Blog: Is Your Recruiting A Journey Or A Destination?

For several years both in Florida and in Georgia I served on Realtor Association boards and panels.  I have been fortunate enough to participate on Grievance Committees, Professional Standards Committees, chaired Grievance and also presided over Professional Standards cases.  I participated in and oversaw arbitration and even had to defend a couple of situations for my agents in arbitration and professional standards complaints.  I enjoyed being involved because it helps our community and on topof that it allowed me to grow.  

 One thing that was really a concerning sign or let’s call it a “warning sign” was when an agent started to justify that the decision they made was because of how long they had been in the business.  They would say things like “I have been doing this for 35 years and we have always done it this way”.  Automatically the first thing that popped into my head was “here it comes.”

 They believed that what they did was right because of how long they’ve been in the business and not how well they worked on their profession during those years.  So as soon as they started saying, “well, I’ve been in the business 30 years,” I was always like, oh, man, here it comes. Just because you’ve done it that way for that long did not make it right 30 years ago and does not make it right now.  Let’s remove ourselves from the real estate industry and go to karate or martial arts for just a moment.

 As an example, in karate, the same thing often happens. There were a lot of people that would get into martial  arts and they would learn techniques, tactics, and mindset in the first 3 or so years and then for 10, 15, 35 years they would literally just continue to do the same techniques.  They would stagnate.  They would get left behind.  Keep in mind, it’s important for you to try to move towards perfection through repetition which as we all know is impossible but truly a worthwhile pursuit in martial arts.  You never get there, but as you try to move towards that perfection, your movement, your technique, and process expose you to new possibilities that help you improve unless you deliberately close the door on that growth.  A black belt is just a mastery of the basics.  It is the practitioner doing the basics well enough to allow them to learn the complexity of combat truly.  It’s a foundation.  My point is that so many people never get the basics down to a science.  They are always trying to learn the next move before 

mastering the first one.  They are trying a “new lead gen source” before they learned how to convert and keep the leads from their SOI.  They are buying the new tech that is being displayed at the board office that has “helped thousands of agents close more deals” before they learn how to write a contract properly.  

Then, they become managers.  Now this pattern of adapting something new and “putting in the time” becomes the way to gauge their mastery instead of intention and repetition.  The next thing you know…..it’s time to recruit new talent to your team.  

 The naturally charismatic people have an easy time getting agents to say yes, the “smile and dial all day” people have success as well but it’s those people in the middle who struggle to find a path to mastery because they skipped the intention and repetition of doing a side kick 10,000 times and that is why… (listen to the rest of the conversation here)