Intro: Welcome to the B- word, the podcast for women who wanna unlock the clarity needed to put your big girl panties on and rock your real estate career like the true boss You are. I'm Joanne Bolt, your host, and together we'll dive into the things your broker doesn't teach you in order to own your own truth, disown the things getting in your way to finding your place, and stop apologizing for the obstacles you have to overcome along the way.

Joanne Bolt: Welcome back everybody. It is quick tip Thursday, and I am going to answer a question that popped into my dms over the weekend that I found very, very interesting. Kandy in Georgia, said, "Joanne, I am starting a team. I've got three buyers agents and I am looking to hire an administrative assistant.

I already have a transaction coordinator, but we feel that the team probably needs a full-time admin. Here's my question, would you hire an admin and let them do business as well?"

Now, this one's really interesting to me guys because it is, it's, it's always a big debate when people start a team and they start looking to hire that first admin.

And what I counsel agents that are running teams on doing is this, you need to focus and acknowledge the difference between allowing your administrative assistant to do real estate deals or expecting your administrative assistant to do real estate deals. A good admin is probably a CS on the disk profile. They are probably not actually a good salesperson. And so when we have teams and we have admins and we expect them to also convert clients and close some deals,

we are actually setting themselves up for failure and our team up for failure in that role. And why are we setting them up for failure is because you are actually asking an administrative assistant whose strengths are probably your weaknesses, and whose lane that they need to drive in is really driving efficiencies in the team, running the systems and making sure that everything is just flowing smoothly.

You're asking them to be a salesperson, which is not their natural habitat. And a lot of team owners get very confused on this because they feel that, oh, they, because they've been agents themselves for so long, they equate everything they do with the gross commission income and they really have a hard time seeing that. A really good admin actually will bring in about three times what their salary is because they're not actually closing deals.

And when we don't watch them close deals, we have to pay attention to other metrics to make sure that they're producing enough revenue incoming activities that will create worth and value on the team. Would I say that they should bring in about three times what their salary is? What they're actually doing is creating efficiencies. They're creating systems, they're creating things on the team that allow the actual agents who are closing deals to close enough more deals that it covers their income.

And when we expect them to close deals, we are putting a burden on them that really pulls them away from doing their primary task, which is creating the efficiencies in the systems. However, I will say a perk that you can provide your administrative assistant is to allow them to do the occasional deal. When I was running my production team, my administrative assistant really understood her role.

Katie is still with me to this day. She still does everything that I need her to do, but occasionally, yes, she knows how to write a contract. She knows what it takes to be a good agent because she sees all the contracts that come through our team. And so occasionally when her friend wants to buy a home, she handles it.

Or when her neighbor wants to sell their home, she handles it. I allow her to do deals as a perk, as being part of my operations team, and as a perk, she gets to do them just to add a little bit of extra income into her financial world, but she doesn't have the burden of always trying to find one or two deals a month.

That is a role and a burden for the sales team, not your admin. So Kandy, what I would say to you is always look at how you're hiring. Are you hiring correctly? Are you looking at someone who really fits the disk profile of an admin or do you have an agent who has asked you to be an admin because they need extra income to supplement their sales agent role?

An agent who is asking to do administrative stuff in order to supplement their sales role is not the right admin. And I am so sorry, not sorry to tell you that because if you've got someone who is wanting to add in an admin salary to supplement, it means that they are not fully focused on either role. And if you get them good and trained in the admin role and what they really wanna be is a salesperson, the minute that the finances start flowing again on the sales side, now you're gonna be retraining and rehiring an admin. So when you're looking at whether your admin can produce real estate and close deals, just really look at the person you know, are they moving from being a salesperson into an admin role because they've discovered that that's a better fit for them? Or are you just trying to find an admin and you like someone who's on your sales team and you wanna shift them into the admin role?

Kandy, thanks for submitting your question. I hope that this gave you a little bit of insight as to whether you should allow your admin to do deals or not. It ultimately is really up to you as the boss to make that decision.