As brokers and managers, one of our jobs is crisis management, as we all know, right? We're dealing with crises all the time.

Agents that come into your office and they say, “I have a problem.”

They all think the problem is a crisis. So I'm going to give you a little tip on something I learned years ago. I call it the “1-3-1 Approach” for helping agents kind of learn to fish.

In other words, teaching them how to deal with the crisis in an effective way. Even if maybe you're not there to help them, you're going to train them how to address a crisis, address a problem that they're going on.

And this is a great retention tool, guys.

So the 131, here's how it works:

First, when they come into your office, you're going to cut to the chase. You're going to identify the problem. So you can identify one problem at a time, not ten. But let's talk about one problem. So that's the 1.

Then we talk about three possible solutions, three possible ways that we could get this issue solved. And I...

Hey guys, if you're a brokerage owner or team leader, I've got an idea for you. And that is the power of gifting.

Why is gifting so important? Well, gifting is important because it helps you show up in people's lives in a whole different way. And if we're somebody that's trying to recruit or retain agents, gifting is a super powerful strategy.

Let me give you both:

So if you have a staff, a small staff or a big staff, why don't you empower them with a small budget? Not a large budget, a small budget, maybe $200 to $300 a month, where they have the power to gift someone in the office or on your team because of something that's happening in their lives.

They had a sick baby, or they've had somebody graduate high school or college, or their spouse is retiring.

Whatever you see, whatever they see as your staff, they can say, “hey, I'm going to go spend a few dollars on a little gift, personalized gift for this person.”

And of course, who is going to be the one that's listed as saying...

I've got a strategy for you when it comes to people that you have recruited.

I know a lot of you see me talking about recruiting and recruiting strategies, but when those people actually do join you, what do you do to make sure that you're going to be able to take this person that's joined you and turn it into even more recruits?

We call this “Linked Chain Recruiting.”

In other words, one person comes, but I'm looking at the other 5 or 10 people I could pull from their office over behind them. I want them to be like a rope. I'm going to pull more people in.

How do I do it? Well, one key way is to make a marker.

What's a marker? I'm going to put in my CRM where I'm tracking my new recruit, my experienced agent who has joined us and add:

What did they do in terms of production for six months prior to them joining, or maybe for a year prior to them joining our company?

Or maybe I just go back a quarter and I say, “Okay, they closed three transactions the quarter before, the three m...

So brokerage owners, if I walked into your office today and I just put my hands out and I said, "How does it feel to be in your office?"

What would I feel?

Would I feel like it's an energetic place, that it's motivational, that I'm inspired by being there?

And even if you're running a cloud-based brokerage, this still applies to you, by the way.

When I talk to your agents, do they say, "Hey, working with this company makes me feel just energetic. I feel excited. I feel like I can tackle the market."

Or if I walk into your offices, does it feel quiet? Are there crickets? Is it like a morgue? Is it not exciting? It's just kind of... look.

What does it feel like?

So here's the real question behind the question:

Can you, as a brokerage owner-leader, influence how it feels in your company?

The answer is, of course, yes.

So how do we do it?

I'm going to give you what I call the Five-One Approach. I call this going big and going small every day.

So going big means we do one thing ...

Hey guys, when you look at every real estate market in America as a broker-owner leader, you can probably agree with me that there's only one #1 brokerage in every market.

Now, today, it may be you, or it might not. Odds are it's not. So if we're not number one, sometimes we can say to ourselves, "Geez, how am I going to attract agents if I'm not the top dog in the market?"

We need to change the narrative.

What do we do to change the narrative? We got to reframe what people are looking at.

So I'm going to give you an example of that:

When we are talking about our firm, instead of just focusing on who sold the most, who listed the most, who painted the most, which is what agents get caught up in, brokerages get caught up in reframing the narrative.

For example, by saying, "Hey, let's look at a couple of other metrics of how we can evaluate companies in the marketplace."

Maybe it's the number of years the broker has been a broker. I'm 36 years in the business. Not a lot of people ...

As a real estate broker, one of the things that we often focus on is recruiting, as we should. Recruiting is the number one way that we can drive profitability to our business over the long haul.

Yet what happens with a lot of brokers is their measurement of their success is misguided.

Let me tell you what I mean by that:

Often we would obviously say that we're successful if we're recruiting X number of people into our company in a given period of time.

But I'm going to suggest to you that is a poor measurement system. And here's why:

Because you're measuring the bottom of the funnel, not the top of the funnel. And the top of the funnel is what creates results. Just like with our agents, when we teach them to lead generate, we have to teach them that they have to fill the top of the funnel.

In other words, they have to go out and lead generate every day to ever hope to generate a listing, a buyer, or a closed escrow.

The same thing is true for us as recruiters.

We have to be fi...

Hey brokerage owners, I have a story for you:

Two branding experts walk into a store where you can buy collectibles, like a thrift store. We'll say that generously they buy $128 worth of just little trinkets, little doodads, this, that, and the other. About 100 items is what they buy.

So they walk out of the store with all this stuff, and they go, and they employ writers, professional writers, to write stories around each of these little items.

Now, they are fictional stories, not real stories, but then they take these stories that have been created around each of these little crazy items, and they post these stories with pictures of the items on eBay. They clearly state, "This is a fictional story."

What do you think happens with this?

A quick example is that they had a little figurine of a cat with a little tamale mustache. They paid $0.50 for it. They were able to sell that thing for $22.

But their whole haul of stuff that they spent $128 on, they sold for over $3,600 by creat...

Hey guys, let’s say you've been talking to an agent in your community and you have a good feeling about the potential to bring them into the office, onto the team.

You've been doing some what I call “No Recruiting” recruiting, building some relationships, really starting to have that great conversation with them.

But they're not quite there, right? They're just not quite going over the fence for you.

I got an idea for you, and it's something maybe you've done, maybe you haven't done. But for those of you that haven't done it, here's some encouragement for you. And that is to do what I call a culture test. And the culture test just means this:

You call that agent, you text that agent, and say:

"Hey John, this morning or this afternoon or next week we're going to have our office meeting. And I just want to invite you to it, just so you can get a vibe and a feel for what it's like to see one of our meetings, to experience a meeting that we do.

We invite people from other companies a...

Hey, brokerage owners and team leaders. I'm sure you've experienced this because I've experienced it a million times:

As a brokerage owner, later as you get a stream of agents coming into your office and they're always asking the same exact question. Like, "Oh, I got to ask you about this." And you're like, I've answered this like ten times this week. Drives you a little crazy, a little bananas.

But you go through and you do it again, and you think about that time suck of answering the same question over and over and over again.

Let me give you a solution for that.

And that is to create your own little mini university, right?

Your mini university just means you're going to create a recorded answer where you answer this frequently asked question, this FAQ question.

And now you push this out to your office and say, "Guys, I'm getting this question a lot. I just want to answer it en masse."

You put it on your Facebook closed group. Maybe if you had a YouTube channel, a private one,...

Hey, brokerage owners & team leaders. Quick question:

What's the number one reason why somebody will join your firm as opposed to all the other firms in the marketplace?

If your first inclination is to say, "It's because we have the best commission plan," you've already lost.

If your whole strategy is based on what you're offering in terms of commissions to agents, you're going to lose because somebody is going to come in right behind you and offer an even lower commission split.

So commission-split warfare is a straight path to going absolutely broke.

This business is not about what agents really want.

If you look at the marketplace landscape in your market right now, I guarantee you the number one offices are not the cheapest offices.

You know who the number one offices are?

It's those offices that are showing agents a path to a higher transaction count (and this is the biggest thing you should focus on).

They're giving them a way to increase the number of transactions they'...