The Best Consultants Don't Give You More Ideas. They Focus on the Right Ones.
I've been asked more than once what makes a consulting relationship worthwhile. It's a fair question because many successful agents have worked with a coach or consultant at some point in their careers and walked away wondering whether they really received enough value to justify the investment.
I don't think that happens because coaching or consulting doesn't work. Quite the opposite. Brokerage companies have invested heavily in coaching, training and consulting resources for their agents. Many of them are excellent. Outside coaches can be equally valuable. The problem usually isn't the quality of the advice.
The problem is that successful people are rarely suffering from a lack of advice.
One top-producing team comes to mind. They were doing everything right. They attended every coaching session their brokerage offered. They hired an outside coach because they wanted another perspective. They went to conferences, read the books and genuinely tried to implement what they learned. After a while, though, they became frustrated.
The brokerage was asking them to focus on one set of priorities. Their outside coach had another list of recommendations. None of the advice was bad. In fact, most of it was quite good. But over time they found themselves trying to satisfy two different playbooks while continuing to run one of the most successful businesses in their market. They weren't lacking ideas, they were drowning in them.
When we sat down together, we spent little time talking about what they should add to the business. Instead, we looked carefully at what was already producing exceptional results. That changed the conversation almost immediately.
Instead of searching for the next strategy, we focused on the things they already did exceptionally well. Those strengths had helped build the business in the first place, and they were still the greatest opportunity for future growth. We also looked honestly at the projects that consumed time without producing meaningful results. Some initiatives were worth keeping. Others had simply accumulated over the years because every new idea sounded like a good idea at the time.
By the end of our conversations, we hadn't created a longer to-do list. We had made the existing one much shorter.
That experience isn't unique.
Over the years, I found that many top-producing agents are not looking for another source of ideas. They are looking for someone who can help them decide which ideas deserved their attention and which ones could be set aside.
A consultant shouldn't feel obligated to justify every meeting by introducing another marketing strategy, another technology platform or another project. Sometimes the greatest value comes from helping a client recognize that they're already doing enough, and that their next stage of growth will come from executing a few important things exceptionally well rather than twenty things reasonably well.
I've always believed that successful consulting is less about providing answers than providing perspective.
As a brokerage executive, I have had a unique vantage point. I wasn't responsible for coaching one team, I was watching hundreds of successful businesses grow at the same time. That made it easier to see patterns. Teams that looked completely different on the surface often struggled with remarkably similar issues. Just as importantly, teams with identical production numbers often needed completely different solutions. That's why I've never believed in a one-size-fits-all approach to consulting.
One of the advantages of spending years around top-producing agents is that you stop assuming the first problem is the real problem. A conversation that begins with recruiting often ends with organizational structure. A discussion about marketing may turn into one about leadership or accountability. The longer I worked with successful teams, the less interested I became in the presenting problem and the more interested I became in understanding the business behind it.
That's why I've never believed in prescribing the same solution to every client.
Every business deserves to be understood before it can be advised.
I've come to believe that the best consultants don't create value by giving successful people more work to do.
They create value by helping successful people become more intentional about the work they're already doing well. Sometimes that means introducing a new idea. Just as often, it means having the confidence to say, "You're already doing enough. Let's decide what deserves your attention and let the rest go."
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The Hard Decision: It's Time to Let Someone Go – Sometimes the most important leadership decisions aren't about adding people, but making difficult organizational choices.
Choosing the Right Coach: What Growing Agents Should Look For – How to determine whether a coaching relationship is helping your business move forward or simply adding another voice.
