Page 88 - Social Media Marketing

68 Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman

student to help me after school and I paid her about $4 an hour.
Her schedule matched mine. If I had 18 hours of floor duty one
week, then she sat beside me for those 18 hours answering phones.
She gave my calls to me and took messages for everyone else. That
freed me up for what I did best-working with my clients. In ad-
dition, all the other agents in the office started receiving legible
messages.

Unfortunately, even though my young assistant answered the
phones and took messages better than just about everyone in the
office, some of the agents were still unhappy. They thought I was
just being a young hotshot. I learned two important lessons from
this: (1) You can't make everyone happy so don't try, and (2) When
you are innovative, praise does not always follow, but don't let that
hold you back. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and I can tell
you that the agents who complained the loudest eventually hired
their own assistants and became superstars!

Adding More and More

Over the years, my number of assistants grew. The last year I was a
salesperson for the Re/Max real estate organization (around 1990),
I had as many as seven assistants. There were 50 other salespeople
in that office, and none of them had even one assistant. All those
other salespeople knew I was the top producer by far, and they all
knew I had all these assistants helping me. Somehow, they never
put the two together.

Over the years, my organization grew to about 50 employees,
many of whom are in charge of managing tasks that I don't have
the time or energy to attend to. During my glory days as an agent, I
had two assistants helping me with listings, two more who focused
exclusively on buyers, and a closing department. I had people who
handled bookkeeping and public relations. I had assistants who
specialized in working with people in foreclosure. All these people
freed me up to work directly with buyers and sellers. As a result, I
could serve more clients better.