The Ellis Posner Accountability Model
The “Accountability Model” is the bedrock of my business and what I teach.
Level One Accountability
If you are a full time working agent, your goal every week is to check off at least one of the following four action items:
ESCROW CLOSED
ESCROW OPENED
LISTING SIGNED
SUBMIT AN OFFER
That’s it. Very straight forward and simple.
But I’m going to guess that your initial response is like most people I initially share this with: “every week?”.
Yes, every week. Or at least 50 weeks out of the year because I really do want you to take some time off. Really.
Because I got so much push back from everyone not named “Ellis Posner” on this, over the the years I added two more levels and renamed the first 4 “Level One Accountability”.
Level Two Accountability
Every week check off two of the following 4:
LISTING APPOINTMENT
BUYER SHOWING
HOLD AN OPEN HOUSE
DOOR KNOCK / COLD CALL
The difference between Level One and Two is that:
Level One you have somewhat less control over.
Level Two you can do if you want to work in this business.
And, if you do enough Level Two activities, you will start to check the Level One boxes more frequently.
Level Three Accountability
But after I added Level Two, I still got some pushback so, yes, we went to Level Three. And as you might have guessed, you have to check three of the following boxes:
HAVE A REAL ESTATE DISCUSSION WITH SOMEONE IN YOUR SPHERE
POST SOMETHING ON YOUR BLOG OR SOCIAL MEDIA
PREVIEW PROPERTY
DO A VIDEO
I would strongly recommend that if you are not checking off Level One items, you can meet the requirement for both Level 2 and 3. Yes, every week.
This is not only how I have held myself accountable for years, but one of the main differences in my Coaching and Mentoring strategy. It is results oriented and measurable.
Here’s the background of how I developed this approach.
History of the Accountability Model
I have been in professional sales and management for over 40 years (yeah, I’m an old guy) in a number of different industries. I’ve also taught sales tactics and strategies and mentored other sales people, managers and executives along the way.
One thing that always surprised me about the Real Estate industry was how many people failed at it. And failed in a system that is far more set up to support agent success than is commonly believed. (But, that’s a whole other discussion.)
By “fail” I’m referring to have zero transactions in a year, not making enough money to get by or just get out of the business entirely within a few years of getting their license. By out of the business I mean they have no broker affiliation, are not paying their board dues, MLS access even if their license has not technically expired. It is a tough way to make a living, no doubt about that and I’m not going to tell you it isn’t.
There’s some obvious reasons for this such as just really not having the skill set or putting in the work and effort. But I’ve seen too many agents struggle who could have been successful if someone had just shared a few pointers along the way and helped them. And sometimes the difference really is just pointing someone in the right direction.
But what I have seen the industry teach is just out and out wrong. There’s a few reasons for this. One is that the changes over the past few years make a lot of traditional training obsolete. The second is that often the trainers and coaches agents are listening to and paying have themselves never even sold one property. I’m not kidding. Some of the biggest names in the coaching industry were never agents.
And then you have the ongoing basic conflict of interest that what is good for many brokerage businesses are practices that are not beneficial to agents.
The Two Biggest Challenges for Agents
Long Sales Cycle
Unstructured Work Environment
You might first engage a Buyer or Seller months and in some instance years before you transact with them. For many agents the sales cycle is quite long. And your sales may no come that frequently.
Most agents may sell 2-3 homes a year. Some don’t do any sales. In most offices if you are doing 10 plus deals a year you might be a top producer.
And, unless you are on a large team or working for one of the few brokerages with an employee not an independent contractor model, you control how you use or misuse your time.
So what became apparent to me, the longer that I looked at the problem of agent success was that what the industry was teaching was not “results oriented”. Here’s what I’m referring to.
Many coaches will encourage you to make 100 calls in a week (or a day), or knock on 100 doors or send out drip campaigns, or other activities that may not directly to getting paid. And if you don’t get paid, you are out of the business, plain and simple.
That’s why I developed the Accountability Model. It is “results oriented”.
A Results Oriented Approach
Rather than focus on activities, I am laser focused on results. I asked how do agents get paid? We close an escrow. That’s it. (Yes, you can also get paid a referral fee, sign a lease, or do a BPO.)
We get paid when escrows close. So I wrote that down as the first thing to measure. Ask myself every week, did I have an escrow close.
But that’s not much of a model so I also asked what leads to an escrow closing. How about opening an escrow? How do you get an escrow to open? What happens before an escrow is opened? You wrote an offer or signed a listing contract.
And that became my business plan and the accountability model which I held myself to for many years.
Every Sunday night I stood in front of the mirror, well not really in front of the mirror but you get what I mean, and asked myself if that week I did one of these four:
CLOSED AN ESCROW
OPENED ESCROW
SIGNED A LISTING
SUBMITTED AN OFFER
And just being focused on that - measurable results, I was able to create order out of the chaos of the unstructured environment and bring structure to the long sales cycles.
But I’m wired a little differently than others and when I started teaching this, the pushback I got was that it was too high a bar for many agents - especially new agents.
So if you are a brand new agent, in addition to implementing the measurements in Level Two and Three, you can adjust Level One to being quarterly during you first six months in the business and then monthly the second six months. Starting in your second year, you need to be on a weekly cycle.
The other group of agents who pushed back on the weekly Level One measurement were those fortunate few who really do high end luxury sales and have an even longer sales cycle than the rest of us. So, if your business is $5M plus or whatever the top 1% price point in your market is, and you have a track record of 3+ years selling in that range, yes you can make your measurement monthly. But here’s what I’ve found about the luxury agents in most markets. They not only sell at a higher price point, they do more transactions than average agents so weekly Level One accountability works for most of them.
I know that my accountability model works. I’ve taught it to many agents who have become successful - some more so than me. Try it or modify it but don’t ignore it