We Are Selling with Lee Woodward
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We Are Selling with Lee Woodward
Teamwork Reimagined with Mark Kentwell
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Mark Kentwell returns to explore the evolution of real estate teams and why traditional models are failing despite appearing successful on the surface. He shares insights from years of studying and implementing various team structures and offers a new collaborative approach that benefits agents, team members, and clients.
• Original Effective Business Unit (EBU) model featured a listing agent, buyer's agent, and admin person with clear break-even points
• As personal brands grew, teams shifted to using buyer managers and admin staff as labor arbitrage without proper training or structure
• Many team members burn out as listing agents get busier, leaving businesses with "onboarding debt" when they depart
• Traditional teams often see fragmentation as buyer managers become targets for poaching by competitors
• New collaborative models distribute work across organizations based on client needs rather than siloed team structures
• Proper talent development requires structured programs to build skills progressively
• Daily huddles and limiting priorities to 1-3 key tasks creates more focus and better outcomes
• The Fishing Upstream system enables better collaboration between senior agents with support from properly trained associates
• Mark's new model has shown 30-50% improvements within six months of implementation
To learn more about these team models and the concept of onboarding debt, follow Mark Kentwell on Instagram and YouTube where he's sharing more insights on these topics.
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Hello and welcome back to the podcast we Are Selling. Today. We are discussing teams. You may be in a team, you may be building a team, you may be part of a team, but the team-based effective business unit that I introduced many, many years ago has gone through transition. It's gone through change. We haven't kept up with that change, what we need to do.
Speaker 1:So today I want to bring some clarity, some gaining visibility about what we need to do in teams, especially on being the lead person within a team and what these people do now. So to do that, I'm going to bring someone to the airwaves who's not unknown to us he's had some spectacular audios throughout our podcasting time and that is Mr Mark Kentwell. Mark, welcome back. Great to be back. Clay, a lot of people know your background, but for those in the UK who don't, you were originally a fault finder in the mines, which I love that. If I ever need to sort something out, let's cross to Mark Kentwell. But, mark, from a solo agent having a very big effective business unit yourself, you now have a whole team of people that are solos or could be in units, and you also came through the original effective business unit Training Workshop, which we might start there, mark, when you first saw the EBUs, what attracted you to it and what was the model back then?
Speaker 2:Yeah, lee. Well, coming from an engineering background, I've always really liked models. I liked when there's a set of guidelines, that there is a sort of framework to operate within, and especially with a service industry like real estate that has so much personality, so much emotion, such a big price pool. I was fascinated when I first got into real estate in 2005, coming out of engineering, just how unsophisticated it was. It was a very cottage industry and I still think, compared to other industries and how much things have developed, we've still got some way to go, and I don't say that in a negative way. I just think there's a huge opportunity and a gap for that.
Speaker 2:So when I got in, it was my third or so year in real estate when I went to the EBU day when you were bringing that model to light. I've been quite deep in my own study by then. That's when I first started working on friendly auctions and being a selling principal that started business from scratch. I was looking for the best of the best of the best. So I was looking global and when I saw this model of effective business I thought, ah, this actually looks like there could be something here. So I leaned straight into it and I suppose that's what's helped me go on to build one of Australia's leading agencies in terms of awards and impact, but now to be able to step out as a founder and scale the business from 15 million on its way to 100 million, with a wonderful C-suite in place.
Speaker 1:So what was the learn? Because in that original model, when I brought that to market, there was the leader, who was the lister. There was the leader who was the lister, then you had the leverage agent, buyer, dedicated focus, service and listing stream of the buyer's agent. And then there was this wonderful human in the background who held it all the admin together and also the vendor management, which is really, when I look back at that, we called them administration, but it was actually an operations role, and that little three unit could buzz along. It had a break-even point. So there was no bonusable dollars, to use that term until we broke even, and break-even was the salary of the lister, the salary of the buyer's agent, the salary of administration, and a lot of people missed that part. They thought, no, it all just comes in and we just keep ripping into it. But there was also a component for marketing, a component for training and all that was built in. And then, above break-even, there was a split of the commissions and obviously, when you look at an effective business unit, it's like a body. The brain is important, but so are the feet. But there's different pay grades for someone who can convert business like that versus someone who's showing real estate In that original model.
Speaker 1:That worked well for a long period of time, but today it's changed. Mark, you've studied this and felt this more than anyone because you're trying to help so many different types of agents do their own thing. Some people should be solo, some people work better in a unit, and I know on the podcast only about eight, nine weeks ago we had the great interview where the agent had actually come from a unit and then went solo and was alone, and I prefer being in a unit. So what's been your learn on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been a very broad spectrum of learning, lee, and I think you know when you're popularizing this and really bringing it into Australian real estate. I think it was around 07, 08 or something like that. I guess those early EVUs were they really like a partnership with the business owner. The agent was saying, look, you know, like how do I grow boss? And business owner, the agent was saying, look, how do I grow boss? And a boss would have said, well, look, there's a few different ways. You can do more deals. You can raise your price or you can raise your average percentage in commission. Now that's actually the only way to grow your GCI in the foundational aspect. But when you have a look at that, if you want to do all three at once, you want to get velocity where you are increasing your price, your fee and the number of deals.
Speaker 2:There's going to come a time when the service standard changes. There's huge advantages to processing large volumes of property and there's huge advantages to dealing with large volumes of buyers. You get market intelligence, you get brand reputation, you get a real groove on. You can work your system. But there's no doubt, if you went to an agent and you put them in an established agency and are well inducted if they only have one listing, you cannot argue that they would do a better job of that one listing than 20 listings. But it's just impossible to do the same job on 20 listings because as soon as you start dividing your attention and you start bringing other people in the mess, it's going to need to be done well and that's where the EBU works really well, because there was so much structure around the EBU, I think where it's drifted and there's been a lot of ways that it's drifted, I think that after a few people caught on to that and some big agents started doing really well and probably paying their client manager really well that operations person you spoke about and where the buyer manager, when they're doing that purist role and they're a consummate negotiator, they're managing a large pipeline of warm to hot buyers at all times. And the collective intelligence of those three people in the business, combined with the others in the rest of the team, that was really a force to be reckoned with. But I think that as personal brands in real estate started getting bigger and they weren't called personal brands then, it was just selling lots of interpaid marketing and that era really was upon us around when paper started dying in the 2010 plus era and the internet came in and agents were selling really big ads and doing big marketing. Online Socials were coming in a bit later, but then when the personal brand started to grow, the agents started to become a bit of a magnet for business and they started using the client manager and the associate agent or the buyer manager as just a labor arbitrage to find more listings.
Speaker 2:And I've interviewed staff to people across the country. I've grown so many of these teams myself and I've probably tried so many different models with that that I've probably been too flexible in the different models, trying to make things work for different agent types and different salaries and different work modalities. And what I've seen consistently in my own companies and also those that I network with that are in the upper echelon of real estate companies is that more of these models are fragmenting than not now, and a couple of things come from it. One of them is the arbitrage that they're trying to create by putting on super junior people but not having a training program for them. The other is that the buyer managers have become much more about finding listings for the lead agent, yet they're not really bonused on the activities that they've got control over. They're bonused at the end of the day when the agent does list and maybe settle a property, or when the agent has a well-listed property and it eventually sells and they've had an interaction with it and the operations managers or PAs or whatever you might want to call them.
Speaker 2:They often end up in a state of burnout as the listing agent gets busier and busier, they get a magnetic personal brand to go with it and some of the commission splits that are then demanded by these agents because they're carrying these wages but they haven't really brought through an ascension of talent that's going to keep growing with them. They're looking for a higher commission split from the boss because they end up in sort of issues when they've got talent moving on or someone burns out and you go from someone that might have been earning, say, $200,000 before tax when they were writing sort of, say, $400,000 plus some change. Let's say they're running $450,000 or so and they've got a bit of money going to marketing and client fulfillment and stuff like that. And let's say they're on the old splits of, say, 50-50, which are still in place in some areas, but they could go to 750-800. But by the time you put a buyer manager in and an operations manager or a PA or a client manager, if you take those wages out and the bonuses, they're actually making about the same or less on a 60% split and then what happens is that buyer manager or associate, they're the ultimate approachable person for the competitors that don't grow their own talent. So that buyer manager has been associated now with some of the higher-ranking agents in the area.
Speaker 2:They're the second name on REA in domain. They look like they're doing all the deals. The public think they're doing all the deals because they take all the buyer inquiry. They show most of the buyers through the listing agents lose touch with the buyers, especially the cool to warm and the warm to hot. They just deal with the ones that have already had offers put forward or are ready to register for auction. They're spending most of their time trying to convince owners to sell and broadcasting their personal brand. And I'm not saying this from a negative point of view because it's kind of just that's a reality.
Speaker 2:It's a reality that it seems to be going. It has gone towards, and I don't think anyone's really paused to reflect on where's this all going now, and there's so much churn, the business gets left with what's called onboarding debt, which I'll unpack with you in a moment, and the agent gets left with these holes that appear in their client relationships, their competency of the people, because they haven't really got the skills to train these people from scratch and the business owners have got no margin left to do it themselves. So I don't think the end consumer is winning from it, I don't think the listing agents are winning from it, I don't think the talent that's coming in as a buyer is winning from it, and I think the industry can do better. So that's why I've been really pursuing new models over the last few years and we're starting to see the green shoots come through with those.
Speaker 1:Mark beautifully articulated and we're actually hitting a challenge of the industry head on. And I know there's people listening to this right now going yeah, I'm carrying way more vendors than ever, but there's nothing left over. So everything escalated in that GCI looks great on the trophies and awards, but at the end of the day, the cost of change to do that they're not seeing that return. So what's the answer, in your view, from someone who's deep dived into this and felt the pain of it, of when someone leaves and someone grows and someone goes and then suddenly everyone's famous on their area. But did they do the work or not do the work? Did the original pipeline bring it in? What are you doing now with your decisions, moving forward to not only build the business but protect the team members?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it comes back to that. First of all, we've got to figure out who we serve. If you don't have a customer, you don't have a business. Figure out who we serve. If you don't have a customer, you don't have a business. And I see every type of people that come in to contact with the real estate business as a customer, a potential customer, so they can become a retained, exclusive client if they list their property with you or if they have their property managed through you. But effectively they're all customers first. And that's what you would call someone walking onto a car sales lot, that's what you would call someone walking into a Versace store, that's what you'd call someone who interacts with PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants. So when you look at that customer and what they need out of the situation, they need to have at least as good as the best listing agent would serve them on two or three listings. If they're only carrying two or three listings, that's the service they have as a minimum standard. That's where it needs to be and with the amount of automation and AI workflows, training that's available to everyone now, there's no reason whatsoever why service standards should be dropping. They should be increasing beyond belief, to the point where people start going.
Speaker 2:I can't believe we didn't use to trust the real estate profession. These guys are consummate professionals. We didn't used to trust the real estate profession. These guys are consummate professionals. They are so knowledgeable, they've got my back, they care about my journey and I would happily advocate for this profession. So to get to that, we've got to look at what needs to be present. Firstly, what needs to be present is that we need to have a quality talent bench or a pipeline of people that we're bringing into the industry that aren't just from the industry. Already Gone are the days where we just need to have people that fall into real estate.
Speaker 2:I know a lot of us talked about falling into real estate in one way or another or pursuing it for a reason. That seemed to be the obvious choice at the time, because it's a fairly low barrier to entry. But I like the idea of recruiting people out of mortgage-broking roles, out of conveyancing roles, people that have been orbiting the property scene for some time. They've worked their guts out, they've possibly had their own business or they've been senior in a firm, and for 80 to 120 grand a year. They're putting in the hours, but they're also learning the craft. They understand wealth creation. They understand how mortgages work. They understand the stress that goes on in people's lives and the legal processes.
Speaker 2:Now, if you're going to be bringing that kind of talent, I don't see too many real estate agents that are sort of on 500 and on their way to a million that are happy just to bring in people on high wages and give them a good year or two of actually training them properly. So where the responsibility of the employer is, that's going to be a challenge. When there's lots of micro businesses open up with managed services and I know that's something that those kind of groups are working very hard on and some excellent ones out there doing it, so I'm not saying anything negative about it. This is a sector of the industry. But if they've got remote support and they're working out of their bedroom or a very small co-working space or whatever, and their whole reason for doing it is freedom and having a higher commission split, if they don't have that kind of development coming through, they've got to commit just like a solo tradesperson would have to do to bring on an apprentice. It's a four-year gig and you're committing to the person as much as you are to improving your business.
Speaker 2:Now, when it comes to the actual businesses that are already established, like mine, we've got a sizable agency, we've got four offices in strategic locations and we've got an infinitely scalable backend with Nexa, our operating system, which some of our listeners would have heard of before. The amount of testing and measuring that's gone into that over time has told us quite clearly that when we recruit senior agents from other businesses, very rarely have they ticked all the boxes or been able to tick all the boxes on the way through their career, on their learning and development, and it's one of the first things that people say when they arrive. And even if they move on at some point, they say I learned more, I grew more when I was there. Now I'm not doing that to beat our own drum, it's just that I see it as an absolute, essential part of it. So I think the employer needs program and the models that we've been moving towards very much fit into the Fishing Upstream system that I've talked about on this program before, where you are distributing work across the organization to where the customer or client needs it. So if we're exclusively retained on a listing and we're going to be selling our listing, it's effectively that the company is listed, the property and the agent is an ambassador for the company, just like if you are going to represent Australia in the Olympics or if you're a large construction company and you're the person who wins the work. You've got to then figure out what talent we're going to need on this case and A lot of the time when the EBUs get too big, or even just when the EBUs have to survive, they find themselves listing in areas that are far flung.
Speaker 2:Just because the buyer manager or the associates come through and met someone in a buyer conversion, they go well, we can handle that. We need to pay the bills. So the agent that's a senior agent that's in another area, even if they didn't have exclusive BDAs, they were the subject matter expert for that area and they could have collaborated. But because these other agents got all these wages to pay, they try and take it on themselves because they can handle it. But it's not about just getting back to inquiring. It's not about just showing people through the property. We need expertise. So if we look at some of the models that have been running globally for some time and that fit into systems like Fishing Upstream, there's a proper accountability Before you put the listing on, you do a red team check on your strategy with someone seeing you that can actually have a look at.
Speaker 2:Okay, how are you going to resource that? How are we going to run these open? Where are we going to get the leverage from? Where's our buyer tank up to? Do we have warm and hot buyers for this listing? Who's going to fill the tank if we don't? If it's an out of area listing, who's going to look after the owner? If you have a sick day or something like that? Who's going to bring in other people that have been looking to sell their property and have been speaking to an area specialist for a while? And what it can end up being is that you have collaboration within the team and people miss this In siloed EBUs.
Speaker 2:I've seen this myself. I've had a whole bunch of very, very high turnover agents we're talking 1 million, 2 million agents with big teams under them. But when you have 4 or 5 or 10 of those in your business, they're absorbed in their own world. There's no time to collaborate with team members. They barely can attend training in a staff event, so they don't really get to know each other's movement. But when you bring senior listing agents together on a listing to collaborate. They work out the strategy from the start and what each other's roles are going to be.
Speaker 2:If you insert a senior company associate, that's come through a proper program, starting on the phones, then getting what we call we call that the medallions course bronze, silver, gold. Then they go over into the field in a bridging course where they can go and get around the rest of the agents and that's where we very much handhold them. We cover their costs. As a company. We provide that extra labor and support because there are some jobs that are a little bit lower end and you need to be filling those coal biotanks that then turn into warm and you put one associate amongst about five listing agents, you'd be blown away how much work those listing agents can get done. We've seen improvements of 30% to 50% within six months of having this model running with structure.
Speaker 2:But then you have a sales manager or someone senior, a principal. It doesn't have to be a huge operation, but someone that helps run their meeting rhythm, someone that is the connective tissue between the listing agents, someone that can help if someone's targets are down, someone's down on their targets. That's a listing agent and their tank to the month might be 50K that they need to hit in GCI to sort of really earn the income they want to earn, and they're running at 30. They can help go and find stock in the rest of the business that's green and ready to sell but the agents aren't actually got that booked in to be sold in the next couple of weeks and they get engineered deals that wouldn't have happened and we know that sliding door moments happen all the time for buyers and vendors. There is no doubt in my mind that if you launch a property correctly with 15 verified hot buyers at the preview, you get two offers or two auction registrations, it's a very low chance that listing is not going to go well over the next four or five weeks, if it even makes it to auction.
Speaker 2:Whereas if you've got listing agents that are using marketing and VPA to get inquiry of buyers they've already met but not have time to process they haven't trained a junior on how to do it then you're actually breaching what you said you would do the owner and bringing hot buyers.
Speaker 2:So if we can have this distributed model where you've got senior people in the business, connective tissue, bringing about a collaborative approach, you're actually solving a cultural problem that's emerged. You're solving an income problem. You're solving a talent development and skills problem. You're solving an area expertise problem and then you actually find that there's a bit of margin left for everyone to play with. It's not just going out the door through the onboarding debt or the heat losses that are happening from spinning your wheel so much, just trying to look big for the sake of it. I think it's come from the wrong model of just trying to get gross revenue, which may be a franchise thing, and not bagging out franchises. That's how awards work when you're clipping money off the top. But we've got to really start to take stock of this and say what is our role as real estate agents, whether on the buyer side, the sell side, property management side. We've got a customer to serve and we've got an industry reputation to improve and I think this is one of the ways that we can go there.
Speaker 1:Mr Mark Kentwell, you've just launched the Effective Business Company where there is a collaboration between all, and I love the note to the onboarding debt, like getting someone up and running, and that's that difference. You know, do you coach or poach? So today I've been at your business in Newcastle with a room full of people learning. We had seniors in there, we had the young ones in there. I had a baby in there today, mk, who's starting very young at their first Lee Woodward workshop and I got a photo of the baby because if you turn up to be a brilliant agent one day, remember this photo.
Speaker 2:That's the talent development bench right there.
Speaker 1:There you go. We're starting them very young, but for senior leaders and managers and sales managers who are struggling with this, I think you've brought an enormous amount of clarity to struggling with this. I think you've brought an enormous amount of clarity to. We've got our essential services, we've got our building the bench, and then we've got listing agents with a company associate working in there. And the one that you've just opened has been really interesting because I know that's the latest one where I think you've got five listing agents with essential services covered with your international team members, but then we've got five listing agents with essential services covered with your international team members, but then we've got someone in the middle of all that who is company funded and working that buyer management side of it. This seems to be a great way moving forward versus the burnout and the grow yourself broke model that we've been seeing in the last five to six years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I'm feeling really good about it. I'm like I'm feeling good about it because the evidence is there the satisfaction ratings of team members, the collaboration, the client satisfaction. We collect data on a daily basis now, but from both customers and our people Customer and people data. That's a scaling up thing and that's all being embedded in the Fishing Upstream system. So we actually know.
Speaker 2:It never takes more than one day for something to ripple through the organization that's positive or where someone needs help, and it's very rarely a full day. You know, if something doesn't work out that day, they have a shot that they've called where they wanted to make sure that they got at least five hot buys booked into the preview. That's coming up on the Thursday night and say it's a Monday. Let's say they got to two and they didn't get there. Right, they do a one wall. What went on? Why do we think it happened? What's the action and what's the learning? And that collective intelligence is shared that day.
Speaker 2:So by the time we meet again tomorrow, I always talk about a task. You've got to bite off what your most important task is for the day, and it's usually one listing action, one selling action. It's rare that you'll get over three. Like Jim Collins says, if you've got more than three priorities, you don't have any Right. And if you have a look at how agents are running around, they are literally running around like they are trying to be in nine places at once and the buyer managers don't get any more guidance than that, whereas if you've got a focused action for that day, I like to say it's going to be something you can bite, chew and swallow before we meet tomorrow. That's my little Kenny Tate freestyler coming out again. It did come out of an accident last year when I was talking to the team. But if you've got something important to do and you're going to get held up from it, you can actually say at the start of the day I've got a roadblock here, I'm going to need support. You come straight offline after that one minute adjustment because you have one minute each to speak about what you're doing. The huddles last for five to 10 minutes, but then you go straight off and you solve it before the day starts.
Speaker 2:This is where fault finding works. Fault finding is not about waiting for there to be a problem and going to try and diagnose it. You are looking for the fault before it occurs. You're looking for weak spot but that can be flipped on its head and look for strength. And if you're playing to strength and you're bringing the right talent just like a builder would bring in the right talent you've got builders that could do one job on their own. But then they've got other ones where you're going to need a concreter, you're going to need a tile arm. We might have to get a garden shed put out the back that's a separate set of skills a landscaper, and by the time the house is finished, great. But then you go into another job. You're not going to bring all those people, all that overhead, all that coordination with you, if you don't need it. So you've got listing agents that can do an off-market deal in one phone call. You've got other ones that are really going to need distributed work and I feel good about it and I do feel that it's really helping solve this issue. And the good thing is when you have a good go at something and you get collective buy-in to it, like we're seeing now with.
Speaker 2:I tried it on a small team to start with. Well, I say, four senior listing agents have been with us a long time, all industry kind of veterans in some way. You know, five to 25 years, or maybe eight to 25 years and these agents are good agents we're talking 400 to 800 grand range and are good agents. We're talking $400,000 to $800,000 range and you know at first. Well, obviously they got faith in their leader and they're still in our business and they love working together and a lot of them came up under me. So when they adopted it, I was pretty chuffed and I was a bit nervous as well, so I put a lot of time into getting it right, and Brett Stafford, our Chief Performance Officer, has been very involved, and Nicole Kelly, our CEO. But now that it's running, it's just a wonderful feeling to have that better together, which is one of our values to really work together and be makers, not takers, to be creating value, not just taking a piece of something that was already going to happen.
Speaker 1:Mr Mark Kentwell, an absolute brilliant episode of we Are Selling, as you always do. We're very fortunate. We've got your fault finding for the nation at the moment, and I think you're going to get a lot of people want to speak to you about this same challenge. They're feeling it and didn't realize it was there. Hence the program like this exists. Mr Mark Kentwell, thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, Lee. Look, I am committed to making sure that the industry can see the light. Well, not just see the light. What I mean by that is I think that the industry deserves to rise and I know there's been a lot of people that are helping with that. It's really challenging when we're on the trust spectrum down with politicians and insurance salespeople and car salespeople which has been great ones of those too but, as you know, it's the common belief and I think that this is a way forward. So if people want to see more of that, it's on my Instagram and YouTube. Subscribe to whichever one suits you the best.
Speaker 2:I'm pumping out lots on this now, just so that we can gain a bit of a collective sort of intelligence on this and share with each other. And if you want any more information on that onboarding debt I got that from Brad Giles, who Phil Harris introduced me to. He did a lot of operations work for them. He's a published author. There's a book where it talks about onboarding debt. And look, just make no mistake, junior roles the business or the person paying their wages gets left with 50% of their annual salary as a cost after they've gone if they don't ascend to the next level and become productive. So this is a cost that I don't think a lot of people are aware of, and I just wanted to put that on at the end there, because I'm really urging both listing agents, client managers and leaders right now to reconsider and just pause. You know, just measure twice cut once. Thanks very much for having me, Lee. Thank you, Mark and Will.