This is one of the most confronting questions you will ask yourself in your real estate career.
The first thing that you can do is to increase your fitness: Physical fitness, mental fitness, emotional fitness, spiritual fitness and financial fitness. Altogether, fitness is actually all about the speed of your recovery. So, the fitter you are, the quicker you can respond to circumstances happening around you.
The second thing you can do to increase your capacity is to create better systems. What I mean by that is, for example, setting up databases that automatically handle all the buy work for you. Through automation you can send buyers alerts that have just been listed by your agency about properties that could suit their requirements.
The third thing is to employ good people. Many good agents in this industry could be exceptional if they just made the decision to actually back themselves. There will never, ever be a perfect time for business growth. Putting on an assistant is one of the best moves you could make for your real estate career. This can only go wrong if you decide to hire someone to do the work, then back away from managing any part of it yourself. What I know is that you’ve got to hire someone who is actually going to complement your skill set.
How do you know if you need an assistant? Across the industry, the benchmark is usually about 30 transactions per year or around $300,000 in fees. As soon as you are doing about $300,000 in gross fees, you are ready to put on that assistant. So, what do you look for? Well, I believe that the number one most important skillset is the ability to prospect, because prospecting actually turns the business around. Prospecting is not something that you can just outsource to a junior. People actually need to be competent and have the capacity and the skill to really be able to work with you.
The next thing to ask yourself is, are you coachable? If you’re not coachable, how do you expect to be able to coach others? In addition to that, is your assistant coachable? Out of all the people I have ever worked with who have put on an assistant, the ones who have really succeeded are those who actually took control of the situation and decided that the assistant is nothing more than an extension of their business.
Working with assistants is not easy. You’ve got to commit to be very clear about the workload and what you’ve got on for the day. This brings us back to one of your basic fundamental skills: The ability to make a task list.
Putting on an assistant could be one of the best things you do in your real estate career. It will take you to over $600,000 in fees – might even take you into $1 million plus type territory – but you’ve got to make sure you’ve got them doing the right work.