In 2024, the Cavender Team in Warsaw, Indiana had 12 agents, 150 closed transactions and $1.06M in GCI. By most measures that’s a healthy real estate team. But Geoff Cavender closed 54 of those 150 transactions himself, 36% of everything the team produced.
Two years later, the team is pacing for 400+ transactions and more than $3M in GCI, and Geoff’s share of production is 10%. The change had more to do with standards than with recruiting.
A team that still grew through its leader
Geoff started his current team with three agents. About a year and a half in, it had reached roughly 10 to 12 agents, and then he joined Reside. On the Reside Platform Podcast, he credited that move with accelerating the growth.
The team was growing, but Geoff was still carrying a large part of the production. Lots of team leaders end up there. Every deal the leader closes keeps the lights on, so it feels safe to keep selling, but it also caps the business at whatever one person’s calendar allows.
Geoff described the tension this way.
You can almost try to grow faster than the team allows because as the team leader, you’re ahead of everything else and you see the vision and all this stuff makes sense but financially the team’s not there yet.
Geoff Cavender, Reside Platform Podcast
He stayed in production to carry the team through those stretches. But the goal was a business that could grow beyond him, and that meant other agents had to produce without him standing over every deal.
Make agents earn leads before they get them
The first change was a gate in front of the lead flow. New agents on the Cavender Team don’t receive team leads on day one. To become eligible, they have to do four things.
- Complete 100 sphere calls
- Complete new agent training
- Attend two additional training sessions each week
- Work with a mentor
Part of that training is RISE, Reside’s six-week program for new agents, which Geoff called a boot camp for how to call and nurture leads. That fits his lead mix. The team runs Zillow, and it also works Google leads, which many teams write off as top-of-funnel. Geoff’s view is that agents struggle with those leads because nobody taught them how to handle them.
He also pointed to the cost difference. When you’re paying $6 a lead instead of $400 a lead, the conversion rate doesn’t have to be as high.
The pre-lead requirements do two jobs. They train the agent, and they show who will do the work before the team spends money putting leads in front of them.
Keep the standard after onboarding
Many teams set a high bar at onboarding and then let it fade. The Cavender Team keeps an ongoing standard that agents have to hold to keep receiving leads.
- 400 outbound calls per month
- 40 meaningful two-minute conversations per month
- Attendance at the weekly Thursday sales meeting
Enforcement is built into the CRM, so it doesn’t depend on Geoff remembering to check. Asked how he gets agents past the hesitation to call leads, he kept it simple.
We tie the leads to the calls. We all use FUB. So, within FUB, you track conversations. So, if they’re not hitting the amount of conversations they need to hit, then they don’t even get the leads at all.
Geoff Cavender, Reside Platform Podcast
Leads are the team’s most valuable resource, and they go to the agents who show the activity to convert them. Agents know the rule in advance, and Geoff doesn’t have to chase anyone, because the consequence is automatic.
Geoff still works alongside the team and joins morning prospecting sessions. He isn’t calling the leads himself, but he’s in the room while agents make their calls, and he coaches by asking why a lead didn’t convert or why a deal fell through.
Hire agents who will meet the standard
Standards only work if the people coming in will meet them. Geoff leans toward brand-new agents, who he says have worked best for him because they take in training quickly and follow the team’s culture without old habits to unlearn.
To find them, he ran a tailored Indeed ad paired with a licensing-school portal, an approach he picked up through Reside. Applicants who respond get a link into pre-licensing coursework before they ever speak with Geoff. The response was large enough that he paused the ad after roughly 200 applicants in a month.
Keep a fast-growing team connected
Fast growth created a new problem. Geoff said the team grew so quickly that longtime and newer agents didn’t all know each other, and some of the early buy-in faded. His response was to spread leadership out instead of holding it himself. He took the top 20% of the team to a growth summit and gave those agents accountability groups, agents who report to them, and parts of the training to run.
He also keeps the numbers visible. The team shares FUB scores along with pending, active and closed totals for the year, and celebrates small wins like a first deal, a first flip or a 50th deal. Questions go into the team group chat instead of a private call to Geoff, so every agent with the same issue learns from the answer. And when an agent goes quiet, he doesn’t wait for them to leave.
When you notice the drift make that phone call, get a lunch, be in person and connect with the ones that are drifting away.
Geoff Cavender, Reside Platform Podcast
More production, less of it from the leader
The numbers moved in two directions at once. Team output went up every year while Geoff’s share of it went down.
- 2024: 12 agents, 150 transactions, $43.5M in volume, $1.06M in GCI. Geoff closed 54 transactions, 36% of team production.
- 2025: 20 agents, 285 transactions, $82M in volume, $2.0M in GCI. Geoff closed 44 transactions, 15% of team production.
- 2026 pace: 30 agents, 400+ transactions, $120M+ in volume, $3.0M+ in GCI. Geoff is pacing for 40 transactions, 10% of team production.
Between 2024 and 2025 alone, transactions rose 90% and GCI nearly doubled. From 2024 to the 2026 pace, transactions are up 167%. Geoff’s own deal count went from 54 to 40, and the team kept growing anyway.
The team no longer depends on the leader’s personal production to grow. The full numbers are on Geoff Cavender’s Reside case study.
What other team leaders can take from it
Geoff didn’t grow by lowering the bar to recruit more agents. He raised it, and three pieces did most of the work.
- Make agents earn leads. Training, sphere calls and mentorship come first. Leads come after.
- Tie ongoing lead flow to tracked activity. A specific monthly call and conversation standard, measured in the CRM, decides who keeps getting leads.
- Hand leadership to your best agents. Accountability groups and training run by top producers keep a bigger team connected without routing everything through the team leader.
Geoff talks through the lead side of the business, including the Google leads behind some of his biggest sales, on his episode of the Reside Platform Podcast.
Reside works with team leaders on building these kinds of standards and accountability systems. If you’re comparing options, see how to choose a real estate team coaching program.
