We would all love to have someone who can do some of our work for us.
When we feel busy and overwhelmed, and see that there is a gap between how much business development work we’re doing, and how much we need to be doing; it’s easy to look at the admin work that is weighing us down.
I hear from agents time and time again. “If I hire an assistant, they will do all of the work that I don’t like doing, and I can focus on getting more clients and making more money.” There is wisdom in this perspective. High producing agents often have assistants; not only because it shares the workload, but because they can stay in the high-level mindset of doing the challenging and valuable work of attracting new clients, delivering amazing customer service and negotiating exceptional outcomes.
But recently, I am hearing more and more agents talking about hiring assistants, I think it’s critically important to ask this question:
Is it truly the administration work that is keeping me from working on client acquisition? Or is it something else?
You need to know the answer to this question before hiring an assistant. Once you hire someone you will be responsible for their well-being at work and the income they count on to support themselves and their family. This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly.
I’ve watched as hundreds of agents take on assistants only to have to let them go a few months later after an agonizing process of trying to train and manage a new assistant under the stress of higher costs. None of this makes it easier to do client acquisition – it makes it significantly harder as your time is more limited in the early stages of a new hire and your mindset can be thrown out of whack.
In most of these failed scenarios, the agent wasn’t doing a good job at client acquisition before they hired the assistant. They idealized that somehow bringing another person on board would miraculously make client acquisition easier but of course, it didn’t. The underlying issue that kept them from doing client acquisition hadn’t changed and now they were not doing client acquisition and they had another person to feed.
We all have different things that get in our way of doing client acquisition and most are pretty complex. That’s what coaching is for – to unearth the real resistance to prospecting and find a way to dissolve it. Not push through – dissolve. (but that’s for another blog post and is well covered in past blogs as well)
If paying this new team member depends on you being able to bring in a lot more income as soon as they’re up to speed, then you certainly don’t want to find that there are other things still in your way of doing this, or else the stress of needing to pay your new hire will have you in a worse mindset than before.
Truth be told, hiring an assistant isn’t an easy process; and from my experience, it’s a burden before your business is at a point where you’re grossing $300k consistently.
And, at the right time, an assistant is the perfect decision that can change the way you see real estate.
If you’re in the place where you’ve done all the work of having great natural sales skills, strategy skills, negotiating skills; you have a system that works for you, are confident in landing new clients, and have a clear plan of how your business will grow; but don’t have enough hours in the day – hiring an assistant could make a huge difference in scaling your business.
If you’re not there yet, asking the above question could lead to some big shifts in your business with an upfront cost that is a lot lower than somebody else’s annual salary.