Want to know the real estate industry’s best-kept secret? Many hyper-successful agents, maybe even the one in your office right now, are hiding something. When you pull back the curtain just a bit, they’re a hot mess. Sure, they might have the charisma of a cult leader and snag all the best listings, but if you sit down with them for an hour, as I have every week for the last decade, cracks start to appear in their polished façade.
For one, they’re laughably disorganized. When I ask which CRM they use, they smile and tell me Excel. One agent — whose monthly CGI is probably higher than your yearly income — told me she still uses printouts. Yes, as in pen and paper. Yes, in 2025. She even held them up for me on our Zoom call.
Why? The skills just don’t translate. The key smoothing your transition is to learn the strategies they used instead of trying to do it the hard way. To find out how, I sat down with three team leaders from The Agency: Michael Biryla (RealTrends Small Teams rank: 753), Gina Michelle, and George Ouzounian (RealTrends Small Teams rank: 207)
1. Be a team first
“We are co-team heads with a long history. No matter what arises, our general shared perspective is what is better for the partnership and what is better for the team before what is better for us as individuals. If everyone kept this same mindset throughout business in general, everyone would win. It is a reminder that the partnership and the team are more important than you as an individual. The priority is to maintain those relationships intact before any deal, commission, or financial gain, because what it can accomplish in the long run is greater than any short-term conflict that may arise at a given moment.”
2. Make yourself accountable — over everything
“Accountability is everything when you are in a partnership or on a team. On our team, our numbers as a team are all transparent, as well as our individual production numbers. When a team member is doing well, it is very evident to everyone else, and it inspires them to do better. Our production numbers are shared with the entire team every Monday, including our individual numbers as team leads’ individual numbers. This can be a harsh reminder when our teammates have to really look at their own production numbers versus what everyone else on the team is doing. Everything is on the table, so if you are not working hard enough, it is entirely evident that your teammates are outworking you. There are no excuses.”
3. Cultivate a service mindset
“If you intend to grow yourself, then scaling a team is not for you. If you’re even thinking of growing a team, you need to first come from a place of service. The point is not to grow your own brand, your own name or even earn more money. The point is to foster and cultivate a culture and environment for people that can grow in step with you.”
4. Lead by example
“It is absolutely impossible to tell a room of people to do things that you are not doing yourself. It is easy to say to people what they should be doing, but if you are not a living, breathing example of these things, the team will not follow or respect you. You cannot say it; you actually have to be doing it yourself.”
5. Hire slow, fire fast
“If you know it is not working, your best course is to have a conversation with that team member, set a deadline, and remove them from the team. We receive many applications to join the team, and we typically reject most of them. It is not for any reason other than we are not looking to be a mega team; we are looking for a small set of high producers who work as hard as we do and want to be part of our work family. Over the years, we have learned that if they are not putting in the work, the proof will be in the numbers.”
6. Set standards and stick to them
This is a big one for us because the two of us are very kind and see the potential in people rather than what they are actually doing. Just like in a family, if mom and dad set the rules, they need to be adhered to and then enforced. If not, then nobody takes the rules seriously (and then why have them?!).
7. Encourage team collaboration
A significant reason why our team’s sales volume has grown year over year is that we learn by osmosis. A unique roadblock in a deal for Agent A gets solved in the office with Agent B sitting at their desk nearby. If you teach one, you’ve taught all. This not only saves time, but it also prevents the same mistake from happening twice. An office culture where we learn from each other helps our team’s tide rise daily.
8. Hire for traits over transactions
Hiring the right or wrong junior agent can push your team forward or set it back months. When it comes to hiring, always trust your instincts and hire based on personal traits, not transactions. It’s easy to check a potential new member’s sales numbers and think they could be a fit, but I encourage any potential team lead to search for strong character and memorable traits instead. You will teach them how to do deals. You need to trust them to do everything else correctly.
9. Always remember your value
Being a team leader isn’t about having such an excess of listings that you need help manning open houses, and then your junior agents working with the buyers they meet there. A good hire isn’t there to be hand-fed business; they’re there to learn what made you successful. Remember that. A slow season where you don’t list as much as you’d like doesn’t mean you’re letting your team down; you’re teaching them what to do when the market slows. The right hires will value your mentorship, and their own business will come.
10. Focus on quality over quantity
Be diligent about who you let into your work family. Just like your regular family, it is a sacred space, and one rotten egg can ruin you/ your team. We don’t care if someone is a mega producer but has an ego and/or unkind reputation; we will politely pass. We also do a ‘vibe check’ with our team to get feedback from the current members to get a sense of whether the new team member will be a good fit for our team culture.
11. Master time management and calendar discipline
When you start your team, it’s important to remember the three silos of your business: your personal business, the team’s business and prospecting for future business. Your Director of Operations should align with your vision for which of those verticals needs your attention, and will adjust your calendar accordingly.
