What Does Hiring A Staff Member Do For Your Mindset?

I hear from agents all the time that think they need an assistant to work for them. You may actually need that, but not for the reasons you think.

You see, most agents suck at being their own boss. They allow themselves to make excuses and they “let themselves off the hook” nearly every single day. Truth is, if you worked for you, you’d fire your ass immediately. What employer would put up with those kinds of excuses?

However, when you hire on an assistant, all of a sudden you have a real business. You have additional expenses and you have to keep them busy so that you can justify their cost so all of a sudden, you are at the office on time, you create marketing plans, you hold them accountable to results, your agenda fills up with appointments and business starts to happen.

As your appointments are filled up, you are signing more clients and the paperwork starts to become a heavy load.

See back when you were a loan soldier, you couldn’t imagine having an assistant. Heck, there wasn’t even enough business for you so why in the world would you need an assistant?

But it’s important to remember that you are a better business owner when other people depend on you to perform. You are actually horrible at performing for yourself. At least I know that’s how I am.

Any time I’ve been the only employee at my company, I’ve failed miserably. I’d just go run this errand or sleep in for an extra hour or go on a little trip or anything else I could do to distract me from what really needed to be done. I wasn’t showing up the way that I should. I wasn’t as focused as I should be. And my marketing agenda looked like a blank piece of paper. Once I got someone on board with me, I felt like I was wasting money to pay them without them creating substantial profit for me so I had them do all of the things that I should have been doing all along.

I’ve always said that I can look at an agents marketing campaign and guess how much their income is. And I’m sure you’ll agree that even you could look at your last couple of month’s worth of marketing and nail the amount of revenue it creates.

The problem for most agents is that their marketing is best described as “random and sporadic”. There’s no consistency whatsoever and it creates a roller coaster of income for them month after month.

When you bring on some help and their job is dependent upon them creating results for you, all of a sudden action is happening every day. And that synergy causes you to perform at a much higher level yourself.

Remember that when you are doing everything yourself, the very act of creating marketing will create lots of business so when you begin working that business, you don’t have time to continue marketing. I’d read that paragraph again.

Your business should at LEAST be separated into two categories called Sales and Marketing. If you have two divisions like this, you’ll find that it’s stronger, more profitable, more consistent and more sustainable.

I’ve always advised agents to just CONSIDER hiring on an unlicensed assistant and create a very strong job description for that person to see how it turns out. Based on that job description and the marketing tasks that you’ll have them completing for you every day, do you think you can make 5 times or 6 times the amount of money you’d need to pay them? If so, then the assistant can never “cost” you money and to be truthful here, it would cost you money to NOT hire someone on because the lost revenue is something you can’t afford.

This whole topic of “systematically growing your real estate business” will be covered at our upcoming Coaching Retreat in Orlando in April. I hope you’ll be there to create a substantial financial impact for your own business.