Tag: Sales Meeting Content

The Big Four and the Power of Community

It was 105 degrees. Too hot to run outside, so I headed to the gym, set the iFit treadmill to a 5% incline, and let trainer Hannah Eden do the talking.

Somewhere in the middle of that climb, she said something that stuck with me. She talked about the Big Four: faith, finances, fitness, and family, with family expanded to include all of our relationships. Her point was simple. We are not meant to do life alone.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how true that is in our business.

Real Estate Is a Lonely Sport

We love to call agents independent contractors. Independent is a great word for a tax form. It’s a terrible strategy for a career.

Agents who isolate stall. They miss the coaching, the conversations, and the deal-saving tip from the agent two desks over. And when a competitor calls with a better split, there’s nothing holding them in place. Agents rarely leave a brokerage where they feel connected. They leave the ones where they feel alone.

That makes community one of the most powerful recruiting and retention tools you own. And it doesn’t cost a dime.

• For the Broker-Owner: Your culture is your community. Ask yourself honestly: would an agent who doesn’t close a deal this month still feel like they belong here?
• For the Recruiter: Stop leading with splits and tools. Lead with people. “Here’s who you’ll be working alongside” is a stronger pitch than any fee schedule.
• For the Manager: Notice who’s missing. The agent skipping sales meetings and dodging calls isn’t just busy. They’re drifting. Reach out before a recruiter does.
• For the Staff: You’re often the first relationship a new agent makes. A warm hello and a quick follow-up make the office feel like home.
• For the Agent: Nobody is coming to drag you into the circle. You have to step in.

How to Build Your Community

1. Find a Community: Your office, a mastermind, an association committee, a running club. Pick a group that’s heading where you want to go.
2. Connect: Show up early. Learn names. Ask one more question than you normally would.
3. Participate: Don’t just attend. Contribute. Share a win, share a struggle, offer to help. Community rewards participants, not spectators.
4. Build Strong Relationships: Relationships aren’t built in a single meeting. They’re built through the power of positive habits: every coffee, call, and check-in adds a strand. As I’ve written before, habits start as a thin thread and become a strong cable.

Faith, finances, fitness, and relationships. Notice that none of the Big Four is built alone. Faith grows in fellowship. Finances grow through people who trust you. Fitness grows when someone is counting on you to show up. And relationships… well, that one speaks for itself.

So whether it’s 105 degrees or 65, find your people and show up for them. That’s how you win the day.

A System Will Produce What A System Will Produce, Nothing Less and Nothing More!

It’s October. Which means the plans are coming.

• The 2027 business plan template.
• The new coaching program.
• The CRM rollout.
• The recruiting playbook with color-coded tabs.

By Thanksgiving, most offices will have more programs than agents using them.

Benjamin Franklin cut through all of it in seven words, in the 1737 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack:

“Well done is better than well said.”

Almost three hundred years later, it’s still the best business advice on the shelf.

Plans Feel Like Progress

Here’s the trap. Building the plan feels like work. Picking the CRM feels like work. Researching the perfect script feels like work.

None of it is movement.

I see it every fall. An agent spends three weekends on a business plan with fourteen goals and a vision board. January comes, nobody calls back, and the plan sits in a folder. Meanwhile, the agent at the next desk wrote one line on an index card, their march, and started the next morning.

By February, one of them has a plan. The other has a pipeline.

Brokers do it too. We launch a mentorship program, a training calendar, a lead-routing system, a culture committee. All good ideas. But your agents don’t experience programs. They experience Tuesday. Did someone call them back? Did their broker check on the deal that almost fell apart? Did anybody ask what they need?

One real one-on-one this week beats a dozen initiatives on the whiteboard.

Why Action Wins

Action produces data. Theory produces opinions.

Make twenty calls and you learn which opening line works. Run one listing presentation and you find out where your pitch breaks. Have one honest recruiting conversation and you’ll know more about what agents in your market want than any survey will tell you.

Theory has its place. You need a direction. The compass comes first. But once you know which way is north, every extra hour of planning is an hour you’re not walking. That’s the gap I wrote about in Stop Knowing, Start Doing, and it gets wider every fourth quarter.

Try This

If you’re an agent:

• Cut your plan to one page. If it doesn’t fit, it won’t get done.
• Take the first step today. Make the call. Send the note. October counts.

If you’re a broker-owner:

• Kill one program. Which initiative in your office has the most theory and the least movement? Pause it and put that energy into one action.
• Book three one-on-ones before Friday. Not a new program. Just the conversations.

Everyone:

• Count steps, not plans. At the end of each week, write down three things you did, not three things you decided.

Question

What’s the one step you’ve been planning instead of taking?

Resources

The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton. It’s the business-school version of this exact problem, and a fast read. For the original, pick up Poor Richard’s Almanack. Franklin was writing productivity advice before anyone called it that.

Well done beats a dozen programs. Today.

In Great by Choice, Jim Collins describes a ship at sea with a hostile vessel bearing down on it and only a limited supply of gunpowder.

If you load everything into one cannonball and fire, you’ll probably miss. Then you have no gunpowder left.

The better move is to fire a bullet first. See where it lands and adjust your aim. Fire another. Once a bullet hits, load the cannonball.

This is how brokerages should be testing AI

Here’s what I see instead. A firm buys an enterprise AI platform and holds a big rollout meeting. Three months later, four agents are using it and nobody can say whether it helped. That was a cannonball fired blind.

What a bullet looks like

A bullet is small, cheap, and low-risk. For example:

• One agent sets up the 5 p.m. daily check-in prompt from Configure the AI Before You Configure the Deal and runs it for 30 days.
• One team lead uses AI to draft listing descriptions for a month, then compares the edits against the old way.
• One recruiter uses AI to prep for five coffee meetings, then asks whether those meetings went better.

Each test involves one person, one task, one measure, and 30 days.

The honest part

Most AI pilots don’t fail because the tool is bad. They fail because nobody decided at the start what success would look like. “Let’s see how it goes” isn’t a measure.

Before you fire, write down one sentence: In 30 days, this worked if ___.

The other honest part: bullets have to be safe. Keep client personal information and contract details out of any tool until you know how it handles data. A cheap test shouldn’t create an expensive compliance problem.

Then load the cannonball

When a bullet hits, commit fully. Train everyone, build it into onboarding, and put it in your recruiting presentation. Calibrated confidence beats hopeful spending every time.

Try This

• Pick one friction point. Choose the task your agents complain about most.
• Find one volunteer. Look for someone curious, not necessarily your most tech-savvy agent.
• Write your success sentence before you start.
• Review at day 30. Then decide to fire another bullet, load the cannonball, or walk away.

Question

What cannonball have you fired lately without a bullet first? And what would a bullet have cost you instead?

Resources

Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen.

Test small. Win big. Win the day.

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.

Win the day.

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.