November 11, 2023In this episode, Tina Caul, a top real estate speaker and team leader, discusses her 24-year journey in the industry. She emphasizes the importance of mindset, top skills for agents, and the value of scripts. Tina shares insights on success through personalized processes and schedules. Distinguishing between a real estate team and a brokerage, she provides pros and cons. Tina recounts her career leap, moving for greater opportunities, and achieving financial and personal freedom by entrusting management with day-to-day operations. A powerhouse in real estate, Tina’s passion and drive yield remarkable success.
Video Contents:
00:00 – Introduction
01:46 – Top 4 Skills for New Agents and the Importance of Scripts
07:00 – Finding Your Process & Define Your Schedule
10:25 – Tina’s Beginnings & Mindset
16:14 – Increasing Your Income by Changing Your Environment
20:23 – Teams v. Brokerages
27: 58 – Walking Away…
33:42 – What Value Do You Offer?
Episode breakdown: scripts, schedules and treating a team as a second business
Tina Caul has spent 24 years in real estate and leads the Caul Group with eXp. In this conversation with Nick McLean, she covers the skills she wants new agents to learn first, the daily schedule she ran as a producer, and why she tells agents who want a team that they’re really opening a brokerage.
Teach new agents the foundation first
Tina’s first advice to a new agent is to skip the rabbit hole of online gurus selling courses. She believes there are 20 skills an agent needs to learn, and she starts with mindset. Agents who got into the business for freedom need a job mentality from day one, because time management will be their biggest challenge. After that come lead generation, lead follow-up and lead conversion.
Then agents need to know what to say. Tina points out that an actor who shows up without knowing the script gets fired, and agents are no different. When new agents tell her scripts don’t feel like them, she tells them that’s the point. They’re beginners, the words aren’t theirs yet, and the discomfort means they’re growing.
Eventually you won’t be an imposter. You’re just a beginner.
Tina Caul
Run the same schedule every day
Tina’s view is that agents of any personality type can succeed, but most get different results because each does the job a different way. Brokerages rarely hand independent contractors a process and hold them to it. She compares it to flying. Nobody wants a pilot who skips a step on the checklist.
She shared the schedule she ran in the office as an agent. Role play from 7:30 to 8. Phones from 8 to 11. Email from 11 to 12, lunch until 1:30, then appointments set that day from 1:30 to 8. An agent relying only on friends and family can’t know whether anyone will call today, but an agent running that schedule every day will make something happen. She would rather back someone who is consistent every day and only 50 or 70 percent right than someone who does it perfectly once a week.
Hire the team leader before you leave production
Tina tells producers who want to build a team that they’re opening a second business, like a restaurant, while still running the first one. A part-time leader won’t make it work. The first step is hiring the person who will run it, an operations manager and team leader who can recruit and train. The producer keeps selling and funds the new business until it earns more than their own production.
If you tell me you don’t have time to run a restaurant, you don’t have time to build a team.
Tina Caul
Her own path followed that order. She started her team in 2014 and admits she failed her first two agents. She didn’t run good team meetings and didn’t have time to train them. In 2018 she hired an operations manager and team leader who taught agents everything from time management and prospecting to listing presentations and pricing. By 2019 the team had 10 agents. Tina cut her own production from 130 deals to 80, then to 30, and stepped out only once 22 agents had done 350 transactions without her. Suneet lays out the roles and the order to hire them in his guide to real estate team structure.
You better hire the staff and the infrastructure to build it before you say bye bye to your production.
Tina Caul
She also warned leaders to take their own production out of the team’s profit and loss. Otherwise the team can look profitable when the leader has only taken a pay cut.
Build the brand and the systems a brokerage would
Tina has worked under RE/MAX, Keller Williams and eXp, and she sold more after moving from RE/MAX to Keller Williams. Her conclusion is that the agent is the brand, so she built the Caul Group name and kept it through every move. She says running a team as if it were a brokerage forces the work many teams skip, such as knowing licensing rules and building deal and transaction management systems.
Hire for the gaps in how your leaders think
Tina is a licensed facilitator of Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius assessment, which sorts people into six types, from wonder and invention to tenacity. She describes herself as an inventor who sees processes quickly but doesn’t want to document them. Her leadership team kept launching ideas that never got finished because no one on it had tenacity. Once they started hiring for it, SOPs and manuals got written and projects closed. Her advice is to map your leaders and fill the gaps, because a team without invention feels stuck and a team without tenacity never finishes anything.
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Teach new agents time management, lead generation, follow-up, conversion and scripts before anything else.
- Give agents a fixed daily schedule and reward consistency over occasional perfection.
- Treat your team as a second business. Hire someone to run it before you cut your own production.
- Take your personal production out of the team’s P&L to see whether the team actually makes money.
- Map how your leaders work and hire for the missing strengths, especially people who finish projects.
