This week at Agent First Summit, our presenter was me—Jaime Resendiz. I am an eXp agent and real estate educator with years of experience in implementing business strategies and building teams. At eXp Realty, I’ve built a large team of agents in the Agent First Group (which most of you know well) and a team of great assistants who help me in my personal business.
Our Agent First Summits happen every Tuesday morning! It’s a perk for all our real estate team members and any of their guests who want to grow their real estate business. To get an invitation, RSVP here: Save Your Seat!
In this session, we dive deep into how we can build leveraged teams to help us save time and earn more as a real estate agent.
Where Do You Earn Your Money?
As we begin exploring how to build a team, we need to consider where the money actually comes from in your business. What are the revenue-generating activities for real estate?
- Lead generating
- Following up
- Setting appointments
- Signing contracts
There aren’t a lot of other tasks in your business that actually generate income, which is why you should focus on making sure these few get done as efficiently as possible. If you need to build a team to accomplish these tasks, then do it!
How To Build the Team You Need
If you are too busy and you think it’s time to start building a team, it’s simple to get started. There are two types of people to consider hiring. Hire those who:
- Bring in business
- Save you time
Here’s the deal: someone has to do it. All these revenue-generating and non-revenue-generating tasks need to get done one way or another. Therefore, there are four possible outcomes:
- You have to do it
- Someone else does it
- A system/software does it
- It doesn’t get done
For all the tasks you need to do, it’s your job to figure out how they’re going to happen based on those four possible outcomes. Here’s how to figure that out and how to create a team that makes the process more effective.
1. List Your Tasks
First things first, you need to figure out how much you’re doing daily, what tasks you can combine, what tasks you can drop, and what tasks you can delegate. To discover this, for at least a week, log your time. Figure out how much time you spend:
- Prospecting
- At appointments
- Following up
- Posting on Facebook
- Etcetera
Once you have this information, you can categorize what tasks are the most important, which are most effective for your business, and what you actually want to do versus what you feel you have to do but aren’t really great at.
2. List Your Wishes
Next, create a wish list of what you WISH you were doing every day. These “wishes” could be business-related work or simply things you WANT to do such as researching ways to adapt your business to new tools. You might be wishing to:
- Call your sphere
- Create TikTok videos
- Create YouTube videos
- Email people
- Prospect on LinkedIn
- Etcetera
Defining your wishes can help you decide if you need to hire some help so that you can focus on completing those wishes instead of completing tasks you hate doing.
3. Organize Your List
Finally, you need to list out the tasks you absolutely must commit to. Each task will go into one of three categories: do it yourself, automate it, or delegate it.
- Do it yourself.
- Document it! Make sure you’re doing the same process each time to maintain consistency and to have a process in case you want to delegate this task later.
- Automate it.
- Use WordPress, Use Zapier, use a CRM, use Notion…whatever you have available, use it to automate tasks you don’t NEED to complete on your own.
- Delegate it.
- Use a vendor from a company whose job it is to help.
- Use an assistant such as a transaction coordinator, an editor, a calling service, etc.
Once you’ve established this list and implemented these jobs in their appropriate categories, your business will run much more smoothly and efficiently. Then, you can start focusing your time and energy on what matters most to you.
Start Building Your Team and Saving Time Now
Here are some practical quick tips to implement RIGHT NOW to start leveraging your time to use it on what matters most to you.
- Use Calendly or a similar software to schedule meetings instead of going back and forth on an email chain.
- Create workflow videos to share with your clients so that they can see what it looks like in each step of the process.
- Use email/text marketing to nurture clients and leads with drip campaigns.
- Block time throughout your day for sending emails, returning phone calls, prospecting, etc.
- Schedule your day so that you ensure things get done—not put off until tomorrow.
- Hire a virtual assistant to help you with simple tasks that you don’t have the time to focus on. Focus on what will help you build income for yourself and for the assistants you are now responsible to pay for.
And that’s it! Once you’ve created these lists and implemented these steps, you’ll be ready to start investing in and building a team of support around you to keep your business running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
Want to be the first to know about upcoming Agent First Summits so you can participate with us in real-time and interact with our experts directly? Save your seat now!