52% → 12%
Dan’s share of team production
104 → 200
Transactions, 2024 to 2026 pace
$41M → $70M
Volume
#1
Real Brokerage team in OR
THE STORY
The business was growing. It was also still running through one person.
Dan Gandee and Ed Zulyevic had built a solid team in Eugene. Sixteen agents. 104 transactions. $41M in volume. Ed ran operations and leadership from behind the scenes. Dan produced.
The problem was how much Dan produced. In 2024, he personally accounted for 57 of the team’s 104 transactions, more than half of everything the business closed. The team existed around his production more than it ran independently of it.
That’s a common place for founder-led teams to get stuck. The business grows to a point, and then it can’t grow further without the founder doing more, which has a hard ceiling.
Dan and Ed decided to break that ceiling the right way.
They joined Reside in February 2025 and committed to a single goal: building a business that could grow beyond any one person. That meant recruiting more agents, developing the ones they had, and building the systems and accountability structures that would let the team produce without everything running through Dan.
Dan didn’t stop producing overnight. But he started doing less of it intentionally, pulling back from personal deals as the team’s capacity grew to absorb the volume.
The results were fast. By 2025, transactions had grown to 141 while Dan’s personal share had dropped from 57% to 28%. By 2026 pace, the team is tracking toward 200 transactions and $70M in volume, with Dan accounting for just 12%.
Along the way, The Operative Group became the #1 Real Brokerage team in Oregon and the #6 team overall in the state.
The business nearly doubled. The founders became less essential to every deal. That’s not a coincidence, that’s the point.
THE NUMBERS
The team grew because one person stopped carrying it.
Every year, the gap between what Dan closed and what the team closed got wider. That’s what scaling founder dependence down actually looks like in the numbers.
WHAT THEY BUILT WITH RESIDE
A scalable business that doesn’t break when the founders step back.
01
A recruiting pipeline that expanded the team’s capacity
You can’t reduce founder dependence without agents who can absorb the volume. They went from 16 to 24 agents over two years, consistently recruiting so the team had the headcount to handle more production without Dan carrying it.
02
Agent development that made new hires productive
Adding agents only solves the problem if the agents can close. They invested in the onboarding and development systems that got new agents producing quickly, which made each round of recruiting compound on the last.
03
Leadership infrastructure that compounded
Clear standards. Consistent accountability. A culture built to produce whether the market was up, down, or sideways. The systems didn’t break when the team tripled in size.
IF THE BUSINESS NEEDS YOU IN EVERY DEAL, IT’S NOT SCALABLE.
Book a Discovery Call. We’ll walk through your current activity and show you what three years of executing the right fundamentals consistently could build for your team.
