Business Standards Help Agents Grow Professionally—and Personally

©Luis Alvarez - Getty Images

More than seven decades ago, CENTURY 21 Curran & Oberski embraced the idea that company leadership has a significant impact on delivering experiences to their sales professionals and their agent’s clients, directly correlating with the company’s profitability and longevity.

Since 2017, when my name was placed alongside the iconic Robert Curran brand, our focus on experiences has served as a differentiator and brand builder for our team. The relationships that we build with our people, and the image we present to the community, not only separates us from the competition, but more importantly, it helps drive a constant pipeline of leads and favorable word of mouth and industry-best reviews on social media from home buyers, sellers, and property investors throughout Michigan.

Our team’s collective mindset is focused on “dressing for success” in proper business attire and prioritizing our overall personal health—from a physical, mental, and financial perspective. These business standards define our family-oriented culture in all four offices. It fosters a place that 250 relentless sales professionals and 30 staff are proud to call “home.”

For us, relationships begin the day our brokerage and the agent decide we have a mutually agreeable future together. We start by asking new agents personal questions like, “What are your health goals? Family goals? How do you see yourself? How do you want other people to perceive you?”

Then we have them answer business-oriented questions like, “How do you want to be perceived professionally? How do you want to run your business? What did you do last year, and what worked? Where did the business truly come from?” We have our team members write down their answers on an index card and suggest they carry it in their wallets.

From there, we discuss our “why” at the company, but we discuss it from the agent’s perspective. Because, at the end of the day, we want to help them succeed at the highest level possible. If they do, the result is a lasting relationship and business success for all involved.

We know having these standards will turn off some agents. But these are exercises we’ve done at CENTURY 21 Curran & Oberski for a long time. Once we go through them, we find that agents better understand what they do well and what they need to lean into. It’s a daily focus that they must move towards every day until they become the person they decided they wanted to be on the index cards.

The idea is not simply to maintain Robert Curran’s and the company’s legacy for delivering extraordinary service to their agents and to their clients but to elevate it. Our reputation for helping our family of agents grow as people and as professionals is and always will be our number one priority. It’s certainly good for us, but more importantly, it’s best for them and the communities that we all serve.