationships in public. But we always recruit in private.

Why? Because if you’re seen recruiting openly at a public event, people will run from you. They’ll think, “I need to get away from this person before anyone sees me talking to them.”

Nobody wants to be seen as the agent who’s being recruited, and you don’t want to be the recrui...

What is a standard agent and a gap agent?

If you're a brokerage owner or team leader, you need to understand the difference between the two because it can really impact your recruiting.

Let's say you've created a master list, what we call an avatar list in our coaching program that includes people you're trying to go after. Maybe it's 300, 400, or 500 agents in your market that you've identified as ideal candidates for your company. They're the ones you want to bring on.

Now, if you started researching them individually, you'd likely find that you could classify them as either a standard agent or a gap agent.

What’s a standard agent? A standard agent is someone who has closed a transaction in the last 90 days, meaning they’re typically closing four to six to twelve or more deals a year.

A gap agent, on the other hand, is someone who may have done well in the past but hasn’t closed a transaction in the last 90 days.

Who’s more likely to make a move? The gap agents.

They're lookin...