 Are you trying to figure out if you want to be a single agent or join a team? Keep watching. I want you to know that this is my life. This is real. Relationships are universal. What's up everybody? Ricky Karuth here. Welcome back to my channel. Man, what an incredible journey has been on YouTube so far. Thank you guys so much for all the love and support. I appreciate you so much. Today's video I want to talk about team versus single agent. Okay, this is the age-old battle here, the age-old debate. So I wanted to discuss this. I've made videos in the past, okay, but I wanted to bring it back up and talk about it a little more. Go a little deeper with it, if you will. Do me a favor before I get started and click that like button. Click the subscribe button if you have not already and shoot me a comment. Let me know if you have any questions outside of this video or any comments about this video or anything else I can do for you. So this subject got brought up on a live stream on Instagram the other day. Okay, they were asking me about single agent versus team and it was actual team leader that brought this up. And the question was, Ricky, how do I coach my agents that's on my team and at the same time keep my production going at the level that I want? This is an incredible question. I love this question and it's a debatable subject. It's a debatable topic for sure. Okay, there's a lot of people that believe one way or the other. All right, it's kind of a polarizing kind of question here, but I'm a single agent. Okay, I always have been. I tried to do a team one time, once upon a time. It was 2012 or so. I went through about 20 agents, I believe. Maybe it was 12. I think it was 12 agents over the course of about a year and a half. And I finally just called it quits and went back to being a single agent, went all in on my clients, went all in on focusing on my sales and my assistant and me and my assistant working as a team to sell as much property and help as many people as we can. And the same reason why I decided to go back to being a single agent is the same answer to this question. It's really extremely difficult coaching agents on a day to day basis that are there physically with you and maintain your sales that you had going as a single agent with no distractions, with no agents asking you questions, with no agents, you know, trying to figure this and figure that out, coming to you for every little thing, you know, training sessions, all the things that go into being a team leader. My answer was this, you can't really do both. Okay, if you're going to be a team leader and you're going to build this big team, now you're moving out of the sales role into a management type role. Okay, where now you're managing people, you're not really concentrating on sales. Sure, you're going to continue to do sales, but you have to realize your sales are going to go down. Okay, you have to sacrifice some of your sales in order to help your team grow. And that's what's really difficult for a lot of agents that try to do a team. That's what was really difficult for me. Right, even now at this point in my career, all right, I've learned a lot about team building. Okay, when I did my team, I was not really in the right mindset. I didn't really understand how the whole team dynamic works. And I didn't set expectations the way that they should be with the people I was bringing on to my team. And that's a big reason why it didn't work. It wasn't that team doesn't work or having a team or whatever doesn't work. It's the fact that I didn't do it right because I didn't know exactly what I was doing. Now I understand a lot more about it. Still not everything, but I'm a lot further along. And right now I'm to the point where I could build a really big team. I could set the expectations the way that they need to be with the people that come on my team. And I could have a very extremely successful team. But I still decide and make the choice not to do it. Okay, and it's because I know that my sales are going to suffer, right? And who knows, maybe I could create a team and make even more money. Not sure if I agree with that or not. That's another debatable topic for sure. Because I mean, in my market, I make more than all the team leaders, right? My personal income is more than all the team leaders. So, you know, I'm not saying that you couldn't do it. I'm not saying that other markets, right? There's other markets that do it, that make more than me. So on and so forth. But at the end of the day, I just, I love sales. And I think at some point you have to decide, do I want to be a salesperson? Do I want to deal with the clients? Do I want to, do I want to, you know, fill those highs of the sale and helping the people and closing the deal, going through all the emotions that are involved in a deal? Or do I want to be more of a manager, right? And manage people and build my business that way. And I think it's just really a personal choice that you have to make. Which direction do you want to go? Now, I'm doing over a million dollars GCI per year. Okay, single agent. My net is a lot more, right? Because I don't really spend a lot on marketing because my business is very, very efficient. Efficiency is the key to everything to me. And I feel like team, right? The way the teams are, it's not very efficient. Okay? Because in today's world, I believe most team leaders, I would say 90% or more of team leaders are buying leads to feed their agents. Okay? And that's not an efficient way to build your business. Right? I think that if, as a team, they would just get red X and just call property owners. Because what happens is the team leader buys a bunch of Zillow leads, and then they have the agents under them call the leads, right? They probably set a time and then they have all these leads coming in or they have this long list of leads. And then they set these times for the agents to call the leads. Maybe they have an ISA or something, and they're calling all these leads. Okay, these are inefficient leads. They're the lowest quality leads that you could possibly have. Why not spend those hours and hours and hours and hours calling the highest quality prospects that are out there available for you. Right? If you have red X and you have Geo-leadge, you can look up every property owner in the entire area, right? Cell phone numbers and everything. You can filter DNC if that's what you want to do. I call them, but that's another story. I'll link my video about that below. But why not call the most efficiently it's possible and have an ISA just calling property owners one after another instead of spinning your wheels and all these buyer leads that are really expensive, that are really low quality. You hear what I'm saying? That's all a completely different subject. The way I would build a team, if I were to build a team right now, is I would set expectations with those agents coming on. Okay, I would understand that my personal sales are going to drop. Okay, it's going to take me a long time to get back to the same income. I wouldn't buy leads at all. I would have them calling the most efficient, most effective leads possible, which are property owners that own the type of property that you want to sell. And all the team is really is a bunch of single agents that are crushing it. You know what I mean? That's why I say to team leaders, look, here's my coaching program, but you're a single agent, Ricky. We're a team. Yeah, but if your team members, if the agents under you understand the principles that I'm talking about as a single agent, you're going to crush it much more. And by the way, it's free and I'll do a free Zoom call with your whole team, right? And anybody watching this, if you want to do a Zoom call with me, I'll do one with your office. I'll do one with your team. Just DM me, email me, put a comment below and let's set it up. So I know I was rambling a lot in this video, went a lot of different directions about team versus single agents. I hope you got a lot out of it. At the end of the day, it's your decision, right? It's your choice, either way you win. Okay, it doesn't matter because if you go the team route and then you decide that's not for you and you go back to single agent, you still win because you made that, now you know for sure, right? You made that mistake. You learn from it. And now you understand a little bit more about how to be efficient. Okay, on the flip side, if you go single agent for a while, right, and you're crushing, crushing, crushing, crushing, and then you realize, you know what? I feel like I'm working too hard. I want to build a team. Okay, that's where a lot of people get in trouble is when they feel like the team is going to help them step away from the business, right? Or work less or not have to put so much effort in. That's where people get into a lot of trouble. Okay, and this is where I think the team concept is, you know, missing a few, you know, links because you're actually more than likely going to be working even harder, right? Making less money. So think about that really hard. Think about what I'm saying. Reach out with questions and let me help you through this. If it's a big decision for you, I'm here for you. Reach out and let me know. But like I said, I hope this video helps you in some way. Click that like button, click that subscribe button, let me know what I can do for you, and I'll see you on the next video. Let's go.