37. The Foundation Behind Our Success: Integrating Notion and Orbit in Real Estate

In the midst of team building, I stumbled upon a game-changing realization that challenged everything I thought I knew about structuring a real estate business. It wasn't about the agents multiplying—it was about the systems that lift them. This morning, I reflect on how adopting a new model transformed not just my business, but the way my team breathes and thrives.

In today's episode of The Work From Anywhere Agent, I dive into the unexpected parallels between real estate teams and legal practices, redefining roles for maximum synergy. With Notion as my secret weapon, discover how I crafted an internal fortress for communication and growth, creating a seamless canvas where every team member's potential can flourish.

Join me as we explore the dynamic duo of Notion and Orbit, and how they individually and collectively play roles in making our business not just scalable, but sellable too. What's it like to marry an impeccable internal structure with an outstanding external presence? Today's insights just might change your game plan.

Curious about how you can reshape your business's heart and soul? Let's keep the conversation going in our Business Systems for Realtors Facebook group. Ready to discover more? Tune in to our episode now and be part of the journey!

Chapters

• 0:02 Team Building Evolution
• 1:03 Specialist Model vs. Traditional Teams
• 2:11 Notion as Internal Hub
• 4:16 Notion and Orbit Integration
• 6:14 Final Thoughts and Invitation

Transcript

Alexa: 0:02

In today's episode we're talking about how we use both Notion and Orbit in our real estate business. Now, as I started building my team, our structure is a little bit different. So, to give you a little background on my sort of team building experience, several years ago I started a team and was super excited because there was a whole bunch of agents who wanted to start selling houses with me, and it was awesome, right. And then I realized that, without giving them any admin support, without giving them structure and systems and all those things, they either A they failed out of the business, or, b they learned how to sell houses. And because the only value that I was offering them was giving them leads, once they learned how to sell and once they learned how to generate their own leads, they ended up leaving the team. And so I sort of went back to the drawing board and focused on how would I build a team that serves the business, serves my goals and also can help transform people's lives, and so what I sort of landed on was that, instead of building a production team per se as in hiring a bunch of agents that I have to give away 50% of my revenue to that we were going to focus on building more of like a legal practice, right? If you think about an attorney's office, it's typically one or two attorneys and then they have a bunch of admin support and they typically really lean on that admin support and paralegals and legal researchers and all the receptionists and all those different roles, and then there's a couple of partners and then maybe, as they get busier, they start bringing on associates, but typically they start with the admin support, and so that was the focus that I brought in when I started rebuilding my team, and I have to tell you I've loved it so much more. We really focus on having specialists in every single role in the business, right? So instead of having again a bunch of agents that are just doing a bunch of stuff, we really focus on defining roles in the business, and then every person is dependent on the rest of the team, and so it's a completely different model.

Alexa: 2:01

Now, with that in mind, when you're dealing with handoffs like that and you're dealing with all these different people who are in one transaction, having a way of communicating and having a standardized way of operating right becomes essential. It's not even a matter of like you know, okay, well, agents run their businesses differently Like no, because every single client runs through the same process. Number one I have a lot more control over the experience that the client gets, because now, when something comes up right, so if a client asks a question, if there is a result that wasn't what we expected, whatever it ends up being, we end up building an SOP around it, and so, little by little, these teeny, tiny 1% improvements now become sort of our standard operating practice. Notice what? See what I did there? So, with that in mind, the challenge became like where do we store all of our SOPs, all of our trainings, where do we keep all of our meetings right? And so it was like started with Google Docs, then it turned into using a bunch of different tools, and so we eventually landed on using Notion.

Alexa: 3:12

Now, I have to tell you, if I'm really being honest, a lot of people speak so highly of Notion, but if you don't have a good foundation or you don't have an operating system to build off of, when you're working with Notion, it just kind of feels like an infinite canvas of nothingness, and while everything might be possible, it's really hard to visualize. And so the first thing that I did when I started getting into Notion was. I read the book Traction and if you've been around for a while, you know I've talked about that book a lot, because it really is the foundation for how we run the internal side of our business, and so it really focuses on setting your goals, narrowing those down into 90-day rocks. We changed the name to Initiatives, focusing on running really highly effective meetings, having really high accountability, and I found a Notion template that helped implement the EOS model, and then we customized the crap out of it. So, even though, yes, we started with a template, we changed it so that it worked for our business, and so, with that in mind, notion has become sort of our internal place that we communicate.

Alexa: 4:16

Notion has sort of become our internal hub, right Like for communications, for tasks, for accountability, for our SOPs, for running our meetings, for setting goals, for tracking, like the details of showing stuff for clients and doing our finances and our HR, and all that stuff happens in Notion stuff for clients and doing our finances and our HR, and all that stuff happens in Notion, whereas Orbit is focused on the external experience, what people see and what people feel, and I feel like I would be doing a disservice if I didn't talk about how we use these together, because, yes, it's important to have that external communication right, but think of Notion as the foundation that Orbit gets built on top of, and so this is the thing that I truly believe is what makes businesses scalable and also makes them sellable right. Because we've gone through in a couple of our acquisitions, we've gone through multiple VAs, and it's interesting how quickly our VAs are able to step into a role and get producing very, very, very quickly because of the fact we have everything so heavily documented. And then, when you layer in Notion AI are you kidding me? Like literally anyone on our team can ask for a status update on a client or how to handle a certain situation and a whole bunch of other stuff, and honestly, it really is one of the most powerful tools that I'm really excited to continue building on.

Alexa: 5:35

I'm pretty sure we talked about Notion AI recently, and one of these days I'm probably going to go do like a whole rundown on our Notion, because there's a lot of aspects of the business that are run out of there, whereas our funnels, our emails, our CRM, our communication is all run through Orbit.

Alexa: 5:52

But truly, the two of them work together, and so I believe that, when it comes to Orbit, we do a great job of helping our agents with the external piece, but, again, a lot of times we need to do the inside work, we need to do the working on the business in order to make sure that the business runs well, especially if we plan to bring other people into our business. So as a solo agent as maybe a solo agent and one admin you can run out of orbit completely. But when you start breaking down the business into a bunch of roles and there's a whole bunch of other complexity, then that's where, like having the EOS model and being able to run it effectively, their notion really comes into play. And, as always, please join us in our daily Facebook discussion in the Business Systems for Realtors Facebook group, and I will see you in the next episode.