Growing a Brokerage From 0 to 100 Agents in 5 Months

[Jonathan Forbes]

Life can be very unpredictable.

Something I could have never predicted was becoming a brokerage owner at an early start in my real estate career.

Being thrown into an unfamiliar industry, I was entrusted with managing brokerages in 3 different States and 1 Province. I built the structure and scaled these cloud brokerages starting from zero.

But of course, I wasn't alone. I had a fellow business partner who was the driving force and leader in executing this new venture.

We started out owning a Brokerage in Ontario, Canada our home Province and Country. We were able to collect referrals from our lead generation services that we did on the side. At the time we didn't prioritize Real Estate, but understood the Marketing systems and took advantage. Up until our venture was paused due to Covid, we then switched our focus completely on Real Estate.

We took everyone's feedback and expanded Operations into the United States, starting in Florida and Nevada, then Texas shortly after. Being that we had a small team based in Canada, we ensured all our operations were cost efficient and of most importantly, cloud based. This marked the start of our journey of being a North American-wide cloud-based brokerage.

This was not an easy task to execute. There was a lot of work in front of us and I took on the responsibilities for our internal procedures and workflows. This included our agent recruitment process, onboarding, cloud-based technology, online environment & culture, and our lead generation tactics, which I already had experience in.

This was A LOT to take on, especially with no experience, resources or tools out there to help. What was most shocking however, was the lack of resources available to help Real Estate Professionals with launching their own Brokerage and expanding their Realty Business.

Nonetheless, after trial and error I figured it out and was successful in building, implementing and managing these tasks. We surpassed our goals, rapidly recruiting in all our markets generating a consistent flow of agents. Additionally, I was able to hire and delegate some of my work to experts who were even better than me, building a team I couldn't be more proud of.

Our hard work took us to heights we never imagined, like reaching 100 agents in 5 months!

After seeing success at a small scale, we were ready to expand operations across the States, replicating the process I've built everywhere. However, life showed me once again how unpredictable it can be. Due to unforeseen internal issues with shareholders, the focus and funding towards scaling was halted. This resulted in my team and I losing out on the opportunity to scale the company to compete with eXp Realty as the number one cloud brokerage.

Additionally, this decision resulted in there being drastic layoffs, causing the team I built to be let go.

Given the relationships I've built and loving the work we did together, I decided to step away from my position within the Brokerages and keep my team together to pursue a new venture.

That's what brings me where I am today. Choosing my team over stability, I've decided to support Brokerages, Agents and Teams across North America.

We'll be taking our expertise, experience and tech to help other Brokerages, Agents and Teams. Whether it's with recruiting, implementing innovative tech, lead generation or building / optimizing a workflow structure, we'll be there.

This is something I wish I had access to when getting started and I believe is essential to have within the Real Estate Industry.

With it only being 2 months since we started, I'm blessed to say we've already had 4 clients sign on, officially starting my new chapter has officially begun!

Stay open minded, go with your gut and always give it your all!