When Ross and Sarah Hardy joined Reside in September 2023, the Hardy Team in Spring Hill, Florida, had 10 agents. That year it closed 214 transactions, did $60M in volume and earned $1.4M in GCI. On the 2026 pace, the team is at 28 agents, 380 transactions, $100M+ in volume and $3.0M in GCI.
Between those two points sits the year most team leaders fear. In 2024, after the Hardys raised their standards, five or six agents walked out, taking more than 100 annual transactions of production with them. The team got through that year, and then grew faster than before.
A team with no standards to hold
Ross is candid about the team he had before Reside.
We didn’t have any sort of system in place for recruiting people. We really didn’t know how to manage them with the systems, and the accountability really wasn’t there.
Ross Hardy
Production was uneven. Some agents performed and some didn’t, and that spread made it hard to keep enough profit to reinvest in the business. The team kept hitting the same plateau.
Recruiting was passive. On the Reside Platform Podcast, Ross said the team added about one agent a year, usually someone who had done a deal with them and asked to join. He had never made an outbound recruiting attempt before he started coaching with Suneet Agarwal.
Ross puts most of the ceiling on his own leadership. He wanted the team to feel small and comfortable, and he worried about making people uncomfortable, so he let standards slide until there were barely any. Everything also ran through him, which made him the bottleneck.
Write standards and apply them to everyone
After joining Reside, the Hardys set clear expectations around prospecting and database management. That meant minimum activity standards for lead follow-up, strict meeting attendance requirements and real performance accountability.
On a lead-heavy team, the reason is practical. Ross says you need standards to know you’re getting a return on each lead source and that leads go to agents who will work them. The team does about 120 Zillow deals a year, so lead handling isn’t optional.
He knew the change would cost something.
As you put systems in place, that’s gonna make some people uncomfortable. Some people are very happy with their production where they’re at and with the way things are.
Ross Hardy
Some agents also felt that every new recruit was taking leads from them. In 2024, five or six agents left, and together they had been responsible for more than 100 transactions a year.
Don’t lower the bar after a loss
The easy move after a loss like that is to relax the rules and keep whoever is left. The Hardys did the opposite, keeping the standard for everyone who stayed and everyone who joined after. Ross also changed how he thinks about his role.
We all have enough friends in our lives. We don’t have enough mentors and leaders, and the responsibility of the mentors and leaders is to hold people to the standard they said they would keep themselves to.
Ross Hardy
In practice, that means going to an agent who missed a commitment, naming it and asking how he can help. If the team leader doesn’t have that conversation, nobody else will.
Build the growth systems at the same time
Standards alone would have left a smaller team. The loss was survivable because the Hardys built the machinery for growth in parallel.
- Recruiting as a real job. With coaching, Ross started outbound recruiting, including Indeed ads he doubted at first. Some of the team’s best agents came from Indeed. Later, Sarah spent a month and a half doing nothing but onboarding new groups while operations slipped. That pushed the team to make its first big hire, a director of agent growth who recruits agents and takes them through onboarding.
- A mentor program for new agents. Getting new agents into production before they ran out of runway had been hit and miss, so the team gave experienced agents room to mentor new ones. Ross calls it the biggest change of the last 12 months and says the mentors do a far better job than he could.
- Support staff ahead of the volume. Instead of hiring a second in-house transaction coordinator, the team added two VA transaction assistants so its TC could stay on the phone with title and lenders. It added listing VAs, two marketing VAs and a database coordinator, and tasks run through Follow Up Boss instead of new software. The rule is to add the next position while there’s time to train, not when the team is drowning.
- Daily contact. The team holds a huddle every day and in-person meetings every other week. About a third of the agents work from the office on a regular basis.
- Skill building that top producers attend. The best agents keep coming back to trainings so they can teach mentees. Ross says everyone who had been on the team for a full year saw their business increase the following year, in a down market.
The results
The walkout year wasn’t a down year. In 2024 the team finished with 16 agents, 224 units, $65M in volume and $1.6M in GCI, coming out of the year larger than it went in.
Then it sped up. In 2025 the Hardy Team reached 22 agents, 292 units, $81M in volume and $2.3M in GCI, an additional $700K. While most teams in its market were down about 30%, the Hardy Team was up 30%. The 2026 pace is another 30% increase and another $700K.
- Agents: 10 to 28
- Transactions: 214 to 380 (+78%)
- GCI: $1.4M to $3.0M (+114%)
- Volume: $60M to $100M+
The full growth snapshot is on the Hardy Team case study page.
Hold the standard and keep recruiting
Raising standards cost the Hardy Team more than 100 transactions of production. Most team leaders who face that trade lower the bar to keep the volume. The Hardys kept the bar and kept recruiting, and the team grew because of who it attracted, not who it held onto.
Two things made that work. The standards were specific and applied to everyone, so agents knew what was expected. And the recruiting, onboarding and mentoring systems went up while the team was still recovering, so new agents had a path to production. If you’re weighing a raised bar against the agents it might cost you, that pairing is the part to copy.
Ross talks through the VA structure, the director of agent growth hire and the mentor program in episode 172 of the Reside Platform Podcast.
Reside works with team leaders on accountability standards and the recruiting systems that have to sit behind them.
