01. Mastering The Art of Remote Leadership

I'm on a mission to build a business that thrives without my constant oversight. Witness the transformation of my real estate practice as I weave personal experiences—like my father's business unraveling after his sudden passing—into a quest for creating self-sustaining operations. What if you could lead a team living the work-from-anywhere lifestyle while still delivering top-notch service? Join me as I recount a year of refining processes and overcoming the vulnerability hangover linked to content creation, learning to navigate the balance between going all-in and needing a breather.

Heading into the new year, I'm eager to share the systems and automations that have not only strengthened my business but also expanded my reach. By collaborating with experts like estate planning and family law attorneys, I've discovered new ways to leverage relationships and share audiences for mutual growth. Tune in to learn about the methods I've developed, from managing every client touchpoint to forming strategic alliances, all while preparing to tackle the ever-evolving real estate market with renewed energy and focus. Whether you're looking to scale your business or streamline operations, there's something here for you.

Join the discussion and share your experiences in the Business Systems for Realtors Facebook group: https://facebook.com/groups/bizsystems.

Up for a challenge? Check out the 7-Day Funnel Challenge: https://orbit.realestate/cnfin7days

And if you’re interested, learn more about joining me at eXp: https://alexarosario.com/exp.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I've been consuming podcasts like crazy, and so I figured it would be fun to start documenting on a daily basis my little journey around what I'm thinking, how I'm building my business and really continuing to work towards that work-from-anywhere agent type of mindset or practice. Right Like from the very beginning, this journey of building my business has been focused around building a practice that didn't require me to be in the day to day of operating my business, and it wasn't because I was lazy, it wasn't because I didn't want to work hard. It was because I've realized that when you build a business that is reliant on you doing everything, your business is very vulnerable, right. Reliant on you doing everything, your business is very vulnerable, right Like when my dad passed away, within a couple of weeks, his business was no longer a business. All the people that he employed had to go find other jobs, and going through like the probate process with his wife at the time was an absolute nightmare, and so it was a multimillion dollar business that just went to nothing because the business relied on his being present to operate.

Speaker 1: 1:07

And so every year around this time of the year, I find myself in this place of really focusing on getting super intentional about content, and I feel like I go through this like vulnerability hangover, almost, where I start creating a bunch of content, I start testing, I start getting really obsessive about it and then I get burned out on content and on putting myself out there right, because it doesn't feel like I'm getting the progress, if you will, and then I end up retreating back into my little shell because, um, that's just how it feels. And then over time, I'm like okay, now I need to do content again. And so in 2024, the first half of the year I really focused on fixing my operations right, so making sure that my team could handle a transaction without me being in the day to day of it. And so now we've gotten to a point where, basically, I do the initial consultation with the client and then I sign them on, I hand them over to my operations operations team and I talk to them every week, but I don't see them again until closing. And so we were still getting great reviews and we're still moving in that direction.

Speaker 1: 2:13

That was like the first half of the year. The second half of the year was starting to really focus on, like the sales and marketing and if you're hearing all the background noise. I have my dog playing around me, I have a plane flying overhead, so I do apologize about that. But the second half of the year was focused on getting intentional around, like my sales and marketing, and I found a content person who she's been great in terms of helping us build the SOPs and all that fun stuff. But I'm finding that we really just need to do more and I need to record more and all that fun stuff. And so now going into the new year is continuing to focus around building the SOPs for things like when we take a new listing, when we're getting a new referral in, when it's somebody's birthday, when it's their home anniversary, so making sure that all of those different random touch points, even though they might feel random, are not actually random at all and we can systematically execute this. And so, as I'm building all of this, I'm sharing it to our Orbit agents and our mastermind and giving you guys my SOPs, giving you guys my automations, everything so that we can continue helping you guys scale and streamline your businesses as well. And so I'm literally testing, tweaking, testing, tweaking, testing, tweaking and then being like okay, yep, this works. Here you go. And so that's been the journey that I'm taking our agents on and really enjoying the process of.

Speaker 1: 3:35

One of the things that I'm thinking about most going into this upcoming year is how, like, I'm seeing my listing inventory increasing and our days on market is increasing. Right, it's no longer put a property on the market and like just post on social media and then it's going to sell. There's a lot more that goes into it, right? One of the things that I'm really focused on right now is being more intentional about leveraging my relationships in all ways, right. So, in terms of content, doing a collaborative podcast with one of my really good estate planning attorney friends a family law attorney who already has a really great following, and so being able to leverage each other's audiences being able to not have to do it by myself is a big one. And then, in terms of the other relationships, plugging into my organizations and my community to do things like hosting workshops at my listings and getting attendance to my listings that way, right, because even if someone's not interested in purchasing property at that moment, it's still a touch point that we can continue building the database and nurturing those relationships. It shows our sellers and shows potential buyers and sellers that we really go above and beyond for our listings. And so now, like in terms of the way I think about operationalizing, this is okay if we're going to do this type of thing.

Speaker 1: 4:52

Number one is like what does it look like to plan an event like this? So I would make a checklist of all the things that would need to happen who's going to be the speaker? What's expected of them? Who's going to pay for the stuff? Is there going to be food? What is the marketing look like? Who's going to do that? I'm really big on MREA, and so it would be like okay, what are the eight touch points that need to happen both before and after an event like this, to make sure that it's going to be successful, and then to deepen those relationships with the new people in our database? And so that would be where I would start and I would map it out on paper and I would do that with my team.

Speaker 1: 5:25

Before I had a team, it was just me and I would just do that. And then I would set up the automations in my CRM. We use Orbit, and so it would be like okay, now that we have the automation set up, now we need to set up the registration page. Now we need to set up the Facebook page. And so now, going back to as I've grown, my team is I'm still involved in the casting, the vision and also some of the high level planning in that sense, and then they take it and run the actual like sending the invitations and making sure that the event is planned and all of the details.

Speaker 1: 5:59

But as I've continued to grow is like stepping away from the minutia and focusing more on higher and higher level strategy. And so it's like in my mind it's always systemize, automate and then leverage it off. So I don't typically just leverage something without having tested and tweaked and tested and tweaked myself. That's something that I implement. First I'm like, okay, this is working, this is not working. And then, once I know that it's gotten to the point where it's boring and I don't enjoy it anymore, I know that I've systemized it to the point that anybody can do it, and so then I install somebody in that role and that's the process that I go through. And so it's like baby stepping through, building myself out of my business where now managing sort of my growth team, as I'm calling it. So that'd be like the sales and marketing focusing around the events, our attorney relationships, our content strategy and mobilizing that entire team to move in one direction.

Speaker 1: 6:52

And so all of these things are happening in the background, where you know they're built around specific SOPs, like I said the event planning SOP, the listing launch SOP, the home anniversary, the new referral, the five-star review, like all of these things. What happens when any of these events happen? And then starting to build out the process and then assigning those tasks out, and so at that point I no longer have to be like, okay, was this done the way I wanted it to be done, as long as the tasks are getting completed and checked off, and then we're tracking the results. That's how this process grows. And so over time like this is why they say there's no easy, quick ways to build a business. It's literally the process that I'm going through and I'm finding that I'm just getting better at leading that process, and so that's the episode for today. That's our first episode ever. I'm sorry for all the background noise. I promise next time will be better, but I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you in the