The danger of being a Deal Junkie forever.

CRE Success Principle: If your team always escalates difficult negotiations to you, they're not developing capability, they're developing dependency.

Commercial real estate principals often tell themselves that spending more time on the tools will drive business growth. And that's true, but only if the majority of that time is spent finding new opportunities and working on large deals.

One of the biggest mistakes I see agency owners make is confusing transaction management with revenue-generating activity.

The Find, Mind and Grind Framework

I often use the Find, Mind and Grind framework to explain where work happens in a commercial real estate business.

Find is winning the business through prospecting, relationship building, and securing listings.

Mind is managing the listing once it's won, including client communication, inspections, transaction oversight and negotiations.

Grind is the administrative execution: paperwork, research, compliance, and coordination.

The problem occurs when principals spend too much time minding and grinding instead of finding.

Why Principals Get Pulled Back into Deals

Sometimes there is nobody else available to handle the work.

Sometimes they believe they’ll achieve a better outcome if they're involved.

And sometimes it's something deeper.

Many experienced commercial real estate principals genuinely enjoy the challenge of a deal. Negotiating terms, solving problems, and navigating complexity are skills we've spent years developing. Being in the middle of a transaction feels familiar and rewarding.

But that can become a growth constraint.

Build a Business That Doesn't Need You in Every Deal

The most scalable agencies separate finding, minding, and grinding across different people.

That allows principals to focus on winning opportunities while developing capability throughout the team.

If you want your business to grow beyond its current ceiling, start by asking where your time is really going.

We explore this in much more detail in episode 277 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. Listen to the episode and consider whether you're spending enough time finding, or whether you've become trapped in minding and grinding.

Episode transcript:

Picture this.

One of your agents is mid-negotiation on a deal. It's not your deal; it's their deal, their client, their listing. It was theirs from the start. And somewhere along the way, you ended up in it.

Maybe they came to you with a question. Maybe you overheard something and you couldn't help yourself. Maybe you just picked up the phone because you knew exactly what to say to the person at the other end.

Either way, you're in the deal now, suggesting key terms, reviewing the wording, maybe even making the calls about the deal yourself.

And it probably worked out well. The deal moved forward because you got involved, and that's usually how it goes.

But there's a question worth asking: Was that the best use of your time, or was it just the most natural thing for you to do in the moment?

If you've been spending more time on the tools lately and you're still finding yourself deep in deals, both your own and your team's, today's episode was made for you.

This is episode 277 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name is Darren Krakowiak. I'll be your host today, and I'm helping commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can run without them, so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

Now, if you heard episode 276 last week, you'll know that we talked about the split between running the business and being on the tools, right? On the tools, meaning you're listing and selling.

And why getting more of your time onto the tools is one of the highest-leverage moves a principal who's facing a revenue plateau can make.

But here's the thing that I didn't say in that episode, because this is a different conversation.

Getting more time on the tools only helps if you are spending that time on the right thing. Because being on the tools doesn't automatically mean that you're finding new business.

A lot of principals are genuinely, legitimately doing deals and still not significantly growing their revenue because most of that on-tool time is going somewhere other than finding new opportunities that will contribute to the growth of the business.

Specifically, it's going to managing transactions that have already been won and doing the paperwork and admin that comes with those deals.

Work that matters. Work that needs to be done. But work that doesn't require the input of the commercial real estate principal.

And that every hour it consumes is an hour not spent growing the business.

So, let's start with your own deals, the ones that you've found yourself.

I want you to consider why, even once you've won the business, why are you the one  who's still managing the negotiation, chasing the paperwork, and following up with solicitors.

Usually, there are two reasons.

The first one is fairly simple. There's nobody else doing it, right?

If there's no one else in your business whose job it is to manage a deal once it's underway, of course it falls back on you.

You found it. You know the client. It feels natural to stay across it all the way through to completion.

The second reason is less about the structure of the business and more about your beliefs.

You genuinely think that you'll get a better outcome for the client and for the business if you stay involved.

And honestly, you're often right about that, because in the moment, your experience does produce better results on individual deals.

But that's a short-term win that costs you long-term gain.

Every hour that you're spending managing a listing that's already been won is an hour that you're not spending finding the next one.

The business doesn't need you to get the best possible outcome on every single transaction.

The business needs you finding the next 10 transactions.

And there is a third reason, and it's one most principals don't say out loud because it's less about logic and more about internal identity.

Some commercial real estate principals just can't help but get involved in the deal. Not because there's no one else around to do it, and not even purely because they believe it gets a better outcome when they're involved.

They get involved because being deeply in the detail of a transaction, the negotiation, the terms, the back and forth, is part of how they experience being good at their job.

It's a kind of deal-junkie pattern, and I want to be careful about how I describe it because it isn't a character flaw. It comes from genuine excellence.

You've spent years becoming the most effective agent in your patch.

You know more about the market than any of your direct competitors when it comes to handling negotiations, how to close a gap between two parties, and how to spot the thing in the contract that everyone else missed.

That's valuable and real knowledge.

But it also means that stepping back from a deal can feel like a loss.

Not a loss of revenue, but a loss of something that's more personal.

Being in the deal is where you feel most like yourself, most competent, most useful.

It's really familiar, and no amount of knowing intellectually that your time is better spent finding the next deal can fully override that pull.

If any of that sounds familiar, I want you to hear this clearly: Recognizing the pattern is the first step to managing it.

You don't have to stop caring about deals, but it is important to notice the moment you're being drawn in.

And when that's happening, ask yourself whether you're adding value to the business that it needs from you right now, or whether you're just somewhere you find satisfying to be.

Now, here's the part that surprises a lot of commercial real estate principals when I bring it up.

It's not just your own deals. A lot of principals are also minding and grinding deals that belong to their team.

And this happens for all the same reasons, plus one more that I've highlighted in a recent episode.

The team has learned over time that escalating to you works.

If something gets complicated, if a negotiation stalls, if a client gets difficult, they bring it to you because you'll solve it, and because that's simply how it's always worked in your business.

Combine that with your own pull towards the deal, the same deal-junkie instinct that shows up in your own transactions, and you'll end up not just available for these moments, but actively drawn into them.

Reviewing one of your agent's contracts before they've even asked you to.

Sitting in on a negotiation that was never yours to handle.

Taking over a difficult client conversation because you know you can resolve it faster.

And every time that happens, two things get reinforced.

Your team learns, again, that they don't need to develop the skill to handle it themselves because you will.

And you're spending more of your precious time on the tools, minding and grinding deals that were never yours to mind and grind in the first place.

Now, there's a way that I think about this that changes how you structure a sales and leasing team, not just how you manage your own time.

Find, mind, and grind.

I've mentioned this concept a few times on the podcast, such as in episode 160, and we'll put a link to that one in the show notes so you can go back and have a listen to it.

But let me spend a moment just to recap what find, mind, and grind is.

Find is winning the business: prospecting, relationship building, getting in front of opportunities before they're competitive.

This is the principal's job when they're on the tools.

It's also the job of any agent who is genuinely good at bringing in new listings.

The finding is best done by someone with genuine relationships and skin in the game, and I think it's really hard to outsource the trust that makes it effective.

The minding is managing the listing once it's been won: the negotiations, the client communication, the judgment calls that come up along the way.

Now, this is important work, and it needs someone capable of doing it, but it does not need to be the person who found the listing.

A senior agent, an associate, someone who's developing into the role, can mind a deal as well as, or even better than, the person who found it, because minding requires attentiveness and follow-through more than it requires the original relationship.

And then there's the grind part of find, mind, and grind.

This is the execution work that is primarily desk-bound.

So, it's documents, it's research, it's data entry, it's chasing solicitors, it's getting the file in order.

It's necessary work, and it's work that does not require seniority or relationships to do it well. It just requires diligence.

Here's what that means in practice on both fronts we've talked about today.

On your own deals, once you've found the business, hand the minding and the grinding to someone else in your team.

And, to be clear, the person doing the minding can be different from the person who's doing the grinding.

Stay close enough to know when it's in good hands, but resist the pull to do it yourself.

On your team's deals, when something gets complicated and they bring it to you, ask yourself first whether this is genuinely something only you can solve or whether it's an opportunity for them to develop the capability to mind the deal themselves with your guidance rather than with your direct involvement.

The businesses that can grow past this ceiling are the ones where find, mind, and grind are genuinely separated, not just in theory, but in who actually is doing that work deal after deal after deal.

So, here's the thing that I want to leave you with today.

If you took something away from our last episode and you've already started to free up more of your time for working on the tools because that is what you like to do and that is what drives revenue growth in your business, good.

That's real progress.

But reallocating that time away from working on the business to working in the business only pays off if the time goes to the finding part of find, mind, and grind.

And for most principals, without a deliberate structure around the mind and the grind, and without recognizing when they're acting like a Deal Junkie, that time quietly gets eaten by the same patterns as before, just with more hours available for them to eat into.

The shift that tends to matter most for commercial real estate principals that I work with is realizing that staying deeply involved in every deal isn't generosity, and it isn't even good business.

Sometimes it's just the thing that feels most like you.

And the business grows when you can tell the difference, and you can build a team that can mind and grind without you on your deals and on deals that others find for your business.

Now, if you want to think through what that structure looks like specifically in your business with the people that you have in the park right now, who should be minding, who should be grinding, and maybe even who should be doing a bit more of the finding to take some pressure off you, and you want to notice how your own pull back into the detail is maybe drifting you away from finding into minding and grinding, find me on LinkedIn, Darren Krakowiak.

Send me a message and just tell me a bit about where things are. I'll get back to you personally, and we can have a more detailed conversation if you'd like to.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.