2005 Top Performer Diaries: March
Coaching Gives Boost to Business Venture
Alicia Trevino tackles the challenges of starting up a new business, hiring salespeople, and taking on a coach.
Alicia Trevino is owner of Alicia Trevino, REALTORS®, in Garland, Texas. After eight years as the top-producing salesperson at a large franchise company in Mesquite, Texas, she left in November to start her own company. She closed about 300 transactions in 2004 with a sales volume of $45 million. Her average listing is a relatively modest $150,000.
In the past month, I’ve been working so hard to get our new office started that our home life has suffered. My family has made a deal to respect one another more. I’ve got a 17-year-old daughter winding up her senior year in high school and a 12-year-old son just beginning to test his boundaries with his dad and me. This arrangement emphasizes the need to respect one another, spend more time together, and establish trust in our relationships.
I know how to be a successful practitioner, but being an owner is all new business to me! It’s been only four months since I started my own company. Getting it off the ground and building our new office have been very time consuming. To help me deal with these challenges, I’ve hired one of the leading business coaches in the industry. For $1,000 a month, he gives me four one-hour, one-on-one training sessions. I decided to hire a business coach because I felt a bit overwhelmed with all of the decisions that needed to be made in a relatively short amount of time. I needed help fleshing out all the details of the business model I was going to follow in the establishment of this office. I’m very excited to reap the rewards of this focused business coaching.
One of the issues I’m grappling with is whether or not to affiliate with a franchise. I’m concerned that the name of my company—Alicia Trevino, REALTORS®—may be off-putting to non-Spanish speaking sales associates considering which brokerage to affiliate with. Could the name be a hindrance in their minds? There are pros and cons to joining a national franchise, and I need to weigh the importance of the name against the other factors.
I’ve already had two sessions with my coach. His counsel was very straightforward, and I truly appreciated seeing an outsider’s perspective. He’s helped me outline my goals and guided me in making some big decisions about how to structure my office. I've decided to organize my office as a team rather than the more traditional models. My coach also counseled me on an effective team structure and on training new salespeople.
I’ve been conducting a lot of interviews to hire new salespeople for the office. My goal is to hire 20 sales associates this year. A sales associate that I recruited from my previous company committed to joining our office, and I am ecstatic! She said the biggest reason that she wanted to join us was because of our name recognition in the area. But I interviewed another sales associate who decided she was not ready to make the jump yet. I understand her trepidation.
I have had lots of meetings lately. I am speaking to my sales staff about the lead dispersal policies and how they would like to structure phone-duty assignments. The salespeople were satisfied with the way we decided to organize these inbound prospect leads and are happy to have been part of the decision-making process!
I also spoke with the builder who’s designing our new real estate office. We came to an agreement on last-minute changes in the building that will better suit the office structure that I’ve settled upon.
We are still holding ground in our market area and gaining momentum. In the past 45 days, we’ve gotten 22 listings and are currently servicing 46 pending contracts. This reflects a 20 percent increase from our performance for the same period last year. We’re very pleased with the growth that these amounts signify. We are well on our way to achieving the goals set forth for the first quarter, which is to go after the higher sales prices in listings and sales.
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