In 2024, Kathy Courtney produced $29M of her team’s $39M in volume. One year later she produced $10M of $44M, and the team went from carrying 25% of the business to carrying 75% of it.
That shift didn’t come from selling harder. A top producer in Reno, Nevada decided to build a team that didn’t need her in every deal, then put the standards, meetings and leadership habits in place at The Courtney Group to make that true.
A strong business that was really one person
By any normal measure, Kathy had already made it. She was producing nearly $30M in personal sales volume a year. She had run a team years earlier, owned her own brokerage and coached high-producing agents and lenders.
That earlier team was a warning. On the Reside Platform Podcast she described it as five agents doing 200 deals a year, with her holding it all together. She burned out and told herself she’d never run a team again.
When she came back to the idea, she could see the same ceiling forming. If the business was $29M Kathy and $10M everyone else, it would only ever be as big as she could personally carry. She didn’t want more agents around her own production. She wanted an organization where the agents were the engine.
So I wanted to build a real estate team, the modern team, with all today’s tech stack, today’s standards. I wanna do it right.
Kathy Courtney
She gave herself four years to get it done. She joined Reside in April 2024 and started with two agents.
Five changes that moved production to the team
Start with mission, vision and values
Before recruiting, Kathy got clear on what the team stood for. She traces that to a webinar on building a team that she believes Reside ran, which advised starting with mission, vision, purpose, values and beliefs. Her team’s version is short. Be of maximum service to clients. Model professionalism in the industry. Honesty, integrity and grit. Education and personal development. Work as a team, give back to the community, and win the day every day.
That foundation became the culture filter as the team grew. Agents who aren’t a fit often select themselves out, and Kathy is glad when they do.
Recruit steadily and accept the math of attrition
The team grew from two agents to 23 in just over two years. Getting there meant running a recruiting pipeline consistently, because not everyone sticks. By Kathy’s own numbers, about 25% of the people she hires make it past the first six months. She also learned it takes roughly six months before a new agent produces real income for the team, so the leader carries the cost of that lag.
She doesn’t treat departures as failures. Her job, as she puts it, is to show new agents what it will really take to be successful. If that’s more work than someone wants to commit to, she’d rather they learn it in 90 days than spend five years finding out.
Write standards, not goals
The biggest operational change was a clear set of minimums that every agent is held to. Kathy built each one around activity she knows leads to success.
I had to learn the difference between a standard and a goal. A standard is the minimum. A goal is what we shoot for.
Kathy Courtney
The team runs on Follow Up Boss, and the standards are specific.
- Claiming 10 new clients a week after real conversations is the bare minimum. Twenty a week is the real standard.
- A morning huddle from 8:45 to 9:00, four days a week, with attendance expected.
- A full team meeting from 10:30 to 12:00 on the fifth day.
- Defined metrics new agents need to hit at 30, 60 and 90 days.
- A minimum number of closed units per year, and a daily lead generation time standard.
When an agent falls short, the result is a conversation, not a scolding, and Kathy frames it as support for the agent’s success. If an agent can’t meet the minimum number of units for the year, the team and the agent part ways.
Lead from beside people, not out front
Early on, the standards alone weren’t working. Kathy remembers sitting in the office frustrated that agents weren’t making an effort to convert the leads she was handing them. She compared it to baby birds with open beaks, letting the worm fall past. Her daughter Anna, who also works on the team, turned the moment into a leadership team T-shirt that reads “Worm Lives Matter Too.”
It was a turning point. Kathy says she realized she didn’t know as much about leadership as she thought. As a coach, her model had been to hand people a system and hold them accountable to it, and she had pictured leadership as a general out front.
What worked instead was standing beside each agent, learning what each person wants for themselves and keeping them focused on that reason. She learned to ask questions so agents reach their own conclusions instead of being told.
People don’t do things because you tell them to. They do that because they see the benefit to them.
Kathy Courtney
Once agents took ownership of the systems and understood why the structure existed, she says, the difference was night and day.
Step back from your own production
The last piece is the hardest for most top producers. Kathy pulled back her personal sales while the team was still proving itself, and her production dropped from $29M to $10M in one year. That gave the agents the room, the leads and the leadership attention to grow into the gap.
She’s open that it wasn’t easy. She described 12-hour days and a couple of points where she was ready to quit, and said she held on by going back to the decision she made at the start.
The results
The numbers from Kathy Courtney’s Reside case study show what happened when the team became the primary driver of production.
- 2024: 8 agents, $39M total volume. Kathy $29M, team $10M. Volume ran 75% Kathy, 25% team.
- 2025: 18 agents, $44M total volume. Kathy $10M, team $34M. The split reversed to 25% Kathy, 75% team.
- 2026 pace: 23 agents, $75M total volume, with $55M coming from the team and $20M from Kathy.
- Team GCI grew from $212K to $1.3M.
She produced less, and the business produced more. Total volume grew every year, even in the year her own production fell by more than half. The ratio matters even more. A business that is 75% the team doesn’t stop growing when the leader takes a day off.
Lessons for team leaders in the messy middle
Kathy calls the stretch between successful solo agent and working team the messy middle, and she says it’s where most teams fail. She has four pieces of advice for leaders in it.
- Check why you’re doing it. If the goal is more money and more free time right away, she says to reevaluate. Building a team takes time away from personal production before it pays back.
- Watch for sunk costs. Having spent time and money isn’t a reason to keep going. The better question is whether you’re on the right road.
- Set minimums, then lead from beside people. Standards tell agents what is required. Questions help them decide they want it.
- Find a model and a mentor. Look for someone whose business you respect, follow the model, and do the work.
Kathy talks through the full story, including the T-shirt, on the Reside Platform Podcast episode What Most Real Estate Teams Get Wrong with Kathy Courtney.
Reside works with team leaders on this same shift, from carrying the production to building a team that carries it.
