Building a team is a challenging and dynamic effort

It may be possible to keep everyone long term, but it’s not likely. When you add your first team member it’s not exactly rocket surgery. The question of who is wearing what hats (who is responsible for which role) is pretty straight forward. You do what you do and give the rest to the assistant. Hats/roles are pretty easy. From the beginning though, roles on your team are something that you want to put some thought to define roles in workflows for your team. 

If your long term plan is to add more than one more person, you’ll want to define your roles up front.

This will of course keep you on track whether your business is on paper or you are using a CRM. The issue here is that if you use a CRM that enables roles, it’s much easier to deal with personnel changes and procedural changes.

When you use a CRM to organize your business, the better ones have the ability to create Activity Plans or Workflows. These plans or workflows consist of any number of individual activities!. Each activity has the option of assigning it to someone. The purpose is that when you start the activity plan, those activities are assigned to each person automatically and added to their to-do list. They are the only activities that person will see on their to-do list. Everyone on your team knows what they have to do as soon as that plan is launched. 

If you assign all of the tasks to your assistant by name, what happens if that person leaves?
You have to go back to all of those activities and re-assign them to the new person.

When you are creating these plans, some of the CRMs have the option of assigning those activities to a role in lieu of assigning them to an individual. This is huge! Consider that you may have only one assistant and they are doing all of your listing and closing admin. Then you hire another person. Now you’ll probably have one be the listing and marketing coordinator, and the other would be the transaction coordinator. Let’s say you have all of the tasks for both assigned to Judy. Since you now have two people splitting those tasks, you would need to go back through all of the activities and re-assign some of them to the new person, John. If you have several activity plans/workflows of 50 or more activities, that’s a lot of work.

Alternatively, if you create your activity plans/workflows with the roles in mind, you can assign each activity to a role such as Listing Coordinator or Transaction Coordinator. This way, while you are still a two person team, you would still start the activity plans, but the plans would be assigned to roles. When you start it, it asks you who the Marketing Coordinator is, and you tell it it’s Judy. When you hire John and it asks you who the Transaction Coordinator is, you select John. No need to re-assign anything. You’ve already established that John will be the Transaction Coordinator and you’ve assigned the activities to the appropriate roles. If you create all of your activity plans/workflows with roles from the start, you’ll never have to go back and re-assign everything.

Without doing a live demo what I’m saying here could be difficult to understand. If your plans include developing a team, let me help! Free half hour call here!