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...

If you're a brokerage owner or team leader and you're saying to yourself, “hey, who should I target in terms of recruiting in my local market,” I'm going to give you The 20% Rule.

This is something we should all be aware of: There are people that are more likely to move than others in your market area, which falls in The 20% Rule.

Here’s what The 20% Rule means:

People that have had an upswing in their business by 20%, or a downswing in their business by 20% over the past 12 months.

So let's look at the downswing folks. The downswing folks are looking to be rescued. It's a perfect opportunity to be calling them because who do they blame? They never blame themselves.

There's never going to be a time where they say, “well, I didn't do what I was supposed to do.” They're always going to say, “well, my brokerage should have given me better marketing or better support or better training or better leads. It's their fault, not my fault.” It's just a natural tendency of what agents do.

A...

The question for you brokerage owners and team leaders out there:

Do you know your numbers?

And when I ask this question, people say, “Oh yeah, I know my numbers.” And then we test it and see if they really do know the numbers.

I'm going to test you right now. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about your market, and I want you to be able to tell me if you know your numbers.

When I say your market, I'm talking about your agents that work within your company. That is your local market, by the way.

And here are the questions:

1. What is your average pending price with your agent body? What is your average listing price with your agent body? What is your average close price with the agents that work for you today?

2. How does that compete with the rest of the market versus the MLS? Are you higher or are you lower? Where are you at?

And then I'm going to go deeper than that. I'm going to ask you this really tough question:

3. What's your average agent's productivity based ...

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...

When you're turning a page with your company and saying, “We want to take our business to the next level. We want to grow. We want to have a year of growth,” what does that actually mean in practical terms? How do you put that into motion in a real, meaningful way?

The first step is to set goals for your firm. You need recruiting goals. You need listing goals. You need sales goals, and you need closing goals.

The recruiting goals fall squarely on your shoulders. You have to figure that out. You have to dive in and work a system, a program, a path to performance. We give you that through the brokerage coaching we offer.

But the other three goals—sales goals, listing goals, and closing goals—are the responsibility of the entire team.

It still falls on your shoulders as a leader, but it also falls on the shoulders of everyone who works for you.

Here’s what you should do, and what most brokers do not do. You need to ask, “What is our closing goal? What are we trying to do on a monthly...

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...

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, I want you to think about the last agent you lost. I know it’s tough — I’ve been there. Losing an agent feels like a gut punch, like getting kicked by a donkey. It hurts.

When you think about that last agent who left, I want you to answer a tougher question: why did they leave? What caused them to go to another firm?

Sometimes they get led down a garden path and think the grass is greener. But often, and this is hard to admit because our emotions get in the way, the real reason they leave is because we didn’t have a close enough relationship with them.

And I’ll tell you something: Friends don’t leave friends.

That’s the reality.

You need a closer bond with your agents individually. And then you need to help them grow transactionally. Start with the relationship, then move to helping them grow their transaction count.

The only reason people leave is because they’ve been promised a path to more transactions. It’s rarely about the commission plan. Sure, that can sp...

Hey guys, do you have emotional intelligence? That’s an interesting question, right?

There’s a massive difference between IQ and EQ.

Some of you, like me, have probably met really smart people — PhDs, doctorates — yet when you meet them, they’re super awkward. They’re not easy to talk to, sometimes they’re complete jerks, and you wonder why these people are flat broke. They’ve got huge degrees but are living like paupers.

Why? Because IQ doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful career or life. EQ, though, has a massive impact on our success as human beings.

You see plenty of people who didn’t graduate high school or college but went on to build incredible businesses. Maybe that’s you. It’s certainly me. They have high EQ, or emotional intelligence.

So what does EQ mean?

It means having the ability to build relationships with people and elevate those around us so they feel good about the relationship — and about how you’re impacting their lives.

So when you think about how...