Dustin Brom (0:00)

These are the top five mistakes that most agents make when they're building a business and how you can avoid them. Let's get into it. The Massive Agent podcast. We lead generation tips and strategies to get you more leads and sell more homes. I love to buy houses. I like to sell houses. It takes brass balls to sell real estate. Wait a minute. The leads are weak. You're weak. I've had better. Better. Oh, have I got your attention? Now, here's your host, Dustin Bro. What is up, guys? Welcome to episode 357 of the massive Agent Podcast. I am your host, Dustin Brom here in Salt Lake City, Utah. And today we're going to break down the top five mistakes that I see most agents making when it comes to building a team, building a business, right? Going from solo agent to having a team of staff and employees and helpers around you to sell the houses and to build the thing. So the most important thing is being aware of these and then not doing them. And if you haven't started yet on the process, fantastic. I mean, you are actually, that's not. If you have started, that's fantastic. If you haven't, okay, I hope you do soon. But now you're going to be able to avoid some mistakes. And if you are in the process of building a team or building your business and you're making some of these mistakes or maybe some of the things I mentioned today weren't on your radar, luckily you're hearing about it. You can make some adjustments. You can, you can make some tweaks and improve. Because, look, the only way that you're going to lose here is if you just don't do any of it. If you. Because if you do everything wrong, you're still learning what not to do, right? And you're never going to learn that if you don't take action. You can learn. You can listen to this episode 500 times, which, which I recommend, by the way. You absolutely should do that. You listen to this 500 times. It's still not as effective as actually jumping in and doing it and saying, oh, ok, okay, so that's what that actually means. All right. This episode is for the agent entrepreneurs, the business builders. If you, if you, if you want to, if you want to one day remove yourself from the equation and still have sales happening, this podcast is for you. I, I say this all the time. And, and sometimes agents get. Get pissed about it or, and I think it's because they misunderstand, they feel insulted. I mean, some of them get offended sometimes, which is really interesting. Like they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves why it's offensive when I say something like this. Most agents do not own a business. Most agents own a job. And the way to tell if you have a business or a job is just take two months off. What happens? Well, if during those two months, if sales still continue to happen, if buyers still continue to make offers and close on properties and sellers continue to list properties and sell them, if deals are still happening, when you take two months off, you have a business. But if not, you own a job. Now you can have a very high paying job, you can make a great living, you can have even a great life. That's fantastic. But there's a big difference between being a solo agent, owning your own job, right? Being self employed and being a business owner. Having a sales business, whether that's a sales team or a referral network or a hybrid version of whatever, there's a lot of different ways to structure it. But it's important to know if you want to be a business owner and remove yourself from the equation to where you could take two months off and sales still continue to happen, money still comes pouring in, revenue still happens, people still get, get serviced, then you've got to start thinking differently and taking different steps. So let's jump into it right now. The top five mistakes agents make when building a business, Number one, hiring the wrong people. This happens for a lot of different reasons. First off, if you're super busy and you're hiring out of necessity, a lot of times you rush it for obvious reasons, right? You're like, oh, I'm so busy, I need help with this. I'm just going to hire somebody. And you're so grateful and excited that you have someone that could potentially be taking over those tasks and responsibilities, that you're not picky enough. You don't do your due diligence, you don't, you don't test them, you don't train them properly and you're just like, here you go. And you hand them the reins and you just hope that they, that they thrive. Like what you're doing is you're throwing them in the deep end and hoping that they swim now. Sometimes they swim, sometimes they swim. On the last episode, you heard me tell the story that Paige Steckling told at our Ignite Team Builder summit a couple weeks ago in Salt Lake, where she got so busy, she had so many clients and leads and conversations happening that she just needed another agent to help her with it. So she brought in another agent. Now, she had a personal relationship with this agent already, so it wasn't a random stranger. So she, she already knew her personality and, you know, thought that she'd be a good fit and she ended up being a great fit. And that worked out. So sometimes by throwing someone in the deep end, they will swim. It's just not ideal. Right? So if you, if you can, if you can help it, take a little extra time and be picky, ask really good questions and zoom out. If you don't like the person, if there's something off about them, if they just don't seem right, they're probably not right. But if you're excited and they seem like someone you'd want to hang out with, someone that you'd be excited for your clients to be spending time with, then maybe they are the right fit. Even if you have to train them a little bit on some of your ways of doing things, talent should be what you seek and don't settle. There's so many great people out there. And the more clear you are as a leader in what your vision is and what you're trying to do, what your goals are, what the mission is, what the core values of your company are, then it's just you're going to, some people are going to come in and they're just not the right fit. Others will come in and because of your leadership and your clarity and your vision, they're going to get in line with it and say, you know what, I can get on board with that. And then now they're, now your vision becomes theirs. And that's a beautiful thing. So the number one biggest mistake, or, and look, these are in no particular order. It's not like this is the biggest mistake because how the hell do you scientifically check that? I don't know. I just made a list of five. So in no particular order, but number one is hiring the wrong people. And it usually happens by rushing and not being picky enough. So give people a 30 day trial run, you know, give them a little bit of work to do and say, you know, here you go. Because a resume doesn't mean, in my opinion, a resume shows a couple things that maybe are interesting and references are much more important than that, but nonetheless, the only thing that really matters, the only way you can really tell if someone's going to be able to do the right to do the job well, is to give them some work to do so they can show you if they're going to do it or not, or if they have the Potential to do it well or not. So take your time, be picky. Just like if you're a landlord, you don't just take the first person that applies just because you're lucky that somebody applied to rent your house. If you've ever done that. Not that I've ever done that. Certainly not if you, if you've ever settled or picked a tenant way too fast, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It never ends well. They usually do it. They do a ton of damage. They're not reliable. It's just a shit show. So don't do that in your own business for the love. So hiring the wrong people, let's avoid that, right? Focus on personality fit versus skills. Because sometimes people can have the skills, but they're just not a good culture fit or a personality fit. Number two, lack of clear systems. If you lack clear systems, right, not having the right processes in place for onboarding, lead distribution, managing the team, then it's going to be kind of a shit show, right? And look, and I'm not saying that before you start making hires, you need to have all these fancy processes, all these sops written out in Google Docs or Train you will or some other platform. Like, I'm not saying that at all. You have to have some thought into, okay, if I'm bringing this person on, maybe it's an assistant. You should have some idea of what you need them to do and how you need them to do it. You should have like, it could be as simple as you spend a day or two or three just screen recording those stuff that you're doing that you're going to be passing off to your assistant or to your, to your va, your marketing assistant, whoever it is, right? You just do screen record use loom and just show what you're doing so then they can see how you do it and what needs to get done. And then you just have a list of those links, make a list of all the tasks that you have to do. I mean, this is one of the first steps before you even start making hires is you need to know who to hire and what you're hiring them for. So once you have that foundation, it's much easier to, to make some clear systems and have some processes, have an idea of, you know, who to bring on for onboarding. And once you get to the point where you have some staff, you can get someone to do the onboarding, to do the hiring. You can have, you know, an HR person. Don't call it that because HR is corporate, right? But you know what I mean, somebody to handle the initial interviews, somebody to handle like the job posting ads, somebody to handle like actually bringing them on, getting them their email set up, getting them certain logins to different things, you know, getting their own account to this, that and the other. So there's phases to this. Just know where you're at and give. Even if you've never made a hire before, but you're about to, and you're about to hire a transaction coordinator, which should be your first hire no matter what, if you're an agent, you need a TC as your first hire. But, and, and by the way, after that, assistant, right? Not buyer's agent. You don't need a showing partner or buyer's agent until, you know, way down the road. Even if that's, even if you have a TC that you're bringing on, you should have some idea of how you do things. But here's the thing. A TC is an easy hire because you're not, you're not picking someone and training them how to do the job. With a tc, you find someone who's already very good at it and you say, hey tc, I need your help. How does this work? And then they will tell you what to do. They will set up their system, they will get you integrated into their systems and their processes. So the TC is the most impactful, easiest hire ever because they're going to give you the systems and the processes for all of that. Number three, the third. Why did I say that? Why did I say like that? The number three mistake that agents make when building a business is the wrong structure or the wrong components of the business. So let's, let's dive deep into that, the business that you create. Here's the problem. I see a lot of agents, they think the next step is I'm going to build a traditional sales team. I need buyer's agents, I need, I need showing partners, I need listing specialists, I need, you know, ISAs. You may like that, that may be exactly what you should do. However, not every one of you needs that because it may not match your lifestyle goals, right? So if you, if you have the wrong business structure, the wrong team structure, or the wrong parts of it that don't match your business and, or lifestyle goals, you're, you may start to feel successful and like you're growing, but you're, you're actually running away from the goals that you have. You're building something that's never going to get you to your goals. If your lifestyle, if the lifestyle that you've defined for yourself is you don't want to work weekends. You want to take Fridays off. You want to be out of the office by five. You don't want to deal with A, B, C or D. And you know that you have to build something around that. And then you start building a structure that needs you involved, that you have to be involved somehow on the weekends. You've got to be the one doing this, you got to be the one doing that. It's impossible for you to take Fridays off because that's when A, B and C happens. Then you've picked the wrong structure. You've just structured it wrong. Or the components, the parts of that business are incorrect. They're not congruent with your goals and in your lifestyle. So, for example, like, personally, I chose not to build a traditional sales team. Now, I've told you, I think I've told you, maybe I'm spilling the beans here, but I most likely will be starting a sales team probably in 2025. I'm already wrapping my head around this. And so there's a possibility that I could be looking for agents for my massive agent sales team. But I chose not to in the beginning because first off, I didn't have nearly the education, the perspective, the mentors, and the knowledge that I have today. So I thought, look, I don't want to manage people. Like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to have to train people. I don't want people to be relying on me for business. I don't want to have to spoo feed leads to agents. Now, look, a lot of these were misconceptions, right? But nonetheless, that's where I was at that moment. And so based on what I knew, I thought, I don't want those things. Therefore, I can't do a sales team. That's not going to work for me. So what can I do? What will give me the flexibility to vacation when I want to take the day off, to go to my daughter's soccer game, to, you know, take my kids to the movies on a Tuesday at 2pm like, you know, when, like, how can I do that? And so I created a version of. I just call it a hybrid model. So I have referral partners locally. So whenever I have transactions to do, I refer them out to my local partners. I have a revenue share organization of 520 agents around the country. That. That's part of the business. There's, there's some affiliate income. There's, there's partnerships, there's a Bunch of different revenue streams and partnerships involved in my overall business. And I made it that way so that I could focus on what I love doing, which is creating content. I love marketing, and I love helping agents. And so I didn't want anything to get in the way of me helping and pouring into agents all day long. If I'm out there personally doing transactions, meeting with buyers, meeting with sellers, making offers myself, it's. It's not letting me do what I want to do. So, again, this is personal. You may completely disagree, and you're like, screw that. Like, I love doing that, or you should do that stuff. You're not a success unless you do that stuff. Fine. You think whatever you want, don't care. You just have to do what's important to you. So I chose back then to build a business structure that would make my lifestyle possible. This is the key. The goal is not to build a business. Sorry, let me start over. The goal is not to build your life around your business and to structure your life around the business you have. The goal should be to define what your life looks, what you want your life to look like, define what you. What your ideal lifestyle looks like, and then build a business around it that supports it, that makes it possible. Most agents do this backwards, and it's because we don't know any better. I mean, nobody teaches this. I mean, what. Besides me? Who. Who last taught you this stuff? I don't know. I mean, I know that there's others out there doing it, but they're very few and far between. I know I'm not the only one, but I certainly didn't have anyone like myself or like our massive agent society program to help agents build businesses and to think like and act like entrepreneurs. So I got in and I'm like, I just start doing activity, just start doing transactions, and pretty soon just get busy and busy and busy, busy. And pretty soon I'm now living life when I can, and I'm living life around the business whenever I settle for living life when my business allows for it. And I realize that's exactly the opposite of what I want. So you got to flip it. You have to define the desired lifestyle you want as vividly as possible, and then figure out what kind of business structure will make that lifestyle possible. You want to build your business around your life, not your life around your business. So we can dive. We're going to dive much deeper on structure and all the different options there. This could be a totally separate podcast, and it will be. And if you're in the massive Agent Society 12 week business accelerator, which by the way, we're closing registration in two weeks. Two weeks? It closes. No, actually week and a half. The third week we actually talk about business structure. So we dive deep into this, we show you all the different options, we give you worksheets and show you how you should structure it, what you should add on, what should be part of it, what should not, what you should do in which order, some stuff you should do now, what you should wait to do, all of that as far as structuring the business the right way, because that's everything. Let's move on to number four. Number four, top mistakes agents make when building a business, not building a strong culture, or even worse, not even considering culture. I think by default, the cultures within teams and within businesses, they really are a byproduct of the attitude or the priorities of that team leader or that founder. And so sometimes you get it right, sometimes you put a certain culture into place where there's recognition, you let people compete, there's, you hold people accountable, there's standards, there's also incentives, there's, you know, incentivization happening a lot of times, I mean, if that's natural to you, which for some people it is, then you have a strong culture and people. You're going to attract great people, productive people, and they're going to stay. But if you don't, then it becomes like one of those revolving door teams that you've all seen, maybe some of you have even had those before. You've all seen those teams that people are coming and going, coming and going all the time. They can't keep agents for the life of them. They're always recruiting and it's because they don't have a strong culture. It's just like a very strict, like, you know, here's how we do things. And aside from the numbers, there's nothing keeping people there like they don't feel bought in. So if you neglect the importance of vision, mission and values when you're creating your business, you're not setting yourself up for success. You're not going to have a strong culture, a sticky culture that attracts and keeps great people. I think you'd probably agree if you're going to be attracting great people to your business, you want them to stay there as long as possible, right? If you're going to attract a producer to your team that sells 80 homes a year, they need to see that staying with you has more value for them than going off on their own. Because if they can sell 80 homes, they can do it themselves. But I see all the time, I see teams that have producers that sell, you know, 60, 70, 80, even 100 plus homes. There was a team leader I talked to the other day and their top agent sells 141 homes a year. And they love being part of the team for a bunch of different reasons, but they feel ownership in it. They feel like as they grow, the company grows. As the company grows, they themselves grow. And, and that is important to them. Not everyone feels that way. There's some agents, all they care about is their bottom line, how much they're going to net at the end of the year. And those people you may keep for a while, but then eventually they're going to be like, I'm going to make more money over here by myself, so I'm out. Okay, you're not going to keep everyone forever, but give thought to and careful consideration to the culture that you're building. Implement competition, implement incentives. You know, if you want people to come in and then grow and advance through the ranks, give them steps to do that. Like give them, give them different levels, they can hit different ranks, they can hit, you know, have. And let competition fuel a lot of this. Like, if you have healthy competition within your team, agents are fighting to be that number one, number two agent, right? They're always fighting for, you know, top listing agent of the month or top sales agent of the month or top grossing agent. There could be so many different ways to slice it. And if you have leaderboards that are, that are live, that track all this stuff, I've seen some really cool stuff from other teams that absolutely adds to a positive culture because that's how you keep competitive people, right? Let them compete and then incentivize them. And if they do win, then they get a certain thing like there's actually something in it for them and they feel ownership in it to where it's not like it's the Dustin Brome team my way or the highway. I'm not going to keep very many good people that way. So the fourth biggest mistake, not building a strong culture. And number five, the fifth biggest mistake that agents make when building a business is not leveraging technology. Now, failing to use the right tools for efficiency like CRMs, communication platforms like Slack and automation is a mistake. I also see this in the brokerage that you're aligned with the brokerage that you're building your business under. And I mean, some of you are going to build it as an independent brokerage. I don't know Why? I don't think that makes any sense in 2025, if I'm being completely honest. You can have all the same upside without all the. Just by doing it with certain brokerages that take all the payroll, the legal, the liability, the trust accounts, the need to be a broker, all that stuff you could just do as a team with a brokerage. I don't know why you need your own independent brokerage these days. I personally don't understand. Not everyone agrees with me. That's totally fine, that's my opinion. But the brokerage that you're aligned with matters because you could take all this technology and build platforms and pay for it yourself for your team, or you could just align with a brokerage that gives you best in class technology to begin with so that no matter what, every agent at really no extra cost just gets all of that technology. And then maybe you give a few extra things on top like, like rent o meter or Slack or you know, a few other platforms that, that you do on top of that, like you know, the lofty team or follow up boss or whatever, right? And so you have to. Here's the thing, if you are not cutting edge with your technology that you're offering, your agents are hearing about better options elsewhere. And it's just, it's little bits of doubt that start creeping in. They're like, I feel like we have a good thing going here, but so and so uses what and that looks better. How come that brokerage has this and we're stuck with this and that's weird. How come we have to pay for this but they get it included? It just starts to. You don't operate in a vacuum. So your team, the way that you structure it with your technology offerings, it has to be competitive with everyone, right? You don't exist in a vacuum. Your agents, your team members, your staff, they're going to be looking elsewhere. They're human. How do I know? Because I look elsewhere. You look elsewhere. We all look to the other side of the fence to see if it's greener over there. We all do that shit. So expect your people to do that. So you better find as green a grass as you possibly can and figure out how to make it the greenest, at least for the people that you have. Because if you don't, they're going to seek that greener grass elsewhere at a certain point. Not to mention if you're not leveraging technology effectively, you're just less efficient. It's costing you, it's taking you longer to do shit Your clients have more friction in the process than they have to. If you're, if you're lacking certain systems and processes, you are. Plus it just, it hurts your credibility, right? If you show up and you're to a listing presentation, you're like, we do all these things. And someone's like, wait, you don't, you don't have a single property website and you don't syndicate over here. So and so told me that if we list with them, they'll have us on 20,000 websites. Why don't you do that? Well, maybe you do. You just haven't, you haven't packaged it up and told them that, right? About syndication. Those are all things that you have to take into account for. So leveraging technology properly and having access to it, whether you pay for it or just align with a brokerage that gives it to you, it's going to make you more efficient. It's going to make your agents more productive because they're going to be more organized. It's going to take them less time to do certain things. When it takes them less time to do things, they get more done. They're more productive, which means they sell more, which means they're happier, right? They're more content when they're making a bunch of money. Automation, AI needs to be factored in here. AI tools. So something that my brokerage does that I love and I'm with real is we have an AI assistant built into our app. So any data point inside our. I call it the business manager. It's the real app. It manages all of our transactions. It does E signature. It manages revenue share, stock income, you know, capping, you know, where are you in your cap, how much you've made this year, gross and net. So it has a bunch of financials, it has wealth planning tools. It also the support website. So like, how do I do this or where do I find this or how does this thing work in our app? You just click it and any data point that exists, like, hey, I need the inspection report for 1, 2, 3 Main street for a house that you sold three years ago, it just grabs it and here's, here you go, you click on it. There's the inspection report. When you have technology available like that, your agents, when they're sitting in front of a listing and they're like, oh, I know I sold that house a year prior. What did it sell for? And what was that thing on the inspection report? It's something with the soil that I need to know about. Well, when they remember that they're going to have to go digging through their email, maybe they log into their CRM and they have to find, find all that. Or if you have the right technology tools available, you've leveraged automation, you've leveraged your brokerages offerings. You could just say, hey, what did one two three Main street sell for? And it says it sold for 555,000. So technology and automation matters when it can make you and your team members so much more productive, so much more efficient. They're going to sell a bunch more, they're going to make more money, you're going to make more money, you're going to retain more people. All of this stuff matters. So let's go over this. Let me recap one more time. The top five mistakes agents make when building a business. Number one, hiring the wrong people. Number two, lack of clear systems. Number three, the wrong structure or business components. Number four, not building a strong culture. And number five, not leveraging technology effectively. Try, let me say this too. You got to think about this stuff, but also don't overthink it. I know some of you are going to overthink the shit out of some of this to where you don't take any action. It just becomes analysis paralysis. So find that happy medium where you're, you're, you're considering it, you're thinking about it, you're, you're implementing it. You're being, you're being intentional with your choices. You're really being thoughtful in how you structure things and what you offer and how you do it and all that stuff. But if you feel like you're getting to the point where you're, you're not taking action because you're like, well, I just need to look at a few more things. I need to think this through. You get to a certain point where that's too much. So you find the happy medium. Do not overthink it. Just correctly think it. Before we wrap it up, one of the tools that I see helping agents dramatically, especially over the last couple years, since the market has been up and down and demand has been up and down and interest rates, are they going up? Are they going down? Who the frick knows? It's just been crazy. Keeping current matters has become so much more valuable than ever before. Like, KCM is absolutely invaluable to an agent in today's world where there's so many factors affecting market conditions and with all the stuff you have to deal with, especially if you're building a business and building a team, you don't want to have to think about economics and housing trends and interest rate trends and all this stuff. Why not just have a team of experts give you an update whenever there's something new and then tell you what it means and how to communicate it to your buyers and sellers. KCM is a tool that you need in your tool belt. All the top producers in your market probably already use it and if not, you have a huge opportunity to get it before them and get a leg up. So go to try kcm.combam right now and try kcm. Keeping current matters is a game changing tool that you should have in your tool belt for you and your team. And then bamx, the community that I highly recommend every agent in our industry be part of, go over to nowbam.com join BAMX and at checkout use code MASSIVE. Save yourself some money. Get a discount on the membership, the BAMX community and training platform. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it. If you found value in this episode, please share it with a Share it with your team leader. Share with a friend, share it with another agent. Share it with anyone that'll watch your stories, help us grow the show, help us reach new agents. Because that's why I do this, to make an impact and help agents. Because damn it, when I was, when I was new and struggling and growing in this industry, I wish someone would have talked about these things rather than just, you know, here's a social media tip or here's, you know, make your calls, make sure you prospect for two hours a day. Look, that's all good shit. It's also incomplete. So share this if you found value. Dozens and dozens and dozens. If not thousands of other agents will also. Please share it. Don't keep this to yourself. Thank you for listening. I'll see you guys next week. Take care.