Reaping The Benefits Of Building An Authority Business

There’s a reason we invest serious effort in building our authority: we want to spend more time serving our niche (at top tier prices) and less time selling.

For an illustrative second, let’s take a look at real estate agents.

The National Association of Realtors proudly reported a 5% jump in the number of U.S. agents to almost 1.5 million in 2020.

The only problem? At the end of February 2021, there were only slightly more than a million homes for sale. No matter how you do the math, that means a whole lotta agents are selling a whole lotta nothing.

And yet, like in any profession, there is the top of the heap—the super agents. They’re the ones commanding multiple pricey listings and a sub team of agents working on their deals.

They’re raking in plenty of clients and commissions because they’ve positioned themselves as authorities.

They’re not so worried about limited housing stock because they’re getting first look at the deals and often being chosen without competition.

All that’s to say that even in a tight market—especially in a tight market—those with real authority outperform everyone else. And we’re not talking about a few bucks either, but by 5-10x—or even more.

The downside for realtors is that they’re stuck with their geography. Sure, they can niche down to a specialty—say baby boomers downsizing or tricky co-op deals—but ultimately they are tied to a local market 100% beyond their control.

We have it waaaaaaaaay better than even high-end realtors.

We can make geography irrelevant by digging into a niche that has nothing to do with where we—or our ideal clients—actually live and work.

We can work virtually if not 100% of the time, then certainly a hefty percentage. We aren’t tied to showing properties and walking through open houses.

We aren’t locked into an industry standard payment (6% of purchase) that makes the only alternative pricing option to discount our fees. Because we can tie our services to value, we can literally build a business without upper limits.

We don’t feel like we’re playing a zero sum game. By focusing on client outcomes vs. competing for a transaction, we aren’t thinking about competition—all our attention is on our clients and buyers.

We can collaborate. We don’t have to hire a pyramid of people (although we can), we can simply build a set of relationships with those we need to do great work (like designers need developers).

The bottom line here is that we have so many benefits to reap from building an authority business—there’s no excuse for burning another hour of daylight.

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