Commentary by James A. Crumbaugh, III
RISMEDIA, Nov. 20, 2008- In the weeks prior to the National Association of Realtors National Convention in Orlando, Florida, I met with a strategic business consultant to discuss how to take our company, Allison James Estates and Homes, to the next level in our recruiting efforts.
Our goal is to recruit 2-5% of Realtors nationwide to affiliate with us, so by my estimations, we want to start recruiting and hiring 300 Realtors a month to accomplish this.
When we first starting meeting with the consultant, we were thinking that we needed to hire up to 50 professional recruiters to cover all 13 states that we are currently in. Until now, we had been doing the recruiting nationally for all our state brokers.
Currently Allison James is operating in Washington State, Oregon, California, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Missouri, Kansas, New York, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Florida.
With that type of coverage we knew we had to make a major investment in our recruiting efforts. So here we are looking at making a huge investment in manpower, when our strategic business consultant took us completely by surprise.
He told us, “You don’t need to hire any recruiters.” The consultant went on to tell me that we already have several hundred recruiters. He tells me that the one thing he has learned from questioning us on details for hours upon hours on how our business model works, is that the Realtors in this country except for the very few are hurting financially.
“Why would you hire all these expensive recruiters, when you can take that same money and put it into the pockets of your own Realtors,” the consultant said. It hit me like a sledgehammer. Our Realtors are the best recruiters we have, and they could use some income to supplement their income from real estate sales…
So we now pay our Realtors to recruit for us. If they bring on a Realtor under what we’ve created as Plan A our Realtor will receive $ 1,000; if they bring on a Realtor under Plan B they will receive $900 and if they bring on a Realtor under Plan C they will receive $300.
In just the two weeks since we have implemented the program our recruiting efforts have exploded, said Crumbaugh.
For additional information about Allison James Estates and Homes recruiting program, contact Tammy Archibald, vice president of sales at (866) 463-5780 or e-mail her at tarchibald@allisonjamesestates.com
James Crumbaugh is CEO of Allison James Estates and Homes.
