By Carla Cross

It's been said that, when you clean your own house (even when you have another profession), you are a housekeeper. Fair enough. But, if you also sell real estate, wouldn't your time be better spent finding, working with, and selling homes to clients than cleaning your home? It's a pretty easy ‘sell' for us salespeople to hire a housekeeper. It saves us time, energy, and frees us to do more sales or spend more time with our families. It's a harder ‘sell' for us to hire an assistant. Yet, it's the same thought process, isn't it?

I Might Be Buying ‘Trouble'
Everyone tells us to hire an assistant (or several) to increase our income and buy time. Then, why don't more agents hire assistants to leverage themselves?

• Agents are afraid to take on more expenses
• They've seen other agents hire assistants and create a ‘revolving door' of failed assistants
• They don't have time or expertise to train them.

Yet, if you could hire an assistant at $15 per hour, and do your $100 (or more) per hour work more frequently, that would be a good business decision, wouldn't it?

How—and Why--Agents Make These Mistakes
When I was the vice-president of a large real estate company I created a series of courses in how to hire and train an assistant. As part of the course series, I invited top agents with assistants to be panel members. Boy, did I open a can of worms! I found that many agents belonged to the ‘assistant a month' club! Well, it really wasn't quite that bad, but almost that bad. Here are the three major mistakes these agents made (and most agents make), resulting in a ‘revolving door' of assistants:

• Agents didn't choose an assistant based on job description, job responsibilities, behavioral profile, or systematic selection approach. They just ‘winged it'.
• Agents didn't train the assistant; they expected the assistant to figure it out as they went. In many cases, the agents weren't trained trainers or coaches themselves, so they had no skill in organizing and implementing a linear training program. They didn't know how to consult an assistant to better performance and greater teamwork.
• Agents didn't have systems in place for the assistant to plug into; they expected the assistants to create the systems—to ‘organize' the agents (in your dreams . . .).

What Skills Do You Have To Hire?
Have you hired assistants or staff in another field before you entered real estate? Most real estate professionals don't have that experience. So, they just find someone and hope for the best. In the next newsletter, we'll tell you how to avoid that mistake. In the meantime, start looking for books, courses, and consulting to get the expertise and skill you must have to interview properly.

What Skills Do You Have To Train?
Have you taken a "Train the Trainer" course? Do you know how people learn? Most agents don't have the skills to train. So, they hand their assistants a list and say "do these things and I'll see you tomorrow." The assistant retorts, "I don't know how to do these things." The agent answers, "That's what I hired you for . . ." It's a vicious circle, and the only one who can stop that going in circles is the hiring agent. In future publications I'll show you the simple, yet effective training cycle to train your assistant.

What Processes And Systems Do You Have In Place?
I have a friend who wants to hire an assistant to ‘organize him'. He thinks that an assistant will be able to create all the processes and systems necessary to run his real estate team effectively. From setting up my own real estate seminar business (from scratch!), and hiring assistants to help me run it, I learned that's not the way it works! I also learned that's not the way it works when I taught people to play the piano. That would be like expecting you to read the music I've put in front of you to play that piece on the piano—when you can't read music yet!

Carla Cross, speaker, trainer and author, has had the good fortune to learn effective teaching techniques from the best. She is a master Certified Real Estate Broker (CRB) national instructor. Her passion is to assist owners and managers in conquering the challenges of managing in today's real estate world. Copyright© 2004, Carla Cross. All rights reserved. For information, contact the Frog Pond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email susie@frogpond.com; http://www.frogpond.com.