Picture this: You’re a high-producing agent closing over 50 deals a year. Your family is well provided for, and your clients are raving fans. But you’ve got no time for what’s most important to you, and you worry that if you keep running at this pace, everything you’ve built will crumble.
This was the story for Nicole Handy of Braden Real Estate Group. After buying and selling homes on the side for nearly a decade, Nicole was ready to build a full-time business. She and her cousin, Jermeshia Goudeau, had left corporate America to start their own family values brokerage in the Houston area.
Before she knew it, full-time had become all-the-time. “I was burned out,” she recalls. “My family life was all over the place. I never had any time off, and when I was home, I wasn’t present. It hurt my heart to walk out the door every Saturday and leave my daughter to go to work. But if I didn’t, I worried the business would fall apart.”
In other words, selling 50 homes a year, alone, wasn’t sustainable without making major sacrifices in her life. Nicole was spread thin, and her family was paying the price. She hoped that growing a team could yield better life balance.
Braden Real Estate Group spent 2020 trying to find the right team-building process. But, according to Nicole, her search for team development strategies was a challenge. “We couldn’t figure out how to do it,” she says. “It felt like we were trying to reinvent the wheel.” After hitting a wall, Nicole and her business partner decided to invest in coaching to see if that could help them build a productive and profitable team.
The outcome? After one year of coaching, Nicole’s team of four agents closed 2021 with $35 million in volume. More impressively, Nicole handled very few of those transactions herself, resulting in much more free time in her life. “I’m present now,” she says. “I can go to Girl Scouts with my daughter and not feel like I have to constantly watch my phone.”
Growing a team helped Braden Real Estate Group empower their agents to be more successful, and their clients now receive customized, higher-level service with specialists at every level of the transaction.
Nicole’s advice for agents is to invest in themselves like she did. “You spend $100,000-plus on college, so why would you not invest in real estate coaching?”
She’s right. Deploying the correct processes and systems with the right coach will not only help you grow an effective, top-producing team with purpose, but it will also make it possible for you to get your life back.
Verl Workman is the founder and CEO of Workman Success Systems, a real estate consulting company that specializes in performance coaching and building highly effective teams. Contact wssm@workmansuccess.com for more information and free downloadable resources.
