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?

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 ...

Hey guys, one of the things I always tell people when they’re starting out in the business is to watch what top professionals are doing and model other people’s success. When you do that, you unlock a bunch of “secrets.”

I’m going to share one secret right now that you may not have noticed, but once I say it, you’re going to dial in and think, “Ah, I have noticed that.” It’s one of those Captain Obvious things when you really look at it.

People who are doing a lot of real estate sales—$20, $30, $40, $50 million in production—often talk about new sales, listings, and closings by saying things like, “I just sold my friend a house. I just sold my buddy a house. I just helped my friends buy a duplex.”

Everyone they talk about is their friend.

Then you reflect on your own business and ask, “Why am I not selling as much real estate as they are?” They put their pants on one leg at a time just like me. They’re not working ten times harder than me.

The reason is simple: they have more frie...

Brokerage owners and team leaders, I have a quick quiz for you. How many social media posts have you put out in the last seven days?

I ask this because we’re constantly preaching to our agents about the necessity of being visible with their database. When we’re visible—highly visible—we’re more likely to create transactions. Visibility matters.

In fact, I would argue that visibility is more important than ability.

You can have an agent who’s fantastic at negotiating, marketing, working with clients, and solving problems—and they’re still not closing transactions. At the same time, there’s another agent in your community who’s terrible to work with, a poor negotiator, and yet they’re closing a ton of deals.

What’s the difference? Visibility.

This second agent is everywhere. They show up on every feed—Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube. They’re highly visible.

Meanwhile, the agent with great ability isn’t closing transactions because no one sees them. Visibility trumps ability. U...

Hey guys, if you want to have a fantastic phone call with everyone in your database coming into December and January—right at the end of the year and the beginning of the new year—this is what I call the “Real Estate Tune-Up.”

We take our cars in for a tune-up every few thousand miles. We need to do the same thing with our database. The way you do that is by being direct and asking one key question.

Here’s the question.

“Hey, this is Jim. How are you guys doing? I’ve been thinking about you. I’m talking to everyone I know as we head into the new year, just on the business side, and I wanted to ask: is there anything you have on the horizon, real estate-related, for 2026 that I can help you with?”

That’s it. You just put it out there.

“Do you have anything going on in 2026, real estate–related, that I can help you with?”

You’ll be shocked by how many people say, “Actually, yes, we do. We’ve been thinking about something.”

Remember, about 5%—one in 20 people you talk to out in the...

Why do agents stay at a company rather than leave and go somewhere else? Forty-three percent of agents report the number one reason they're loyal to their current company is not their compensation plan. In fact, only 13% rate their compensation plan as the number one reason they're staying.

Forty-three percent rate the culture at the company—the culture, the vision, and the leadership of the company they're working at—as the number one factor for sticking around and staying loyal. So think about that from your perspective as a brokerage owner or team leader.

What’s your culture like when somebody comes in? How do they feel about working in your environment or office space? Does it feel like a family? Does it feel like you’ve got esprit de corps, you're having fun, you're energized? Is it a fun place to be with a shared vision of what you're trying to build? Or do you not have that?

If you don't have that, you're at risk of losing people to other firms that have a better vision, bett...

As a brokerage owner or team leader in charge of recruiting, where is the number one source of recruits for your team or office? Where are you going to get the most recruits?

It’s an interesting question, right? You might think it comes from video, cold calling, sending texts, video texts — all the things we talk about in recruiting. I’m going to tell you: all those things play a part, for sure.

But the number one recruiting source for brokers and team leaders across the country comes from one area: referrals from your current team.

Just like agents, whose number one source of business is their SOI — their Sphere of Influence — our number one source of recruits is the same.

It comes from your own version of an SOI: your agent body.

Now, what if your agents right now are not referring more agents? You might ask, “Why aren’t they sending me agents?” That should be your number one source of recruiting. Why aren’t they doing it?

A few reasons:

• You’re not close enough with them. Yo
...

How many referrals would you like to receive next week?

If you could just say, “Hey, I want to receive referrals,” how many would that be? Now, everybody would say, “As many as possible,” but let’s be realistic. How many have you received this year? What’s been your average? You’ve probably been getting one a week. For most of you, that’s not the case.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you just got one referral next week? What if you got two? Wouldn’t that be absolutely incredible?

You might say, “How can I start to juice this? How can I get referrals to start flowing to me regularly?”

We often think of it in terms of our spheres of influence, which is good. But we can also get referrals from another category, another source — and that is B2B referrals.

What’s B2B? Business-to-business. We’re always looking at business-to-consumer, B2C, but B2B is a powerful, powerful strategy for you.

Let me give you a good example. If I want to start receiving one referral a week, maybe two, what shoul...