We would like to welcome this week’s guest blogger Alyssa Hellman. Alyssa is the Director of Go School of Real Estate, part of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Go Realty, and a member of Realtor Magazine Class of 2015 ‘30 Under 30.’ After working as a real estate agent and developing a strong set of career values and goals, she found herself eager to share knowledge with up and coming agents. Connect with Alyssa on Twitter @AVHellman or on her website at www.alyssahellman.com.
As the director of the Go School of Real Estate, I have the opportunity to meet soon-to-be agents every day. It is a small part of why I love what I do. In speaking with them, one thing has become incredibly clear: as an industry, we’re discussing the wrong things. Brokerages offer training on how to price your listings and how to prospect, but what many forget is that those things are only part of what a new agent needs to know. New agents need to know how to be part of a company and not just get lost in the numbers.
For us at Go School of Real Estate, this is extremely important. Our company lives and breathes a set of core beliefs that guide our actions and decisions each and every day. We don’t recruit numbers, because we believe that just leaves you with… well, numbers. Instead, we recruit based on culture, lifestyle and beliefs. I don’t mean to imply that we all are the same. We’re not. We’re a perfectly imperfect bunch of true individuals, but our culture ties us together in a way that sales transactions never could.
I am a big believer in the importance of culture and the foundation that it builds. By making your culture what you protect at all costs, the production follows. Agents thrive in a place where they can do their best work. This isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
Creating a great culture is supplemented by the actionable tools that agents are given. For example, at our company, we run a five-week program for all new agents called Launch. It is designed to help them kick off their real estate career. It focuses on utilizing the tools available to help them grow into thriving agents. We cover everything from logging in to the Greenhouse, BHGRE®’s one-stop shop for tools and services every real estate professional needs to be successful, to registering for webinars. We also cover how to do a CMA, effective prospecting activities and everything in between.
But, what does Launch start with? Culture. The first week of Launch is focused on culture because we want every agent launching his or her career with us to understand that our culture is the foundation of everything we do and what we have built. Moreover, we want them to understand that culture should be the bedrock of what they build too.
Company culture isn’t just a set of words written on a piece of paper and ours isn’t just something that hangs on the walls of all of our offices. Culture is found in the way you greet your customers, the way you market your listings and yourself and, most importantly, in the way you treat each other. For us, it is a living, breathing part of each of our agents, and a living, breathing part of our leadership.
