You can't train someone to care! with Clare Yates & Jo Bourne

What if the biggest problem facing estate agency isn't regulation, technology or even the market itself?

What if it's people?

Not because we don't have enough of them, but because we're still asking the wrong questions when we recruit them, develop them and lead them.

In this episode of The Viking Chats, I'm joined by two of the industry's most respected trainers and leadership specialists, Clare Yates and Jo Bourne, for a conversation that quickly challenges some of the biggest assumptions surrounding recruitment, training and professional development in property.

We begin by exploring a topic that every agency owner wrestles with: should you recruit experienced agents, or look outside the industry altogether?

It's a debate that struck a particular chord with me because it's something we've consciously done at Base Property Specialists from day one. Rather than simply hiring people who've always worked in estate agency, we've often looked to industries like hospitality, where customer experience, communication and genuinely caring about people are fundamental parts of the job.

As Jo puts it during the conversation, technical skills can be taught.

What can't be taught is whether somebody genuinely cares.

That single observation becomes the thread running through the entire episode.

We discuss why attitude almost always beats experience, why so many agencies still underestimate the value of emotional intelligence and customer service, and how some of the very best estate agents don't necessarily arrive with years of industry knowledge—they arrive with curiosity, empathy and a willingness to learn.

The conversation then broadens into something even more important: leadership.

For all the industry's talk about compliance, legislation and systems, we arguably spend far too little time developing the people responsible for leading our businesses and teams. Clare and Jo explain why leadership isn't simply about managing performance or understanding process. It's about creating environments where people feel safe enough to ask questions, admit mistakes and continue learning without fear of judgement.

That philosophy sits at the heart of the Women in Estate Agency Leadership Programme, which they have developed together. Although designed specifically to support women stepping into leadership roles, many of the principles we discuss are universal. Confidence, psychological safety, self-belief and effective communication aren't gendered concepts. They're the foundations of every successful team.

Along the way we explore why so many talented people underestimate their own ability, why others often overestimate theirs, and how creating opportunities for personal development can transform not only individual careers but entire business cultures.

We also discuss the industry's long-standing reluctance to invest in training. Too often, learning is viewed purely through the lens of legislation or compliance, something that has to be done rather than something that should be embraced. Yet some of the most valuable development has very little to do with technical knowledge and everything to do with communication, confidence, listening and understanding people.

Because estate agency has never really been about property.

It's always been about people.

Buying, selling, renting or letting a home is one of the most emotional experiences many of us will ever go through, and the professionals who guide people through those moments have an opportunity to make an extraordinary difference. But only if they understand that service is about far more than completing a transaction.

One of my favourite moments in the episode comes when we compare estate agency to hospitality. Nobody expects to walk into a five-star hotel and receive the same experience as a budget chain, even though both ultimately provide you with a bed for the night. The difference isn't the product. It's how you're made to feel.

Perhaps estate agency should start thinking about itself in exactly the same way.

This is a conversation about confidence, culture, customer experience and creating better businesses by first creating better people.

And if our industry genuinely wants to raise standards, maybe the answer isn't simply more regulation.

Maybe it's investing more in the people delivering the service in the first place.

Transcript

Speaker 1  0:00  
Ladies,

Speaker 2  0:00  
hello.

Speaker 3  0:01  
Thank you for joining me in the cocktail dungeon of Shoreditch.

Speaker 4  0:04  
It's fabulous. Thank you for the invite.

Speaker 3  0:07  
So, for anyone living under a rock who has not crossed your path as yet, would you mind giving us just a little bit of an intro of for each of you of who you are, what you do?

Speaker 5  0:20  
I'm Joe Bourne, and I have could be called Impact, which I've had for 11 years. I spend my time working with agents, businesses, all things team building, culture, leadership, state agency background, 35 plus years in the industry. Basically, I love helping people. That's what I really enjoy doing. So, building teams, working with teams, throw it at me, and we'll see where it lands,

Speaker 2  0:50  
right? So, I'm a freelance trainer as well. I specialise in customer experience, that's a primary thing, but also showing people how they can do something. There's an awful lot of training out there that shows people the technical side of it, but people walk away still unable to actually use that training in a practical way. So I do it in a lighthearted, humorous way, because I believe that people remember stuff when they've laughed. So, and the biggest fool in

Speaker 1  1:15  
the room, but

Speaker 3  1:16  
people remember how you make them feel.

Speaker 2  1:17  
Absolutely, and the biggest fool in the room is nearly always me, which is great fun, and I genuinely love it. I'm ex agency, as Joe is found my career and training through a series of unfortunate accidents, but ended up being very fortunate, and yeah, so I work with agents and lawyers and suppliers, so quite a broad, a broad church, if you like of people, but that's me.

Speaker 3  1:42  
Great. So let's dive straight in. I think training is such an interesting part of our industry. I think we all know it's talked about a lot. It's not done enough. It's not certainly not done well enough, so to start something a lot of people fall into agency. I think that is definitely a common theme with a lot of the conversations that we have with people. It's quite rare that you come across the likes of Megan, who's, you know, ever since she was five or six years old, had this aspiration of following her mom's footsteps and pursuing a career in real estate, but I think that is definitely not the norm for our industry, and a lot of people, much like myself, fell into it for whatever reason, you know, unsure what career path to follow, or a change of careers, or a change of circumstances, whatever it is, and the low barriers to entry in our industry are actually as much as they get lamented, and we've got a lot of conversation around Roper. There is also an argument that that also actually allows people to come into the industry quite easily, right or wrong. Now, something we've always found with base is actually we've found, as you guys know, we huge part of what we do is about the service and the experience that our customers have, and that was always our objective when we started base. It wasn't about how many deals we were going to do, or you know, really from that business mindset, and but because of that we hire quite a lot out of the industry, quite a lot of the people we have come into our business do not come from working in other, in another agency, a because we find our culture is so different to 99% of agents, it's very hard to kind of either unpick that or they come into an environment that doesn't feel like the agency world that they know, but also we find certain skill sets, and unsurprisingly, and we hear so across a lot of businesses, and we've had a lot of people out of hospitality, a lot of people out of hospitality, and what are your kind of thoughts on, you know, people coming into the industry as an employer, whether you're an owner director or a branch manager for a larger business. What do you guys kind of see as sent out? What do you guys see as kind of essential traits that are really good kind of core underpinnings to bring into the industry.

Speaker 5  4:27  
I think, picking up on what you've said, when I was working in, I was carnal sequence for the 25 years, a large part of my team, and I ran 12 offices in the north came from hospitality, retail, travel industry, transferable skills, so people skills, the stuff that people talk about as soft skills, but actually they're the real core skills, they're the backbone of good state agency, good teams, good leadership, so listening skills. The ability to communicate, the ability to have a conversation. So, I think I think taking somebody who hasn't got agency experience actually isn't a problem for me. Some of the bigger problems were people who came with preconceived ideas, to your point, that well, we did it this way, where I was, well, you've left there to come to

Speaker 6  5:19  
us, yeah,

Speaker 5  5:19  
and now I want to do that way, so I think that's a massive part. I think attitude, somebody's attitude, somebody's how they want to work, and their willingness to learn. I think you can work with that, and you can build on that. And I think that's a massive part of the certainly the work that I do, and I think the same for Claire is absolutely about bringing out those skills, you can't teach

Speaker 3  5:43  
someone to give a shit, can you? No, you can't.

Speaker 5  5:46  
You can't.

Speaker 3  5:47  
It's got strength. You can't. There is no training course in the world where you convince someone who doesn't give a shit to all of a sudden.

Speaker 5  5:57  
It's about personal. It's about belief. If they don't believe they can do it, and they don't want to do it,

Speaker 3  6:01  
and if they don't believe in the product, they don't believe in the service. I think I think that's something else I remember. Again, this is one of these kind of agency conversations, so it's always going to stick to me. I remember being at a networking event, probably about 10 years ago now, sat opposite an agent who was bemoaning the dropping of fees, you know, and he was sat there going, well, my two biggest competitors have both dropped their fees, and I was like, right, and he's like, so we'll, we all do exactly the same job, so I'm gonna have to, I just went, sorry, pick your bug, he was like, yeah, we all, you know, we all do exactly the same thing, so I can't charge any more than they charge. I was like, sorry, you, you don't genuinely believe that you do a better job than your competitors. I'm like, no wonder you're not getting

Speaker 5  6:51  
there's your starting point. And there's, you don't believe in yourself, and you don't believe in what you're doing, and you don't believe in your product. How are you going to go out there and say I'm worth it. How are you going to say I'm going to get you the best price? I'm going to get you the best deal, whatever that looks like, if you don't actually believe you're worth that. So to say you can't differentiate between me and somebody else shows you don't understand your value. Yeah, and that's that's got to be a massive power.

Speaker 2  7:18  
So there's a slide that people have seen me put up frequently of a very grumpy looking cat with a sign saying I hate people, and then I say, do you know somebody who shouldn't have a phone, so why do you put them on the phone? There are some brilliant administrators, yeah,

Speaker 3  7:36  
they can be a great, they can still be a fabulous part of the team, just

Speaker 2  7:39  
just don't put them in front of anybody, and but the thing is that we are, we are the blind data ranges. We are the dating agency. We match people every day with property, we match landlords and tenants, we match sellers and buyers, and we do it with research. And if you haven't got time for people, you shouldn't be in the business at all. But the other thing is, it when we get to our fees, this is really silly. It's like saying all hotels are the same.

Speaker 6  8:03  
Yeah,

Speaker 2  8:04  
everyone's providing you with a bed and

Speaker 3  8:06  
football ceiling, the

Speaker 2  8:08  
experience. And I was walking past Art Hotel on the way down here, and I was looking at booking that for a theatre trip for us to go away for the weekend. There's no way that Art Hotel would say that they're worth the same as a

Speaker 3  8:21  
holiday in across the road,

Speaker 2  8:22  
exactly, and they'd say it's the way we make you feel when you stay, and it's all the stuff that goes with it. Estate agents can do the same, but they think of it as a popularity contest rather than a fee contest. So an agent that's got look at all the properties we've got listed doesn't tell me that they're better, no, says they're cheap.

Speaker 3  8:40  
Well, and also I think you know the volume thing, I think that's such a huge point that agents, biggest will get hung up on. I think once you become a big agent, of course, fair enough, that is that is part of your play. You need to leverage your kind of scale of business to kind of present in that format, but I think far too many independents get far too caught up on volume.

Speaker 2  9:05  
It should be

Speaker 3  9:06  
quantity over quantity, but you

Speaker 2  9:07  
don't want it to be on a huge conveyor belt with every, you know, 50 properties in a window and three negotiators. What kind of service are those sellers going to get? You know, and it's that whole thing of just thinking hard about what do we want to be, how much do we want to earn? What should people be saying about our business behind our back, and, and, and how do we make sure that everybody lives that? And that's why hospitality does it so well, because you're trained to pour a pint, you're never put behind a bar or on reception without some training, and yet we put our least trained members of staff, in fact our newbies, on the front desk with a phone, front

Speaker 3  9:41  
line, wear the

Speaker 2  9:42  
red carpet, and kind

Speaker 3  9:43  
of figure it out, you know,

Speaker 2  9:44  
yeah,

Speaker 3  9:44  
learn by mistakes, but it's our poor customers, and

Speaker 6  9:47  
yeah,

Speaker 3  9:48  
applicants, and whatever else you want to call them, that, yeah, get that myriad of experiences, and as we know, right, that 50% of leads, that unbelievable stat that. Seems immeasurably almost set in stone, you know, 50% of leads that goes unanswered or properly unserviced, or you know, and we've all seen the calls where sales people aren't asking about if they've got a property to sell or if they've got a mortgage in place, or you know, whatever the priority is, but they're also not also the flip side, robotically going through those questions. Sorry, I can't go further if you don't give me an email and you don't confirm you've got a mortgage in place, and blah blah, I know I can't give you more details about that property until I know your blood type and your star sign and your last three dating preferences.

Speaker 2  10:39  
Are you only one of minimised?

Speaker 6  10:41  
Yeah, are you registered?

Speaker 5  10:42  
But that goes back, doesn't it, to what you said at the beginning about taking people that aren't necessarily from the industry, people who can communicate, people who want a conversation. If you are, if you ask somebody why they want to be an estate agent, say it's because I like houses. Well, actually, it's probably the wrong conversation. You need to like people, so to your

Speaker 3  11:02  
architect or an interior, if

Speaker 5  11:04  
you like meeting people, helping people solve problems for people, and you like talking to people, then that's pretty much sorted. You can do the rest, but if you can't have a conversation with somebody, you're never going to get past that 50% of leads that don't go down. But

Speaker 3  11:17  
again, we come back to hospitality, right? You think about, you know, you go into a restaurant or a bar, and it's that difference between the person who goes, "Oh, what do you want? You go, a beer and a wine, and they instantly pour you a pint of Stella and a glass of the house souvenir. Or the one who goes, "Oh, well, you know what kind of beard you like? Are you more of a pale ale or a real ale person? You know, we do have a house, but actually, what kind of white are you? Oh, we've got a really nice, you know, don't worry, it's not too expensive, but you know,

Speaker 2  11:47  
yeah,

Speaker 3  11:48  
and it's that experience you get, right? So, when you're ordering the food, oh, you know, have you thought that's a really nice side to have with that dish, and those are the things, yeah, they're still just fundamentally doing their job.

Speaker 5  11:58  
I think people sometimes think, certainly in ages, if they're asking those questions, they've been intrusive, or they're asking too much information, as opposed to if you're asking why, and why again, and why again, it's to help listen most. Yeah, as long as you're listening,

Speaker 3  12:12  
as long as you're not asking that question just to tee up another question,

Speaker 5  12:14  
100% And that's the other thing, isn't it? Are you actually listening? And that's my big, you know, soapbox thing about, do people listen to actually hear, or do they listen to respond, or to fix? That's a big piece. I

Speaker 3  12:27  
mean, I do struggle with that sometimes, because the way my brain works, but I remember my first boss in HFC, and she said, "You've got two ears, one mouth, and there's a reason for that. There's that, if you're talking more than you're listening, you're doing it wrong,

Speaker 5  12:41  
absolutely. And if you took, if you're listening, and you're doing something else, and we all like to think we're good at multitasking, you're not

Speaker 7  12:46  
listening,

Speaker 5  12:46  
but we're half typing an email while we're half listening to somebody when we're not really there, are we? We're sort of in Outlook and listening, we're not really listening, are we, Claire? What did

Speaker 2  13:00  
you just say you're

Speaker 3  13:02  
right. The weather in Corfu was lovely. Anyway, back

Speaker 2  13:06  
to my holiday, but actually the travel industry is the best analogy, because we will deliberately pay more to get a better experience. We look for five star. It is the

Speaker 3  13:21  
perfect.

Speaker 2  13:22  
It's the same with flights. It's the perfect example. It's the same with flights. You say, okay, so I'm going to done your short distance. I can go cheap and cheerful on that flight. Long haul, you go, what's the best seat I can get on the plane, and what can I afford? And then you start thinking, it's a huge amount of money, I'm not going to take a risk with a with a low cost provider. And then, and so on. And the older you get, the wiser you get on this as well, and you're less willing to put up with so people said, which is the safest agent to go to, which is the agent with the best success rate of selling my property, which agent looks makes property look gorgeous, and I just don't understand why we would ever put ourselves in the same as everybody else, really.

Speaker 3  13:59  
I think the other thing is, as well, I think, because everyone is seemingly so obsessed with property all the time, you can't go to dinner party without someone finding out your angel and then asking how much their nan's cottage and oppressed with is worth, and but I think there's also this presumption that the customer knows more than they do, particularly if they've sold a couple of houses before, if they've, you know, they've been around the block a few times, and they've been through a few properties, oh, you know, they've sold a couple of properties before, they know what the game is like, you don't know what that experience was like, you don't know what that circumstance was, or anything else, you know, to presume that people kind of expect the same outcome, I mean, I've always used cars, that's always been in a similar way to holidays and hotels. I've always been like, well, fundamentally, whether you're driving a 30 year old Skoda or the latest million pound Rolls Royce, they still get you from A to B. You've still got 70 mile per hour limit on the motorway, you know, but like you said, it's how come. Possibly, you get there. How reliably? How important is your

Speaker 2  15:02  
journey?

Speaker 3  15:03  
How important is your journey?

Speaker 2  15:04  
The thing that I find the most shocking is, we're custodians of people's front door keys and burglary code. We put strangers in other people's houses, either to have a walking tour or to live in. Would you seriously give your front door key and bergamot code, and the privacy and security of your home to the cheapest agent in town,

Speaker 3  15:22  
isn't it? Isn't it? It, this is this is one thing I've always found utterly fascinating about real estate, is you could stop someone in the street and say that give me 20 quid and in a week I'll send you 100 quid, and I guarantee you 98% of the people that would stop you, you, that you'd stop, would go, I'm giving you time credit,

Speaker 6  15:45  
yeah,

Speaker 3  15:46  
like they would want to know, are you FCA regulated? Have you done this? What's your company registration number? Is there insurance? What's the money returns policy? But walk into their 300 500 million pound home, and undercut everybody with bold assertions about the fact you're going to get me better priced than anyone, quicker than anyone, cheaper than anyone, and more often than not, you know, here are the keys. Where do I sign?

Speaker 2  16:16  
And in Latins, they put it in lettings, putting their money in your bank account. Well, not just

Speaker 3  16:21  
that now, now with the level of compliance as well, now, like, and as we know, whilst agents have an increasing level of culpability as the landlord, you're never off the hook now, so you know, I mean, we're dealing with a landlord at the moment who has self-managed for 20 odd years, thought she was doing a good job, but because of the renters rights act, decided now is the time. The only thing she had in place was a gas safety certificate on each flat. Deposits weren't registered, no EICR, smoke alarm in one flat's broken, no carbon monoxide in the other one. Because of all of that, she doesn't have a property licence on either, and she's facing over. If the council rocked up tomorrow morning, she would be facing over 200,000 pounds per property in fines and rental payment orders, and yet that is someone who decided, yeah, I know enough, and went through a very popular online letting solution, and they believe that they've kind of, it's all done,

Speaker 5  17:24  
and this is the thing, isn't it? Everybody thinks they're all right until something goes wrong, and then, and that's that whole point, isn't it? Again, when you go back to fees, we're selling a service, and of course, you can't touch a service until you've experienced it, so the big thing to demonstrate fees always is, you've, I used to say in the nice pub, you got to touch your client three times before they trust you. What got me into trouble last night, but because they're buying that service, they've got to start to believe. So, if you say you're going to do something, you're going to do it. So, when they spoke to you, you'll send a message, you'll email, you'll send a WhatsApp, you'll send, you'll send somebody to them, so they start to see it, they start to understand what they're going to get. It's not like going out and buying a pair of shoes and you can pick them up and

Speaker 3  18:10  
hold yourself to, but it's a wondering quote. I remember it was shared at YA Masters a few years ago, I can't remember who the original quote is from, but how you do everything is how you do anything.

Speaker 5  18:20  
Yes,

Speaker 3  18:20  
and it's, it's, it's an impossible standard to hold yourself to, because we do also fuck up as human beings, and that's, that's fine, but it is that thing of, you know, if you promise the world, and then the first three things you said you were going to do, you either don't do, or you do them later, you do them poorly,

Speaker 5  18:37  
it's that trust,

Speaker 3  18:38  
don't be surprised that the rest of the service is going to follow that exact same path,

Speaker 2  18:43  
but going back to what you're saying about training, the idea, the idea that we take people's alarms, alarm codes, and security details with no training, and say, how difficult can it be, the idea that we don't have to regularly train, the idea that something that we went on 20 years ago, you're not required to have a criminal

Speaker 6  19:02  
record check.

Speaker 2  19:02  
No, that well, you kind of are the general public don't realise that we should be. It's on the list, we just don't do it. But the idea that we talk about the fact I don't need any training, can you tell me an athlete that would say I don't need any training? Can you tell me anybody else, a surgeon that would say I don't need any training. I've been doing this for 25 years.

Speaker 3  19:23  
Walk into the London Stock Exchange, you go and move over, boy. Yeah, a solicitor, billion pounds worth of assets. I'll show you how it's done. The

Speaker 2  19:30  
solicitor who hasn't retrained since they qualified 30 years ago and still loves his fax machine. You don't hear any other business bragging about the fact that they don't spend any money on training, or that they only do it when they've got some money in the bank, but the rest of the time they'll just fly by the seat of their plant. It's an embarrassment, actually. Now it's not just for us to sell more training. There aren't enough of us, actually, to fulfil the need. If, if everybody said, "Let's go and train, there aren't enough industry trainers over that.

Speaker 3  19:58  
I don't think it. A secret that there is a big chunk of our industry that that needs to figure out a way to do more. There is, there is, as frustrating and disappointing as it is at times, there's a reason why our industry profession, whatever you want to call it, as an industry, I suppose, at the moment has the rather tariff, terrible reputation that it does. It's because so many people have had such a horrendous experience, and it is so personal, moving away from the letting side, you know, people moving homes, there is so much tied into that, and when you, when you actually move away from the transaction itself, and you look at the, the reason why people are moving jobs, or babies, or losses, or looking after, you know, a loved one, or whatever it is, there is often so much other emotion and stress and everything else tied into that, and on top of that, you're doing someone's biggest financial transaction. For most people, it's yeah, it's something fascinating. If something I found fascinating, do you remember, probably about 10 years ago now. Charlie Lambden used to be Charlie Wright. He tried to set up something called CLR, which was the Charter of Independent Estate and Netting Agents, and it was all about championing what independent agents do when raising their profile under a blind. There was there was a fascinating part in that journey where he put together a board of us, and I actually thought he did a really good job, because we were, we were all independents, but he didn't do the London-centric thing. I think there was myself and Peter Wetherell for London, but then there was Perry Power. There was, I mean, we had guys from from across the whole country. I don't think anyone had more than like three offices, but all successful in our own right, but much smaller independent operations, but everyone well respected. I think everyone there had won some sort of award at something, but I will never forget when Charlie then went out on the road to start kind of drumming up interest in terms of agents actually signing on board to come on board with this thing, and I remember about two weeks into it, Charlie called this sudden emergency meeting, and he said we need to have a chat, and we all are interesting, and he calls me, and he said, so said interesting feedback, said a lot of the agents I've been speaking to, they're struggling to keep their doors open all every month. It's like Jesus Christ, how are we going to be able to pay to keep the lights on, pay to keep the doors open? Are we still going to be able to keep the whole team, and they don't feel that who is on the board is a fair representation of who they are in the industry. You are all too successful, too reputable, and I remember a soldier zicking around the room going, sorry, sorry, they, so they want to be represented by people that are struggling to keep the doors open. I was like, isn't this isn't this about championing the fact that independent agents do this incredible job, and you can get this incredible level of service and expertise and customer care, and you know that you can do the things that a corporate can never do. You can give that truly professional, sorry, truly personal curated experience, depending on, you know, your agency and what market you operate in, but I found it absolutely fascinating, and that was kind of one of the big things that kind of derailed that whole CLA movement that he was trying to set up, was it all kind of fell apart over that, because it was like, okay, but so who, who, who's gonna head up this board, and if they're struggling to keep their doors open,

Speaker 5  23:45  
and that in yourself, if they're struggling to keep the doors open, surely that's the point that says we need to invest in development. To how do we get better fees? How do we get our team slicker, more able to answer those 50% of inquiries that aren't being answered? How do we grow, but yeah, we can't afford to do that, and that's one of the biggest things I think we probably find is business owners or directors or whoever are responsible for saying, "Oh, yeah, we'll pay for some training or whatever. They want an instant ROI. How do you measure that? But then do they look at the retention, they look at how people feel about their role. How do they feel? Do they feel more confident because somebody's investing in them? And you see them when we've seen people come out of workshops, they go a bit taller, but bit shoulders back, and they want to ring you and tell you their successes.

Speaker 3  24:35  
Well, I think with a lot of these, I think when you, when you talk, when you talk, when we talk about reluctant training agency owners, directors. I think when they do think about training, they think of it as something highly technical.

Speaker 5  24:45  
Yes,

Speaker 3  24:45  
right. You're going to learn how to comply with AML. You're going to learn how to deliver the Renters Rights Act. It's a very technical, you know, school-like. Here are the facts you will learn, so that you have the knowledge to be. Compliant rather than

Speaker 5  25:02  
it's personal for me.

Speaker 3  25:03  
This is about personal development experience development by people into the business. This is how you convey the value of what you do, rather than transactionally we sell houses.

Speaker 2  25:15  
Absolutely. Now, this is funny enough, because we haven't directly gone into it, but this is kind of why we developed the leadership programme with Weir, because what we'd realised was that women think about this role of leading and managing and encouraging their team, they take it very seriously, and I don't mean only women do it, but lots of women won't put themselves forward for a position they don't think they qualify for.

Speaker 3  25:39  
Well, yeah, I mean, well, it's quite well documented, right. Women won't often put themselves forward unless they feel they meet 90% of the criteria. And on the flip side, us blokes, you know, we get 10 or 20% I mean, it's a shoe-in, right? Yeah, and there's

Speaker 2  25:53  
a winging it. There's a winging it and a believing that they can, no matter what. And there's an anxiety about what if I don't and what if I can't, and not wanting to wing it because it's too, it's, it's, it's too much, and some women are leaving their kids behind for longer periods, and there's so much, it's, it's a huge investment in their, in their future, so it's easier for them to say no to these positions than it is, and they take this whole thing of training very seriously, but at the very same time, there are people making decisions quite often for them as to whether or not they got it, whether they see something in them, and whether they be, they're looking and saying, "You know, I don't see any ambition from that, that woman, and actually she's screaming inside, going, "I really want to. So we wanted to, to encourage people to be able to make a decision on some affordable training, where all they needed to do was take a day off that they could come and spend a day with us with like-minded other people in a very safe space where they could say whatever was in their heads and not have it as a, as a power competition, and being careful. Actually, no, I'm going to say as a willy-waving exercise, because that, because the vulnerability in our room is very important, and you talked earlier about men and mixed training, and all this stuff. Women wouldn't be that honest in the room, and men definitely wouldn't be as honest in the room. There's a real, the

Speaker 3  27:12  
weird movement has done what it's done. I think, I think, even if you, even if you forget the later iteration of it with the conference and everything else, when you look at what it fundamentally sits on, which is that Facebook WhatsApp group, that safe space for women to ask the questions that they

Speaker 2  27:32  
don't want to ask, they don't want to ask a stupid question, which goes back to, you know, that whole thing, there's no such thing as a stupid question, but there's people who, when they go and ask it, they go

Speaker 3  27:40  
just so much thing as an asshole to my answer. Yeah,

Speaker 2  27:43  
I haven't got time to go through this now. Look it up. Here's a website, check it out, rather than just explain things in simple ways. So, so training for me has got to stop being something that you have to do and something that you get to do, want to do,

Speaker 3  27:57  
but I think also, as well, don't frame it in that, like in my mind, I think a lot of agents see it as, like, a property mark course, a technical, and not dissing to property mark courses, we do need technical knowledge, that is absolutely, you know, and I think, particularly so in that things, you know, that is incredibly important, but, like, we talked on the soft skills, as we call them, the ability to, you know, finding people's joy at work, you know, finding what genuinely makes people happy, because guess what, if they actually come in and like what they do, they tend to have quite a bit more fun doing it, and they tend to step up to do other things, and they have ideas because they're passionate about what they're involved in, and you know, and I think you know, again, we were talking about agents who, who I find it fascinating, this kind of, there is a lot of our industry that seems to be on this constant brink of struggle, and we've seen it recently with the, what was it, Taylor Begbie's report of, you know, businesses in distress being more than ever before, and you know, the Renters Rights Act will have, will have added fuel to the fire with that, alongside all the cost increases and everything else, but again, it's that old thing of, you know, was it the definition of madness of doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

Speaker 6  29:13  
Yeah,

Speaker 3  29:14  
and I think there are so many agents out there that are so frozen in the fact that this is how we've done is how we've always done it, you know. You, you make 200 calls a day to book eight viewings a day to get three offers to get one sale, and as long as that happens,

Speaker 8  29:33  
yeah,

Speaker 3  29:33  
you know, we will keep marching forward. We will keep our doors open in the tough times, that will just about get us through the darkness, and in the good times, we'll be fine.

Speaker 5  29:42  
Yeah, and you'll keep riding that roller coaster. That, if you've been in the industry long enough, you'll know it'll go up, it'll go down, but you'll keep riding. You're

Speaker 3  29:50  
constantly mercy of what the market absolutely, you have no control over the future.

Speaker 5  29:57  
And I think a lot of the workshops I do are very. Collaborative, they're about having fun. If you have fun, people learn, people remember. So we use I use Lego, I use flip charts and pens and Post-Its, and whatever we need to do to make a point, and we have fun. But there's a serious element to it. It's not death by PowerPoint. It's about what do you need, what do you need to help you be stronger, better, more confident, whatever that is. And that's where that's the starting point. And we built the stuff that we built around the leadership was about confidence and building it from there. And we'll continue to build that, and the things that we were working on, we'll continue to build around those things.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai