The three pillars of a scalable commercial real estate agency.

CRE Success Principle: When you can identify where the problem in your agency exists, you can stop treating symptoms and start working on what is holding the business back.

After hundreds of conversations with commercial real estate principals, I’ve noticed a pattern.

Almost every business problem in a commercial agency sits in one of three buckets: pipeline, people or process.

If you want to build a business that can operate without depending on you, these are the areas worth examining.

1. Pipeline

Pipeline is not simply about generating leads. It has three parts: generating opportunities, qualifying them and converting them.

That means using multiple sources of opportunity, including outbound prospecting, referrals, existing databases and inbound enquiries.

Just as importantly, you need to know which opportunities are worth pursuing and where deals are getting stuck.

2. People

People is all about hiring, developing and retaining your team.

Recruitment should be proactive rather than something you only think about when a vacancy appears.

Development requires a consistent one-on-one rhythm, not occasional conversations.

Retention depends heavily on culture, leadership and whether people understand the direction of the business.

3. Process

A process should not only exist inside someone's head; if only one person knows how something gets done, the business has a dependency risk, rather than a repeatable process.

Clear responsibilities, accountability and documented systems make the business more resilient.

Increasingly, AI-enabled software can also improve how efficiently work gets done.

Pipeline, people and process. If one of these is holding your agency back, that's where the work starts.

Listen to episode 283 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for the full breakdown and prepare for the upcoming deep dives into each pillar in our next three episodes.

Episode transcript:

After hundreds of conversations with commercial real estate principals around Australia about what's going on in their business, I've noticed a pattern.

Almost every problem, no matter how it's described to me first, ends up belonging under one of three categories: pipeline, people, process.

And that's where almost everything needs to be worked on in your business belongs.

So today I want to give you a proper look at all three, because over the next few episodes, we're going deep on each one.

Welcome to episode 283 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name is Darren Krakowiak. I help 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.

If you've been listening to the podcast over the past couple of months, you'll have noticed that we've had a run of episodes where we've been talking about identity and beliefs.

What it means to be a commercial real estate principal rather than just a senior agent, why freedom and performance compound instead of being a trade-off, the mindset shifts that need to happen before growth becomes possible.

I hope that you found these episodes genuinely useful, and I've received some feedback from listeners that they've resonated with them personally, which is great.

But I think now it's time to get a bit more practical, because knowing who you need to be does not automatically tell you what you need to be focused on.

And I want to spend the next few episodes on the actual, tangible, buildable things that separate a commercial real estate agency that's thriving from one that's stuck.

Not beliefs. I want to talk more about systems.

So today, I'm introducing three areas: pipeline, people, process.

And then over the next few episodes, we're going to go deep into each one of those with real, specific, practical content that you can actually apply in your business.

So just a bit of an overview in today's episode, we'll start with ‘Pipeline’. And I want to correct something up front because I think some agents in your team might be getting this wrong.

‘Pipeline’ is not just about generating opportunities and not just about finding leads.

That's an important part of it, but pipeline is about three things working together: generating opportunities, qualifying them, and converting them through various stages.

Stages which require a range of different skills depending on where that opportunity is in your pipeline.

On generating leads, I think some agencies are focused on one channel when they should be focused on generating leads through many of them.

Outbound prospecting done consistently, persistently, and proactively targeted at the right people, not just with anyone who has a pulse.

Referrals, both from an individual agent's network and also from high-value referral partners who send quality opportunities on a consistent basis.

We want to be mining your existing database for more business. I think this is lower-hanging fruit that most agencies don't spend enough time on.

And also, we've got to be capturing inbound opportunities properly.

Inquiries that come from your current sales and leasing campaigns, from your social media content, through general inquiry, we've got to make sure we're catching them and converting them rather than just letting them slip through the cracks in the follow-up stages.

On qualifying, here's a thing that I think many people miss.

Not every lead is worth the same. Chasing every inquiry with equal intensity is how good agents burn through their best hours on opportunities that were never going to close.

Quality matters as much as quantity. And I've seen many agencies that don't have a deliberate process for telling the difference early enough.

And then on converting, this is really about what happens to an opportunity once we know it exists.

Most agencies know the stages of a pipeline, but they don't track where things are getting stuck.

An opportunity either closes or it quietly dies, and sometimes we, we don't really know why.

So, generate, qualify, convert.

That's pipeline properly understood, and we're going to go deep on all three of those next week.

The second pillar is ‘People’. And this one breaks into three parts, too: hiring, developing, and retaining.

On hiring, the biggest shift I try to get principals to make is thinking about recruitment the same way that they think about prospecting, and we talked about that in episode 278.

Consistent effort is required, not just reactive scrambling when we've got a vacancy that needs filling.

Part of that is what I call warehousing candidates. It just means to build relationships with a number of good quality people in the market before you have a role to offer them, so that when the time arrives that you need to start looking, you're not starting from zero.

On developing people, most principals think they're doing this because they occasionally have a conversation with people on their team.

What I see that actually works is something that is more specific. It's a genuine, consistent one-on-one rhythm. Not a status update. An uninterrupted in-depth conversation regularly is where development really happens.

Some principals either don't run one-on-ones at all, or they run them so inconsistently that they don't function as a development mechanism.

And just on retaining people, I think this comes down to a couple of main things. It's the culture of the business and the quality of the leader.

People stay where they feel like they're part of something that has some direction, some momentum, some purpose, and that means the principal's vision, whether they've actually communicated it and got real buy-in, matters more than most commercial real estate principals actually realize.

And sometimes that comes from a place of humility.

Actually, what you believe and where you want to take your business is extremely important to your people.

So, hire, develop, retain. We're going to go deep on all three, and specifically on the one-on-one as a development and retention mechanism in the episode that we do on people.

Now, the third pillar is ‘Process’, and this is one that I think most principals know is important, but they also just don't get around to doing something about it because they're so busy executing.

I reckon ‘Process’ is about three things. It's how tasks get done, it's who does them, and how efficiently that they're being completed.

On how tasks get done, the test is simple. If the way something gets done in your business only lives in someone's head, you don't have a process, you have a person.

And when that person is away, sick, or they leave, the business doesn't just lose that person, it loses the knowledge of how the work that they are responsible for gets done.

A real process is documented and able to be followed by another person stepping in. It belongs to the business, not the individual.

On who does it, this is about structure, clear reporting lines, clear division of responsibility and accountability.

When it's not clear who owns something, it either gets done by whoever has the least on their plate or it doesn't get done at all. We want to avoid that.

And just on how efficiently things are getting done, this is where things have genuinely changed over the past couple of years.

AI-enabled software is increasingly where the system actually lives. The tools available to businesses now can do things that used to require a person and a spreadsheet, and the agencies that have figured this out are the ones that have a real efficiency advantage over the ones that haven't.

So, who, how, and more efficiently, that's ‘Process’, and we'll go properly deep into it, including where AI genuinely changes what's possible in the process episode.

So, ‘Pipeline’, ‘People’, ‘Process’. Almost every problem that I see in a commercial real estate agency lives in one of those three places. It belongs in one of those three buckets.

And in the next few episodes, we're going to go into more detail on each one of those.

The next episode is on ‘Pipeline’, so generating, qualifying, and converting opportunities properly.

And after that, ‘People’, including the specific one-on-one approach that I show my clients so they can develop and retain their best people.

And ‘Process’, system, structure, and software that is genuinely changing what's possible when it comes to the productivity in a commercial real estate business.

Now, if one of those three areas is already on your mind as the thing that's holding your business back, why don't you send me a message on LinkedIn?

Find me, Darren Krakowiak. I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message and tell me which one it is and what you think the problem might be in your business, and I will get back to you personally.

For now, that's our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening. I will speak to you soon.