Business guru and best-selling author Jim Collins often talks about getting the "who" before the "what." He uses the analogy of a bus and says you need the right people on the bus before you go anywhere. I believe he's right, too. In his book, "Good to Great," he shares plenty of real-life examples of successful businesses that got the "who" before the "what" and then went on to make tons of cash. If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: Realtors must operate like a business. And I often yell from the rooftops that you can't be successful by yourself. Show me top producers and I'll show you at least one other person (usually many people) behind every single one of them. So you're the driver of the bus -- your real estate business. Here are some tips to start your bus (business) rolling in the right direction: Decide where you're going. "But Bob, you just said the 'who' comes first." No. Collins says the "who" comes before the "what," not the "where." You have to know where you want to go so you can share it with your future bus riders. Spend time developing the specifics of where you're headed - your goals - so you can match prospective employees with that vision. The more you know on the front end: how much you'll pay them, the must-have skills, the kinds of experience they'll need, etc., the better prepared you'll be to find the right people to fill the seats. Look for people who can answer 'yes' to these three questions: Do you respond well to change? Are you self-motivated? Do you understand where I want to go? Then ask for them to expand on their answers with real-life examples to the first two questions, and for the third question, ask them why they want to go there with you. Great employees respond well to change, they're self-motivated and they always want to reach higher ground. As Collins says, "Great vision with mediocre people still produces mediocre results." Think carefully about the interview questions. Get candidates to share actual experiences instead of hypotheticals. So, instead of asking, "What would you do if ..." go with, "Tell me about a time when you faced change." And, "Give me an example of you being self-motivated in a past job." This is part of what's called behavior-based interviewing and it's worth learning more about because it considers past behavior as the best predictor of future performance. I'll close with a true story of one of my clients, Char MacCallum of Olathe, Kan., whose buyer agents were only contributing 15 percent to her total sales volume. Char had fallen into the trap many brokers fall into: lost objectivity. When hiring, many brokers rely on gut feel, or worse, friends of friends who know someone who's looking for a job. Then they feel obligated to hire people who aren't suited for the job. Char is one heck of a broker but she's not a human resources expert. When we added objectivity, we were able to get the right folks on her bus. Today she's flying down the road with buyer agents who are contributing nearly 40 percent of her total sales volume. This translated to a nearly 40% of a bigger bottom line (total sales increase 35% and buyer agents went from 15% to nearly 40%). Do you have the right people to get you where you want to go? If not, what are you going to do about it starting today? Can you retrain your current staff or do you need to add new folks? Bob Corcoran is a nationally recognized speaker and author who is founder of Corcoran Consulting Inc. (800-957-8353), an international consulting and coaching company that specializes in performance coaching and the implementation of sound business systems into the residential broker or agent's existing practice.
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