WELCOME

Hi and welcome! I am typing this in a bathing suit because every year, I take my team away for a few days. Yes, we get away to talk business, but over the course of a few days of sitting on the beach together, something much more important happens.

Today, I’m talking about why I believe going on retreat with your team may be one of the best investments you can make in your business. Because a great retreat isn’t really about planning next year’s numbers. It’s about finding out whether the people helping you build the business are also building lives they actually want—and whether you’ve created the kind of place they want to come back to when the retreat is over.

STORYTIME WITH GLENNDA

The Art of the Retreat

Hello from the beach! I’ve spent the last few days here with some of the women I love most in the world. Technically, we’re here for work because this is our annual team retreat. That means we’ve packed our swimsuits AND our laptops. We’re here to comb through the numbers and talk at length about what worked this year and what didn’t in terms of clients. However, we’ve also segued into topics like the profound unfairness of not yet having seen Taylor’s wedding dress. Plus, we’ve made decisions on where we want to go next.

What’s funny is that if y’all asked me what the most important thing we accomplished here was, I’m not sure any of it would entail real estate. (And that’s not because the dress chat got heated.) Something happens when you pull people out of the place where they normally work together. Even if you’re having the same exact conversation, there’s an inherent transformation when you sit in Adirondack chairs on a bluff instead of across a conference table. When we go on retreat, we talk about the business for two hours and then spend the rest of the day chatting about everything else.

It’s my experience that when we remove ourselves from the day to day, something magical happens. Eventually, people start telling me things they don’t think to say in the office. They tell me what they’re worried about or what they want. They’ll tell me what I did that worked, and if I’m lucky, they tell me what I did that was really weird that one time and didn’t work at all.

I’ve been doing team retreats for years. I feel like they’ve changed because my idea of leadership has changed. When I first built a team, I wasn’t thinking “big picture.” I didn’t have my mind wrapped around the business book topics of “culture” or “retention.” My needs were much more basic because I was pregnant with Lucas. My thought process was, Hey, I need help, so I’m going to hire some people to help me. We didn’t even really call ourselves a team because we were just a bunch of people trying to get a lot of work done together… except that’s exactly what a team is!

It wasn’t until I hired a business coach that I started to understand that if I wanted to build something that lasts, occasionally I’ve got to remove us from the daily grind to see what we’re actually building. New vista = new perspective. Our retreats started small and we’d stay in Atlanta. We’d maybe go to lunch, have dinner, and hit the spa. We’d spend a morning talking about what we wanted to accomplish the following year. These were good, but they weren’t enough.

THE SHIFT

Over time, though, the retreats became less about setting goals and more about asking better questions. What I mean by this is that one of the biggest shifts happened when we finally had enough business coming in. We realized that we could stop asking, “How do we get more?” and start asking, “Do we even want more of this?” This is a small shift with a major impact.

On these retreats, my Diamond Squad began going through our transactions for the year. We rated them from one to five stars, with one important rule: we cannot give anything a three. Three is where you hide when you don’t want to make a decision. I wanted to know what we loved and what we hated. Which clients would we work with again tomorrow? Which transactions made us want to throw ourselves into traffic? What made the good ones good and the bad ones miserable?

That exercise taught us something incredibly important: not all business is good business. Growth for the sake of growth isn’t always commensurate with success. If somebody was a one- or a two-star transaction, why the hell were we spending the next ten years marketing to them? Why were we trying to create more of an experience we didn’t enjoy the first damn time?

Instead of constantly asking how to get more business, we started asking how to get more of the business we actually want.

ROI, SURE, BUT WHAT ABOUT ROH?

That thinking eventually led me to something I care about even more than ROI: it’s ROH—return on happiness. Of course we look at the numbers on these retreats. There’s a good bit of data analysis during these days. We look at the technology we bought and whether anybody actually used it. We parse what we spent money on and whether it made us money. But I also want to know whether something made our lives better. So, when we discuss, we go through a litany of questions:

Did it make the job easier?
Did it make us happier?
Did it give us more time?
Did it make us better at the parts of real estate we actually enjoy?

Listen, I want my team to make as much money as they can doing work they like while still having a life they love outside of work. That matters to me because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that you can’t build a sustainable business around being miserable. If you enjoy something, you’re going to keep doing it… and you’re probably going to get better at it. And you’re a whole lot less likely to wake up one morning and wonder why you’ve sacrificed your entire life for a job you hate.

That’s why I don’t believe our retreats should be three straight days of sitting around a conference table with a whiteboard. No, ma’am. When we’re on retreat, we work hard for about two hours every day, and I mean we work. We focus, make decisions, and talk about what needs to change. And then… we shut it down. We go to the beach. We eat, laugh, we dance. We get to spend time together, uninterrupted. Nobody has to keep one eye on their computer, worrying about a contract or a showing or whether or not somebody’s appraisal came in. We just get to be in the flow of it all.

NON-COMPETE

I’d argue that some of the most valuable work happens after the work stops. That’s when I learn what my people need from me. I want to talk about their families and their relationships and their lives. I need them to be in a place where I can ask, “If you could build this job any way you wanted, what would it look like?” It’s also when they’re comfortable enough to tell me where I screwed up because even though it’s hard, I want to hear it. I need to hear it.

I’ve never believed in making my team compete with one another. Other team leaders have told me, “Glennda, you have to have a leaderboard.” They love to tell me that competition makes agents hungry and that turnover is healthy because new people bring fresh energy. Maybe that works for them, but it’s never been what I wanted to build.
The minute I make two women on my team compete against each other, I risk turning an ally into an adversary. Oh, my stars, I’d so much rather have them know that the woman sitting beside them has their back.

Information and burdens should be shared. I want each of them to be able to step in when somebody else’s life falls apart, because eventually everybody’s life falls apart. If I’ve learned anything over the last five years, it’s that sometimes the greatest accomplishment of a team is simply that everybody made it through. Between all of us, we’ve faced death, divorce, and disaster. But through all of it, we kept going. We took care of each other and of our clients. Now, yes, somebody could look at a spreadsheet and tell me our volume didn’t grow enough or our GCI should have increased more over those years, but I think that misses the entire point. We made it through five years that I’m not sure any one of us could have made it through alone.

I consider that an extraordinary return on investment.

My Diamond Squad isn’t just women who work for me. They’re the people I do life with. When I think about what I want to accomplish coming out of a retreat like this, it isn’t just a bigger number at the bottom of a spreadsheet. My aim is to create a business where they know they’re valued, where they have every confidence that their lives matter, and where the relationships we’ve built are everything.

THE TOASTER CONUNDRUM

One of our biggest goals coming out of this retreat is to make sure our clients feel like they’re our everything, because they are. Years ago I worked at a bank. Back then, banks used to give people gifts for opening new accounts. One day our manager was making a huge fuss over a new customer and presenting him with a shiny new a toaster. One of our longtime customers, Mr. Tillman, watched the whole thing with more than a modicum of disgust.

You see, Mr. Tillman had more money in that bank than I had ever seen in my life, but no one was making a fuss over him. Instead, the manager was falling all over someone who’d opened a savings account with a hundred dollars. Mr. Tillman pointed out something I’ve carried with me ever since: This fuss over who’s new and not who’s true is how you lose the customers you already have.

I didn’t get what Mr. Tillman was saying at first. I go, “Mr. Tillman, I have an extra toaster and I’m happy to give you one.”

He told me, “Glennda, do not miss out on the lesson I’m teaching you.”

You see, Mr. Tillman did not need a toaster. That wasn’t the point. The point was that we were falling all over ourselves to celebrate the person who had just arrived while barely acknowledging the person who had trusted us with his swimming pool full of money for years. Every business needs new customers, but sometimes we become so obsessed with acquisition that we forget to love the people who have already chosen us.

So that’s one of our big takeaways this year: Let’s stop giving all the toasters to the new clients. We need to think about how we love on the people who’ve already trusted us, referred us, hired us, and helped build this business. We need to make sure the client who’s been with us for ten years feels every bit as important as the one who signed a listing agreement this morning.

THE LESSON

Maybe that’s what these retreats really do for me. They remind me that the business is never just the business. The numbers matter, but the numbers aren’t the reason people stay, whether we’re talking about employees or clients. People stay where they feel seen, valued, and cared for.

I want my team to leave this retreat knowing that I love them, I appreciate them, and that I have their backs. I want them to know this isn’t Glennda Baker and a bunch of people who work for her. This is the Diamond Squad and every facet of us sparkles in unison. I want that same philosophy to extend to every client we serve, so nobody ever thinks they have to get Glennda or they won’t get the same level of care. The standard belongs to all of us.

I started doing these retreats because somebody said they were a good way to plan the business. All these years later, I keep doing them because they remind me what the business is for. We work hard and we make money, but that success doesn’t mean jack if the people beside us are miserable while we’re doing it.

The highest level of business isn’t business. It’s building a life you actually want to live, with people you actually want to live it with.

So, every once in a while, you’ve to get out of the office, put your feet in the sand, and make sure that’s still what you’re building.

@glenndabaker

The girls on my team aren’t just colleagues, their family! #GlenndaBaker #RealEstate #AtlantaRealEstate #TheDiamondSquad #GoogleGlennda #glenndatok

Today’s Words of Wisdom

GLENNDA BAKER & ASSOCIATES

Future-Proof

If you’ve been waiting for the price to meet the moment, why, here it is! We’ve just reduced the price on 232 Arpeggio Way in Alpharetta.

I invite y’all to look at what you’re getting for your money: a gated end-unit townhome in Overture at Encore with four bedrooms, three and a half baths, fresh flooring throughout, multiple balconies, a private fenced patio, a huge third-floor flex space, resort-style community amenities—and an elevator serving every single level! That last part matters, because this is a home you can buy for the life you have today and still love decades from now. Add the zero-entry shower, stepless front entrance, smart-home features, chef’s kitchen and location minutes from Avalon, downtown Alpharetta and 400, and this is an enormous amount of house, convenience and future-proofing at the new price. Somebody is going to recognize the value here… it might as well be you!