Watch the On-Demand Replay
Many mega agents and team leaders struggle to keep their pipeline filled with potential agents. Others find good agents and then struggle to retain them. In this special mastermind hangout, mega-agents Josh Smith and Jeff Cohn share their best strategies for both recruiting and retention.
3 Takeaways
- Know the game you’re playing – Your ability to be a good agent is irrelevant to your success as an entrepreneur
- As a team leader, your job is to create more leaders and provide value for your agents
- A full-time recruiter might be the last key hire that allows you to exit your business
Resources & Links:
Expansion- Learn how you can partner with Elite Real Estate Systems – build your career, start your own satellite team and remove yourself from actively working with clients – all without leaving your current broker.
Team Building Workshop – Spend the day observing these systems in person, including board meetings, Monday Team Meeting, agent one-on-one meetings. Also includes hours of private consulting to create your own custom roadmap to build and exit your real estate team.
Tools & Services – See all the tools, professional services and companies Jeff uses and recommends to help build your real estate team.
“If you’re a true entrepreneur, it’s always “How can I fire myself?” Our ultimate job as the CEO is to make sure we know the game, and then ask “How can we afford to get the right people in the right seats?” -Joshua Smith
We started with Jeff and Josh’s backgrounds, where they started and what their teams look like right now. Josh’s team has about 60 agents including both part- and full-time agents, Jeff’s team is around 30 agents and they’re constantly bringing on new agents.
Josh shared some key mindset shifts that will help you make the transition to team leader. The first is to know the game you’re playing. As a team leader, your game is to recruit agents, onboard them, lead them and get them producing. “My job is to create other leaders, and when I’ve done my job, it means they’re going off and creating their own teams, Josh explained. “The reality is – you are a stepping stone as a team leader. So you can’t have resistance to it. You have to accept that and honor that.”
Josh then broke down some of the stats for his team. Each agent averages 1.8 transactions a month, it takes him 90 days to get them to that production level, and his agents stay with him for an average of 24 months. The challenge is how quickly can you get agents producing, how can you recruit more agents than are leaving, and how can you make sure your team isn’t in a vulnerable position when they leave. Josh also shared that hiring a full-time recruiter was his last key hire, something Jeff is considering as well. Josh’s role in recruiting is local speaking events, videos and email blasts to 40,000 local agents.
Jeff then shared one of the key mindset shifts that helped him go from losing almost all his initial buyer agents to retaining his best agents over the last few years. “The disconnect for me my first year of trying to run a team was that my focus wasn’t on providing value for the agents…There’s two businesses there; #1 is the agent-focused business, #2 is the client-focused business.”
Josh and Jeff both shared their onboarding process for new agents, profile for their ideal agents and how each of them broke through limiting beliefs as their teams grew. Then we went deep into the recruiting process, including how Josh’s team uses a separate recruiting CRM to send customized 20-page business plan to all agents in the area, follow up with phone calls and set appointments, all tracked through the software. Josh attributes half his new hires to this process, and the other half to the value he gives in his podcast and speaking to agents for free.
Jeff also shared his approach, which includes contacting agents on the other side of their transactions, only hiring one of every ten applicants, how they score agents and use team meetings to close recruits, and use the recruiting process itself as part of the interview.
We finished by discussing some high-level concepts like sellability, team branding and teams within their teams, including how the splits work, and how this helps them retain their best agents. Josh explained his approach, “I want to create something that I can do because of volume but they could never duplicate that profit margin on their own.”
Remember that your real estate business is really two businesses – providing value to your agents, and providing value to your clients. The more value you provide your agents, the easier you’ll find it to build a predictable recruiting system while retaining your best agents.
Guest Bio
Josh Smith is one of the top 30 real estate agents in the country (WSJ), founder and owner of Revisto Real Estate Group in Maricopa County, AZ. Josh also founded GSD Mode, which includes his own interview podcast with top agents and entrepreneurs, live webinars and a clothing line. Check out Josh’s excellent training course, 90 Day Mastery, a group training program that walks you through the skills you need to master to have an extremely successful career.
Join us on the next Elite Real Estate Systems Hangout where we’ll share more unconventional systems and strategies for expanding your real estate team.
