One thing I hear a lot this time of year from brokerage owners and team leaders is, “I’m looking at my budget and cutting costs to increase profit.”

Here’s my message to you: that’s fine. It’s good to be a controller. You don’t want expenses out of control.

But you can’t cut your way to profitability. You just can’t.

What happens is you start cutting services, cutting staff, cutting tools, and cutting resources. If there’s some fat to cut, great. But most of the time, you end up cutting things agents actually like.

You get so focused on creating profit for yourself that you create a whirlpool effect—a downward spiral—for the entire company.

Agents see services being cut, team members gone, staffing reduced, and tools taken away, and they think, “I’m going somewhere else.”

You lose an agent, and your profitability gets worse. Then another agent leaves. Then another. Pretty soon you think you need to cut even more.

You can see where this goes:

You cut yourself right out of busine...

Almost every week I have a new agent come to me and say, “Hey, I want to tackle a new area of the market.” Maybe it’s for sale by owner, maybe it’s expired listings, maybe it’s farming— all very valid areas to market to.

But my first question is always, “Let’s talk about your sphere of influence first. Tell me about that.”

A lot of times they’ll say, “Well, I don’t really have a good number on that.” That’s how I know they’re not really dialed in on their sphere. I’ll ask, “How many people are in your sphere?” And they’ll say, “It’s like 100… it’s like 200.”

They can’t tell me a specific number because they’re not actually in control of their business.

So the number one thing we have to do—before we chase rabbits, before we look for other business, before we search for something else—is get our sphere of influence dialed in.

Why? Because 70–80% of your business is going to come from this source. We have no business spending time, resources, money, and energy elsewhere when we have...

Hey guys, one of the things I always tell people when they’re starting out in the business is to watch what top professionals are doing and model other people’s success. When you do that, you unlock a bunch of “secrets.”

I’m going to share one secret right now that you may not have noticed, but once I say it, you’re going to dial in and think, “Ah, I have noticed that.” It’s one of those Captain Obvious things when you really look at it.

People who are doing a lot of real estate sales—$20, $30, $40, $50 million in production—often talk about new sales, listings, and closings by saying things like, “I just sold my friend a house. I just sold my buddy a house. I just helped my friends buy a duplex.”

Everyone they talk about is their friend.

Then you reflect on your own business and ask, “Why am I not selling as much real estate as they are?” They put their pants on one leg at a time just like me. They’re not working ten times harder than me.

The reason is simple: they have more frie...

For you agents out there, I’ve got a question: have you mapped home anniversaries for your entire database?

What does that mean? When we help someone buy a home, we automatically record the closing date in our CRM. If you haven’t been doing that, start now. If you haven’t done it for your whole career, go back and do it for every house you’ve ever sold.

When that anniversary date comes up—January, February, March, April, May, whenever—you now have a reason to call those clients and say, “Hey, happy six-year home anniversary. Can you believe it’s already been six years?”

Then you say, “Guess what? It’s your turn for a home equity analysis. I like to update all my friends on how much money they’ve made on their house over the last 12 months.”

You tell them, “Here’s what you’ve made. Percentage-wise, it looks like about $22,000.”

That’s a great present to get every year. Your clients will love this.

Second, you follow it up by saying, “By the way, if you know anybody buying or selli...

Hey guys, here’s a great message to put out to your SOI, and specifically to buyers who may be on the fence about entering the market.

A new study just came out from HousingWire showing that 40% of listings on the market today have had a price reduction of some kind. That’s higher than the last two years—higher than ’23 and higher than ’24.

That makes this a great time to be a buyer, especially if you’re a bargain shopper.

So what’s the text? You could simply say:

“Hey guys, if you’re out there wanting to find a bargain in today’s market, the time is right. Forty percent of listings on the market today have had a price reduction of some kind. Some sellers are more motivated than others. If you’re ready to start shopping, this may be the best time to shop for your next home.”

And that’s true.

Now is a great time to be a bargain hunter. Put that message out. Shake up some interest. Get people looking at homes.

It’s a great time to be a buyer.

Hope this helps. If you want more ide...

Hey guys, if you want to have a fantastic phone call with everyone in your database coming into December and January—right at the end of the year and the beginning of the new year—this is what I call the “Real Estate Tune-Up.”

We take our cars in for a tune-up every few thousand miles. We need to do the same thing with our database. The way you do that is by being direct and asking one key question.

Here’s the question.

“Hey, this is Jim. How are you guys doing? I’ve been thinking about you. I’m talking to everyone I know as we head into the new year, just on the business side, and I wanted to ask: is there anything you have on the horizon, real estate-related, for 2026 that I can help you with?”

That’s it. You just put it out there.

“Do you have anything going on in 2026, real estate–related, that I can help you with?”

You’ll be shocked by how many people say, “Actually, yes, we do. We’ve been thinking about something.”

Remember, about 5%—one in 20 people you talk to out in the...

If you’re a real estate broker or team leader, I’m sure you’re experiencing what I’m about to describe. I call it the 80/20 rule, and it’s not the 80/20 rule you’re thinking about.

The 80/20 rule we usually think of is that 20% of the agents do 80% of the business. It’s probably closer to a 90/10 rule now, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is the 80/20 rule when it comes to the deployment of the technologies, tools, and services you provide to your agents.

As a brokerage owner or team leader, you invest in all this tech and all these tools, and then 80% of your agents don’t use them. You’re spending thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of dollars, and you’re thinking, “This is crazy. Maybe I should just stop providing this stuff.”

That’s a mistake.

First, you have 20% of your people who are actually using these tools, and those are usually the people producing. If you stop providing the tools, you’re hurting that group.

But there’s another reason you shou...

As a real estate professional, I know you’re probably already on Facebook and Instagram. Everybody is.

But are you on LinkedIn? And if you are, are you using it to its fullest potential?

Here’s why I ask: Did you know that one in three business owners is on LinkedIn? One-third of all the businesses in your town are on LinkedIn.

The beauty of LinkedIn is that it helps you flesh out your own database—your CRM, your SOI—because it connects you to people from professions you’ve been in before. If you list past employers and say, “Hey, I’ve worked at these three companies,” LinkedIn will suggest people you might know.

You might look at that and say, “You know what? I do know that person. They’re not in my database, but I do know them.”

Now you can connect with them on LinkedIn, send them a message, get reconnected, and start a conversation. Then move them as quickly as you can into your SOI.

Think about alumni groups or colleges you’ve attended. All of these business-related connectio...

Let me tell you a story:

I had a friend of mine that had cancer a while back, and I was at a garage sale and saw this book all about the Mayo Clinic. It had a story in there about the Mayo Clinic, a study of 400 patients the Mayo Clinic had served, and these 400 patients had had miraculous recoveries from cancer.

I thought, “Oh, this is a great book to give my friend.” So I got it and gave it to them. I was telling him about the story—it was absolutely incredible.

But what was interesting about this story of the cancer survivors was that the one thing they all had in common wasn’t their treatment plans or some crazy protocol.

They all believed that they would get better.

Every single one of them had a 1000% belief that they would survive—and they did. They had miraculous recoveries that no one could explain.

So why do I bring this up? How does this relate to real estate? It relates in that your belief about the market matters, and your approach every day matters. If you come into...

I have a question for you. As a real estate agent, how topical are you?

What do I mean by topical? In other words, when you watch the news at night, open up your web browser, or scroll through social media, a lot of real estate news hits us. Because we’re in the real estate business, we see a lot of news that affects us.

If it’s really top of mind for you, guess who else sees that? All of your clients see that too.

So when there’s a topic that’s hot, and you see a lot of trending discussion around that topic, what should you do with it? Well, you should speak to it. You should put out your own content where you talk about your opinion on that specific topic.

I’m going to give you two examples that fall into that realm right now—topics there’s been a lot of chatter about, two proposals by the current administration. You can agree or disagree with them, but there’s still a lot of chatter.

The two proposals: 50-year mortgages and portable mortgages.

Have you heard the chatter?

This...