7 Lessons I Learned from 7 Years of Owning a Real Estate Brokerage

It is the seventh anniversary of CB&A Realtors. I want to talk to you about what I've learned in seven years. Hey, my name is Chance Brown. I'm the broker owner of CB&A Realtors, and I make video content for Realtors because I am passionate about helping them build their business. We've learned lots and lots of lessons over opening a brokerage. Trust me, this list could go on and on and on. We're going to do seven years, seven lessons. Lesson number one, be open and transparent in your communication. Nobody likes veiled communication. Nobody likes oh intrigue and what are they thinking? No. Just be clear with the people who you work with and what's going on and it makes life a whole whole lot easier. Number two is understand who you are. Like with me, what you see is what you get. I'm not putting a shirt and tie on unless I absolutely have to. It's the bane of my existence. I'm going to wear a polo shirt almost every single day. Are we right for everybody in the business? No.

And we're okay with that. If you're passionate about building a real estate business and you want to come work at CB&A, we have a place for you. But if you're looking for certain things, we may or may not have it, and that's fine. There's plenty enough for everybody, but we know who we are, and we're going to work to play to those strengths. Number three is making sure you're surrounded by the right people. That's at home. That's in your business. It's making sure you're surrounded by the right people because the right people move you forward. The wrong people hold you back. Now, does that mean that you're not going to make mistakes on that? You're going to make mistakes on that. And that's okay as long as you recognize it and move forward and grow because of those experiences. Which brings us to number four, which is owning the mistakes you make. I could sit here all day and list mistake after mistake that we've made over the last seven years and even beyond that because we were in business as a franchise for 5 years before this. We've made lots and lots of mistakes and I try my best to own every single one of them because two things.

Number one, people need to know that their leaders aren't perfect. It's important. Number two, it's at the end of the day my responsibility for the mistakes that happened. Even if I didn't make the mistake, even if it was one of the people that I relied on that made the mistake, at the end of the day, it's my responsibility. And number three, you're always going to make a mistake. And it's important that you acknowledge it so you can learn from it. Like, we've made personnel mistakes. We've made curriculum mistakes for our training program. We've made operational mistakes that have cost us money. We have made those mistakes. We take those mistakes and we make sure that moving forward hopefully we don't ever repeat them again, but that we've learned what we did wrong and we create better processes and systems because of that. Number five is doing the right thing. Anytime that I've ever made a decision that was based off of money or anything else, it's always turned out wrong. When we created a framework for decision- making around here, it's always putting our agents first and making sure that what we're doing we think is going to be the very best thing for our agents. Because if we do the right thing for them, we end up doing the right thing for us. That's super important. Same thing goes with you and your clients, with you and your team members, anything else that you have in your business. If you do the right thing for everybody else, trust me when I tell you, it'll come back to you and be the right thing for you as well.