KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Building a Rockstar Real Estate Team: When and Who to Hire

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

SummaryThis episode provides a clear, strategic guide to building a real estate team that not only grows your business but also gives you back your time. It cuts through the confusion of when to make your first hire and which roles are the most crucial. The discussion offers a step-by-step blueprint for scaling your business by delegating tasks, creating a culture of success, and assembling a team of top performers who can handle more clients and revenue.Key TakeawaysWhen to Make Your First Hire: Learn to recognize the signs that you need to hire, such as consistently closing 2-4 deals a month, feeling overwhelmed by administrative tasks, and struggling to maintain a work-life balance. The episode emphasizes that you should hire when you need the leverage, not just want it.The Most Valuable First Hire: Discover why a transaction coordinator or an administrative assistant is often the best first hire. These roles handle the "low-value busy work" like paperwork, scheduling, and data entry, freeing you up to focus on what only you can do: prospecting and closing deals.The Ideal Team Structure: Understand the key roles that make a "rockstar" team. The discussion breaks down the responsibilities of a buyer's agent, listing agent, inside sales agent (ISA), and marketing specialist, and how to build a team with clear roles that boost productivity and accountability.Hiring for Mindset and Grit: Learn to look beyond an agent's sales history. The episode emphasizes that the best team members are coachable, have a strong work ethic, and a proactive mindset. These qualities are more valuable than experience alone for long-term success.TopicsReal estate teamReal estate hiringTransaction coordinatorReal estate business growthReal estate rolesCall-to-ActionListen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and start building your rockstar team today!

Right, welcome, everyone. It is so great to have you into today's session. You see, Elite Masterminds is a session whereby I go through a specific topic. And that particular topic is to help you in your real estate business. Now, today I want to talk about something that really, it might not be in your, well, short-term future, but it could be something that is in your distant future. And that's about building a team. Well, not just. just any team, it's about building a rock star team. You see, building teams is a way for you to become the true entrepreneur. You see, the true entrepreneur not only works in their business on a day-to-day activities, but the true entrepreneur actually levels themselves up and starts working on their business. And what I'm going to share with you today is some very simple steps to follow to help you to get you to that point where you'll be able to trigger it and say, I'm ready for that rock star team. So that's what we're going to be covering today. And a question that actually, when I was thinking of this particular session, why would I want to do a team? Why would I want to

have staff? Why would I want to have all these people around me? And that was the very first question than I actually wrote down. And I was thinking to myself, you know, as a real estate agent, you can get yourself into an extremely high level of production. But in order to get to that high level of production, there's a lot of administrative duties that comes into it. There's all that paperwork, making those particular calls, chasing signatures. That's a massive one. Chasing signatures. and sometimes even just doing follow-ups with individuals, that can actually burn your time. And ultimately what happens is it puts you onto a plateau

because you can only do so much. And one thing that really will become apparent is in this particular journey, when you get to that high level, you're going to start putting on so many different hats, the transactional hats, the lead generation hats, the negotiator hat. And sometimes you even put on the photographer's hat and setting and staging hat.

But it's all of these particular areas that actually prevents your business from growing. And once you get to that particular point in your business, well, you need to ask yourself, are you ready to become a team leader and run that rock star team? And this is something for so many people becomes daunting. How do I actually do this? Now, if you're at that particular point where you say, hey, I'm crazy, I'm busy, I need to start this team like today. I want you to pull the handbrake. I want you to stop because there's a couple of steps that you need to take.

You need to have these in place before else what's going to happen is, well, everything is just going to start falling apart in front of you. And that's not what you actually want. So your business has hit this plateau and you want to go even higher. What do you do? Well, that's exactly what I'm going to be discussing today and trying to break it down into these simple steps to help each and every one of you. Now, you do this before you even think or consider of bringing in an additional agent, before you even consider doing any hiring. I'm going to share with you two steps that you need to do beforehand. And the reason for it is without it, you're going to find that your team is going to ultimately become quite lost.

They're going to start doing their own way of doing things. And your standard that you've presented to your sellers that's built that culture, that connection, those relationships, suddenly starts to disappear. And you spend more of your time trying to put out fires. because you've got a standard, hey, when I do this, that happens. But nobody else is following those simple systems. And that's our very first area that I want to talk about, which is building a system. You see, a system is the foundation of all of your leveraging tools. And without a system, you actually have, well, kind of just working in the dark.

you need to make sure that you have a system in place. Now, what is a system? A system is a documented process of how you do things. And it is so important because you're doing things in a way that's getting you into production. Also, what a system can do is, well, once you're documented, you can actually say, wait a minute, there's my problem. you can be able to identify it. So setting up the system is so important. So what type of systems can you actually do?

Well, listing presentations. You can have a system that you work around how to do a listing presentations. You could have a system on when you meet a buyer for the very first time. What is the process that you actually follow? You can have a system when you've taken a listing. What is that process? What are those steps that you take in order for arranging for photographers stages, cleaning, etc. going through this process. You could have systems for once an offer and a contract

has been closed. What are those follow-ups that you're going to be doing? You could have a system for once the deal's done in the poop and you've done the key handover. What is the system that you've followed thereafter? You see, in any area of your business that requires you to do an activity, it's the activity that makes the system. And what you really need to start doing is to start to document it. Now, I know that it can become tedious because we think, I really do I have to go down and just jot everything down? Well, I can promise you this.

When you document something down and you're having one of those days where you're just going, I've got so much on my plate, I actually don't know what to do and how to do it, having this little documentation can actually give you those guidelines of going, ah, that's what I did the last time and it worked. That's the process that I went through. That's the person that I should be phoning. So step one is making sure that you have that system in place, documents it.

From starting in lead generation, going into the follow-up process, going into the closing of a transaction, going into what happens after that particular a transaction. Going into how do you put people into your database, documents all of those systems. And something that I did was I actually went out and I bought a whole heap of these little A5 books. Each A5 book, I would actually have it as a heading on the front cover. And for me, I had my listing presentation. I had what I did with buyers. I had what I did when I actually closed a deal. And each of those particular books, I would just jot down notes. If I went on a listing presentation. I had them in my car. I'd come out and I'd say, right, I did this, I did this, I did this.

And as I was going through time, I could actually see what I did on a common basis. In essence, it was a journal, each one of those books, writing it down in every single appointment as I went through, correlated at the end and I created my system. Very straightforward, very, very easy. But that's the first step. You see, as I mentioned, without that system, in place, you could actually become overloaded and actually feel stressed. So have that system to allow you to know, I've done this, and that's coming up next. So now that you've got the system in place and you've got this documented in place, now you can start looking and say, right, now that I've got this process,

well, now we can move on to step two. And step two is, well, what can I do that's going to support this particular system because you want to make it easy for yourself. Well, it's tools. You see, you're going to start looking at what tools you can implement that is actually going to help you to make sure that that system flows. So, for instance, a CRM system. It's one of the most powerful tools that you will ever have and you need to make sure that you've got one in front of you. And you'll have a system on how you enter data. You'll have a system on what happens on anniversaries, birthdays, how do you get your newsletters out. There's a whole marketing follow-up. That's the second part of it, the follow-up systems. You could also have a tool that can help you

with your transactional management. Now, you'll find that a lot of the CRM packages may even have built in some form of transactional management where you've got the deal coming through. through and you can give updates and it can feed so you know exactly where you're all. Another tool that was actually very handy for myself was a tool of being able to communicate with my different vendors. Now yes, again, there was a CRM tool that actually helped with it, but the tool that I actually used back then was actually using WhatsApp. I used that as a tool and I created these different labels and I would know where, my buyers are where my sellers were. I even had tools or labels that actually defied my attorneys

that I was dealing with, my bond originators, my electricians that I was actually dealing with, all on these particular labels. And I used that as a tool for communication so that I always knew where I was throughout the particular process. So now you've actually, step one, you've documented a system, a system, which is those steps of activities in order to complete a certain task. Step two is then having a look at those tools, those tools that will help you to support implementation of those particular systems. Now, as a solo agent, as an entrepreneur, you need to have this in your business. You need to be looking at this, even if you have got no desire to set yourself up as a team

leader. Set up your systems. Set up those tools to support your particular. business. Because now when you start to get to that point where, well, I've leveraged the maximum capabilities of these tools and I'm finding, 50% of my time is actually spent on administrative work and I actually are making quite a bit of money in the deals that I'm doing. I can afford somebody. Well, now what I can do is I can then go to step three. And step three is really starting to look at how do I leverage my time? That is ultimately the reason why you are wanting to build

a rock start team. It's how to leverage your time. Remember, as a team leader, you become that entrepreneur that's working on your business and you're rewarded for that because you have the systems in place. You have the tools in place that can be leveraged to help you to grow. But here's the first almost mistake that I find with so many agents and entrepreneurs, they want to replicate themselves. Or they look at the duties which are the worst lead generation, canvassing, and they want to replace it with somebody else. So they want to take themselves out of the picture. In essence, what they're doing is they're not actually doing any justice to their business. What they're doing is they're giving away their business.

because you shouldn't be starting by giving away what's most valuable to you. So how do we actually go about our first hire? Well, one area which is so, so important, is to identify all of the duties, not tasks, the duties that you do in your particular business, and you actually put them into a category. On the one side, these are income-producing activities, and on the other side, these are non- income-producing activities. And the reason why we split it is because your responsibility will always do income-producing activities.

So building relationships, doing the lead generation, those are income-producing activities that will build up that client base. But phoning for a photographer, arranging for a signature that is missing, making sure that documentation has been collected and passed to the relevant parties, those are non-income producing activities. In fact, those are administrative duties. And ultimately, your first hire should be to take away all of those administrative duties. So your first hire needs to be someone that's an admin-based, not a sales-based. You see, that admin-based, in essence, will be able to give you back more time. So think of this. You're working eight hours a day and four hours you're

basically doing income producing activities and the other four hours you're doing those administrative duties. If you were able to get those four hours back and replace it with income producing activities, you're actually going to double your business. Now that makes absolute sense. you want to double your business, you want to be able to grow, you want to be able to leverage. You could say, well, I will stay exactly where I am, but that wasn't really why you became an entrepreneur, is growth. So if you get an administrator, and they will take away those administrative duties, and you will actually be able to have more time on those income-producing activities. Now, there's a big area of this. People like to hire family and friends.

They like to hire people because they like them. But ultimately what happens is they get to a point where they are still doing the administrative's job. You need to be very, very clear in your business. When you hire someone, you're hiring for growth. You're hiring it so that you can have more time on your hands. You're not hiring somebody so that you can actually do their job as well. Then why did you hire in the first place? So going through this process, make sure that when you are hiring, it could be family or friends.

You need to make those clear boundaries. Those are your duties and that's what you need to do. And you add into it. We're going to work for 90 days. In 90 days, I need to be able to double my revenue. And if I'm not doubling my revenue, you've actually got the wrong hire. So just think of that when you're actually making that very first hire. When you bring an administrator in, your revenue should double.

You should see a doubling in your activities over 90 days. If not, you've got the wrong hire. And ultimately, what you're doing is you're still doing the ultimate administrative job. You see, administration is going to save your time. It's going to free up all of those little headaches if you want to call of it. It's also going to help you to start closing some of these deals a lot quicker. because instead of you chasing documents and signatures, they can do all of that for you. But now this comes as question.

You're not giving some of the responsibilities to your administration to make contact with your buyers and your sellers. Is that a risky job? Well, this is where when you're going as a team leader, it is so important to create this rock star team. You've got your systems. You've got your tools. but you've also got your communication with your clients. And it's one of the very first areas when you're building up a team is you communicate that to your clients.

Hey, by the way, this is my administrator. This person will be doing this and this and following up on me. Introduce them as part of your team. But what you really do with your buyers and sellers is you actually almost give them a job description of what they're doing. They're not there to close any sales. they're not there to go and ask for leads. They're not there to do any of that.

They are there to make sure that this transaction flows as smooth as possible. And the reason why, and I share this up front, I was coaching a client who did not set those particular boundaries. Their administrator suddenly, after 18 months, became a top-producing agent. They learned from their particular, call it, team leader. but what was really frustrating for my client was this administrator actually took half their clients with. Why? Because the administrator suddenly took on their responsibility of saying, hey, do you know anybody else? They're looking at buying or selling. They started taking on the lead generating activities and ultimately took the business away. Their growth went backwards. So please do be aware of that.

Set those boundaries. This is the person that will be assisting through the documentation. and you actually detail what they will be doing to your buyers and sellers. Just as a cautionary heads up because you don't want to fall into that trap where you actually start to lose. And that's one of the reasons why you hire administration first and not sales. Because you're doing all the hard work, if you employ or bring someone into your team that does sales, ultimately what's going to happen is it's going to start to take your business away. And ultimately, if you're doing commission splits where you as a team leader are earning a percentage of their transactions, they're going to think, hey, I can do this by myself. I've got your client base. I've got your systems. I know your tools. I can just do it myself.

And ultimately, off they go and you lose your client base. So that's not building a rock star. That's just building a rock of a team that sinks. So now the big question that always came in, but Stuart, if I want to build a rock star team, when do I get to the point that I actually then start to bring in agents? And I actually then can start overseeing them. And is there such a defining point? Well, absolutely. You see, the defining point is when you're getting in so many leads, you just cannot handle them. you are generating leads.

That is why they call it a team leader. And leader has the word lead. You are getting in all the leads. You're actually getting way too many leads. You just cannot handle all of them. And when you get to that particular point, what you're actually doing is you're not allowing the agents to go out and canvas and lead generate.

You're actually giving them leads. You're saying here's a lead for you to work. Because you just don't have. have the capacity to handle all of those leads. Now, what's great about that particular point of your business, the only time that you're going to get to a high level of incoming leads is when all those systems, all those tools, all that administrative work has strengthened your team to such a point that clients in the market,

they recognize you and they want to deal with you. And that's one of the reasons why successful teams suddenly when they get to that point, their growth becomes exponential. They become not only just rock star teams, but they become super rock star teams. And that's really where you can actually almost put your business on autopilot because it will start to grow by itself. Everybody is following the systems that you'd actually implemented. Everybody's using the tools that supports. You have the administration in place that can help to alleviate all those administrative time duties.

And now your processes are working to such a point that the clients start giving you these leads. And when you get that influx of leads, well, now you can start adding these team members. Will the team members come and go? Absolutely. They will come into your team, they will go out. But one thing that's really, really powerful to keep them, the great leads that you give them will be the reason why they actually join your particular team.

So I know there was a huge amount, and I know for many people, they look at this and they go, I'm actually fearing setting up a team, or I'm excited to actually set up a team. I just wanted to give you the processes of where to start. But more importantly, you don't have to get to the point that you want to start a team. You could use what I've shared with you today just to grow your ecosystem. And ultimately, growing your ecosystem could actually, in fact, get to a point where it's just you as the solo agent,

you may have four, five, six administrators around you. And your team, well, guess what? It is a team. Your little team can actually just operate as it is without any additional agents if you want it like that. But just remember when you do things in, and I'm going to say the most powerful way, the way that people recognize you, you're going to find leads are going to start coming in your direction. they're going to start to grow and you need to make sure that you're geared

for this growth when you actually hit well it's not going to be a plateau it's going to be a ceiling that you'll blast straight through it will come and it will get to that particular point so make sure that you're leveraging first that is with the systems and the tools so stop doing everything and you actually start to leverage you start to systemize it

because with that system in place, it can start to become scalable as your growth. Make sure that you're hiring very smart. It's always administrative first. Your agents, they can come later, but start with those administrations first. And lead the team intentionally, not on a reactive basis. Don't just suddenly wake up in the morning and think, let's do this. Do it with attention. think about it as you're actually growing through.

You see, growing a team, you all can do it. And it's something I've coached so many individual solo agents where they've grown themselves up to 30, 40 agents in their team. And they're actually sitting with probably between seven, eight different administrators that actually support the team. And ultimately, you actually, as a team leader, you actually almost. take a step not out you take a step up and the higher you go the bigger you can with the higher you can oversee your particular team and that growth you can start seeing the dynamics of how to expand not any in just a suburb but you could actually go into multiple suburbs and you could start to set up multiple teams why because you'll have all of that in place but it starts with you it starts with you

documenting. Journal what you do every single day. Create those systems so that you know how to do and how to repeat it and stop getting those teams built. So I wanted to jump into that for today because the thought of setting a team can become daunting. And I wanted to just break it down into simple steps, just three very simple steps to help each and every one of you to take you from where you are today to where you can be, and it could be in six months. It could be two years. It could be 10 years. You're in control all of that.

So from myself, I want to thank you for joining in today. Elite masterminds, we typically take a topic and I just unravel it, simplify it. I normally do have a guest. Unfortunately, my guest today had laryngitis, so could not join me in today. So I thought, let me just jump into my own personal experience of what I've done personally, as well as what I've coached with different agents to help them in their particular business to create those rock star teams, those rockstar teams that you can actually do. Now that you know how to do it, I'm looking forward to seeing you grow your team for where you

are right now to right where it is in the future. So from myself, Stuart, you have a fantastic day further.