By Adam Hergenrother
I’ve been in the real estate arena for 13 years now and early on I realized that if I wanted to achieve the levels of success I had envisioned, I would not be able to do it alone. When I graduated college, I started working as a commercial underwriter (which only lasted about six months before I was fired) and joined another company as a financial controller. The new job was great. I was a recent college graduate and I had an assistant right away. I wasn’t exactly sure how to navigate that relationship and often had her fetching me coffee, filing, and faxing documents for me. At the time, that’s what I thought assistants did.
I was at that job for about a year and a half, but there were limits that came with working for someone else, at least at that organization. I needed to be free to think, explore, and experiment with my own ideas and my own business. I needed to be in control of my life. So I did what every sane person would not do in late 2006, during one of the biggest, if not the biggest, real estate bubbles in history, I quit my job, became a Realtor, and started building a real estate team. When I began my career in real estate, I really started to understand the importance of leveraging to a great assistant. It wasn’t just handing off miscellaneous tasks, it was creating a mutually beneficial relationship. I focused on sales, and my assistant focused on her strengths— handling marketing and client services, and creating systems and processes to make my business run smoothly, which was good for business for both of us.
Over the next four years, as I was building my real estate team and later launching a real estate franchise, I went through several assistants, none lasting longer than eight months. It was a combination of my relentless drive, incredibly fast-paced and impatient attitude, and overall lack of leadership skills, as well as the assistants falling more in the reactive, rather than proactive category. I didn’t really understand how to properly hire talent back then, and I paid for it with high turnover—until 2010, when Hallie Warner (who is now my Chief of Staff) and I joined forces.
The first, and arguably the most important, hire you should make as a real estate agent or entrepreneur is an assistant. It’s your first point of leverage. This hire allows you to start working in your strength zone and on the 20% of tasks that make the most impact on the bottom line of your business. On the fence about hiring an assistant? Don’t be. A great assistant will force multiply your activities and the business. In fact, a great assistant should bring four times their annual salary in revenue to the business. What are you waiting for? It’s an investment you can’t afford not to make.
