RISMEDIA, April 8, 2010—In order to find profit in your brokerage in 2010, you will need to recruit. By now, you’ve probably cut the expenses about as far as you can because the last two years in this industry has forced that for most everyone. If you cut any further, the viability of your firm may waiver.
If you own or manage a brokerage that needs to find profit in 2010 and can’t cut expenses any further, what do you do? Thankfully, the answer to that is quite simple; however, finding the time, learning the best ways to do it and then mustering the discipline to do it, isn’t. The answer to finding profit this year is to recruit experienced agents.
Have you ever taken the time to truly figure out what it would mean to your bottom line if you recruit? Most, I daresay, haven’t. The pressure to recruit agents is part of everyday life for a real estate broker; however, the knowledge of what it actually means to your profits, isn’t.
Let’s look at this further. If every experienced and productive agent you recruit adds, on average, between $10,000 and $25,000 to your bottom line, adding five agents will boost your bottom line by between $50,000 and $125,000 in year one.
Over the course of three years, those same five agents will add $150,000 to $375,000 to your business, while at the same time creating excitement and momentum in your office. Now keep that recruiting mindset for the next three years and do the math with 15 new agents…the numbers add up to enough to see your way through to profitability but also to have the money to begin investing in new technologies and training again.
Now what? You have always known it’s important to recruit and this simple exercise proved that even more. So, what do you do now?
1. Make a target list of agents who you would like to have in your office.
2. Call them on their cell phones over and over again until you actually speak to them.
3. Create curiosity and close for a meeting with as many agents as you can.
4. Learn recruiting best practices, interview techniques and make hiring agents your top priority.
5. Hire them.
Not to over simplify the process by any means, but what else is there? If you have one recruiting appointment per week and a modest 4-to-1 ratio from interview to hire, you’d have five “new” agents to your office by fall.
Let’s work backward from that. In order to get one appointment per week, how many contacts will you have to make? 100:1? 50:1? 25:1? Only you know your average conversion ratios. If you need to, for example, reach out to 50 agents per week in order to get one appointment, how will you do it? That’s 10 contacts per day, which will take between 35 and 40 calls to their cell phones. Is your system in place to make that happen? Can you carve out 25-50% of your week to focus on recruiting?
If you are a real estate firm that needs to see profit in 2010 and have made it through the cost-cutting and business-smart exercises, then there’s only one thing left to do: add producing real estate agents to your office. You can work that process on your own, with an accountability team or outsource it to the experts. The choice is yours. Only you can decide what is best.
Todd Shyiak is president of Cogent Step Recruiting (CSR), a leading expert in outsourced recruiting. Contact Shyiak at www.cogentstep.com or 250-682-2961.
