If you’ve been following my journey for some time, you know I took over the family business at 30, with no leadership experience. I was the top sales agent and the business’s bottom line relied on me selling homes.
It’s why the transition from salesperson to CEO has been challenging, especially in the early days when we were still in the red. It took a good three years to become profitable, after discovering millions of dollars of hidden business debt.
But even now, eight years later, the agency still relies on me to sell. When we lose a key performer, I have to step in and plug revenue gaps.
I often still wrestle with how much I should be selling as a real estate principal. I wrote about it in a recent article, about how I’ve landed on selling 25-30 homes per year. That feels like the right number for me, right now, and where we’re at as a team.
We’ve also been doing a lot of culture work at Nitschke, so I’m clear on the end goal of me ultimately selling less as the leader. I treat every lead, idea or issue as an opportunity to level up the team. I systemise every step, so that I can start to get out of the way.
If you’re constantly feeling overwhelmed, burned out, disconnected and unable to fully trust your team, you’re not alone. But if the goal is to build a business that can not only operate but thrive without you, you need solid systems.
Systemise your prospecting (and profit)
For real estate leaders, I’d start with lead generation. If your business relies on the principal to bring in listings, you’ll eventually hit a ceiling.
Instead, focus on building a company-wide prospecting strategy that supports your agents in generating new leads, growing their databases and creating consistent listing opportunities.
There are three areas I’d prioritise:
- Lead generation: Establish a repeatable prospecting process within your core market. Define where new leads will come from, who is responsible for generating them and how you’ll measure activity and results.
- Database growth: Create systems for capturing, organising and allocating new contacts so your agents can consistently build their own pipelines, rather than relying on the principal's relationships.
- Database nurturing: Develop a structured follow-up strategy that keeps your team connected with past clients, prospective sellers, and homeowners. The goal is to turn relationships into future listing opportunities, rather than relying on sporadic prospecting.
Find ways to gamify growth and make performance a team sport. This is especially important in sales.
Once these systems are humming, you can start delegating responsibility, measuring performance, and gradually extracting yourself from the day-to-day activity.
That's when you begin to future-proof your business. You're no longer relying on one high-performing salesperson or yourself. You're building a business that can generate opportunities, develop agents in the process, and scale independently of you.
Of course, lead generation is only the beginning. You also need systems around your people, operations and client care as you make the transition away from the day-to-day.
The ultimate goal is to build a business that doesn’t need you to do everything.
This is the thesis for my new podcast, Run It Better. Every episode, I dig into a different agency issue that a principal might be facing – all issues I’ve overcome myself.
If you lead a real estate agency, share your business question or issue with me for a future episode.