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 ...

People often ask me, “Jim, what’s the secret to recruiting?”

Here it is: spend one hour a day recruiting—just like your agents are expected to spend one hour a day lead generating. We tell agents to prospect daily; as a brokerage owner or team leader, you need to do the same thing with recruiting.

I call this the “Five by Five” system. It’s a proven strategy we use in our company and with our brokerage coaching students across the country to drive performance and success.

Here’s how it works. Within that one hour of recruiting, you commit to:

• Making 5 calls
• Sending 5 texts
• Sending 5 video texts
• Writing 5 personal notes
• Doing 5 social media touches

If you hold yourself to that standard, you’ll start unlocking new opportunities.

The next question is: what do you say? What should you be texting, saying on calls, writing in notes, or posting on social media?

The key is natural, authentic conversations that resonate. Great recruiting isn’t about pushing for an appointment eve...

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...

As a brokerage owner and team leader, I have a question for you: when’s the last time you fired someone?

That’s a big one, isn’t it? Have you ever actually fired someone, or do they just leave on their own? A lot of brokerage owners and team leaders don’t have the strength to say, “This person isn’t working here anymore.” But avoiding that creates roadblocks for recruiting.

Sometimes one agent creates what I call the “bad apple syndrome.” They’re so difficult—dramatic, gossipy, toxic—that potential recruits won’t join your company because they don’t want to work with them.

Think about your roster right now. Maybe everyone is fantastic. But maybe not. Maybe you’ve got someone with barnacles—someone others don’t want to work with.

And here’s another question: how many people on your roster haven’t closed a deal in the last year? You might have five, six, eight, even ten agents producing nothing. Why are they still on your roster? They’re dragging down your company’s production number...

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...

What is push-button recruiting?

If you're an office leader or team leader, you might be tempted to say, “I want to recruit, but I don't want to spend the time doing it. I just want to plug into a system—a CRM, AI platform, or some kind of tech—that will do the work for me. It’ll send emails, send texts, and every day it’ll do the job automatically.”

Then, like magic, people will just start calling, wanting to work for you.

Well, I wish that were true. That would be nice.

Another version of this is hiring virtual assistants overseas to make a thousand calls a day.

I'm going to tell you something you might not want to hear:

These systems, by and large, do not work.

On the rare occasion they do set an appointment, it’s usually with the lowest-hanging fruit—the kind of agent you don’t want anyway. These are people who’ve changed companies five times in a year.

Why doesn’t it work?

Because it’s not personalized recruiting.

Imagine you’re on the other end. If you're getting a gener...

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...

I want to give you a strategy to start using every day in your office.

As you're walking through the halls and having conversations with your agents, follow those conversations up by asking, "How’s your pipeline?"

You’re communicating to your team that you care about their performance and want to help them reach the next level in their business.

By asking those magic words—"How’s your pipeline?"—you’re going to unlock a lot of meaningful conversations.

People will say things like:

• "I wish I was doing better"
• "I feel like I'm underperforming"
• "My last listing just sold"
• Or "I’ve only got one escrow left and I’m worried about paying the bills"

You’re going to hear a lot of that. And that’s exactly what you want.

Don’t avoid those conversations… go straight at them.

Because if you’re not having that talk, someone else is... and that someone is likely trying to recruit your agents by offering them a solution.

You are going to be that solution.

When an agent shares a challe...

Hey guys, what do you think is the average age of a REALTOR in the United States?

For the 35 years I’ve been in the business, we’ve been hearing—and I was a part of it when I got in at 19—that a whole wave of 20-somethings and 30-somethings would enter the business. We kept hearing that REALTORS were getting younger.

Guess what? The average age of a REALTOR today is still 53 years old.

Yes, we do see some younger people getting in—I was one of them. I have young people working for me, and I’ve got young people working at our companies. But the reality is, the average age is still 53.

Why does this matter when it comes to recruiting and retention?

Because we’ve got to be mindful of how we build out our companies. We’re constantly told to design everything for Gen Z or even Gen Alpha—but that’s not true.

The vast majority of your agents are going to be Gen Xers like me. They’re going to be in their 50s. I’m 55. That’s your actual market.

When you're building out your office, your ...