Your First Hire As A Real Estate Agent

Congratulations!  Your business is kicking butt and you are getting overwhelmed…this is a good problem to have!  So who should be your first hire as a real estate agent?  You should hire a buyer’s agent to run buyers around so you can focus more time on listings, right?

Right?

WRONG!

This is a classic mistake most agents make when they are ready to expand their business.  They realize that running around with buyers is taking up too much of their time, so logically they think they will replace this aspect of their business, and everything will start running smoothly again.  However, what is really slowing you down and costing you time (income producing time) is your administrative work.

Gary Keller spends a portion of the book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, or MREA, for short, describing how the organizational model of your business should look.  I will spend the rest of this post summarizing that section, however, I highly recommend you read it if you haven’t already.  Oh, and if you have read it, go through it once again with a highlighter, pen and paper, and really start formulating what your business looks like on paper, compared to what it can become.  You will be amazed at how inspired you will be to build the best version of your business, and to take it from an income producing career, to a business you run, not one that runs you.

There are 3 areas of concern when making any hire for your business:

1. Hire The Right Position
2.  Hire Talent
3. Take The Time To Train And Consult

Hire The Right Position

This comes back to how this whole post started.  You need to hire the right position for whichever stage your business is in.  If up until now, you were a one person show, hiring the right administrative assistant is key.  Firstly, your business growth indicates that you will soon need to implement systems. Systems will both help make the repeatable tasks easy to leverage and outsource, and will free up more of your time for income generating activities.  The rule of thumb is as follows:  If there is a task that you do more than one time, it needs to have a system created for it.

Now, pause for a second and look back over your last handful of transactions.  How many tasks did you repeat in each transaction?  How many tasks did you repeat within a single transaction?  Every single one needs a system, if you want to scale your business.  The issue is creating and documenting these systems becomes very time-consuming, and if you are the one creating them, it will be counter-productive.  Most agents will not take the time to document tasks they do, for each and every transaction.  This is the first reason why you must hire someone who will see what you are doing, document each step of the process, and ultimately create the system for each process.  The administrative assistant should come before the development of the systems.  It is your admin who will create these systems for you.

Hire Talent

No matter what position you are hiring for, whether it is your first assistant, your second assistant (Bet you didn’t realize you should have two assistants before hiring your first buyer’s agent, huh?  Read the book!), your buyer’s agent, listing specialist, all the way up to your CEO, you need to hire talent!  Gary Keller describes talent as someone whose natural skills, experience, and aspirations all line up around the job description and give them every reason to succeed at a very high level.  Now you can base your decision against clear criteria, not how they are as a person.  This takes the emotion out of hiring, and when done properly limits the amount of people you need to fire.  Oh, and while we are on the subject of hiring and firing, you MUST hire slowly and you MUST fire quickly!  This rule is paramount to the health of your business.

Now a perceived challenge with hiring talent is it may cost you more.  I say this is perceived because if you are looking at how to get by as cheap as possible with talent, you are taking the wrong approach.  That is a mindset of scarcity and defense.  I challenge you to take the mindset of abundance and offense in this scenario.  Hire and figure out how to structure the compensation so the talent wants to stay as long as possible, rather than for them to always be looking for a “better opportunity.”  Think about it this way, hiring talent is an investment in your company, and it should be one that has a considerable ROI.

So how do you recognize talent?  Well, if you are part of Keller Williams, you can go through the Recruit Select program, which will teach you exactly how to recognize talent, and more importantly, how to recognize those we wouldn’t consider talent.  For now, we will extrapolate some of the indicators that Keller gives in MREA:

• Talent pushes to get answers
• Nontalent needs to be pushed to get answers

• Talent pushes you constantly
• Nontalent requires you to push it

• Talent is continually raising the bar and wants to be associated with talent
• Nontalent may not know where the existing bar is set or even what bar you’re talking about

 

Take The Time To Train And Consult

According to The MREA, there is the right way to train and consult, and there is the way most agents do it.  Take a look at the images below taking from the book and you should instantly see why one works and one typically leads to disaster:

The Right Way To Train and Consult:

 

The Way Most Agents Train and Consult:

 

Do you see the difference?

The typical agent doesn’t take the time to invest in his newly hired talent.  He or she assumes the new hire will read the agent’s mind, and know exactly what to do.  I hear it from agents all the time.  They don’t understand why they can’t find good “human capital” for their team or business.  Most of the time, the reason lies within.

The right way to train and consult a new hire is to take the time to help them understand why you hired them, learn the skill sets necessary to perform the job at a high level, and then develop the tools and systems.  Then they can begin to implement what you taught them.  You should hold weekly (perhaps even daily in the beginning) accountability meetings with them at set times and without distractions.  Take this opportunity to review goals and tasks, and to adjust course as needed.  This continues for the entire duration of their time with you.  You want them to constantly strive for higher levels of growth and goal setting, and you want to be there to guide them along the way.

Or, you can go the route most agents take and beat your head against the wall every time you hire the wrong person, give them inadequate training and accountability, and play the excuse game and blame everyone but yourself.

What’s it going to be?  Can I get you to commit today, to building the best version of your business that is possible?  Do you believe you owe that to yourself, your family, and your business?  If the answer is yes, then read the Millionaire Real Estate Agent and go out there and crush it!

If the answer in anything but yes, well then I wish you luck…you are going to need a lot of it.