1. In both situations, highly talented individuals are asked to contribute to a team effort
2. Both are highly rewarding in terms of income, but due to spin off success, high performing teams typically earn more than high performing individuals alone
3. Both scenarios require high ego-driven individuals to respect and support overall team goals
4. Both situations present challenges for leaders and managers in creating perceived value for their agents and staff

To Agents

To me, the conversation always comes back to accountability; accountability to self and accountability to the team. Just think about the interviews that were aired during this most recent World Series. In fact, if you recorded the games go back and view them again. What you will hear, time and again, is a high performer crediting teammates for their personal success. If you stop and think about this for just a moment, it is a really striking development and testament to the fact that high performing athletes understand what Warren Buffett meant by the following statement.

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction” – Warren Buffett

So the secret to winning, whether a World Series of baseball or any campaign in business, revolves around one simple notion – the ability to hone and develop one’s personal skills and success, while at the same time helping others around you to succeed as well. This is an art that was formerly a fundamental part of the fabric of American business, which sports modeled itself after. Today, it all too often seems to be regarded as a nice, yet antiquated idea. This must change!

By the way, It is interesting to note that only two teams (one in professional baseball and another in college football) do not display player’s names on their jerseys. Can you name them?

To Leaders and Managers

Great managers like Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry, or Joe Girardi create cultures where high expectation and a high degree of accountability is the accepted norm. These leaders also understand that all interactions need to form a two-way street of accountability. At times in our business, leaders unwittingly discount their own value by allowing communications and accountabilities with their “team” to become a one way process; always heading in the leader/manager’s direction. Of course agents provide productivity and hence dollars to the company and no one could ever dispute the critical nature of that contribution. But leaders are equally critical in this mix. After all, it is the leader who;

1. Creates a sound culture
2. Coaches agents to higher levels of productivity
3. Uncovers opportunities in the marketplace
4. Distributes company leads equitably
5. Helps in the negotiation of transactions
6. Provides marketing guidance, and
7. A myriad of other things that have value to agents and company alike.

In Summary

It is time we all realize how much we all truly need one another. It is time for all of us to understand how inextricably we are all connected with each other’s success. This applies to agent teams, the entire collection of agents within a brokerage or our entire industry for that matter. Given the pressures we face from organizations outside our industry who continue to wedge their way into our relationship with consumers, let the valuable words of Henry Ford serve as an anthem for how we can win every World Series of real estate.

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success”

The past several months have flown by like weeks, and our brand has come to life in so many different ways. For all of us, to launch a real estate brand from start to finish was a new experience. Fortunately, when you put the entire team together, we collectively had the right combination of experience, intelligence, energy, youth, appetite for risk, aversion to risk, creativity and guts. That part was no accident. I chose very carefully who would best be suited to create an international real estate brand like no other.

As a team. we challenged and continue to challenge ourselves and each other to ensure everything we create remains in sync with our core business values and brand promise. All of the team members have taken themselves far outside their comfort zone during this process, and everyone continues to have the opportunity to challenge the status quo by exploring areas few others have been allowed to go. Personally, I knew from the beginning it was going to be like this, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Some of the things I obsessed about over the past several months included yard signs, avatars, scented candles, search engine functionality, website design, branded bags, our growth plan, business cards, our vision, party invitations, grass, Web 2.0, our blog, the list could go on forever.

We ate a lot of pizza and jellybeans. We drank too much coffee and Diet Coke. Our Blackberries buzzed 24 hours a day with messages from our extended team members from California, Des Moines, Washington, Toronto, Boston, New York and, of course, Parsippany. We came in on weekends, we stayed late into the night, we arrived early in the morning. We took the red-eye back from broker meetings to be in the office in time for the next meeting. We baked Better Homes and Gardens® recipes for prospective brokers. We laughed at ourselves, we worried, and sometimes got upset (but not very often). Some of us pulled all-nighters. A lot of people stepped up to the plate to help in ways I never would have imagined.

The thank you list is long and deserves a blog post of its own. Each and every person contributed in their own unique way. It is not uncommon to feel an emptiness after you have worked hard on something that has finally come to fruition. Events like a wedding, a big party, a conference… once the event has taken place you wish it wasn’t over. The difference for all of us involved in the launch of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate is that this really is just the beginning.

In the weeks, months and years to come we will affiliate with many brokerage companies, we will continue to enhance our tools, our technology, and our services. We will add to our team. We will strive to exceed consumers’ expectations, as well as our brokers and their agents. We will listen. We will research. Our job isn’t over with the launch, it has really just begun.

Tomorrow, we begin our media quiet period. You will still hear from us, but we won’t talk about ourselves, the launch, or the brand until July 23rd. On that day, we will unveil what we have been working on for the past nine short months. Stay tuned… something we are very proud of is about to be born.

You might think I am going to write about great technology applications as they relate to “the real estate brand of the future,” and I will… but not in this post. Technology will continue to empower both the consumer and agent by allowing for more transparency and greater efficiencies, and the tools will continue to become more sophisticated in the months and years to come. All of this excites me, but without the right people (as in team) in place, it all falls flat.

One of the most exciting things for me about building BH&G Real Estate from scratch is having the opportunity to put a best-in-industry team in place – believe me, there is nothing more powerful. And if early feedback is any indication, we are off to an outstanding start! One of the key prerequisites to be considered for the team is a keen passion and desire to build a service offering from scratch that embodies the needs of broker owners, agents and consumers, that takes the best of what we have today and marries it with what the future should look like. It is one of those funny things… you either get it or you don’t.

Wendy Forsythe gets it… with the opportunity to become employee #2, this talented executive packed up and moved from Canada to develop and launch our broker and agent tools, career development programs and a nation wide recruiting platform. All of this designed to bring the highest production and productivity from agents and brokers alike. Wendy and I used to work together in our previous lives, as I like to say, and I guess our time together had just begun… we simply picked up where we left off several years ago.

Nicolai Kolding gets it too… after heading up Realogy’s merger and acquisition team for several years, Nicolai decided to put his strong financial abilities to use in an operational environment. In fact I received a late night “we need to talk” ping from Nic while he was travelling on Realogy business in China – he was interested in joining the BHG team and is now putting a plan in place to service brokers using strong financial benchmarking. I couldn’t think of a better choice as COO of this new exciting brand.

Kevin Doell gets it big time. He applied for his position as Senior Director of PR and Communications by presenting a serious pitch on a concept he refers to as “Project Cool” otherwise known as our green initiative, which quickly becoming a major force behind what BH&G stands for. As it turns out, he is a pretty serious video editor, a very good writer, and passionate about PR. A unique skill-set to say the least!

Meet these talented individuals and get to know them as they comment on this blog on issues and topics they are passionate about. You will begin to feel the power of our team…

It is a lot of hard work launching a new real estate brand, but with the right people in place it is more fun than you can imagine! Stay tuned…