Hey Reader,
Two weeks ago I asked you two questions. How many deals. How many people.
You answered. I read every one, and wrote back to every one. A few of those threads are still going.
Here's what surprised me.
Some of the strongest numbers came from the smallest operations. A husband-and-wife team with one TC: 34 closings. A solo agent with a transaction coordinator: 35.
Not because they couldn't build a team.
Because they decided not to.
One of them put it better than I could: growing a team isn't the only way to run a real estate business.
She's right. I've spent 17 years watching agents build teams they never actually wanted. They hit 25 deals, somebody at a conference tells them the next step is a team, so they start adding agents.
🚩Three years later they're running a ten-person operation that makes less per deal than they did alone!!!🚩
Bigger. Busier. Not richer.
Next: what makes small-on-purpose actually work. From what I see, three things.
- They know their number. Not GCI. What they keep per deal. They grow by raising that, not by adding headcount.
- The support role is a system, not a person. The TC works inside a written process. If the TC leaves Friday, the next one plugs in Monday.
- They decided what they're NOT going to do. Lower price points referred out to trusted partners. Platforms dropped. Small means saying no on purpose.
When does it break? When the owner is the system. When every decision, every follow-up, every client relationship lives in one head. At that point you haven't built a small business. You've built a job you can't quit.
So here's the question I'd sit with this week:
Did you choose the size of your business, or did it happen to you?
There's no wrong size. Only the one you didn't choose.
– Yvonne
P.S. Know an agent who's producing but stuck? Forward this. They can join The Weekly Accelerator here.
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