The catalyst for building your real estate team.
I recently read this amazing book called “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It”, by Michael Gerber. It isn’t a book meant for a start-up business, but rather is targeted towards a business that’s busy and thriving, but isn’t necessarily well managed.
The bottleneck for most businesses is usually the owner, or in our world, the realtor. All the tasks are typically performed by one person and that person is usually the realtor himself. Some will hire an assistant; some will bring on buyer agents. The largest number, however, try to wear several hats at once and do it all themselves.
What the ‘E-Myth’ book makes clear is that in order for a business to grow and not simply exist at its current levels, it will need more than one person to fulfill a variety of roles.
Every business starts with what the author describes as a founder and this person has to have three roles within themselves that are essential to any business set up: the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur. The technician role is the knowledge: this is the moneymaking part of the founder’s personality, shall we say. The entrepreneur is the dreamer side who comes up with ideas to change, grow and evolve the business. The manager is the part of the founder that gets things done on a daily basis.
Even at that, you can imagine that most founders have a solid grasp on the technician side of themselves, but it’s the other two parts of the full package that tend to falter. To be really successful in any business, the founder needs to be made up of all three parts. That’s all well and good but is a founder who does the work the same as a business? Are they one and the same? No. A business needs more parts, usually of the human variety.
The book describes this as the ‘franchise prototype’, where a business that goes beyond the founder to create a platform upon which things run, even when they aren’t present, is moving forward beyond a solopreneurship and into a full-fledged enterprise. The platform has multiple strategies to deal with everything from human resources (people strategy) to management strategy and marketing, of course. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that a business isn’t a business unless it has the processes and ‘systems’ to run smoothly, without the founder necessarily always at the helm. We all get sick, after all; we all have lives. And you have to plan for that in running a business.
The perfect organizational structure for a real estate business is one where all the following hats are worn by someone BUT they cannot be worn by one person alone:
- Sales — Converting prospects into clients.
- Lead Generation — Taking internet/sign call inquiries and turning them into prospects.
- Administration — Ensuring all offers, waivers, CMAs, etc are completed in a timely manner with accuracy.
- Marketing — Creating the funnel of people that call in, email, refer leads to you.
- Listing Coordination — Managing a client’s listing once it is signed up (photography, measurement, description, sign installation, broker loading, etc…)
- Client Care — Taking care of clients’ needs before, during and after the sale.
- Buying Representation — Taking clients out to see homes, educating, searching.
- Accounting — Ensuring expenses, invoicing and payroll are taken care of.
Some of these tasks can be contracted out to other people or businesses that support a realtor and others can fall under the domain of a full time assistant, who can take on many of these hats.
By creating a structure that allows the realtor to focus primarily on sales—or lead conversion, which is what they do best—the remaining tasks can be delegated to a team, internal, external or some combination of that.
For more information on how to grow beyond a one-man (or woman) show, AGENTC can help you structure your business for growth. Adding the right virtual, part-time or full-time help is the key to business success.
