For you brokerage owners and team leaders, I’m going to give you three things not to do as a recruiter. Recruiting is the number one task you should be doing every day, but what are the things you shouldn’t be doing when you recruit?

Number one: you should not be cold recruiting.

Cold recruiting means having a master list of people and calling everyone with the exact same message. That is the worst thing you can do. When you recruit, recruit with intention and purpose, and have a warm reason to reach out. There’s been a trigger event that gives us a reason to connect.

This is what we coach in our program: finding warm reasons to reach out that make sense, that are organic, that are authentic—not just making another call on a long list of calls you’re trying to get through that day.

Cold calling is death to recruiting. People know when you’re cold calling, and they shut you down. Then you get upset, disappointed, and feel defeated, and eventually you stop doing it.

You have to have...

Hey guys, if you're a brokerage owner or team leader, I've got a strategy for you when it comes to recruiting, and that's what I call “Weakest Point Recruiting.”

You might say, what does that mean? Weakest point recruiting simply means this: I want you to look at your overall business today—your brokerage, your team. Most of us are pretty strong in residential resale. That’s the general core.

But what about other areas of the market? Maybe you're weak in land sales. Maybe you're weak in rural property. Maybe you're weak in waterfront, golf courses, condos, or commercial property.

I want you to identify two or three areas where your company or team is just weak—where you're not very strong in that market area. And I want you to look at this not as a weakness. I want you to flip it on its head and ask, “how can I turn this into an opportunity?”

Your opportunity is to recruit to your weakness.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to identify the top 10 agents in that niche who coul...

Hey guys, there’s an interesting new study from 1000Watt. They studied 600 agents and asked them several questions about where they thought they were in their career.

A shocking number: 31% of these agents said they were actively considering making a real estate brokerage change—switching offices.

That number jumped to 53% for agents under the age of 35.

So when you hear that as a brokerage owner or a team leader, what should that represent to you? What I think it should represent is opportunity.

If you look at your entire market—maybe you have a thousand agents, maybe ten thousand—think about one-third of them are actively considering making a change, and 53% of that younger generation are actively considering it. Then the question becomes: What can you do about this opportunity? How can you get ahead of it?

The way you get ahead of it is by being intentional with your recruiting strategy—getting out there, having conversations, building relationships, and really showing your val...

Brokerage owners and team leaders, I want you to start watching for something, and I want you to be opportunistic. That might sound negative, but it’s not.

As an office leader, you have a duty to yourself, your business, your family, and your colleagues. That duty is to recruit consistently. One of the easiest ways to do that is to be opportunistic in a positive way.

What does that mean? Look for trigger events.

Trigger events in your community could be:

• An office leadership change at XYZ Company
• A brand change
• A staffing shakeup
• A technology challenge

I hear about these things all the time, and when they happen, they give me a reason to engage with that company.

For example, I might ask in my office, “Do you know anyone who works at XYZ? They’re having some changes over there. I’d like to reach out.”

Then I’ll make the call:

“Hey, I understand there’s been some changes at your company. I’ve always been impressed with your work. You’re probably very happy where you are—a...

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 ...

Brokerage owners and team leaders, how do you establish trust with agents in your market area?

The number one way to build trust today is through social media. Specifically by recording video daily. The most effective way to build trust is by letting people get to know who you are.

Thanks to video, people can now get a real sense of your personality, your energy, and your overall vibe.

Think about an agent who’s never seen you on video and hasn’t met you in person because everyone’s so busy. All they know is that you're the owner or leader of XYZ Company. You’d be surprised how many agents feel intimidated. Not because you’re intimidating, but because of your title, experience, and success. They might think that they could never talk to you, let alone calling or texting you.

They don’t know you because you haven’t made the effort to show up.

And the way to break down those walls is to consistently show up on social media and post videos daily. Post them to your personal page. Frie...

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...

If you're a broker, owner, or manager, here’s a key question for you:

Are you benchmarking your agents?

What do we mean by benchmarking? It means drawing a line in the sand—looking at what an agent has done over the past 12 months and what they want to accomplish in the next 12 months.

We call this Per Agent Productivity.

Start by measuring your entire office: What is your average per agent productivity?

Let’s say the average agent in your office is closing 6 transactions per year and doing $3 million in production. Once you know that number, and you must know that number, you can set a growth goal.

Now, based on that, figure out how you can push the envelope and go from 6 to 7, 8, 9, even 10 transactions per agent? What’s it going to take to make that happen?

It comes down to two things: recruiting and retention.

From a recruiting standpoint, your goal should be to help new agents outperform where they came from. This is another layer of benchmarking.

When an experienced agen...

As a brokerage owner or leader of a real estate company, you probably remind your agents every week that the best way to grow their business is by engaging their Sphere of Influence (SOI) and consistently asking for referrals.

But are we holding ourselves to the same standard?

We should be asking our own agents for referrals and recommendations about who we should be talking to in the marketplace.

Questions to ask regularly:

1. “Who are the top agents you’ve worked with in the last six months that would be a good fit here?”
2. “In that last transaction, how did Bob do? Would he be a good fit for our company?”
3. “Is there anyone I shouldn’t talk to—any red flags in the marketplace?”

By engaging agents consistently and requesting their generosity, they start to understand the importance of referrals—just like our clients do when we ask.

Agents aren’t conditioned to send referrals unless we ask. The best time to ask is right after you’ve helped them like after:

• Solving a problem
• H
...

Let’s say you got a referral today. What's your next step?

You should have a series of steps you follow every time. When you systemize how you approach referrals, sure enough, more referrals come your way.

Let’s start with what NOT to do: We’re not just going to send a silly little gift card or a coffee card as a thank-you. That would be ridiculous. We should do way more than that.

Think about it—this is the apex point. Everything you do with your SOI (sphere of influence) is leading up to getting a referral. And when you finally get that payoff, when someone actually sends you a referral, wouldn’t it be crazy to just send them a $5 or $10 gift card?

That’s why we're going way bigger than that.

So here’s a list of things to consider:

First, call them and thank them. If you haven’t already, send them a handwritten note: “Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate the referral.”

Then praise them publicly on social media. Make a post thanking them. This encourages others in your SOI to t...