3 Steps To Achieve 300% Growth

The ability to grow rapidly and predictively is one of the most important tasks – if not the most important task – for any team leader or broker/owner. Surprisingly, achieving rapid growth is not as hard as it may seem, but it does require a steady hand, strategy, and the ability to execute. Based on interviews with hundreds of team leaders and brokers who have experienced rapid growth, here are the 3 steps that are common themes among all of them:

This chart shows the real estate platforms by their ability to generate a high volume of leads while remaining a great quality.

1. Get the best leads and platform available in your market.

If you want to grow faster than your competitors, you will need a better platform and better leads than them. I recently published the article, 2017 Study: Real Estate Software Compared, where we compared the performance of various lead sources and tools.

Overall, Great Agent, ranked the highest overall in the survey.  The company repeatedly scored “excellent”  in most of the categories and contains most of the features noted in the survey. Realtor.com came in as the second best provider. However, they only provide leads, so your team should make additional investments in SalesForce.com or similar tools if you decide to go that route. You can read the entire study here.

2. Launch an agent referral program that stands out

Each of your agents should refer at least 5 other agents who join your team every year. Instead of just saying, “For each agent you refer us, we’ll pay you $500,” make the referral a subject your agent can’t avoid, and make the reward program stand out. Here’s how one Director of Business Development of a $1 billion brokerage explained it to me: You simply book a new meeting about once per month, but let the agent know what you expect from them:

“Joe, I am going to schedule 15 minutes for us on Tuesday morning. I want both of us to show up prepared. I am going to look through your connections on LinkedIn and friends on Facebook, and you are going to help me identify the top 10 that would do best as agents on our team.”

Put the agent’s name in the hat every time someone refers another agent who ends up joining the team. Then every year at their holiday party, draw a winner from those names and reward the winner with an all-inclusive trip to somewhere tropical for the agent and their family. It’s so much more exciting to win a luxury trip than it is to get $500.

3. Build a recruitment agency within your team

The best agents in your market can pick and choose between the teams and brokerages they can join. These top performing agents are not going to respond to some job ad on Indeed, Zip Recruiter, or any of the other tools trying to sell their job postings to you.

You need to actively approach agents, build a connection, and recruit them. This is no different from how a recruitment agency will operate. In my experience, outside recruitment agencies charge too much and provide no better candidates than you can find yourself by using free versions of LinkedIn and Facebook. Make it a goal to connect with at least 100 agents on LinkedIn every week, take their email addresses from their profile, and contact them that way. They are much more likely to see an email directly from you than some free or costly InMail.

On a final note, while these steps together might seem overwhelming, remember that Rome was not built in a day. Don’t feel as though you have to implement each part of the process immediately. Start with Step 1, get things in place, and then move to Step 2. Make small, incremental improvements to help your business grow.