If you’re a broker, you’re probably often thinking of strategies for how to grow your team or agent count. However, growth shouldn’t be the only concern you have when it comes to team-building. In fact, there’s something to be said for maintaining a smaller team of agents.
Now, this might sound antithetical to your instincts as a businessperson – the priority as a business leader is to be growing all the time. In a client-facing industry like real estate, keeping stock of your sphere of influence is vital and a natural way to expand that sphere is via agent recruitment. Despite the advantages of team growth, there is a definite cost/benefit analysis to team size that you should do before sending out the hiring call.
You’ll know each and every agent
As a team leader, you have a responsibility to know the people working under you. You have as much of a duty to excel at leading them as they do to fulfill the job you hired them for. It’s easier to be that type of leader if you know your followers’ concerns, priorities, etc. In turn, it’s easier to have and retain that knowledge if you have a team of two dozen rather than six dozen.
Remember the agents’ names and faces, but you can and should go beyond that: birthdays, families and what listings they’re working at the moment.
A smaller team means stronger relationships
In a smaller team, it’s not just brokers who will be better able to connect with the agents; so will the agents themselves with their teammates. A smaller environment means a more tight-knit one and greater opportunity for forging connections and boosting morale.
Ironically, a larger team can make its members feel more isolated–it’s easy to get lost in a crowd, which in turn might make your agents more inclined to work solo rather than alongside each other. At that point, why even bother being part of a team in the first place?
It’ll be easier to retain agents
The first two lead to this third, subsequent benefit: if an agent feels like they’re valued by their broker and likes the team they’re a part of, it’s much less likely that they’ll jump ship to a different brokerage.
The last thing you want to create at your brokerage is a revolving door of hires. You get the drawbacks of a large team–having to constantly recruit, onboard and train new agents –without the benefits–a roster of reliable team members. If your brokerage gets a reputation as such, new agents might even join with the mindset that this will just be a stepping stone, rather than a permanent place on your team.
