Most brokerages have an exit interview. That’s the conversation where you finally ask a good agent what went wrong, right after they’ve already signed with someone else.
That isn’t a retention strategy. It’s an autopsy.
Ask before they leave
Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, authors of Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em, have long championed a simple alternative: the stay interview. You sit down with your best people while they’re still here and ask why they stay, and what might make them go.
It sounds obvious, but almost nobody does it. Most broker-owners assume they already know the answers. They usually don’t.
Five questions that work
What keeps you here?
When was the last time you thought about leaving? What was going on?
What’s one thing we could fix that would make your week easier?
What do you want your business to look like in three years? Are we helping you get there?
If a recruiter called tomorrow, what would they offer that we don’t?
Listen for the D’s underneath the answers. “The TC was slow on my last three files” is De-Risking. “I’m not learning anything new” is Development. “I don’t know where we’re headed” is Direction.
Three rules
Don’t defend. The moment you explain why something is the way it is, the honest answers stop. Write it down and say thank you.
Meet on their turf. Go to their office, or buy them coffee near their listings. Your office feels like a performance review.
Close the loop within two weeks. Pick one thing they said and fix it, then tell them you fixed it. That single follow-up builds more loyalty than any split concession.
The quiet ones matter too
Don’t only interview your top producers. Include the steady $2M agent who never complains. Quiet doesn’t mean content. Sometimes it means they stopped expecting anyone to ask.
Try This
Pick six agents this month: your top five producers and one quiet, steady agent.
Hold each conversation in 30 minutes. Use the five questions and nothing else.
Fix one thing for each person within two weeks. Tell them when it’s done.
Question
Which of your agents would give an honest answer to question two? And what would you do if they did?
Resources
Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em and Hello Stay Interviews, Goodbye Talent Loss, both by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans.
Every semester, I watch students light up when they pass the final. They’re ready to go.
Here’s what I wish I could tell every one of them before they walk out the door.
Your license is permission, not preparation
The exam proves you know the rules. It doesn’t prove you can get a stranger to trust you with the biggest financial decision of their life. That part takes practice, and the practice starts now.
Choose a brokerage for what it builds, not what it pays
Every new agent asks about the split. Here’s the math nobody says out loud: 90% of zero deals is zero.
In year one, the questions that matter are different:
Who will train you?
Who will you call when a deal is falling apart?
Will someone sit in on your first listing appointment?
In the Eight D’s, Development and De-Risking will pay you more than Dollars ever will in your first year.
Build habits before you need them
The agents who make it aren’t always the most talented. They’re the ones who did the work on days they didn’t feel like it. Start now. Pick three daily non-negotiables, like five calls, two notes, and one coffee, and do them before you have a single client.
Your sphere is bigger than you think
Most students tell me they don’t know anyone. Then they sit down and list 100 people: their dentist, their kid’s coach, their old roommate. You don’t need to sell to them. You need them to know what you do.
Plan your runway
Your first commission check may be months away. Know how long you can go without one, and plan for it. Financial pressure makes people pushy, and clients can feel it.
Stay a student
The best agents I know are still learning in year twenty. Read, take the class, and ask the question that makes you look like a rookie. Everyone was one once.
Try This
List 100 names this week. Don’t contact anyone yet. Just write.
Interview three brokerages. Ask each one who will train you and who you’ll call when a deal goes sideways.
Pick your three non-negotiables. Start them before your license arrives.
Question
If you started your career tomorrow, what would your first 90 days look like? Could you write that plan out today?
For broker-owners
What are you telling the students who walk into your office? If it starts with the split, start somewhere else.
Your career doesn’t start when your license arrives. It starts with today’s habits.
As some of you know, I’m training for the Long Beach Half Marathon. Part of that training includes cross-training on the bike and the rower, and on the bike I’ve spent a few work out sessions with Ashley Paulson, an iFit trainer, indoor cycling instructor, and marathon runner.
Somewhere between the intervals and the climbs, Ashley tells a story about resistance and persistence. It stuck with me, and I think it will stick with you too.
The Story
A quick disclaimer: I was taking mental notes while pedaling, so I may not have the exact times or the exact number of attempts right. But you’ll get the gist of the story.
Ashley wasn’t a high school or college cross country standout. She didn’t run track. After having four kids, she set a goal most people would call unrealistic: qualify for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials.
On her first attempt, she missed the qualifying time by about a minute.
On her second attempt, she missed by about 30 seconds.
The next time, she missed by roughly 15.
And on one attempt, she came up short by just 1 second!
Did she get discouraged? Of course she did, just like you and I would. Coming that close, over and over, is its own kind of pain. It’s easy to wonder whether the goal is still worth chasing.
But Ashley did something I’ve had to learn the hard way over 30+ years in business and life. She followed three steps:
Accept. The result is the result. The clock doesn’t negotiate. Instead of arguing with reality or making excuses, she owned where she was.
Reflect. What happened? What worked, what didn’t, and what’s within my control next time? Reflection isn’t beating yourself up. It’s gathering information.
Redirect. Take what you learned and point your energy at the next attempt, with an adjusted plan.
Long story short, after several attempts, Ashley beat the required time and went to the Olympic Trials.
What Mental Toughness Really Is
Ashley’s story is a textbook example of mental toughness. Mental toughness is the ability to stay committed to a goal and keep performing through setbacks, discomfort, and pressure. It isn’t the absence of disappointment or doubt. It’s feeling both and choosing to keep going anyway. Accept, Reflect, and Redirect is simply mental toughness put into practice.
What This Means for You
If you’re in real estate, you know this cycle well. The listing appointment you didn’t win. The buyer who went with another agent. The recruit who chose a different brokerage. The quarter that came in short of plan.
Missing by a minute, then 30 seconds, then 15, then just 1 second is not failure. That’s progress, even when it doesn’t feel like it. The agents, managers, and broker-owners who win over time aren’t the ones who never miss. They’re the ones who Accept, Reflect, and Redirect, and then show up again the next day to execute the fundamentals.
So after your next disappointment, ask yourself: Have I accepted it? What did I learn? Where do I point my energy now?
My Own 13.1
Now, about Long Beach. I’m not looking to break any records. I’m going to participate and cross the finish line alongside one of my sons. For me, that is the win.
Not every goal has to be 26.2 miles and a ticket to the Olympic Trials. But every goal, big or small, gets reached the same way: one training day, one conversation, one step at a time.
Roald Amundsen’s team held a steady pace every day. In good weather they stopped at their mileage goal, even when they could have pushed farther. In bad weather they still made their miles. Robert Falcon Scott’s team pushed hard on good days and waited out the bad ones.
Amundsen got there first. Scott’s team arrived more than a month later and never made it home.
Jim Collins tells this story in Great by Choice. He calls Amundsen’s approach the 20 Mile March: a steady pace you hit no matter the conditions.
Your business plan probably isn’t a march
Right now, a lot of agents are writing things like “$10 million in 2027.” That’s a destination, not a march. It tells you nothing about what to do on a Tuesday in February when nobody’s calling back.
A march is a number you control. For example:
Ten real conversations a day.
Two appointments set every week.
One handwritten note before lunch.
For broker-owners it might be:
Four one-on-ones with agents every week.
Three recruiting conversations every week, whether the roster feels full or not.
The march has a floor and a ceiling
Most people only set the floor, the minimum. Collins says the ceiling matters just as much.
The agent who makes 60 calls on a great Monday and burns out by Wednesday hasn’t beaten the plan. They’ve broken it. The brokerage that hires eight agents in a hot quarter with no onboarding capacity learns the same lesson. Steady beats heroic.
Plan for bad weather now
Your march will get tested. A family emergency, a slow market, or a deal that eats your week will all push on it. Decide now what the bad-weather version looks like. Maybe it’s five conversations instead of ten, but never zero.
Try This
Pick one march number for 2027. Write it down before Thanksgiving, not January 2.
In The Compass Came First, post I ended with a question: can you write the one sentence that tells you which way is north? Then the harder one: could your agents write it for you?
Here is a way to find out. At your next sales meeting, hand out index cards with one question: Where is this company going in the next three years? Keep it anonymous. Collect them.
Read them that night. If your office is like most, you’ll get “bigger,” “more agents,” “not sure,” and a couple of good guesses. You might even get one that asks about a rumor you’ve never heard. (Bigger is a result not a direction.)
That’s not a failed test. It’s the most useful data you’ll collect all year. Most leaders have a direction. It lives in their head and in a business plan nobody has opened since January.
Direction is the first D for a reason
In the Eight D’s, Direction comes first. Agents can live with a split that isn’t the best in town. They struggle to stay somewhere they can’t describe. When a recruiter across the street asks, “Where’s your company headed?” and your agent shrugs, that recruiting call is already half won.
So what if they can’t write it?
Here’s the good news. That isn’t an agent problem. It’s a communication problem, and communication problems are fixable.
Write it yourself first. Use one sentence in plain words. Something like: “We will be the brokerage where a new agent gets to 12 deals by year two.” That’s not a mission statement. It’s a direction.
Say it until you’re sick of it. Leaders get tired of their own message long before the team actually hears it. Open every sales meeting with it and put it on the wall.
Connect decisions to it out loud. For example: “We’re adding a transaction coordinator because it gets newer agents to 12 deals faster.” Every decision you tie to the sentence makes it more real.
Let your best people push back on it. Give the draft to your top five agents and ask what’s missing. People defend what they helped build.
Ask each agent to write their own. Then show them where their direction overlaps with the company’s. That overlap is your retention strategy.
Try This
Run the index card test at your next meeting. Keep it anonymous so you get honest answers.
Write your own sentence before you read the cards. Otherwise the cards will write it for you.
Rerun the test in 90 days. The gap between the two rounds is your scorecard.
Question
If a recruiter asked your best agent tomorrow where your company is going, what would they say?
Between 2008 and 2012, the real estate industry went through the worst stretch most of us will ever see. Values collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of agents left the business. Brokerages that looked unbeatable in 2006 were gone by 2010.
And yet some firms grew.
My friend and longtime business colleague Steve Murray and his team at RealTrends wanted to know why. They studied 500 brokerages. Only 15 grew through the downturn. That’s 3%. They called the study “Against All Odds,” and they expected to find a secret strategy, a clever new model, or a lucky market.
They didn’t. What they found was simpler, and harder.
Three things the winners had in common
1. Great leadership. Not flashy leadership. Steady leadership. These owners faced the facts without panicking. They told their people the truth about the market and gave them a reason to believe they would get through it together.
2. They got closer to their people. When the market pulled away, these leaders leaned in. More one-on-ones. More coaching. More presence in the office. They knew their agents’ goals, their fears, and their numbers. Agents don’t leave a leader who shows up for them in the hardest year of their career.
3. They executed the fundamentals every single day. Calls. Contacts. Follow-up. Showing up at 8 a.m. when there was nothing on the calendar. While others waited for the market to come back, these firms kept doing the work that would matter when it did.
Why this matters now
Jim Collins found something similar in Great by Choice. He studied what he called 10X companies, firms that beat their industries by at least ten times in chaotic, unpredictable conditions. Two of his ideas line up closely with what Steve’s team saw.
The 20 Mile March. The best companies made steady, measured progress every day, regardless of conditions. They didn’t overreach in good years or stall in bad ones. That’s the daily fundamentals, just by another name.
Return on Luck. Every company gets good and bad breaks. The difference is what you do with them. The brokerages that grew didn’t get a better market than their competitors. They got more out of the same one.
That’s what winning the day means. You can’t control rates, inventory, or headlines. You can control what you do between 8 and 5 today.
What winning the day looks like for you
If you’re a student: Build habits before you need them. The agent who learns discipline in school doesn’t have to learn it in a crisis.
If you’re an agent: Pick your daily non-negotiables. Five calls. Two notes. One coffee. Do them when you feel like it, and especially when you don’t.
If you’re an affiliate: Be the partner who shows up when business is slow. Your clients remember who stayed.
If you’re a broker-owner: Get closer to your people. Know every agent’s goal and check in on it. In a tough market, your presence is your retention strategy.
The bottom line
The firms that grew against all odds didn’t have better luck. They had better days, stacked one on top of another.
The market will do what it does. Your job is to win today. Then do it again tomorrow.
It was 6:31 in the morning, and my feed had already handed me six productivity systems. Pomodoro. The 3/3/3 Method. The Eisenhower Matrix. Eat the Frog. The Seinfeld Strategy. Time blocking. One graphic promised eight hours of work in four. Another had been shared more than thirteen hundred times.
Then one plain gray card stopped me: “Don’t forget that the compass was invented before the clock, because direction is more important than time.”
The Honest Update
The history doesn’t hold up. Sundials and water clocks were telling time thousands of years before anyone pointed a needle north. The compass only beat the mechanical clock. And the card credits “The Stoics,” but you won’t find the line in Seneca, Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius.
So the clock came first. The point still stands: direction matters more than time.
The Clock Problem
Every tool on that list is a clock tool. They make you faster. Not one of them tells you where to go.
I see it in brokerages every week. An agent time-blocks 9 to 12, then spends it redesigning a website nobody visits. A manager runs perfect Pomodoro sprints through an inbox a policy manual could answer.
Speed in the wrong direction just gets you to the wrong place sooner.
Set the Compass First
Writer and entrepreneur Dan Koe calls it an anti-vision: write, in detail, the future you refuse to live.
For a broker-owner, it might sound like this: Three years from now, same 22 agents, three years older. No one under 30. Still answering every “got a minute?” My two best producers recruited away because nobody asked them what was next.
Now flip every line. That’s your direction. Write it in one sentence and read it before you open email.
Then Pick Up the Clock
Once you know which way is north, the clock tools finally earn their keep:
Eat the Frog: For a recruiter, it’s the call you’ve avoided for two weeks. Make it first.
The Eisenhower Matrix: Recruiting is always important and never urgent, until the day your roster thins out.
Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available. Give the recruiting deck two hours, not two weeks.
The Seinfeld Strategy: Keep the chain alive. One miss is life. Two is the start of a new habit. Never miss twice.
Disappear From the Noise, Not Your People
Koe’s advice is to disappear for six months. A broker-owner can’t vanish on their agents. So go quiet on the Facebook groups, the fifth webinar, and the shiny tool demos. Show up louder for your people.
Try This
Write Your Anti-Vision: Thirty minutes this week, before email. Flip it into one sentence of direction.
Audit Last Week: Hold your calendar against that sentence. Did each block point north, or just fill time?
Pick One Clock Tool: One. Not six.
Name Tomorrow’s Frog Tonight: So you can’t negotiate with it at 8 a.m.
Can you write your one sentence of direction in under a minute? And the harder question: could your agents write it for you?
Resources: C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1955 essay “Parkinson’s Law” in The Economist, and Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog!
Note to self: Even though the clock came before the compass, direction will always matter more than time. Know where you’re going before you start running.
Inspired by Seneca’s first letter to his friend Lucilius, written almost two thousand years ago.
Seneca was one of the richest men in Rome.
Villas. Vineyards. A fortune most senators could only dream about. He tutored the young Nero and then served as one of the emperor’s closest advisors. Power, access, reputation. He had all of it.
Late in his life, he began writing letters to a younger friend named Lucilius. In the very first one, he told him this:
“Everything, Lucilius, belongs to others. Time alone is ours.”
Not long after, Nero ordered his death.
All that wealth could not buy him one more day.
Seneca knew exactly what he was talking about.
Look at What You Actually Own
Now look at your business.
That listing? Borrowed. The seller can expire on Tuesday.
Your top producer? Borrowed. Every agent on your roster is one recruiting lunch away from a transfer.
The split model. The market share. The rate environment. The award on the wall. All borrowed. All of it can be called back by circumstances you do not control.
There is one asset in your business that nobody lent you. Today. The hours sitting in front of you right now. You get them outright, every morning.
But Seneca adds a warning. Anyone who wants that time can walk right in and take it from you.
And here is the part that stings. It is the asset we guard the least.
We Fight Over Desk Fees and Give Away Afternoons
Watch how a broker owner handles money. We might argue over a $50 transaction fee. We might audit a vendor invoice line by line. We might spend a month negotiating a lease.
Then someone leans in the office door and says, “Got a minute?”
And we give them forty-five.
Seneca saw the same thing in Rome. People were tight-fisted with their property and careless with their time, the one thing where being stingy is actually a virtue. Nobody logs the loss. Time never shows up on the P&L.
Taken, Stolen, or Slipped Away
In that first letter, Seneca breaks down how our time disappears. Some is taken from us. Some is stolen. And some just slips away.
Here is what that looks like in a brokerage.
Taken. The agent crisis. The deal falling apart at 6pm on a Friday. The escrow officer who needs an answer now. Some of this is the job. Leadership costs time, and it should.
Stolen. The meeting with no agenda. The vendor demo you agreed to because saying no felt awkward. The email thread with eleven people on it and zero decisions.
Slipped away. Seneca called loss through carelessness the most shameful kind, because nobody did it to you. The five minutes between recruiting calls that turn into forty. The “let me just check the CRM first.” The call block that quietly becomes a planning session about the call block.
Taken time you can manage. Stolen time you can refuse. Slipped time is on you.
The One Debt You Cannot Repay
Seneca makes one more point, and every recruiter needs to hear it.
If someone lends you money, you can pay it back. If someone gives you their time, even the most grateful person alive cannot return it.
So when a $20M producer gives you an hour at a coffee shop, understand what just happened. They handed you the one thing they will never get back. Walking in unprepared is not casual. It is disrespectful. That is why the quiet hours of prepmatter so much.
Now flip it around.
If time is the only thing an agent truly owns, then the most valuable thing you can offer them is hours, not two more points. Transaction support that keeps them out of the paperwork. Systems that kill the busywork. A leader who removes friction instead of adding meetings.
Which is why one of the best questions in any recruiting conversation is also one of the simplest:
“If I gave you back six hours a week, what would you do with them?”
Here is the part that makes this freeing instead of grim.
If everything else is borrowed, you can stop gripping it so hard.
The listing that went to the other broker was never fully yours. The agent who left for a better cap was on loan the whole time. The market that shifted under your feet was never yours to begin with.
That does not mean you stop fighting for them. You fight hard. It means losing one does not get to set the temperature of your day. You feel it for an hour. You learn what you can. Then you go back to the only thing you actually control.
What you do with the next hour.
Try This
Keep the account for one week. Seneca admitted he wasted time too. But he said he could tell you exactly what he lost, why, and how. Can you? Three columns: taken, stolen, slipped. Be honest.
Treat a time request like a money request. Before you say yes to a “quick call,” ask what it is withdrawing from. If you would not write a check for it, do not write your afternoon.
Close the open door. Set office hours for walk-in questions. Your agents will adjust faster than you think.
Stop saving the hard call for later. Seneca told Lucilius to grab hold of today’s work so he would depend less on tomorrow. The recruiting conversation you are holding until “after the quarter” is a bet that you will have the time. You might not.
Give one hour back. Cancel or cut in half one recurring meeting this week. Your agents will notice. So will your calendar.
Question
If you had to send an invoice for every hour you gave away last week, who would get the bill?
And the follow-up: which of your agents is waiting for someone to give them their hours back?
Resources
Read Seneca’s first letter to Lucilius, usually titled “On Saving Time.” It is two pages. You will find it in Letters from a Stoic. Then read On the Shortness of Life. You can finish it in an afternoon, which feels about right.
Winning the day is not about owning more. It is about owning the one thing that was yours all along.
“I train like I’ve never won, and I compete like I’ve never lost.”
It sounds great on a motivational poster. But look closely at what it actually asks of you on an ordinary Tuesday morning.
Gu’s equation splits high performance into two completely different gears:
The first half builds discipline and humility in the quiet hours when nobody is watching.
The second half silences doubt the moment the pressure is on.
In real estate—whether you are listing homes, running a brokerage, or building a team through recruiting—almost everyone gets trapped on one side of that equation.
The Quiet Hours: The Recruiter’s Grind
Take recruiting.
Training like you’ve never won is the dirty work no one posts on social media.
It’s spending hours building relationships, researching local MLS data before making a phone call. It’s auditing an agent’s production gaps, analyzing their recent transactions, and anticipating their objections. It’s role-playing difficult conversations, refining your value proposition, and following up with agents who ignored your previous messages.
The moment a recruiter or manager thinks, “I know my pitch, I don’t need to prep,” complacency takes over. You wing it. You make a generic call. And the candidate smells it within thirty seconds.
Humility keeps you sharp. It forces you to respect the process, regardless of how many desks you filled last month.
The Arena: Absolute Certainty
Then comes game day.
You’re sitting across a coffee table from a $20M producer who could transform your office. Or maybe you’re standing in a living room fighting for a crucial listing against two rival brokers.
This is where humility has to turn into conviction.
If you walk into that recruiting conversation worrying about your brokerage’s flaws, hesitating on your split models, or acting grateful just to have their time, you’ve already lost. A top producer isn’t joining someone who seeks permission to lead them. They join certainty.
Competing like you’ve never lost means you believe down to your bones that your platform, your leadership, and your culture will make their business bigger and their life better. You don’t bring doubt into the room. You bring an immovable belief in the value you deliver.
The Balance
The lesson cuts through the noise:
Preparation requires humility. It keeps you hungry, grounded, and outworking yesterday.
Execution demands conviction. It silences fear and projects unshakable authority.
Carry only humility, and you out-prepare everyone but fold under pressure. Carry only conviction, and you’re all swagger with zero substance—and the market will expose you fast.
Elite performers do both. They grind in the dark as if they have everything to prove, and they walk into the room as if they cannot fail.
Take a look at your calendar, your pipeline, and your next appointment:
Which half of that equation is harder for you right now: the daily grind, or silencing the doubt?
Dollars Is Seventh on Our Own List. It’s the Only One They Ask About.
Every leader in real estate knows how the recruiting conversation starts. An agent sits down, glances at the numbers, and asks the question you can set your watch by:
“What’s your split?”
And if we aren’t careful, we answer it. We negotiate caps. We shave desk fees. We find two more points somewhere. In doing that, we quietly agree with the agent’s assumption — that the only lever available to them is a cheaper version of what they already have.
Henry Ford supposedly said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The line survives because it gets something right about how people ask for things.
But here’s the part worth sitting with: the agent isn’t being naive. Dollars is the only D anyone publishes. Every brokerage in the market advertises its split. Nobody advertises their transaction-support response time, or how many deals their broker saved at the closing table last quarter. So the agent optimizes the one number they can actually see.
That’s not their failure. That’s ours.
Run the Math Out Loud
Take an agent doing $1.5 million in volume — three or four deals a year at 2.5%. Roughly $37,500 in gross commission income.
Move them from an 80/20 to an 85/15. Five full points. The kind of concession you’d have to fight your P&L to make.
It’s worth about $1,875 a year to them.
Now sell one additional $500,000 home. At 80/20, that single transaction is worth roughly $10,000.
One deal beats five points. Say that out loud, on a whiteboard, in front of the agent. Once they see the number, you are no longer defending your split — you are asking the better question: what is standing between you and that one extra deal?
The Eight D’s
We’ve been writing about the Eight D’s here for two years — 104 straight weeks. They came out of the agent migration data, not a brainstorm, and they hold up because agents don’t move for one reason. They move for one reason they can articulate, sitting on top of six or seven they can’t.
Direction — Leadership vision and brokerage strategy. Do they know where this company is going, and do they want to go there?
De-Risking — Support systems that reduce personal and financial risk. One rescued deal pays for a lifetime of split difference.
Development — Training, mentorship, and growth opportunities. Not generic webinars. One gap, ninety days, measured.
Differentiation — Clear brand or model advantages. Something that answers the client’s real question: why should I hire you?
Digital/Data — Tools and platforms that actually raise productivity, plus live local market intelligence they can use in a listing appointment tomorrow.
Dollars — Competitive compensation and commission structure. Real, and worth being honest about. Also the only D on this list that can’t create a transaction that didn’t already exist.
Dissatisfaction — The push factor. Nobody moves because a deck was impressive. They move because something has been grinding on them long enough that change feels safer than staying.
Look at where Dollars sits. Seventh of eight. That ordering wasn’t an accident, and it isn’t marketing — it’s what the migration data shows. Meanwhile it’s the first thing out of the agent’s mouth in nine meetings out of ten.
Your job in that first meeting isn’t to present the other seven. It’s to find out which one the Dissatisfaction is actually attached to — because it is almost never Dollars, even when Dollars is the word they use.
The Questions That Replace “What’s Your Split?”
You don’t get there by presenting. You get there by diagnosing:
How many appointments did you set last month — and how many did you actually run?
Walk me through what happens between “I got the lead” and “I’m at their kitchen table.”
Where in the last year did a deal nearly fall apart, and who did you call?
What part of your week do you dread?
If I gave you back six hours, what would you do with them?
Every answer points at a D. None of them point at Dollars.
When the Split Is the Problem
The honest part, because leaving it out makes everything above sound like a broker defending an uncompetitive model.
Sometimes the agent’s math is simply correct. A 100-transaction producer paying $60,000 over cap for services they don’t use is not asking for a faster horse. They are reading a spreadsheet accurately. If you can’t say what the other seven D’s are worth to that agent in dollars — not in adjectives — they should leave, and you should let them.
So this isn’t a rebuttal you deploy when the split question comes up. It’s a standard you hold yourself to: if you can’t price your value, you don’t have any. Do that work, and the split conversation stops being a threat.
The next time an agent asks you for a faster horse, don’t quote them a rate. Find out where they’re actually stuck, and show them how to build the engine that gets them there.
That is how you win the day.
When an agent sits down across from you, which of the Eight D’s is actually driving the move — and which one do they say out loud?
