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The Strategy Sessions we are holding will book extremely fast. The training program we have is doubling or tripling most of our clients businesses in 12-24 months and as a result the requests for Strategy Sessions is very strong. Book immediately to reserve your spot.

Look Who Just Joined the B-School...

The Strategy Sessions we are holding will book extremely fast. The training program we have is doubling or tripling most of our clients businesses in 12-24 months and as a result the requests for Strategy Sessions is very strong. Book immediately to reserve your spot.

Lessons Learned from Our Recruiting Mistakes

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Transcript:

All right.  So the first, who?  Then what?  If I only could have known what I know now about recruiting and talent and just trying to motivate people versus just a natural motivation, what lessons have you learned?  Everyone is going to have bad hires, but to try to avoid bad hires, what advice can we give the room here?

"I'll start, because I've made a lot of mistakes in this area.  But first, who?  Then what?  It's a standard thing.  So once you see the type of people you want in your business, you have a new bar, right?  It's raised, and you just never go back. 


"So for me, I have a bar.  It's there, and I made a promise to my buyer's agents, for example, that never will I let anybody in the door that doesn't have the same standard, or higher, than we do. They don't have the stuff.  Right? 

"So I just have a system around hiring now.  They go through several filters.  I use (check) Wise Hire.  I have a lengthy interview process, and then a team interview, and so they have to go through that filter as well."

"I'll share. Recently, we've been talking about core values, mission statements.  I don't know if any of you out there are like me, but I know I've been through several of these intensives with Lars and other type of conferences over the years for probably the last ten years.  

"I've been in real estate since 2003, and I just kind of glossed over that mission and vision.  That sounded like fluff, and I didn't even know what I wanted to do, except for make a bunch of money, pay my bills.  

"So when I first started to build my team, I just started throwing people on the bus.  'Hey, get on.  Let's go.  We're doing something.'  And I could motivate and inspire and -- I don't know what the heck happened.  Then we all started to fall off the bus.  

"So really, what it boils down to is, I look at first who, decide who you are, and then what do you want to do, and then I'll find people that align with your goals and your mission, instead of trying to fit talent that may not fit your goals and kind of putting up the stuff that's going on your team, or it's just not a good fit.  

"More practical tool, also, before you bring people on, you have a real solid vision, mission, and goals, but you also want to be very thorough.  We have a nine-step interview process on our team, and that's pretty rigorous. 

"And the final step is we take their spouse out to dinner with our operations manager and her husband, and it usually works out pretty well, because he's got, like, an innate gut, my operations manager's husband, and he'll just tell me how it is.  He's a little more seasoned in the business world, so it's kind of nice to have that in my back pocket.  

"But one thing -- if you're going through an interview -- and I just had this recently happened for an agent that I had to let go just two weeks ago.  And I saw a pattern.  Actually, it's my wife.  I should probably give her credit for that.  She's my HR manager.  And we've had a couple agents that they interviewed great.  

"When people show up, they're going to look their absolute best when they're there sitting in front of the interview.  And they're going to put on their best face.  So we found that the longer we stretch this interview process, the more natural, the more comfortable they become.  

"So the first one, we have a phone interview.  Then they come in and meet with my wife, who's the HR manager, and she does a brief interview.  Then they meet with the team.  And then the office manager, operations manager, goes at Starbucks and meets with them kind of casually just to kind of get to know them.  Then they come in and meet with me.  Then we do the dinner interview.  

"And then we do the DISC test and some other assessments in between all that.  But anytime you're in that process, anyone in the team can say, 'I just don't get a good gut feeling about this person.'

Another theme that we saw in the interview stages that now we're looking at -- and we're going to avoid hiring these people -- is if they complain a lot about previous employers, that's a bad sign, because they're placing blame with previous employers.  

"Then, we thought, "Oh, we'll just give them the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe it was a horrible work environment.  They had a horrible manager."

"But if someone is just negative about and they spend more than two seconds talking about their negative traits, their previous employers or brokers, you want to run.  I could have avoided two or three bad hires just for that advice right there."

What to Do if You're Struggling with Work/Life Balance

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Transcript:

There is a period of time where things are just going to be sideways, and you're filling all four functions in your business:  you're marketing, you're selling, you're delivering world-class service, and you're counting dollars.  And you're your own visionary, and you're the CEO, and you're just doing every job in the business.  

And you have a spouse.  And you've got to keep a real open dialogue with your spouse about just the reason why you're putting in the work and the ascension that you're looking to do, and just make sure your spouse, your children, that they all sort of understand why you're making these sacrifices.  

Because there is no easy way to do this.  You cant part-time your way to building a sustainable, real leveraged business, but it is -- I just love that: "Entrepreneurship is living your life for a few years like most people won't so you can live the rest of your life like most people will never even dream of."

If you talk to my wife, she still talks about the time that I took from our family -- I cry -- just building the business.  And I knew what I was doing.  I was very deliberate and intentional, high-level communication, but it still hurts her.  There's still pain in there for her.  So if you don't communicate that with your spouse, they're going to feel just left out of the process.  

And you're going to have to lean on them heavily, and they have to know that you're fighting a fight by building a business that most people will never do.  

And I promise you the systems are here.  You've got to go do the work.  We're here to support and help you and make sure it happens, but if that falls apart in the process, ugh.

And the hard drivers in the room, you know, I can make the excuses like the best of them.  That's selling another home or building another business.  Like we're doing it to provide this life for my family.  

But I promise you, your children don't want you to sell another home, you know?  I promise you that your spouse really doesn't give a shit if you sell 250 homes or 50 homes with an admin.  

I went through years of that, saying I'm doing this for my family, and ultimately, it's a huge blessing for us, and we're impacting people, and all that good stuff.  But you're doing it because God created you to just be a driver.  

And so it's a personal decision.  It's a personal decision for you to be on this team, and a personal decision when you decide not to leave the office at 5:30, or whatever time that is for you.  

And it's just priorities.  Like, in the grand scheme of things, at the end of your day, your last day, what do you want to be remembered for?  And family is going to be a big part of it.

"You really want to just draw a line in the sand for you personally, and say if you're going to be home at 5:30 then I'm going to be home at 5:30.  You need to hold yourself accountable. Because that could cause marriage issues just down the road.  

"So you can pick and choose your battles and say,  "I can't be home every night at 5:30," or whatever the situation is, "but on Monday nights or Friday nights, we're going to do a date night."  You just need to carve out family time first and then plug in the rest with work, because work will consume your entire life.  So put those big rocks in first, like Stephen Covey."

"And one thing I would add to that, too, is we started our team in 2010, and six months later, I found out that I was expecting.  So I wasn't planning on that to all happen the way it did, but it actually worked out to be a blessing, because I could not -- at that time, I was a single agent doing everything, and there was no way I could have kept up the level I was at and have a family, too.  

"But I would say the thing that -- and I think you're one that is always struggling with work-life balance, and my thing is -- someone said this one time, and now it's kind of stuck in my head, that it's -- whatever you're doing, be 100 percent engaged in it. 

"If you get home at 5:30, but then you're just on your phone or in front of the computer, it doesn't really matter.  So I kind of think of it as quality over quantity.  And so if you're at work, be 100 percent at work, and if you're at home, be 100 percent at home.

 "And if you just have an hour but just be fully engaged in -- when he gets old enough, he's going to remember that hour you have playing football versus, oh, you were home for five hours, but you were looking at your phone the whole time."

Yeah.  That's really, really good.