Ep. 285: 4 Things You Need to Turn a Team into a Company (with Tom Toole)

Building a Real Estate Business

Who should listen: Agents looking for golden nuggets about lead gen, lead conversion, and content marketing, but especially those agents wanting to power up their teams’ production.

Key idea: You can’t run a real estate team and be in production and expect to do both well. Your team will suffer.

Action item: Define, put into place, and uphold minimum standards for yourself and your team.

Tom Toole leads a team of RE/MAX agents that has been ranked #1 in Pennsylvania and Delaware and #49 in the US. That’s no small feat, which means Tom is not your average team leader. In this week’s Stay Paid episode, Tom shares with our listeners some solid advice that is born from experience and supported by success.

As always, we want to suggest that you listen to the full interview so that you get all the value so often revealed in the details of our many conversations. You’ll especially want to hear about how Tom turned his team of agents into a full-scale real estate company. But he also shares some wisdom about lead generation, lead conversion, and content marketing.

Here, we list the four mechanisms Tom argues you need to move a team to the next level:

• reliable systems,
• repeatable processes,
• thorough training, and
• leaders dedicated to key functions.

Reliable systems and repeatable processes

We’ve discussed before about how scaling a business starts with having the right systems and processes is place:

• In Episode 175, Ravi Abuvala talked with us about the huge boost in efficiency and effectiveness that installing internal sales agents (ISAs) can provide.
• In Episode 213, Joey Gilkey shared why small businesses wanting to grow need to build out their sales operations.
• In Episode 233, Michael McFall talked about systematizing your sales process.

And, of course, we’re frequently talking about the need to set goals and measure your results (your KPIs) because unless you know what you want to achieve and how you are performing, you’ll never know what’s working and what needs to be adjusted. (To help with that, we’ve got a free lead calculator you can use that’ll reverse engineer your sales goals by telling you how many activities you need to do to hit those goals.)

Thorough training

For Tom, training his agents is simply a repeatable process where everyone runs through the same skills training until they demonstrate they can do what is required.

One skill Tom’s agents learn is to use every one of the tested scripts (like the LPMAMA script) in the script book they are handed when they come onboard. His agents are evaluated on getting the script right, but they’re also assessed on their voice inflection, body language, ability to ask the right questions, and more.

Leaders dedicated to key functions

It was when Tom hired a sales manager that he says his business became a “real company.”

Tom had always been in production, selling 90 homes a year, and that didn’t stop when he built his team. But he realized along the way that he was doing a disservice to his team—he couldn’t keep selling that many homes a year and do everything that his team (and his business) needed him to do. That’s when he hired a sales manager. After that, he hired an operations manager.

His point is that he needed to hire people dedicated to certain functions not only because he wanted to stay in production but also because he realized that, by being the only person doing everything he was doing, he put his business in jeopardy. If he wasn’t available, then his business would be vulnerable.

Please enjoy this episode and some of the others shared above. There are golden nuggets in each of them.

We’d also appreciate it if you would give us a five-star rating and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. (Not sure how to leave a review? Click here.) Thanks.

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