In this video I discuss when is the right time to scale and start acquiring buyer's agents on your team. For those of you who don't know, I actually have a team of about 37+ agent and brokers that I currently work with across New York, North Carolina and Florida. We are scaling all over the nation! But before that, I was a solo agent, like many of you, and I was struggling to build my team, because I was skipping steps – I was trying to "save money" and not spend so much.
How Do You Scale Properly
Your business is on fire, you're getting a lot of deals through the pipeline, and you're starting to make money, right?
How do you know when is the actual right time to add a buyer's agent to your team? The right time is when your lead generation is performing really well. Whether it's doing Facebook ads, google ads, zillow premier agent, or whatever you're doing. Once you're getting an abundance of leads, some of them are slipping through the cracks, your conversion ratio is sky high, (2% to 3% conversion ratio), and you're doing a really solid job.
Once you have all that covered, then it's the right time to get ISA.
I know what you're saying. You're like, wait, we're talking about buyer's agents, right? The buyer's agent side of it shouldn't come until after you get a Virtual Assistant (and/or Transaction Coordinator). I've been burned here. Many times I tried to skip this step, because I didn't want to invest in my own business in that aspect. I thought it was a waste of money, I could "do it on my own". The truth is, that the first thing you're going to want to do is get an ISA (inbound sales associate/assistant) to handle the influx of leads that are coming in so that they're not slipping through the cracks.
Now your only job is to convert them into a client (after your ISA converted them into an appointment), show them and close them.
Who Handles The Transaction Side?
You can outsource this to the ISA, but I wouldn't recommend it. I highly recommend that the ISA is hired first and then from there you're going to get a Transaction Coordinator. Remember, the buyers agent is the third step! Some brokerages offer a transaction coordinator where their only job is to follow up with the attorneys, the appraisal, final walkthroughs, etc.
You can hire a Virtual Assistant (VA) – which can cost you anywhere from about $6,000 to about $10,000 per year.
Once you have five to eight clients at any given time, that's when you're going to start needing a buyer's agent to handle any extra clients that you're getting. Typically handling MORE than 5-8 buyer clients at any given time is going to cause stress. When we're stressed...we make stupid mistakes.
You've got the I.S.A. to handle calling and converting new leads to appointments, you'll handle converting those appointments to showings/deals, and your T.C. or V.A. will handle the transaction coordination.
This will allow you the mental and time space to handle training your buyers agent: what they should do on the showing, how they should close, how they should negotiate, how should they run comps, etc.
I don't recommend getting a buyers agent first. I've made that mistake and it's really not worth it because you become the admin and your job shouldn't be pushing paper around.
You should be just focusing on money making activities, which is lead generation, conversion, showing and closing. That's what you should be focusing on a majority of your business. Once you start outsourcing all that paper work stuff and you start converting more, guess what? You're going to have a well-oiled machine. Now You can pick and choose what clients you're working with and it also frees you up to even go get listings!
When you're getting listings you're feeding the system.
Getting your own listings will feed the funnel you've created. I know it can seem scary to start spending money on an ISA and then a VA/TC, but trust me – it's the best way to scale. Many team leaders feel regret about starting with a buyers agent. You don't want to become your team's admin.
Have questions? Contact me @alexfazelani or comment below!
