Council Classroom
By Kim Cameron, CRS
When I welcome participants to this class, I always say, “Spoiler alert: We’re all a team!” Nobody gets anything done in this business on their own. It takes a village—one made up of your office administrative staff, manager, broker, title company, lender, closing specialists, attorneys and inspectors. The class, “Building a Team to Grow Your Business,” will help you make sure your team is put together in a way that enables you to get everything you—and they—need to be successful.
Whether you’re a solo practitioner with a virtual assistant or a buyer’s agent who’s part of a mega team, you’re going to get to a point in your business where you cannot grow without leveraging your skill set and expanding. If you really, truly want to lead a real estate team, this class will get you started. However, if you want to leverage growth, you’re going to need support, and this class will get you started down that path as well.
One trap agents can fall into is believing they can remain a jack-of-all-trades. And as the saying goes, when you’re a jack-of-all-trades, you tend to be a master of none. You can only spread yourself so thin before things start falling through the cracks. Your performance and level of service start to dwindle, or you begin missing important things in your personal life.
In the end, your team will become one of the cornerstones of your business, like your systems, CMS, marketing plans and technology—all will help you provide the personal touch for next-level customer service your clients expect.
Nuts and bolts
Assess your needs
The first step in building a team is to figure out what you need most. Oftentimes, an agent’s first hire will be someone to handle the paperwork, an admin or transaction coordinator. The next hire is an agent to assist with buyers. The guidelines offered in the class will help each agent identify their strengths and hire team members who make up for their weaknesses. If you are super social, hire an assistant who is detail-oriented, for example. Get to know the DISC profile and hire your opposite.
Core values
The class will also cover some of the intangibles of team building. What kind of culture might you want to foster? As a team leader, you need to truly lead the culture. What’s the team’s mission? Learn how to build a well-thought-out mission statement that is easy to articulate and convey. This mission should be supported by core values that your team can adhere to. Leaders are readers, so you must always educate yourself—and your team members should, too. As team leader, make sure your team members are always learning and prospecting. It’s your responsibility to hold them accountable in the same way you hold yourself accountable for how you perform.
Recruiting
This class will also give participants a good grounding in hiring tactics and team management, information that will be particularly useful for those who haven’t hired or managed people before. (It’s very different from managing oneself.) This overview will cover the best places to recruit, how to conduct interviews and how to set expectations for those who have come on board.
