Don’t forget where you make your money
So you think it’s time to grow your company up and out. It’s only natural that you add more support staff and more offices. Maybe it’s even time to think about dabbling in some auxiliary businesses. After all, that’s how you grow, right?
To Shapiro, that’s where you start down the path to bloat. WEA has one focus: high-end sales. Everything else is overhead.
“We specifically targeted a market, understanding our goal was not to grow and open multiple offices like a Coldwell Banker or Prudential but deal in one specific market, which is a high-end,” he says. “We realize that we’re not going to have offices with hundreds of people; we’d rather have offices that specialize in the market we wanted to capture.”
Shapiro understands that there is money to be made by putting his hand in escrow and other businesses, but once you start mixing businesses, you’re compromising your core success.
“The other thing that (the large companies) did, they got into auxiliary businesses, they got into escrow, they got into title, they got into lending,” he says. “The commission became less important to them and what they did was force-feed the agents the necessity, ‘You have to make your deal through our escrow company, you need to write our title company, you need our loan company.’ To me, that’s just wrong. If you’re selling somebody a house for $20 million, that’s where you make your money. … When you’re transacting numbers like we do, that’s your primary focus, not your secondary focus.”
To Shapiro, it’s more about keeping his company’s focus tight. You can have higher returns with experts making you No. 1 in one field than by having thousands of employees muddling through several businesses.
A smaller, narrowly focused staff also helps with the next piece of advice Shapiro can extend: Stay nimble and you can excel through technology.
“Another problem of large companies is that when they make a technology change they are doing it for thousands of people, so they’re reluctant to do it,” he says. “And they also put it off because they know that whatever changes they make today, that technology will be less expensive in a year, so why don’t we wait a year, not understanding that in a year there is going to be newer technology.”
From the first generation of BlackBerrys to current phones that turn office voice mails into e-mails, WEA spends top dollar to make sure agents are in touch with clients. Spending on technology creates a more productive employee and can cut overhead costs on extra time and people saddled by old technology.
“We want our people to be available at all times,” Shapiro says. “It has changed the business that when somebody e-mails me, I immediately respond to them. Their conclusion is that they are very important to me.”
