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...

I’ve got a question for brokerage owners and team leaders:

If you could wave a magic wand over your business right now and hire somebody—a staff member—and money was no object, what would that position be? What would that full-time person look like coming in and helping your company?

What would that position be for you?

A lot of people would say, “I’d hire a social media director.”
Some people would say, “I need a marketing person.”
Others would say, “I need a TC,” or “I need an inside sales agent,” or “I need a tech person. I need a technology expert in my company.”

Or you might say, “I need somebody running my Google Ads or my Facebook Ads. I need somebody in that room.”

All of us have different needs, but I want to go deeper with you on this.

I don’t want this to be a dream. I want this to be a reality. And the way we do that is by identifying your hiring trigger.

For all of us, that trigger is going to be dollars flowing through the front door. We need more revenue coming in t...