Nine Months With a Team
Nine months after I hired her, I shut it down.
She was a good agent. That was never the problem. I had listings producing more buyer traffic than I could work, and hiring someone to take those buyers is the most obvious move in real estate. On paper it looked exactly like the model everybody was running.
Then I ran it, and the paper stopped mattering. I was generating the opportunities. I was building the marketing. I was making the relationships that produced the calls. What I had actually built was a business where one person did all the generating and someone else did the closing, and the generating never stopped being mine.
I want to be clear about something, because it’s the part agents get wrong about me. I am not against help. Before that hire I had licensed agents in both Tucson and Alaska answering inbound calls and internet inquiries, and their job was to set appointments. My job was to go on the listing appointments, run the buyer consultations, have the conversations, and get agreements signed. That worked beautifully.
I also had a licensed transaction coordinator in Florida. Because she was licensed, she could do things an unlicensed assistant legally cannot — talk with the other agent, help manage contracts, handle amendments, keep a file moving. She wasn’t showing homes. She wasn’t going on appointments. She wasn’t trying to become the face of anything. Hiring her was one of the smartest decisions I have made in twenty-five years.
So the difference was never help. The difference was what I had made myself responsible for.
What I finally understood in month nine is that the successful team leaders I knew were not out selling houses every day. They were recruiting, training, managing, motivating, holding people accountable, and generating enough business to feed everyone underneath them.
It’s a good career. Some of the best people in this industry have built it and love it. It simply wasn’t the one I wanted, and I was nine months into it before I said that out loud.
So I closed it and went back to solo, and the relief was immediate. The stress went. The frustration went. The weight of managing personalities went. I went back to the work I actually like, which is helping people buy and sell houses.
What survived the shutdown
Everything that didn’t need managing. Technology. Automation. Vendors. Specialists. Contractors. A transaction coordinator. Now, AI tools. That is the Quiet Team™ — leverage that doesn’t make me responsible for someone else’s income while I’m still building my own business.
Staying solo has never meant doing everything yourself. It means being deliberate about what you do personally and what gets supported behind the scenes.
Most agents who tell me they need a team don’t. They need leverage.
The goal was never to build a team. The goal was freedom. For some agents freedom comes from leading people. For others it comes from building systems. Know which one you are before you hire anybody.
One thing to do this week
Write down the ten things that ate the most hours of your week. Be honest, and include the ones you’d rather not admit to.
Then mark each one with a single letter. M if only you can do it — the appointments, the conversations, the advocacy. P if a person could do it. S if a system could do it.
Count your S’s before you go looking for a P. Most of the time the list is telling you that you don’t have a hiring problem.
