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Thad Wong hosts company meetings about eight times a year. “The no. 1 thing we’ve started doing now is we have a section of the meeting focused on disruptors,” he explained.
For example: Redfin. @properties spent the meeting examining why Redfin is successful, discussing Redfin’s rebates, demystifying their value proposition and then connecting the dots between how they operate and how the disrupter does.
This way, he added, he can use the same language that the disrupter does when discussing business with a potential client. Agents can talk to the clients who are interested in discounts using terminology they understand.
Wong also has his top producers tell their stories about how they got started and scaled their businesses up — which serves both to inspire current agents and reconnect his top producers with other agents. For those meetings, he noted, the room is almost always silent.
Katie Maxwell of Intero Real Estate works with mostly millennial agents. She hosts one meeting a week — but they’re short, sweet and to the point.
“I can’t get all of them there every single week,” she said, “but my top producers come every single week.”
You’ve got to come up with different ideas, Maxwell suggested. She invited agent spouses to one meeting to talk about what it’s like to be married to a real estate agent — and said it helped her get that much closer to the domestic partners who are important to her agents.
“It’s very important that people get something out of it,” she said. If agents commit to coming, you should be ready to provide them with something useful.
Jim Garmin of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Go Realty said most of his agents attend his monthly meetings — and if agents don’t feel like they might have missed something at the meeting, then you’re making a mistake.
“We believe that people come to things because you ask them to,” he said. Not because of emails, evites, Facebook groups — his agents are individually asked by their team leaders whether they’ll come to the meeting.
And Garmin mentioned that he tries to keep meetings authentic. If a piece of software or project didn’t work out — own it. He said his millennial agents in particular are grateful for this attitude.