Blog

Tough Love: How Mentors Can Bring Out Your Best as A Brokerage Owner

— Michele Watson


It takes an entrepreneurial spirit to build a successful real estate brokerage. You’ve crafted a long-term vision for your brokerage and hired a skilled real estate team, putting your talents and efforts into creating value for customers. As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for ways to improve your processes and your people and ultimately grow your business. You don’t have to do it alone. Partnering with a mentor for support, frank talk about your bottom line, and new ideas is a great way to ensure your brokerage meets and exceeds your goals and keeps moving forward.

Benefits of Having a Mentor

A mentor, like any good coach, will be able to identify and hone your strengths.  Your mentor will also help you recognize and remove obstacles to success. Beyond those two comprehensive benefits, a mentor helps challenge you and can bring out your best performance in the following ways:

  • You’ll gain knowledge your mentor gathered through experience. Real estate training and textbook information are essential, but first-hand accounts of challenges (and solutions) are valuable lessons only a mentor can offer. A mentor can guide you past potentially expensive missteps and find more efficient ways for your team to work.
  • A mentor’s objectivity makes it easier to improve performance. Yes, a mentor will encourage you, but more importantly, will be honest and direct with you. Great mentors deliver ‘tough love.’  You and your real estate team become stronger when you receive constructive and respectful feedback.
  • Your mentor can assist with goals, strategies, and best practices. You know what’s worked well for your real estate brokerage. A mentor brings new ideas for you to think about when you’re setting goals, developing a yearly business plan, choosing tools and technology, and recruiting and retaining staff, as well as just best practices for good operational management in a brokerage.
  • A mentor helps hold you stay on track. You are there to help keep your agents on track with their goals, but who is there to keep you on track? Your mentor or coach will help keep you on track when you start to veer off course, and help you dig in and cheer you on to the finish line when you are tempted to settle for less.
  • A mentor provides networking opportunities. As you know from your own experience, personal connections and relationships are vital to real estate brokerages. Your mentor will have a network of people you can tap into for additional support if needed.

Choosing the Right Mentor

Qualities of a mentor or coach mirror those you’d expect from a good manager. Look for a real estate coaching program that has the following characteristics:

  • Responsiveness. Your mentor or coach won’t be an active member of your real estate team, but should be available to answer your questions within a reasonable time. Having scheduled times to connect is recommended to ensure accountability. Regular meetings also give you opportunities to discuss current performance and adjust plans and tactics as needed.
  • Favorable track record. Experience and proven results are crucial qualifiers for a mentor’s effectiveness. You’ll benefit most from working with a coach who has been successful in areas you want to improve.
  • Communicator and collaborator. A trust-based relationship starts with an honest and transparent conversation about expectations and boundaries. A good mentor will have your back, but also expects you to be direct about your needs for support.
  • Realistic and positive. A mentor who brings out your best will be frank about what’s possible and rein in ideas that may be a bit unrealistic. Remember, good coaches encourage growth and find ways to remove obstacles.

The best mentors and coaches care about your team’s success, providing the direction and resources you need to achieve your goals. They view their role as an opportunity to help your real estate brokerage thrive and grow.

Finding the Best Real Estate Coaching Program

Interacting with a mentor or coach is more than a week or month-long program. A real estate mentor will coach you and provide feedback as needed. The relationship with your mentor will be most useful when it develops and endures over time. You’re both committing to working together to achieve long-term success.

If you’re ready for the next level of success in your brokerage, then joining a team like Weichert may be worth considering. The Weichert franchise model gives you access to one of the best real estate coaching programs available. You are assigned a business coach who will work with you. The model is based on proven processes that are always there for you and cover almost every aspect of real estate, including solutions to common problems related to brokerage growth. You’ll get:

  • One-on-one business coaching including business planning, recruiting support and financial management training, as well as things such as building culture, implementing change and increasing engagement.
  • Regional broker meetings, rallies, chat boards and national conferences that connect you with other broker/owners in the Weichert network who openly share their solutions to the similar challenges you may be experiencing.
  • A regional service manager to provide day to day support on accessing and using the Weichert tools available.

The comprehensive coaching program from Weichert helps bring out the best in you as a leader and supports your efforts to build your business with proven processes, not guesswork. It’s all part of being in business for yourself, but not by yourself. Like all things Weichert, it starts with “We”.

If you think you might be ready to get started with one of the best real estate coaching programs available, Call us at 877-567-3350 or contact our team today.

Let's Connect

Are we a good fit?

Let’s talk about it. We promise no pressure, just useful information.