If you believe that success is a one step process. . . think again. The goal of building a Champion Team is to identify the steps and apply them in the correct order. You must have both the steps and the correct order. The right steps in the wrong order will take you a long way from the success you want.

Stage 1 – You

Stage 2 – You and your first assistant

Stage 3 – You and the Closing Coordinator and Listing Coordinator

Stage 4 – You and the Closing Coordinator, Listing Coordinator, and Buyer’s Agent

Stage 5 – You and the Closing Coordinator and Listing Coordinator and Multi-Buyer Agents and Field Coordinator

Stage 6: You and the Closing Coordinator and the Listing Coordinator and the Multi-Buyer Agents and the Field Coordinator and the Lead Manager

Stage 7: You and the Closing Coordinator and the Listing Coordinator and the Multi-Buyer Agents and the Lead Buyer’s Agent and the Field Coordinator and the Lead Manager

Stage 8 – All of the above and Director of Operations

I really believe that you can’t deviate from this order until after you get past stage 5. You can add additional buyer’s agents between stages four and five, but you shouldn’t change the structure until you get to stage 5.

Don’t get the cart before the horse.

The biggest adjustment most agents make is to add buyer’s agents before they have administrative help. I guarantee you will see significant consequences for that mistake. Your service to customers will be poor. Your time invested in closing your trades, even if you are an experienced broker, will be needed. The customer relationship will remain with the buyer’s agent, not the team. When they decide to leave, the clients they have worked with will leave with them. The reason is that there really was no team to attend to them.

If you cut your short-term production to help your buyer’s agent and only received a fraction of the gross fee, you didn’t secure the long-term customer. . . He did not put the cart before the horse. A great administrative assistant is the horse of your practice.

If you build it, the sales will come.

I know the first extra mouth to feed is scary. Having another person or family in charge, who relies on your production for their livelihood, is a tremendous burden. I understand how scary that position is as an agent and business owner. In over twenty years of running an enterprise sales business, I have never had to fire anyone due to slow sales. I didn’t want to do that to the people and families who trust me and my companies. I’ve certainly fired people for not performing, but I’ve never had to fire anyone.

The first time you hire and start paying someone a base salary from a 100% commission job, you will scare them to death. When you have to pay them and give up your paycheck this pay period, you’ll want to go back to the comfort of not having an assistant. The best way to solve this is to increase your time in direct income generating activities. Increase your time in prospecting and especially in the follow-up of leads. When your cash flow is low, you must respond quickly to this request.

1. Aggressive action on price reductions

You can never keep a good listing a secret. Make sure you have good listings – lower the price. The shortest line between a commission check and you is a price reduction.

2. Sell to your committed buyer at home

Anyone who is exclusively committed to you, who has not yet purchased and has reasonable expectations, needs you to find them a home. Take them out more often and get them into a home now. With step one or step two, you could cash a commission check in thirty days.

3. Review all your leads

Call all potential clients (even the oldest or longest standing ones) and schedule appointments with them. One of the fastest ways to take care of cash flow in the short term is to reach out to your potential customers. They are the third-party clients and prospects closest to a commission check. Make sure you have left no stone unturned with your desire to convert, engage, and create a high level of urgency in your database leads. Don’t forget that there is a direct link between motivation and time frame.

4. Increase your prospecting

When you increase your number of contacts, the volume of leads will increase. Some of the leads you create will be leads now and some will be leads in the long run. The source you select for prospecting will have a strong influence on the timeline and urgency of the leads. You are more likely to get long-term leads from prospecting for your sphere and past clients. You’ll receive short-term leads with a higher level of urgency when you prospect for FSBOs or they expire, for example. This is due to the difference in the level of motivation of these groups.

Avoiding the main mistakes of building out of order

The most common mistake off-duty agents make is adding production assistants as purchasing agents before adding support staff. When this happens, the lead agent is forced to train, manage, and train someone to a reasonable level of productivity while trying to do all facets of her own production. When the buyer’s agent makes a sale, they create even more administration that the primary agent must take on as well. The problem is that their administration tasks are usually worth half the money. It’s worth the money because the other half goes to the buyer’s agent. He’ll end up doing most of the paperwork to close the deal for only half the normal fee. His efficiency model is shattered, net profit is destroyed, hourly pay is reduced, and prospecting ceases. All of these things add up to disaster in his business.

Champion Team Rule: If you spend more than 50% of your time on administration, you probably don’t have enough administrative help.

We don’t want too many people because it causes too much in the field of management.

Based on my years of experience, the tendency for agents is to be too understaffed rather than too heavy. Check your time allotment. That will tell you if it’s time to add staff.

I know many agents who have been thinking about adding a staff member for years and have never done it. It’s like they’re waiting for the perfect situation or the perfect person to walk up to them, smack them over the head, and say, “Here I am!” You will never act on your desire or find someone outstanding with that philosophy.

If you’ve been considering building a team or expanding your existing team for more than six months, it’s time to act. A decision is in order. . . now. The biggest waste of time in life is from the moment you know a decision needs to be made until you actually make it, when you act and take action on that decision. The lapse of time we waste on knowledge and non-action kills too many people’s success, don’t let it kill yours.

Your systems, processes, procedures, checklists, and other support structures for your business will never be perfect. You will never bookmark it, so there will be no changes in the future. If you’re not changing, you’re not growing, improving, or staying ahead of the competition.

Establishing your business vision, organizational chart, hiring and tracking practices, checklists, timelines, task lists, and team communication systems is enough to create a solid foundation to begin the team building process.