June 13, 2025Lauren Holland sits down with Brooke Riecke, Client Success Manager at Reside, for a deep dive into the mindset, systems, and strategies that fuel scalable, sustainable team growth in real estate.
They unpack how to eliminate chaos with onboarding clarity, why “I don’t have time” really means “I don’t have systems,” and what it takes to lead a business that thrives—without sacrificing personal freedom.
If you’re a team leader or ops director who wants to scale smarter, hire intentionally, and actually enjoy the business you’re building—this is the playbook.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – Unlocking Growth: Why Systems Beat Hustle
- 00:00:29 – Real Estate Reflections: What Scaling Actually Takes
- 00:01:02 – Meet Brooke Riecke: The Spark Behind Smoother Ops
- 00:02:19 – Hiring Smart: Solving for Clarity, Not Chaos
- 00:09:00 – Systems that Save You from Burnout
- 00:16:24 – Process Over Panic: Making Ops Your Power Move
- 00:18:41 – Who Owns This? Why That Matters
- 00:18:53 – SOPs Aren’t Boring—They’re Freedom Blueprints
- 00:19:19 – Training Without Guesswork Starts Here
- 00:19:38 – Getting Granular: Building One Task at a Time
- 00:20:07 – Automate the Chaos (Without Losing the Personal Touch)
- 00:20:42 – Onboarding Done Right: The Video Playbook
- 00:22:05 – Don’t Just Build Systems—Empower People to Use Them
- 00:24:54 – Set Your Team Up to Succeed (Not Just Survive)
- 00:26:36 – Numbers Don’t Lie: Track What Matters
- 00:28:43 – Great Leaders Audit. And Adjust.
- 00:34:26 – One Final Truth: You Can’t Scale What’s Broken
Links and Resources:
- Reside Platform
- Reside Platform Website
- Lauren Holland on LinkedIn
- Brooke Riecke on Facebook
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to the Reside Platform Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube to leave us a review!
Episode breakdown: systems, processes and people
Lauren Holland, director of team operations at Reside, interviews Brooke Riecke, who had joined Reside in client success less than 60 days earlier. The two had worked together in real estate operations for years. Their conversation covers the three-part framework Reside uses to scale teams: systems, processes and the right people running them.
Hire with a job description and a 30-60-90 plan ready
When Lauren needed someone to take over client onboarding, she started by asking what was lacking and where the team was falling short. Nick McLean told her to hire someone better than her. She wrote the job description from what she was already doing and wanted to hand off, built a 30, 60 and 90 day training plan, and made the hire before the workload got worse.
Brooke says that clarity is why she could move fast. She didn’t have to guess what success looked like in the role. Lauren uses the same lens on coaching calls when a team says a new hire isn’t working. Her first questions are what the training looked like, whether there was a job description and whether the role changed after the person joined.
Give every tool an owner
Brooke describes systems as the tools that replace memory and firefighting with predictability. Earlier in her career she juggled transactions and listings for five teams across the country without clear systems, and she was constantly putting out fires. Once she understood the systems and how they affected the agents, the work became predictable.
Her warning is about buying software to escape operational pain. A team leader comes back from a conference with a tool that costs a thousand dollars a month, sets it up and walks away, and nobody owns it. Someone has to be the champion, keep it updated and hold people accountable to using it. She names three core systems to start with: lead routing and follow-up flows inside the CRM, onboarding playbooks for agents and admins, and financial dashboards that show where the money goes.
If no one logs in, it’s just an expensive address book, you’re wasting money.
Brooke Riecke
Her quick win is to pick one broken process this week, such as lead assignment, agent onboarding or the transaction handoff, and map it out visually. Lauren adds that a team leader who can’t say how many pendings they have should move that tracking from pen and paper to at least a spreadsheet.
The goal really isn’t perfection, it’s just that progress with clarity.
Brooke Riecke
Record it once, then turn it into an SOP
Brooke lists three signs of a process problem: you answer the same questions over and over, new hires take too long to ramp up, and no one knows where to find the right way to do things. Her fix is low-tech. Record training on Loom, Vimeo or Zoom, take the transcript, have ChatGPT draft the process, and store it in a central hub like Google Drive or Notion. Every process should say who is responsible for each step, because ownership is what turns a list into accountability.
She also asks operators to break each task down: what it is, who owns it, how it works and why it matters. If you can’t answer the why, that’s a clarity problem. From there you can decide whether to automate it, hand it off, cut it or add a missing step. Lauren adds that the same approach works for agent onboarding. Teach it live once, record it, and point people back to the video.
I stopped thinking of documentation as extra work, and I started seeing it as an investment in my future time.
Brooke Riecke
Track the numbers that show whether it’s working
Brooke starts with the end in mind and then tracks agent activity and follow-up inside the CRM, cost per lead and ROI by marketing source, time from contract to close, and the percentage of workflow tasks completed on time. The point of the data is to coach, not criticize. When something breaks, she asks whether it’s a people issue or a system breakdown.
Audit on a rhythm and close the feedback loop
The leadership habits Brooke relies on are weekly accountability huddles, monthly audits of systems and tasks, and scorecards that actually get reviewed. Lauren adds that every lane needs a clear owner, since unclear ownership leads to duplicate work or no work at all. She also wants a weekly sales meeting early in the week to celebrate wins and the CRM leaderboard.
On feedback, Brooke’s team has changed its onboarding and rollout sequence based on where clients got stuck. Lauren’s caution is to check whether a suggestion reflects one person or the whole team before changing a system.
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Write the job description and the 30-60-90 day plan before you start interviewing.
- Don’t buy a tool until someone on the team is named to own and drive it.
- Pick one broken process this week and map it out visually.
- Record repeat training once, turn the transcript into an SOP, and name an owner for each step.
- Track CRM follow-up, cost per lead by source, contract-to-close time and on-time task completion.
- Run weekly huddles and monthly system audits, and use the numbers to coach.
