KGCI: Real Estate on Air - How to ACTUALLY Take Time Away From Your Real Estate Business!

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Morning Primer is your weekday boost from Mindset & Motivation Monday—quick, focused, and made for agents by KGCI Real Estate On Air. Give yourself a daily mindset reset for the daily direction you need to show up sharp and ready to win.Start your morning ahead of the market and ahead of your competition every day with KGCI Real Estate On Air. SummaryThis episode is a no-nonsense guide for real estate agents who feel trapped in their business and can't take a day off without stress. The discussion provides a clear blueprint for building a business that operates without you, allowing for true time and financial freedom. You'll learn how to implement the right systems, hire the right people, and create a scalable business model that gives you the flexibility to take a vacation without sacrificing your income.Key TakeawaysMindset Shift: From Agent to CEO: Understand that your business won't run without you until you stop doing everything yourself. The episode emphasizes a shift from a "hustle culture" mindset to a CEO mindset, which focuses on building and managing a business rather than being in the trenches for every transaction.The Power of Delegation: Learn what to delegate and when. The discussion highlights that a majority of tasks—from paperwork and scheduling to lead follow-up and social media—can be outsourced to a virtual assistant or an administrative assistant. This frees you up to focus on high-value activities that only you can do.Build Systems for Scale: Discover that a business that runs without you is a business with airtight systems. The episode provides a blueprint for creating simple, repeatable processes for everything, from lead intake and client communication to transaction management, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks while you're away.Communicate Your Boundaries: Learn how to set clear expectations with your clients, your team, and your family. The episode emphasizes that once you have a plan in place, you must communicate your boundaries effectively so that everyone respects your time away and allows you to truly disconnect.Topics:Real estate time offReal estate burnoutDelegationReal estate systemsTime freedomCall-to-ActionReady to get your life back? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and start building a business that works for you! Ready for more? Subscribe now and tap into our Always Free Real Estate On Air Mobile App for iPhone and Android, where you’ll find our complete archive and 24/7 stream of proven real estate business-building strategies and tactics.

This is your Monday momentum. Extended all week. Morning Primer from the Mindset and Motivation Monday on KGCI, Real Estate on Air. In this episode of the High Performance Agent podcast, I'm here to talk to you about how to actually take time away from your business. If you've been in this industry for even a few months, you know that it can just feel nonstop, that it's hard to take a vacation, and it's hard to just take that time away and feel like you have boundaries and control over your business. I am fresh off of my second maternity leave. I just took three months off to welcome my beautiful baby girl into our family. And a lot of agents reached out to me asking, how did you do that?

And who's doing what in your team? And I'm so burned out. So this podcast is inspired by the people who have asked me how they can create that kind of system and foundation in their business. And I look forward to explaining all of that to you in this episode. Hey, my name's Tina Beliveau. And I am obsessed with all things real estate, growth, marketing, social media, technology, and team building. If you're an ambitious agent who's hungry to grow,

work on your own terms, and build a thriving life outside of your business, this is the podcast for you. I got into real estate when I was 18 years old and grew my business from nothing through referrals and social media. And since then, I've built a top performing team and I've sold over 1,700 homes and $400 million in sales volume. In this podcast, I keep it real and I tell you exactly what I'm doing to sell tons of houses, lead my team, market my brand, grow my social following and database, and maintain incredible work life balance. I'll never shy away from sharing my biggest mistakes, as well as the juiciest parts of my secret sauce. Pull up a seat and get ready to learn and be inspired. This is the High Performance Agent podcast with Tina Beliveau.

Hey everyone, I am so excited to be back. If you didn't know, I had a baby in May of this year and this is my first episode since welcoming her into our family. She actually turned three months old yesterday. And in this episode, I'm actually here to unpack how I took almost three full months of maternity leave from my business. And not only did I take the leave, it went really smoothly. Just like a tiny bit of backstory. This is actually my second time taking maternity leave. I had my son, Austin, in July of 2021. And we just welcomed. baby Samantha in May of 2023. So when I was out on leave, I got a lot of messages from agents who were, A, wishing me well, which I appreciated so much. And B, I also heard from a lot of agents who were

seeing that I was completely unplugged from work, and some of them were asking me how they could do that too. They were curious who was doing what and just had questions. And I also heard from some people who expressed to me that they feel like they just can't take any time away from their business. They can't even take a vacation and they just feel really burned out. So I decided this would be a great episode to hopefully impart some of my experience with setting my business up to run very well in my absence. Therefore, I took some time and reflected on how did all this come together? How did I figure this out?

Drafted a bunch of notes and thoughts. And I realized that it boils down for me to find. key components that have helped everything be so smooth. So I'm going to tell you the five components and then we're going to talk about each of them. The first one is that I have a team of talented people who are very good at their jobs and also very good at working autonomously. And I want to explain a little bit about my journey to getting to that point because my team didn't always function that way. The second thing is I planned all of my content, marketing, and key needs in advance, and that was a serious project worth every minute, but definitely a project. And the third thing

is that I have really strong systems, and this is something people kind of know me for. It's what I teach in my high performance agent academy. I have a lot automated in my business as far as the day to day. Plus, I had a set of extra systems that I put in place during my leave, and I'm going to break down what those were. And you may never, you may be someone who won't ever need to take leave or family leave, but maybe you want to take a month off. Maybe you want to take a sabbatical. Maybe you want to go to Europe or somewhere in a very different time zone where it just isn't possible to run your business. I want you to hear what systems I've got in place and hopefully be able to translate them to your own situation. The fourth thing is I set expectations with my team members, my clients, and my business

partners, aka, like my key vendors, on what to expect what I would be doing and not doing while I was out and when I would be back. And I'll talk a little bit about boundaries and really my boundaries for myself. I don't have, we all have people that might test our boundaries, but for me, it's really self-management. That's the challenge. I don't know if that resonates for you, but that's definitely the case for me of like tempering my ambitions, my desire to please, to be liked, to seem nice, things that are, I think, intrinsically nice qualities, but can get me in trouble. And then the fifth thing related to the fourth thing is I paired down to the absolute minimum of what was essential to get done, not just during my leave, but also leading into it and then coming out of it, which has been like a whole new. I feel like a baby being born myself where I'm like trying to open my eyes and the sun is too bright and I'm like, I don't even know how to live yet. The transition from one to two kids has been really just, it's been a transition. It's been a transition. It's been challenging. It has been filled with very sweet, loving moments. And there have also been

some really hard times for me mentally, psychologically, emotionally of sharing myself between two kids and figuring out what it's like to even care for myself in this new normal. And what that has created is clarity for me that there's even more of a compression on the time that I used to have available for work. I basically have less time and energy than ever. I hate to admit that, but it's true and how do I start to create my new normal inside of that. So let's break this down piece by piece. And I think the first piece I have the most to say about. So number one, what I said was I have a team of wonderful, talented, autonomous women

who absolutely slay it at their jobs. Now, here's the good news or the bad news depending on where you are in your business. it took me a good long while to build a team that functions this way. So the good news is don't compare your chapter one to my chapter 27. Now, depending on where you are in your business, you may have been in this team game for a long time. Maybe you're brand new, somewhere in between. But I think it's really important to not compare your chapter one to my chapter 27, as I would say. So it took me a good long while to really figure this out. When I first started team building, the reality is it's a lot of extra work on top of what you're already doing to sell houses. And I have a three-part series on team building

that is in my episode library that really dives into a lot of exactly what I did in the decision process to build my team and then the early steps and actions that I took to set my team up for success. I'm going to give you a little bit more of a higher level picture of the progress. I'm going to from way back in 2013, 10 years ago, as of this recording, when I really committed to going from the agent plus assistant model to full-blown team. When I decided to do that, in addition to continuing to sell a lot of houses, I had to dedicate above and beyond time on top of my day-to-day work to build my team. So that required me creating the time and energy to find an interview candidates to create job descriptions to figure out exactly who I wanted to work with me,

what I was going to pay them, what order I was going to hire them in, onboard those team members, and then train them extensively well, and then spend ongoing time coaching and supporting them on a regular basis. And then also along the way, documenting all of our policies, procedures, best practices, and systems so that we could scale our business and work in the same manner and maintain the quality that my clients were accustomed to, hey, if I hire Tina, this is how she does things, this is her vibe, this is her personality. If you want your team to be reflective of your values and the way you think business should be done, you've got to document stuff. You've got to train people. You've got to loop back and check on them and make sure that they're doing things the

way that you need them to be doing, not to the point of over control, which I'm about to talk about. But at the end of the day, if you want to run like a real professional business, I think that all of those things are necessary. So my team was not always so autonomous. Like in the early years, first of all, there was a lot of upfront legwork that I just described to you of getting all of that up and running. And then from there in the beginning, I was much more heavy-handed with training, with leadership, with the frequency of meetings. And I always think like the post-COVID world for me is so different. Sometimes I can't even remember how everything was so different. Like, before when like we were in an office all the time and had a lot of like regular meetings as a group

and lots of one-on-ones. So it was very intensive. And at the beginning, that was the right thing for me. It was what felt right. I did have a higher level of control over what was happening. And when you're moving from solo and from what some people say going from I to we, there is a time period where you need to test what works, build trust in people, give them more and more freedom to the point where you're confident that if they're out there representing your name and your brand and even working with your own book of business, that you're comfortable with the way they're doing things. Later on, as my business evolved, I was definitely craving more and more freedom. And I think the beauty of team building is you can grow your business through others.

The downside to team building is you have to grow your business through others, which means you need to manage people, you need to coach them, give them feedback at times, have conversations that aren't always super comfortable. So as I was craving more freedom, I did find that any sort of heavy-handed management wasn't my ideal and that it just wasn't, it didn't make me happy. It didn't give me life. Like in my heart, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a creative. I'm a people person. I'm not intrinsically a manager. So I've been on a journey of figuring out how to create more freedom for myself and also the people who work with me. And it became necessary for me to consciously choose some tradeoffs in order for me to have more independence and not have a very

like meeting and supervisory heavy team culture. So today I encourage as much autonomy and independent work for my team members as humanly possible. I've found a sweet spot in my opinion for me of providing a huge amount of training, support, and resources at the front end. And I do everything I can within my time and energy and abilities and systems to provide everything that I can for someone to come out of the gate, successful and well trained. And then once I'm confident that person has the skills and the knowledge that they need to do a great job, I set them loose to slay their role in the way that they know how and in the way that's organic and true for them. I try to hard at this point, I feel like one of my duties is to be extremely available to my team members. So when

they do run into a tricky or novel situation, it's easy to reach me. That doesn't mean that I don't do anything else or I drop what I'm doing. But I think part of what has felt really nice for me in my current team culture is they really do their own thing. But they just know that I'm there if they need me. They know I'm going to make time. And that like approachability and availability can be tough in real estate. Because if you have a team lead who's so busy out in the field doing 80 million other things, which is completely understandable. Sometimes it's hard to even reach that person, especially if you are having transactional challenges can be time sensitive. It can be tricky. So essentially for me, it's become a core value in my team to have a very strong foundation in

systems and training at the outset so that they can do their jobs without me needing to constantly be present as like an overlord or a babysitter of what they're doing. And this was a huge learning curve for me, and it still can be to some degree. For a long time in my business, I made myself the center of everything. First of all, when you run a referral-based business, like, you are the sun that your clients, like, orbit around, like, you are the reason that they come back. You are the resource that they're used to tapping into. So it's very natural to be the busy body, the center of everything that people rely on. And then also for me, there was a, there was fear and a need to control, a need to make sure things were done a certain way, and that can be such a double-edged sword, because there are

certain things that I consider the Bellevoux Group way that I feel really strongly about, and I feel very strongly about the way people are treated and spoken to, and I think a lot of that are just values that you can't teach, and the people who work with you either feel the same way and value people in relationships the same way, or they don't. On the flip side, if I expect someone to talk exactly like me and use the same vocabulary or give the same exact advice, that's just not reasonable. Every human being is different. We're all, you know, literally just different beings who all have different experiences and filters about the world. So for me, there's definitely been a learning curve of letting go more and taking that step back. And ultimately, it's in everyone's best

interest to function that way. I can't expect my team members to be anyone but themselves. And conversely, I don't want them to expect me to be anyone but me. I just am who I am. I post what I posts on social media. I say what I say. I have the filter that I have. And there was a time where I worked with people who I feel like that two-way street wasn't there. They maybe didn't understand me so well and I didn't understand them so well. And that was a huge point of friction. So today, I just want to be me and I want to empower the people around me to be them and just make sure that they're backed up by the right systems and resources and all of that. So I just want to say, if you do want more support with team building because this is such a deep topic. Check out my prior episodes on this.

There's the three-part series. And you also might want to get on the wait list for my academy for more mentoring because this is an area of real estate that is complicated and there's so many ways to customize it to work for you. And as you can hear on what I've just shared, I've been on a 10-year journey of figuring out what works for me. And there have been some beautiful, huge accomplishments. And there have also been some very tough times and very hard lessons as I walked the path to figuring out what works for me. But what I do know is if you want some freedom from your business, you need some sort of autonomous team who can do things in your absence. And maybe that's just technology. Maybe that's just a virtual assistant. Maybe it's something more complex than that.

But I think if everything's all you, it's hard to take that time away unless you're just not going to do business while you're off, which by the way is a really valid choice to just take a sabbatical and refer everything to someone you trust. I think there's just such like a go in real estate that sometimes we feel like we don't have permission to just do those things that are a little bit radical, but are really healthy. Okay, that was point number one. Point number two is that I planned all of my content, marketing, and key needs in advance. And I have to admit that this was very hard for me, but also so good for me. And I'm going to explain why it was hard. One of the mindsets that I've embraced in the last few years is, first of all, recognizing how much of a creative person I am

and that when I try and do the same things, it's a paradox because I do like systems and I like things that are duplicatable. But if something requires my involvement, I get very de-energized to just run the same playbook over and over again. It's boring. I like to shake things up. I like to do different events and tap into new networks and try different forms of media and change our brand every so often. So I've learned to trust my creative flow. And what that means is certain aspects of my marketing are very ad hoc because I am a believer in I'd rather send less emails than a bunch of crappy emails. That's one of my mantra is with the way I view email marketing. But that means a lot of my marketing is ad hoc. Like I will sometimes sit and wait an extra three weeks until I have something of value

to say versus just manufacturing like boilerplate kind of content to send out. So when I'm inspired or have a great idea, I run with it. So I do have very consistent systems for my email overall, for my mail, gifting, and social media. And those are always running in the background. But sometimes working so heavily in my creative flow means that at times things are a bit less consistent if I'm just not inspired or I'm really tired or the flow is there, but it's very last minute. And if I'm doing it all myself, that's okay because I'm not like pulling my team members along for my roller coaster. but going on leave really forced me to think four to six months ahead, which is not my norm. I do plan my key client events in advance. There are certain things that I do in advance

mostly, but a lot of the day-to-day creativity can just be a little bit of a roller coaster, which like I'm saying, it has pros and cons. But at the beginning of this year, I was lucky enough to just be introduced to a marketing contractor who is absolutely wonderful. And I have been gradually handing more and more of my marketing over to her because that's been my role at the Bellevaux group is that I've still managed all of the marketing and leveraged everything else to other team members. I've been working long enough with Alicia. Shout out to Alicia, you just slayed everything in my absence, first of all. So I've been working with her long enough that she knows my brand voice. She knows the look that I like in my marketing materials, the aesthetic,

the style. And she knows what my goals are. She knows what's important. And she's also great at understanding copywriting and how to actually convert from email and create social posts that are actually like readable and encourage people to engage and things like that. So being in a place where you're not doing everything yourself is extremely helpful to take time away and have things go more smoothly. But I had onboarded Alicia initially just to do a list of very specific things for me. And coming into my leave, I realized that there was a lot that I do myself. In fact, I think it's easy to become blind to how much you're DIYing in your business until you need to stop doing it.

Or you start catching yourself going, oh, wow. Like this Facebook group that I admin actually takes up a ton of my time and I'm spending a lot of time doing X, Y, and Z. So I had the run up to my maternity leave to really start to become in tune with that and figure out what I was going to turn over to herd my absence that actually generates revenue or some things I do are more like big picture. may not generate revenue today, but they're part of a much longer term strategy. And I would say that both of my Facebook groups definitely fall into that category. They both have some like immediate opportunity, but definitely midterm and long term. And it was important to me for those groups to get some maintenance while I was out so that I just didn't have to worry about it and also had the peace of mind to know that there wasn't like a huge opportunity cost due to lack of maintenance and engagement.

So the couple of things that she and I planned ahead that might get your wheels turning of what you could leverage to someone. Number one, I run these two busy Facebook groups. One is agent facing and one is my digital geographic farm. I have other episodes on all of this. So you might want to check my library if that gets your attention. So Alicia and her team, because she has her own team too, she handled admitting new members, adding new members to my CRM, and posting content that we co-brainstormed and copy wrote before my leave. So we had three months of posts pre-planned for both groups and ready to go. to keep engagement up in both groups. And then when I was out, she posted on my behalf.

She's logged into my Facebook. She has all the right admin permissions to post as me. She even private messaged my hottest leads on my behalf, had lead generation and conversion conversations with them. And if anyone turned into a hot lead who was ready for a call or an appointment, she flagged our team admin at the Bellevote group, Melissa, and got someone else from the team on it. So basically, I operate as that lead generator in my team.

team. She stepped into those shoes in my absence and did an amazing job. We had several leads get handed over to the team and a few that actually nurtured and popped right when I got back to work last Monday. It was just, it's funny how energy works. So that was a major thing. I had been doing the vast majority of that myself or in conjunction with her, but not planned out. And so getting out of that ad hoc situation was such a good thing. The second thing is she handled my email marketing on my behalf and my absence completely. Prior to my leave, she was creating emails for me, and then I was like editing them heavily. And it was also a good time for me to train her more on. This is what I like. I prefer this formatting. Can we make this more concise? Can you add an image here?

So we had the opportunity basically January through April for her to learn how I like my emails to be done. And then while I was out, she just did them for me. I didn't proof them. I did give her a few sentences of copy one or two times. Like, she wanted to know exactly how I wanted to announce my daughter's birth. And then I think she ran one other thing by me. And other than that, we really didn't talk about much of anything. I pre-planned the broad strokes of what email, what each email was going to be about. And then she wrote, designed, and sent the emails in my voice. And I have two different email campaigns, one to my agent-facing business, and one to my clients. And she did two emails a month to the agents and one email a month to my sphere. And it was fantastic. And now that I'm back,

I'm going to let her keep doing that instead of putting all that work back on my plate. So I'm growing. I'm growing as we speak. Alicia also runs my Bella Vogue group Instagram account and creates ad hoc design materials for us when we need them. She continued to do all that. And again, me being out of the mix and her liaising with Melissa on my team about posts, gave them a chance to just collaborate more without me inserting myself in the middle. And like I've alluded to in this episode a few times, inserting myself in the middle is something that I do very naturally. And it's good for me to take a step back. This piece of things was new for me on my second leave, by the way, turning over my marketing. My first maternity leave, I really only took seven weeks off. And I planned accordingly back then.

It was during the summer. And I just said, oh, we just won't have any emails for two months. No big deal. Right now I'm in a place where that did not feel right or in the best interest of either of my businesses. So this longer leave and planning ahead really forced me to loosen my grip on things that I normally do myself. And it just felt great to let it go and see that it worked out so well. And if you're wondering, no, it was not perfect, but it was pretty darn good. And the bottom line is that done is always better than perfect when you want consistent marketing in place. So that was point two. Turning over my marketing. marketing and planning my marketing in advance. Number three was having strong systems. Like I've said a

few times here, I have ongoing systems that I've worked very hard to put into place over the years. And then I have several simple maternity leave systems that I added on top, which is what I'm going to really focus on. As far as my ongoing systems, they are covered in a lot of my other podcast episodes and more to come. But to give you a sense, I have systems in place for consistent email marketing, lead follow-up, my website conversion, my social media accounts, online lead capture, direct mail, client gifting, referral thank yous, aka my VIP system, and a whole bunch of other stuff. So all of those systems run either completely automated or they can be managed by our team's client concierge, Melissa, who did such an incredible job

while I was out. Now, specific to my maternity leave, I decided to keep things as simple and clear as possible. So I boiled down to five sub points here of what I did. So number one, kind of basic stuff, I put up autoresponders on my email inboxes, but I didn't just put up any auto responder. I made sure that they were extremely purposeful. I gave links. I gave resources. I even said, hey, if you want to see my baby, come follow me here on Instagram because I'm always like trying to centralize my social media following strategies. And then I also put very clear contact info and expectations so someone could reach out to other people on my team if they couldn't wait till I was back to be helped. My agent facing email, no one looked at while I was out. And there was an agent who

actually emailed me a referral, got my auto responder, realized she could message my other email and that my admin Melissa would pick it up. And then they were all in touch while I was on my leave. So shout out to purposeful email autoresponders and not just having something like, hey, I'm out, best wishes to you. The second thing related to that is Melissa checked my email. every business day. And she reached right out to any leads and past clients that came in to make sure that like if a lead emails and gets an auto responder, we're not just going to put it in their court to then email the right person or call in. She then reached out personally and said, hey, I'm Melissa. I'm checking Tina's email while she's out. I saw you want to buy a home. So excited. Does Tuesday

work for you? Let's get on the phone. So that's how we handled that. She also skimmed my email for me to make sure there wasn't anything really important that I needed. So, So what I did in advance is I wrote a detailed list of which emails needed to be forwarded to me. For example, I get an email from my broker every time a deal closes and a direct deposit is on the way. She forwarded that to me because I still managed payroll myself and reconciled all of the commission payments while I was out because that's the kind of stuff I'm not going to ignore for three months. So those are the kinds of things that she forwarded me. And I also gave clear written instructions that we also discussed about if there's any scenario that she needs. needed to personally contact me to discuss. For example, if we had a transactional issue where there was

maybe like risk management or coaching needed for one of my team members, she knew to flag that for me. We didn't thankfully have anything like that on my leave. But again, you just want to be really clear about the times when you do need to be pulled in. The fourth thing is, this is simple too, but I updated my voicemail message to make it clear that I would not be returning work calls or text and gave appropriate points of contact in my absence. And then the fifth, thing is I made a checklist for myself of what to do before and after my leave. So I was prepared and basically had a clear front view of everything that I needed to do right before my leave. Update your voicemail. Turn on your email responders. Turn on these filters so these certain

emails forward to these other inboxes so you don't miss them or so your team members don't miss them. And then I had a list that kind of coordinated with that for when I came back to make sure that I undid all of that. And as I was getting ready for this episode, I realized that I haven't looked at the to-do list for a couple days, and my voicemail still isn't updated. So that's the kind of stuff that, you know, you want to document and then actually use your systems. So the other system that I embraced before going out is the concept of content batching. And that relates to my podcast. So I really wanted my podcast to keep running during my leave. I launched it about a month before my due date. And then I didn't want it to go on this huge hiatus after putting so much time, money and energy into launching it.

So what I did was I cleared my schedule for the last two weeks before my due date and decided to record as many episodes as I could. I had a very ambitious goal to get 14 episodes recorded, which would cover my whole leave. And I actually did it, which I was beyond thrilled about. I made that my primary focus. And if anyone has had babies, you will laugh about this. I teach spin classes and I'm pretty fitness oriented. Towards the end, I wasn't done my episodes yet. I stopped working out because I didn't want to trigger going into labor.

I was like, these 14 episodes, it was like one of those things that like for my integrity, like I just had to get it done. And then I got them done. And then I think I had like four days before I gave birth. And I think I like went to one more spin class. So I did what I could to make that like a clear primary focus. And then I also have an amazing podcast manager. Shout out to Pamela. She did everything for me in my absence. She edits every episode. She releases them on the platforms. She even posted reels to my personal Instagram on my behalf. I gave her a template and she got those up every week so that I could continue to promote the podcast. So I have never batched like that before. It's definitely something I'm going to continue doing with the podcast and also batch planning my Facebook engagement and

some of the other marketing things that I do to just do my work once and not be constantly like coming back to things over and over again when I could have just sat down for one hour and been really structured, which is not innate to me. but that's important. So we are rounding up on the end here. The fourth thing I did was I set expectations with my clients, my team members, and my vendors on what to expect, what I would be doing or not doing, and when I would be back to work. So similar to the written resource that I made for Melissa, I gave my team members a clear idea of what my level of availability was going to be on my leave. So what I did was they knew they could reach out to me if they needed support with certain topics. And I did

end up communicating with each of my team members on a few occasions. And it felt great to me to know that they were empowered to reach out if something felt like we should discuss it. But also they knew my boundaries and they felt empowered to handle things themselves. And while being a present leader is important, I also think it's really empowering for people who work with you to not always be able to tap into you. And they up their problem solving skills on their own and their confidence. So I think my time away has been very healthy for my business. And I also know that my team members were very glad to have me back and we did miss each other. The other thing I would say is most people in the industry don't take time away. So I was very clear with other agents and vendor partners that I was off. I did have quite a few people reach out wondering if I was really off. I even had one person asked if I was quote, still on vacation, which annoyed me and also made me laugh. And I was quick to say, yep, I am off until August 21st. And I was actually really vague with people like end of August. I didn't even want to give an exact date in case I just didn't want to feel hemmed in by anything. So that's how I handled expectations.

And the fifth thing that I did was I paired down to the absolute minimum of what was essential, not just during my leave, but again, leading up to it and ramping back in afterwards. And this is an important one for me and maybe for you too if you're ambitious, because one thing that's always hard for me is to be realistic about how much I can get done in a day, in a week, in a month. And the beauty of having a hard and fast deadline like a baby or an international trip where you won't have phone service or whatever is it really clarifies your priorities. Normally, I like to have a client event in the spring. I was due with my baby girl on May 28th. By the way, she came on her due date, which was amazing. So this year, we just had to skip having

a spring event. The timing didn't work. And I also just had to be realistic that I didn't want to have a lot of commitments in the four to six weeks leading up to my due date. I didn't want to worry about what if I go into labor early or what if I'm not feeling good? And I truly just did not have my normal energy level. And I tend to work myself really hard and I want to chase every idea that I have to fruition. So this process really helped me exercise that muscle of setting boundaries with myself and then honoring those boundaries. I even had this hairbrained idea to host a little fundraiser for a nonprofit that I'm passionate about a few weeks before my due date. I put it on the calendar and then the next day I was like, what am I doing?

and I canceled it. And I always have to, one of my favorite sayings is no one cares but me. And that really helps me bring my head back down to reality when I feel like I've committed to this or or people expect me to do X, Y, or Z. And like the bottom line is most of the time no one's paying that close of attention, which is a beautiful thing. And I do want to say that I'm currently, again, at the beginning of my second week phasing back into work. And I've had another huge reality check. Even though I had a baby two years ago, it's crazy how much you forget. You forget how tiring it is. and adjusting to life with two kids instead of one has brought a lot of new challenges. And then even just realizing when you're asleep deprived as I am right now, it's so hard to think

clearly. It's hard to be productive. It's hard to be a taskmaster the way I sometimes am, not always. And it's hard to have the energy I even had at the end of my pregnancy. Like I could never batch record 14 episodes in two weeks right now. Like just thinking about that, I want to yawn and roll into bed. So right now I'm just pacing myself and making sure that anything I do commit to doing is important and effective. And quite frankly, if I feel like I'm in over my head, giving myself permission to cancel and scale back, that is okay. It's okay. I'm talking to myself now. So to summarize, we've talked through five key components for taking time away, having a talented and autonomous team, planning in advance, strong systems, expectation setting, and pairing down to the

minimum of what really matters. And the beauty of doing something like this is it's an opportunity to refine your systems, become a better planner and leader, and to find the holes in your business. And this has taken me a long time to accept because I think for a long time I just thought I would arrive and my business would run smoothly and I would never have problems again. Very childish mindset, but just like magical thinking. I've now learned that no business runs perfectly. People are going to leave you. No system is bulletproof. And I'm always going to want to refine things. I'm always going to wish my brand was cuter, that my social media was stronger, that my website was that I had more clients, that we were converting leads at a better percentage than we do,

there's just always room for improvement. And the piece that I found in that is that there's always time to continue working towards those improvements. And that's what keeps things interesting. If it all became completely benign and vanilla, I know that I would be bored as heck. So if you're feeling called to improve your systems, marketing, and leadership the way I outlined, I do encourage you to join the wait list for high performance agent academy. I'm going to be opening up spots later this fall as soon as I'm feeling like I have my feet more under me than you've heard right now. So if you get on the wait list, you'll get the first opportunity to enroll. I'm going to have a special incentive for anyone who did hang out on the wait list all these months

while I was transitioning into this new chapter of my life. And I would love to have you. And regardless of whether you join the Academy, I just want to say thank you for tuning in. Thank you for supporting my podcast. And I look forward to being back with more episodes soon. Thanks again.