WELCOME

Y’all, I’ve been sitting on some pretty big news, and I can finally tell you: I wrote a book!

It’s called Arrive Unknown & Leave Unforgettable: The Untold Story Behind Real Estate’s Most Recognized Voice, and I can hardly believe I’m typing those words. This book’s about everything I’ve learned about walking into a room, owning who you are, connecting with people, and making sure they remember you long after you’ve left. In other words, it’s about the thing I’ve been doing my whole life without realizing there was a name for it. And now it’s a whole dang book!

I’ll be sharing a whole lot more about Arrive in the weeks to come, but today I want to talk about something that happened when my team and I got away for our annual beach retreat. I went there thinking we were going to figure out what worked this year, what didn’t and how we were going to tackle Q4. While we did all that, I came home having learned things about my business, my team and even myself that I absolutely did not see coming.

Turns out, sometimes the most important thing a leader can do isn’t have all the answers. Sometimes you just have to shut your mouth long enough to hear what your people have been trying to tell you.

STORYTIME WITH GLENNDA

The Question I Never Thought I’d Hear

Every year, my team and I go on retreat before we head into the final stretch of the year. We get away from it all so we can talk about the business, what worked, what didn’t, where the holes are, and what everybody wants next. This year, my biggest takeaway happened before we even got to the beach house. We were in the car coming from the airport when Evelyn asked me how much longer I planned to do this.

At first, I thought she was joking. Turns out, she wasn’t.

Evelyn told me that I work so hard and so much that she was worried about how long I could possibly want to keep doing it. Underneath that question was a much bigger one: If Glennda decides she’s done with real estate, what happens to us? Oh, my stars, I was floored. This literally knocked me for a loop because the experience of my life is almost exactly the opposite. I don’t feel trapped by real estate; real estate is what’s given me real freedom. I mean, I don’t report to anybody and I don’t have a boss breathing down my neck, reviewing my performance or deciding whether I get a raise. I 100% control my own destiny.

I think what prompted her question was because she knew that I was still working at 10:00 pm on Friday night. But what she didn’t see is because I put in that time on Friday, I was able to go to my grandson’s soccer game at 10:30 on Saturday morning and entirely focus on him. I can arrange my schedule around the people I love and that’s invaluable to me. So I looked at Evelyn and said, “We just flew first class to spend four days at a beach house, where we’re going to talk about real estate for an hour or two a day and then sit on the beach. You’re worried I’m going to stop doing this?” To me, this isn’t a job I’m fixing to retire from. This is a life by design.

However, what mattered was that Evelyn didn’t know that. I’d failed to make that clear to her, and if we hadn’t created the time and space for this conversation, I might never have known she was worried about what was never going to happen. I promise y’all, by the time we left Thursday, she wasn’t worried anymore. When we got on that plane to go hope, she was excited about real estate again. That alone made the retreat worthwhile.

You Have to Make It Safe Enough to Share the Truth

Our open and honest conversation is a perfect example of why we go away. If you want people to tell you what they really think, you can’t simply announce that you have an open-door policy and expect that honesty to just come pouring through it. You’ve got to create an environment where honesty is actually safe. For us, that meant establishing the rules up front: no judgment, no bullshit, no repercussions. Everyone’s marching orders were:

Tell me how you feel about the transactions.
Tell me how you feel about the team.
Tell me how you feel about the brokerage.
Tell me who drove you crazy.
And, in a perfect world, tell me what you’d want.

The important part is what happens afterward because I can’t invite people to be honest and then weaponize that honesty two weeks later. If somebody tells me something vulnerable on the retreat, the last thing I can do is to throw it back at them the next time I disagree. That’s just dirty pool.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my own life is to trade expectations for acceptance. Stop expecting other people to think like me, work like me, parent like me or want what I’d want. My own marching orders are to accept who they actually are and start there.

I’ve also learned to ask a very simple question and it works everywhere, whether you’re talking to your kids, your spouse, your friends, or your team. The magic words are: Are you looking to vent, or are you looking for advice? Because those are two entirely different conversations. Leaders (and moms and partners and friends) get themselves into trouble when they assume every problem they hear is a problem they’ve been asked to solve.

My job at the retreat was to listen long enough to figure out two things: Where are the gaps in our business, and where does each person on my team want to go? Because if I don’t know what they’re working toward, I’m employing target-practice leadership. Maybe someone wants to pay off her house. Maybe she wants to put her children through college, build an investment portfolio, accumulate cash or stop selling houses altogether in ten years. My goal is to create a runway that gets her where she wants to go, not where I’ve decided she should go.

The Transaction Is the People

When we started reviewing the year’s transactions, I asked everybody to look at the best ones and the worst ones. I expected to learn something about pricing, properties, negotiations or clients. What surprised me was that the answer was people.
Elizabeth mentioned one transaction where she loved the clients but described the deal itself as a nightmare. That stopped me. How could both things be true?

Well, it could be true because the lender was a GD nightmare. Another transaction had a terrible attorney. In a different case, the problem might have been the appraiser or the co-op agent. I realized we’d been evaluating transactions with far too narrow a criterion. We were looking at whether we liked the buyer or seller when a transaction is actually an ecosystem of people. So we started over.

Now we’re looking at everybody involved: the client, the other agent, the lender, the attorney, the appraiser. Who made the transaction better? Who made it harder? Who would we happily work with again? Who do we need to remember before we find ourselves sitting across a closing table from them another time? After 34 years and thousands of transactions, that was a genuine revelation for me. The house may be the asset being transferred, but people determine the experience.

The Best Business Was Already in Front of Us

Then we found something else that knocked me for a loop: Our best-quality transactions came from past clients and our sphere of influence. When we looked back at the year, there wasn’t a nightmare transaction that came directly from a past client or someone in our sphere. The one referral deal that went badly went badly because of the builder, not the client. That hit me because of how much time and money this industry spends trying to find strangers.

Think about all that we do to get new business: we make videos. We do social media. We’re in these streets sending postcards and knocking on doors, all while we’re fretting about Google. And now in the age of AI, we’re worrying about whether ChatGPT recommends us. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on coaching specifically to learn how to show up better in AI search. Do y’all know what happened with my last three listing appointments that found me through ChatGPT? All three wanted discounted commissions. And, all three wanted to list higher than I recommended. (Not a little bit higher, like cartoonishly higher, I’m talking 40% higher.) And wouldn’t y’all know it, all three ultimately listed with somebody else, whether it was a friend, a relative, or an agent with far less experience in that particular market. Turns out, they wanted free expertise and had no intention of hiring us.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean I’m abandoning marketing or AI. Rather, it’s that the retreat illuminated where my highest-quality business has always come from: relationships. So I’m putting serious energy into my database and finally investing in the CRM infrastructure to support it. I went with GoHighLevel, which my coach described as the Rolls-Royce of CRMs. I figured, Why buy the Yugo when I already know I’m going to want the Rolls-Royce?

What Q4 Looks Like From Here

So, what does all of this mean for the last quarter of the year? First, I’m not building our strategy around interest rates. Understand this, people buy and sell real estate 365 days a year because life happens 365 days a year. It’s deaths and divorces and diapers. It’s that somebody is sitting in 8,000 square feet they can no longer maintain, while someone desperately needs all that space.

I have never believed that an interest-rate change by itself is the deciding factor in most of those moments. What concerns me more is the current level of uncertainty. When people feel real financial instability—when groceries are stretching the household budget and they don’t know what comes next—that can affect the decisions they’re willing to make. But I’m not going to run this business waiting for the perfect interest rate, because life doesn’t wait for one either.

More importantly, Q4 is going to be about implementing what I heard at the beach. I’d say 75% of my focus will be on creating the best possible environment for my team to succeed and 25% will be on my own listings and sales. Because letting people talk for four days can make them feel heard. The proof that I actually heard them is what changes when we get home. We’ve spent the last four or five years feeling like we were constantly catching up, chasing our tails and trying to keep our heads above water. This retreat felt different. For the first time in a long time, I left thinking, This is going to be a good year.

That realization gave me the overwhelming feeling of freedom. I realize that I don’t have to be the answer to every problem. I don’t have to impose my goals on everybody else. I don’t have to control every outcome or predict what interest rates are going to do. What I need to do is to listen carefully, put the right people around the transaction, take care of the relationships we’ve already earned and create a path for the people on my team to build the lives they actually want.

If I can do that in Q4, I’m not just trying to finish this year strong. I’m building the runway for an incredible Q1.

Today’s Words of Wisdom

GLENNDA BAKER & ASSOCIATES

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