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SPONSOR PROFILE the bank. The first step: Team leaders must stop viewing themselves as agents and start viewing (and believing in) themselves as business owners. That can be an abrupt change in mindset for most agents, who are used to being players on a team rather than management making decisions from the GM’s office, but it’s a necessary one. Once a team leader has it in her head that she is a business owner and not an agent, her focus shifts to profitability and her role becomes very, very clear: identify the areas of the business where investment will provide the most valuable returns. Having a clear vision of where the money’s going and the initiatives your future investments will support is one of the best ways to attract top talent. Illustrating for a prospective hire what your team can do for them in terms of training, marketing and growth potential is a tremendous advantage, but it can only be done when your team has its financial house in order and you can demonstrate how you’re going to fulfill your promises.
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Lack of long-term strategy
A team leader has to make tough decisions every day. But what will those decisions be based on? Without a long-term business strategy in place to give it context, how can you even determine what a good decision is? A top-performing team must have in place two-, five- and 10-year strategies for growth and sustainability that include the team leader’s personal aspirations. One of the biggest mistakes team leaders make is that they limit their strategies to the business and ignore their goals as human beings. You need to build the business in such a way that you’re not simply creating an army of six-figure earners; there needs to be an escape plan in place for when you want to retire or scale back your workload. Creating such a strategy is a big ask for new team leaders, but without one, a team might be painting itself into a corner by making choices that will pay short-term dividends but might ultimately harm the team in the long run.
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Misunderstanding value As a team leader, you must understand
your value to your team and your value to future team members. What do you bring to the table? Is it valuable enough to entice the industry’s best agents into working with you? We often consider this an aspect of recruitment, but at the end of the day, recruiting agents is all about providing the most value to them. The key to demonstrating your value as a team leader resides in speaking to agents about solving their problems, not about how they can solve yours. Find out what an agent is after, professionally and personally – training, leads, a better life – and then explain how you can make that happen. If you’re a capable and prepared team leader, your longterm strategy and understanding of your value should converge to provide a path toward any potential outcome a team member could possibly want. If I were personally looking for a new team to sell for, I would want it to be led by someone who provides complete transparency on growth opportunities; who can explain the training I will receive and what the potential results of that training will be; and who will leverage my strengths, keep me in the fast lane and take off my plate all of the duties that get in the way of me doing what I’m good at. A team leader who makes me believe I have found all that sounds like a pretty good person to go to war with. One of the biggest dangers in running a team is overestimating your value and assuming you can make the impossible possible for your agents. Making a million promises and then failing to fulfill any of them is a one-way ticket to the bottom: unhappy agents, disappointed clients and terrible word of mouth.
Try it, test it, best it With so many pitfalls baked into the creation of a real estate team, launching one on your own can be like playing chess for the first time: Victory isn’t impossible, but discovering which moves will set you up for a win is a slow and frustrating process. In my view, it would take a real estate team starting from scratch about 10 years to trialand-error its way to a set of repeatable systems. It would then take another year or two to fully implement those systems in another office. Why run uphill like that for so long?
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE The next few months will be exciting ones at KBCC. On December 12, I’ll be releasing my book, The Top 1% Life, which I hope will help agents grow their business to seven figures while also maintaining a life outside of sales. On January 16, we will be hosting our next Mastermind meeting at the KBCC training centre in Oshawa, where current and aspiring team leaders can ask me and some of my top coaches their most pressing questions in an exciting eight-hour session. We also have two larger events coming up in 2020: our annual Ultimate 100 Deal+ Mastermind meeting for North America’s heavy hitters in June, and our Ultimate Team Summit in November, the biggest team-specific real estate conference anywhere on the continent. Sign up at ittakesa.team.
At Kathleen Black Coaching and Consulting, we share with you the systems that have turned 80% of our clients into top 1% producers with their companies. We have an entire ecosystem – a vault of resources, experts specializing in every facet of the business – to support our clients in hitting the goals they have set for themselves, both professionally and personally. And because we ourselves are a team, we practice what we preach. The processes we recommend for our clients are the same ones that have allowed us to grow into one of North America’s most respected coaching companies. We track the performance of thousands of agents selling for hundreds of teams, so we know what works and who it works best for. Unlike most coaching outfits, KBCC is not the product of a single voice, it’s a choir: dozens of experts harmonizing their efforts to find a unique, nuanced solution for every client. If any of the issues discussed above apply to your real estate business, KBCC has the solution. If your team is having trouble reaching the next level, we’re the boost you’re looking for.
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