At Nitschke, every quarter we go off-site for the day to review the past 90 days and plan the next 90. We’ve been doing these quarterly off-sites for years, and it’s one of the most powerful team-building activities we invest in.

If you want to catch up on what went down in Q1 and Q2, read those reviews. As a leader, I love documenting our 90-day worlds, both to track progress and inspire other agency MDs.

Q3 wasn’t what you hoped for? Book a 15-minute chat with me if you’re feeling stuck and we’ll get you set up for success in Q4.

Let me start with my Q3 highlights.

I spoke at the Laing & Simmons Leadership Forum, which was my fourth keynote this year. I delivered a talk that 30 days prior I wasn’t sure I’d be able to achieve (on the back of a couple culturally influential people leaving our agency without warning).

As a result of that crisis, I brought in external support to build a culture playbook, rather than that coming from top-down.

We invested in AI-native, custom-built systems, which has enabled us to continue operating efficiently without backfilling headcount. Read about the AI tools I’ve created this quarter.

With a tighter, more aligned team, it means I’m needed more in meetings, not just leadership and sales, but also PM. This has helped the team feel more connected to leaders, and vice versa.

I also launched my first product, OS – more on that here.

It was a quarter full of growing pains, as well as gains.

Lots of lessons

Here are some of the most potent lessons I learned last quarter:

  1. What got me here won’t get me there. The way I led in 2018, absorbing everything and deciding alone, is what saved the business when we had six weeks of cash left. But this instinct that rescued me became the bottleneck. I couldn’t coach myself out of my blind spot, hence bringing in outside help.
  2. Acts of service is my love language. This doesn’t always work at work. Jumping in to solve problems just because I can do it fast doesn’t do anything for our culture.
  3. Losing two people exposed our culture gaps. A crisis doesn’t create a problem, rather it reveals what’s actually there. You can’t change a culture overnight either.
  4. Bigger before better applies to recruitment/retention, not just systems. I’ve chosen a smaller group I can actually give my attention to.
  5. Recruiting from outside real estate. Everyone good at this came from somewhere else first, not from another real estate office.
  6. I posted about a hard week and three people rang me. The thing I was embarrassed to say is what brought people closer. Vulnerability is everything.
  7. I needed to know my break-even and profit targets in settlements and properties under management, not dollars.

Looking ahead

I’m expecting Q4 to be strong. We’re planning to finish the culture work we started and implement the written set of standards we co-created. We’ll hold the new rhythms (the Monday stand-up, the 1:1s, and the monthly whole-team session) until they become routines.

We’ll finish moving Nitschke to our own systems, running a smaller team with more capability. I want that to be a design choice, rather than something that happened to us.

Other areas of focus are being more visibly present, not just available. This means saying hello and goodbye to everyone, every day. Hitting our break-even and profit targets is a business design discussion, not a work-harder problem.

I’ll be closing out the quarter on the back of my big Thailand trip, where I’ll ride 500km with real estate colleagues from other agencies across Australia. Here’s the donation link if you’d like to contribute – every dollar goes directly to the kids in need.