Team Eligibility & Team Building Philosophy
Our #1 goal is to support our agents to successfully build their businesses. For some, this may mean starting and growing a team. Unfortunately, in our industry there’s a prevailing narrative that expanding through a team is a necessary step in building your business but we disagree with that sentiment and our team eligibility requirements reflect that.
At Bramlett, an agent becomes eligible to form a team when they exceed $15M in personally-generated sales in the previous calendar year or rolling 12-month period. This requirement is set for a few different reasons detailed below.
Business Logic
The majority of teams at most brokerages are not profitable, but that’s not the case at Bramlett. This is, in part, because of our eligibility requirements and strategies. Team-building is hard work and it requires an entirely separate skillset from helping buyers or sellers; It’s effectively management. Because of this, we require that agents reach a certain level of production before they are team-eligible – close a bunch of deals, gain efficiencies, then explore team building. This approach gives our eligible agents that do decide to launch a team the best chances of success in doing so.
Focus
Focus is incredibly important to an agent’s success. Team building requires branding, recruiting, management, mentorship, and more. Our culture is one of “getting things done” and we believe that these activities are often a distraction until an agent has reached this level of production.
Leads Eligibility
Teams are not eligible to participate in our high-intent leads program (though our high-funnel program is still available to teams).
Team Profitability & Lead Generation
We have had the opportunity to interview a great number of teams, many of which appear quite successful. However, when we pull the curtains back, most of these teams that appear successful are, actually, not profitable because they focus on agent count, rather than production and revenue. Low-producing team members are unprofitable and require exponentially more support than busy, producing agents. We strongly encourage team growth that focuses on lead generation rather than mentorship. Mentorship requires the team leader’s time, which isn’t scalable. By contrast, for teams that focus on lead generation, recruiting, management, and quality control all become easier. Mentorship is incredibly important and rewarding, but we feel strongly that it should come secondary to lead generation.
Partnerships
We’re strong believers in collaboration and cooperation and we’ve found that many of our agents form informal and more formal partnerships, often with their significant others. We encourage and promote these partnerships and allow branding consistent with our guidelines. We’ve often seen these types of partnerships be successful and, once the partners meet our team eligibility requirements, they formalize their collaboration into a team within the brokerage.
Is Team Building for You?
Ask yourself, “Do I like helping clients or do I like managing people more?” Time is both finite as well as your most valuable resource. Bramlett has very successful team leaders. We also have very successful scaled agents without teams who “only” leverage an assistant or assistants. They are similarly profitable. Team-building is not “passive income” in the least; It’s very hard work and it’s time consuming.
Does our messaging sound different?
Some brokerages aggressively encourage team building. Why is our messaging different? It’s in a brokerage’s best interest to encourage team-building when that brokerage’s goal is size (our goal is not size; It's to be the best!) When encouraging team-building to all agents, brokerages are effectively able to outsource their recruiting and training efforts to their agents. Recruiting and training is hard as well as expensive so it’s wildly profitable for a brokerage to promote team-building to their agents in order to offload some of those costs.
It’s important to visualize what success looks like to you and how your business will fit into your overall lifestyle. We would love to discuss this with you; Business strategy is a favorite topic of ours!