CWIRED Ep 8 _ Melissa Lewandowski - Marketing if Your Secret Weapon

Melissa Lewandowski brings a powerful blend of marketing expertise, operational insight, and leadership experience to this conversation—offering a behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to build and scale a successful real estate business. In this episode, she shares practical strategies for growth, the role authenticity plays in long-term success, and how women can step more confidently into leadership positions within the industry.

Through the lens of Canadian women in real estate, this conversation goes deeper—exploring how we can redefine success on our own terms, build businesses that align with our values, and create space for more women to rise, lead, and thrive.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If we look at the numbers, the numbers don't lie. The majority of real estate agents are female or identify as female, right? More than fifty-five, I think it's fifty-five to sixty percent of the population are women. But when you look at the leadership roles, whether that is a broker owner, a CEO, CFO, we do not have a place at the table. And you know, that that has to change. And that's that's over the the 30 years I've been in this. It has changed a little. You know, the needle is moving a little bit, but it's quite slow.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Welcome to the Canadian Women in Real Estate Foundation podcast. Sea Wired. This is where bold ideas, real talk, and inspiring women in real estate come together. If you are building a business, a legacy, or a life on your own terms, you're in the right place. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Seawired podcast, which is the Canadian Women in Real Estate. Today I am absolutely thrilled to have Meliska Melissa Lewandowski. Hopefully, I pronounce that properly. Um, founder of the Real Estate Source and Open House magazine here with us today. The real estate source is a consultancy firm providing hands-on advisory and fractional leadership across marketing, brands, and operations for real estate businesses across the country. With over 20 years of experience, Melissa has held senior roles with the Ontario Real Estate Association, Roy LaPage Canada, and has led marketing and communications for Caldwell Banker Canada. Today, Melissa works closely with brokerages and industry leaders to bring clarity, structure, and alignment to their business through customized, behind-the-scenes support designed to drive sustainable growth. Melissa is also the founder and editor of Open House Magazine, a platform dedicated to elevating the real estate industry in Canada through thoughtful content and diverse voices. Melissa, all I can say is wow, you bring a wealth of knowledge within the marketing and operational side of the real estate industry. And before we dive into the business side of what you have to offer, I would love for you to share with our audience a little bit about you and how that shaped how you see the world of real estate and your desire to help others.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me on, Carolyn. You know I love you so much. And I really appreciate being a part of the podcast. You know, my career in real estate has been an interesting one. Uh, I've seen it at all levels. I always joke and say, you know, I was born into real estate. I've been in it corporately. Actually, my anniversary just passed for 23 years. Wow. So working career-wise in the sector, specifically around marketing and comms. But I've been actually in the industry for 30 years. Um, my mom was a realtor. Oh. My mother was a realtor. Uh, it was a short-lived career. Unfortunately, my mother was fell ill and didn't pursue it too much. But I spent so much time because I worked in I worked the front desks, right? As all real estate agents do with their kids. Yeah. And it was in my blood. You know, I just fell in love with it. And I remembered I graduated from university, was meant to either be a lawyer or a marriage counselor. And those that's actually my educational background initially. And I went back to school um actually through AREA. Um, I got a we ended up landing a great role in the marketing team. I was on the wow, it really dates myself. I was the um one of the inaugural founding members of their marketing team. So it was myself and a marketing manager, and we kind of just grew that team. And I went back to school and I fell in love with real estate, right? Like real estate is a people industry. There's so much involved economics, statistics, it's numbers, as you name it, it's it's involved with what we do. And it brought together the love of marketing with this amazing field of real estate. And, you know, again, I I just I love real estate.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Well, thank you. And that's an interesting segue into it because, as you said, a lot of people that we know probably in our age category got into it. Either their parents were involved, um, they knew they had family members, friends, and it sort of gave them that itch, that bug to, you know, really get involved in this dynamic industry. It's interesting that now we are seeing realtors come into the industry in their 20s. That was not necessarily something that we saw, you know, back 20, 30 years ago. So I think that next generation sees the opportunity and um can also leverage some of their strength in technology and marrying that with sort of their social skills to build a very successful business.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

100%. 100%. And I'm very much a big proponent that real estate is not just real estate agents, right? Obviously, there's real estate agents and brokers, but it's so expansive. And to your point, Caroline, it's it's grown, right? Like we've got marketers, we've got this, we've got legal, we've got so much involved with real estate, and it it's just growing.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

It's just growing. Oh, absolutely. And as we look at this industry, I mean, a lot of us got into it because it is a dynamic industry, but when you look at the trajectory of it now, it truly is kind of being geared towards people who are more tech savvy. Um, relationships are always going to be front and center. But when you can marry technology, the back end with the people skills, that's really where we will see most of these businesses soar. So, question for you as a female entrepreneur leading in what was traditionally a more competitive and at times um rigid industry, what challenges have you faced and how have those experiences shaped the way you lead and advise your clients today?

SPEAKER_00 6:37

You know what? I mean, we're here for a reason, right? So C Wiries, Canadian women in real estate. And why do we have these groups? If we look at the numbers, the numbers don't lie, a majority of real estate agents are female or identify as female, right? More than 55, I think it's 55 to 60 percent of the population are women. But when you look at the leadership roles, whether that is a broker owner, a CEO, a CFO, we do not have a place at the table. And you know, that that has to change. And that's that's over the the 30 years I've been in this, it has changed a little. You know, the needle is moving a little bit, but it's quite slow. And you know, having been in C-suite roles and having sat at various tables, it's still challenging. Even when you get that seat, Caroline, you are always justifying who you are. You know, I've led some interesting projects, like I rebranded Aurea. I read a variety of like led national camp campaigns at Royal Page, one of the Kickstarters for Royal Royal Page's commercial division, real estate company, 100th year anniversary, you know, rebrand of Johnson and Daniel, rebrand across all verticals for Cole Banker, residential, commercial, and luxury, and yet always having to re-justify what I've done, how I've done it, you know, and raising my hand at the table, especially when we talk about brand, I've done a little bit of real estate branding, right? Like, but yet having to consistently to fight for my seat, right? And I think that's across the board for a lot of women.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Now, do you see that changing? Because this is one industry where I remember somebody asking me quite a few years ago with some award that I'd won within the industry, and they said, Do you feel like you are at a disadvantage as a woman in this industry? So tying into that last question. And when you think about it, realistically, we are at an advantage. Women in general, if you have the knowledge and the skill set of the industry you are in, but then you also have the compassionate side, realistically, that is where we are seeing more and more women getting into this industry and moving up the ranks. It is taking longer than we would like, but it is nice to see that we are starting to see some traction in that. Are you seeing that in the back end? And how has technology and the operations side really made a difference in moving forward the number of women who are sitting in those corner offices?

SPEAKER_00 9:16

That's such a great question, Caroline. Like honestly, I think it is moving forward. I think we are making movement again slower than we'd like. But again, groups like this allow us to have open conversations that this is what we're struggling with. This is the challenges that we have. I mean, our society has not built it to make it easy for us. And I'll give you a very specific example. So I have two young kids, as you know, I'm very proud mother, um, you know, mom first, but society has not made it easy. And I'm not just talking about moms, this is in general, right? Like what and I'm I'm speaking to the mom portion of it, but you could have a sick parent, you could be sick yourself. And what do you do in those situations, right? We we don't work, work is first and foremost. And it's challenging with you know, two young kids at home, they end school at 3:30. And I don't know what work day ends at 3:30.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

It's very, very rare if you're day exactly for men, and I think that's really where it is. As women entrepreneurs and as women realtors, we often wear more hats than the man who, you know, gets his lunch and leaves for work and comes home and dinner's ready. As working women, and especially as realtors, where you are on call and you do have a lot of moving pieces, you still have other responsibilities, whether that's children, aging parents, um, taking on a lot more of those responsibilities, which is, I guess, where the technology and the systems really come into play in helping agents, especially women, structure their day. So, one of the things that I found very interesting about your business is you offer fractional leadership services, um, which seems to be an emerging model in real estate these days. So, can you maybe break down what that looks like in practice and why brokerages, um, team leads, etc., are turning to fractional um CMOs, COOs instead of full-time hires?

SPEAKER_00 11:19

It's interesting, it's kind of going back to what you were saying about how technology is kind of coming in and it it allows for us to make our lives easier. But the challenge is as time has progressed, the expectation, I think, specifically on the brokers has gone up and the margins have shrunk. And you know, how do you pay to have a full-time marketer? Or uh if you have a situation where you do have a marketer, and God forbid that person is sick or takes a vacation. Having seen this from the corporate side, I saw I identified that as a gap. So the business has two sides. One, there's myself, obviously, from an advisory standpoint, come in and provide that support. But what is coupled with that and works really well is allowing us to now come in and we offer a variety of different services. So if you need someone, say, for example, your brokerage, suddenly someone gets sick. This is typically with an existing client. We can come in and and cover that, right? Then specifically from a marketing and operation standpoint. Right? Uh yeah, sorry. Go ahead, sorry. Well, and the and the reason I think it's becoming more and more popular is again, like, look at our economy, look what's going on. And when money is becoming tighter and tighter and tighter and that margin's, you know, diminishing. How can you afford to have someone on a regular basis? And this gives an alternative to having a, you know, a seasoned marketer like myself who has been around who can do a lot of that work or hire. So I do have a team, like I have fractional people on my team as well, who come in and say, okay, this is this is what, and every brokerage is different, and this is the interesting part of our industry. Every brokerage is different. You may have 15 people on your team, and you know, Bob has the same amount, but the two of you run your business very differently. You may be a uh a practicing broker where you're in the field, versus a managing broker may not be doing that. Well, you're gonna have two different requirements, right? You may need more because you don't have eyes, you're busy potentially selling as well. So this gives an alternative to to hiring someone full-time where you're paying benefits, your the expectation is to be seated at that desk. This kind of go goes away with the new style of quite frankly, how we're living life, right? Like we are now mostly remote, people are running around doing different things. We can do so much with a fractional person versus someone who's now dedicated to that one brokerage.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Right. So it's almost like um you are contracting out based on the task at hand rather than being committed to a company. So I know you do a lot of this with brokerages, but say, for instance, for your average, and I'm gonna say female realtor because obviously Canadian women in real estate is focused on the Canadian realtors. Um if you have if there was an agent who was really struggling, um, having growing pains, whether that was building out a team with their brand visibility, because as we know, I always say it's like the weird Waldo. When you look at the number of realtors in a specific market, we're dime a dozen, there are a lot of them. How do you differentiate yourself from the competition? How do you start building out that value within your community? So if you were to say um work with, say, a team leader or somebody who is looking at gaining more tractions, what are the first areas of their business you would evaluate? And what are some of the things that you are most often uncovering that they might need to work on?

SPEAKER_00 15:02

You know, I it it's a we have 160,000 agents across Canada. That's a massive amount of people, right? So how do you stick out? Like, how are you different than me? And it so often the challenge I see is people will always be looking at everybody else. And rather than looking inwards, who am I? Who's Melissa? Who's Caroline? How do I represent myself? And you know, wanting to be like someone else. And again, I'm not saying don't look at your competitor, but you really need to define who you are in terms of your values and what you are trying to bring to the table that is in fact different than some somebody else. Everyone can have the same SOPs and you know, you can build systems. Absolutely, and I'm hope you are building a system. So that's number one. I would look at their systems to see if they actually have built that. So that's from the operational standpoint. But really, it are you aligned? Are you aligned with what your goals are and what you're trying to accomplish? Whether you want to be, you know, the first-time home buyer. And again, I'm not saying that's the only client you can ever have, but if you are positioning yourself, how are you doing that? So it's your market position. So, number one, what do you look like to your exterior people? And if that's your goal, whether it's again, maybe it's to navigate, you know, someone who's an empty nester. Right? I live in Burlington now, and typically people are empty, there's a lot of empty nesters and then young families. And the young families are displacing the empty nesters who are perhaps downsizing. If that's your specialty and all of your marketing is just generic, you are not speaking to your target audience, right? So that's number one. Number two, have you defined your actual market position? And is your operation? So now this is an inwards uh look, have you defined it? And is your operations actually working to support what you've defined? And I will tell you 95% of the time the answer to that question is no, it is not working to do that. And then the last thing is how are you communicating that outwards? So, and not just outwards, also internally, right? And then we can talk a little bit about hires and staff, but yeah, you can communicate that outwards, and maybe you look beautiful and shiny on the outside, but internally, if your staff, if you have a revolving door, which again, very commonly why I get called in, is they have a revolving door, whether it is front desk staff, their marketer, their social media person, could even be their agents. Why are they leaving? Why are they not staying? So we look at those three different things and then we try to refocus the team lead or the broker owner into saying, Well, this is what you're trying to do. This is what you're trying to accomplish. You want to have a great team that specializes in, you know, the GTA or specializes in condos or specializes in in you know new investment, whatever the case may be, right? Like you are trying to do that, you've identified your target audience. Great. Well, let's move into the next step, which is creating operations that work. So, what is the system that if I report into this person, do I know that I have the autonomy to make a decision? I wish I was kidding. I have people who social media managers who have to have the broker approve every social post. That is really hard because social media is live and quick and constant, and you have to be posting and you have to you have to define up front, that means your systems are not in place, right? You haven't defined what that looks like.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

And it would run through every part of your business. So, what we always say is you want to be authentic. You know, understand your unique value proposition when you are sitting across the table from somebody at a listing presentation and they say, Why should I hire you? You should be able to immediately articulate the value you bring. And so this is where it's so critical that you understand your competition. Not so you ever bash them, not that you try to do what they're doing because what works for one agent is not necessarily going to work for the other. But you have to be able to speak to that. And as you said, then it goes right through who is your target audience. So if it's working with seniors, it doesn't make sense for you to be spending valuable resources on social media advertising where that when that is not where they are going to be. So understanding who your target audience is and what unique value proposition you bring to the table, then everything rolls out from there. And from there, you also start attracting the type of clients who want to work with you. You're gonna start attracting those agents that want to be on your team within your brokerage. So yeah, it goes right through from the very first thing is understanding what you are good at, where your focus is, and then from there, everything runs through it.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

100%. 100%. I mean, it just even if you look at, I'll use my own business as an example, right? When you're looking at me, I you see what I post about on social, right? So, yes, marketing, yes, operations, I talk about the business, but I talk also a lot about my kids. And it's a huge part of who I am as a human being. They may that I'm not saying everybody is like that, but for me, that is who I am. And I get a lot of people reaching out to me, whether it's about the kids, but the relatability as a parent, like, oh my gosh, I'm running here now and dance and this and that, soccer, and but they get it because that's their life too. So there's a little bit of a synergy there. So they may be more inclined to contact me because they know I get that they're they've got a wild schedule, right? Especially as a real estate agent or a broker owner where you're all over the place and you've got this person calling you, that person calling you, did-da da, ticking call, da-da-da-da. Mulskin, hold on a second. I know that lifestyle, I get it, right? And I and there's that relatability that translates very easily into real estate, right? And and and being comfortable with the person you're sitting with. They understand, you know, I I just recently lost a parent, so I can understand what you're going through and having that translation. And again, I'm not saying use that, but it is there. You that synergy between understanding as human beings is you can't make that stuff up. And I could try to be like you as much as I wanted to, but I'm not Caroline. I'm Melissa, and I need to stick to that. And it's it's unfortunately, you know, people look and see you like, oh, look at that person that's doing this, and they're doing such a good job, and they're making good money, and I want to be like them. But that's not that's not how you can bring across your value, right? The value is who you are.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

And again, it's always gonna come back to being authentic. People like to work with who they know, like, and trust. And when you have something in common with them, that Is really where the magic happens. Because again, a lot of times people look at um real estate as sales, and yes, there's a lot of money that goes on the table. Usually it's your largest investment that you are buying or selling, but at the end of the day, this is a relationship business. It is people are going to work with people they like, who they understand. And that's what we always say: whether it's sports, whether it's your children, do things that are authentic because as you mentioned, yes, they understand people like when somebody is, you know, showing who they truly are, not just the sales. I remember when I was in real estate, and at one point, you know, as a single mom with young children, and I'd say, you know, from from five until seven, it's homework and it's dinner, and I can take you out after that. But if it's gonna be before, keep in mind I might have my daughter with me and they'd be like, oh my gosh, that's and you start building relationships over and above just the actual transaction, because I think in real estate, it really is not about the transaction, it is a hundred percent about that relationship, about doing the best job you can for that person you are building relationship with. So, no, I I totally agree with you on that aspect. So, next question: if somebody was to, you know, hire you, and again, say, say just a not a brokerage, but a real estate agent who is listening to this podcast, and they say, you know what, I really love what you are saying, Melissa, and you know what, I'm I'm doing okay, but I would really love to fine-tune my message, fine-tune my image to really be able to scale. What would that look like? And, you know, walk us through what the steps might be for an agent who is looking at hiring you to take their business to the next level.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

First thing we do is we look at what they're currently doing, right? You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you currently are, right? So I do an audit, we do you sort of what we do a clarity check. So that could be digital, but we also look at the back end of the business. So kind of going back to my my the first question about well, how do you how do you operate differently? I don't just talk to the person who's paying the bill. Um, and that sometimes can get me in trouble, but it it is I'm doing them a disservice if I don't do this. So we'll have a conversation with the whole team and understand what's happening at that, whether it's the brokerage or specifically with the agent, we're looking at what's going on, what's not working. If you're posting content every single day, five times a day, but you're not getting a lead, there's a problem there. So then we're really doing, we're taking a step back and we're looking at what's your strategy? What are you trying to accomplish here? So from an agent perspective, agents are trying to do what? They're trying to show, they're trying to educate, show the personality, show who they are. And so often the focus is on the brand. And to them, brand is a is a logo. That's not brand. Brand is how you are perceived, and that's by the consumer. So the person consuming your service or your product. So whether that's an agent, so you're helping them transact, or a broker who's trying to recruit into the business, or a business who wants to say, Hey, here are these great services. You're a real estate agent. I love you to use my services, no matter where you are in that, you need to understand a what service you're providing, how to articulate that, and whether or not you're spending your resources in the right places. And again, it goes back to what you were saying before. If you don't know who your audience is, you are just throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping for the best. And you can post as many TikToks as you want, but if you're not generating a lead from that, so the example I always use, so I teach courses periodically, and one of the examples I consistently use is I ask the question would you rather have 10,000 followers and garner one client from that where it's a regular client, say it's a$5,000 a month client, or would you rather have five clients where four of them or five, sorry, five followers and four of them become clients? Same thing. Who would you prefer? And what bucket would you want to go in? Great, you have 10,000 followers, it looks great on paper, but you're only making five thousand dollars a month. Versus if you have five followers and four people are actually using your services at five thousand dollars a month, it's twenty thousand dollars a month. Which bucket do you want to be in? And it comes down to it it comes down to understanding the return on investment.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

Well, and also I was gonna say, I think where a lot of people fall flat is not understanding the metrics, not tracking their success. So for somebody that might say, Oh, I'm, you know, I should be so successful, I've got 10,000 followers. If that is not resonating into deals, there's a disconnect there. So at the end of the day, we really should be trying to create advocates. So those are the ones, again, they always say, I remember somebody said to me, you know, as we get older in life, you are gonna meet more and more people, whether it's neighbors, colleagues, do sports, do the um, you know, your children's sports, etc. There are so many people that if we were to put all their names in a bucket, the bucket would be overflowing. At the end of the day, the core people are gonna fit in the in the palm of your hand and that same mentality as a real estate agent because just having numbers and knowing people does not necessarily resonate into sales and into business. So, with that in mind, where are some of the areas that say brokerages or agents are underinvesting in, say, marketing and communication that could positively impact the growth of you know their their clients, their recruitment, etc.?

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Strategy, right? There's a lot of there's too much investment into tactics or too much, and when I say investment, I don't just mean financial.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

I mean resources, time into Which is the most time is the most valuable asset of all.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

100%. And if you're spending all of this time creating, again, great, I'm not saying don't create content, but if you have no strategy behind it, then what are you creating it for? You don't know your metrics, you don't know the rationale, you don't know the reason why you're doing all of this, and then you know, you wonder, well, why isn't this working? Why am I not getting leads? And what's worse, if you do get a lead, well, what do you do after? Are you actually curating that lead? And more often than not, they're not. So I think strategy is is the number one thing that is lacking. People want to go, go, go, go, go. And, you know, they want to move forward, they want to move forward, and they're always in a rush. And sometimes that they struggle with my personality because I'm not. I am not, I'm like, why are we rushing? Why are we trying to get to that? Help me understand why you need it to drop on May 1st. Help me understand. If you can tell me right now, very succinctly in two sentences, why we need to hit that deadline, then okay. But I would push back and say, I want to understand your overall strategy. I'm not just looking at today, I'm looking at about your first, second, third year plans. What are you doing in 10 years? Will you be selling your business? Will you be retiring? We all joke, like realtors retire when they die. That's horrible. But it is the truth. So many realtors don't have a plan for what they're gonna do when they hit 55, 60, 65. Are you looking to retire? Are you looking to pull back from the business? And those conversations aren't happening. And marketing and the problem is it's marketing is not the problem, right? And I think that's kind of where people get lost. They get lost in the visual and trying to throw things out. That is not the problem. The root cause is actually what what why are you doing this?

SPEAKER_01 30:07

What are your goals and it comes down to what's your why, right? At the end of the day, what is your why? Why are you in real estate and then build it from there?

SPEAKER_00 30:17

100%. And when you know that, you can then reverse engineer what you're trying to do. And your marketing plan makes so much more sense because if you're doing all of these TikToks and you're doing and no one is actually coming in and you're not generating any income from it, especially as a real estate agent, then you're doing it wrong. And what do we change?

SPEAKER_01 30:38

Is that something that you help them with? Because we always say with our agents, we, you know, at the beginning of the year and part way through, we really encourage business planning. And business planning is yes, you are going to build out your marketing and your social media campaign. It's like what do you want your GCI, like going through all those different things. But first and foremost, it starts with your why. It starts with also what time do you have available, what resources do you have to build this out. But then taking that, so building out your year plan of when are you dropping, you know, social media, when are you having client events, when are you doing postcards, like build that whole thing out, but then looking at a three to five year plan because that is really again the strategy that is going to support your business on a daily level. And again, it's so important to get the back end done, including the systems. So, again, whether it's CRMs that are automatically sending out, you know, monthly newsletters that are reaching out on birthdays, setting those systems up so they can remain top of mind, um, continue to build the business, continue to support those relationships, and you know, to feed that that next level of business. So, is that something that you offer an age? Like, how do you maybe explain to our audience some of the services that that you offer?

SPEAKER_00 32:06

So, again, because it is so customized, is it sometimes it is challenging to to respond to that? Like, so typically I do work at a brokerage level. Um it is my core competency, right? Having worked at the different places I've worked, do we support agents? Yes. Sometimes I refer agents to another marketer, uh, usually all in the real estate sector, uh, just because again, there's so much work, right? Um, I think from a brokerage standpoint, really is it comes in as an emergency 95% of the time. So my my nickname is the fixer. So they'll call me in. Oh my god, Melissa, my marketer quit. What do we do? I we I we need we provide marketing services, and you know, sometimes there are like 200 people offices and they don't have a marketer. So that's the typical way that my clients have come in. The preferred way is hey, I'd love to plan ahead, and this is kind of where we're going. If anyone knows me, I am I can't help myself. I I yes, I look at the marketing, but marketing is you can't have marketing without having that structure in place, Caroline. You have to have your business structure fixed, and that's where marketing and operations are go hand in hand.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

And we regardless of the level or where they are in the business, those are the core competencies that that they need to have in place for any business for sustainability and scalability.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

And that's and that's key. What you just said is so key. Scalability. So often the broker owner wants to take over everything and they need to be involved with everything. But if you hire right, if you have the operations in place and you know this is the system and it's streamlined, and you know, okay, you've hired the right person, they're going to be responsible for this, da da da da, and they only come in to sign off. And if you have a really good system, so I love Monday.com, it's great for you know approvals. Here's that access to the Canva link or what here's the content, here's the caption to Google Drive. You just simply click on it and they approve the content. To me, that is gold because you can create again all of this stuff. But if you don't have a content calendar, if you don't know when it's going up, why are you approving it the day of? You can approve lots of content weeks in advance, and that allows you, okay, I'm gonna set aside one day every two weeks as a broker owner, team lead, approve the content that my social people are creating, whether that is an outsourced group like mine or someone who sits there. We create those back end systems, allow them to go through the process, approve it for oh, I don't know, next month. Oh my goodness, unheard of. But yes, can you imagine? You you were for Royal Page Canada, you know. Could you imagine I didn't have a structure in place there? We had at the time, it started there at 13,000 when I left. There was, I think, 18,000 five. 18,500 agents. We have over 20,000 agents now. So just think of the scale. Imagine having that number of people, you have to be organized, right? You have to have your content. You know when all of the holidays are. You should have your content ready and and up for posting, right? And I think there's such opportunity to set up those SOPs, to standardize those things, to allow a broker to actually do their job, which is to be a broker. Right.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

And often it's very hard, whether it's a broker owner, manager, team lead, to pass off, to step away from some of those things, but you have just proven it is critical for scalability. You you cannot move forward or efficiently if you are trying to wear all hats. You have to really trust the people that you are bringing in to get the job done and know that that is their expertise. And almost as if with your business as well, bringing somebody in who specializes in something, I think day gone are the days where you would have, let's just think of a manager that oversaw everything. Now, even if say a brokerage has multiple locations or an agent has um multiple, like team leader has multiple agents working with them, you might have one that specializes in pre-con. You might have somebody who specializes in downsizing, like you really start building out based on specialization versus trying to be a generalist across the board. So what you offer and the insight that you've shared today has been extremely valuable. And so, your final question I wanted to ask in closing What is the one thing you would challenge every real estate leader, entrepreneur listening today to do to reevaluate in their business over the next 90 days to ensure that they are positioning themselves for meaningful and sustainable growth?

SPEAKER_00 37:14

Look at your numbers. Be numbers driven, don't just guess. I think that's the biggest thing. Every client that comes to the door is shocked when they don't know how much they spent on marketing. How do you not know? How you you need to, even though you are not a gigantic corporation, you are a business. And you need to know what your numbers are. So whether that is your metrics for social media, the time spent, those are hours. If you are spending four hours a day on social media, that's money, right? And what does that translate into? So to me, next 90 days, sit down, take take a day. It's worth it, I promise you. Take a day and look at your numbers. You're you have financials, obviously, that's tied to everything, because at the end of the day, we are here to make money. We're not gonna, you know, flower that up. You're here to make money, but also look at your resources and look at the time invested, whether you have so often I I get pulled in when there is, let's say, an operations person who's doing everything and not being paid a crazy amount of money, and then they leave, and then the brokerage is surprised. Why did they leave? Or the team leads surprised. Well, did you look at their time? Have you been monitoring how much work they're actually doing? Because you're burning that person out and not hiring appropriately, right? Like social media itself is a gigantic beast. Okay, so then you've got front desk doing it.

SPEAKER_01 38:47

That's exactly so that is the one thing that we are gonna leave with everybody today is over the next 90 days, really look at their numbers and the metrics, and we look forward to watching everybody's business soar. So, Melissa, thank you so much. You have offered such a wealth of information to everybody today. I hope they picked up a couple nuggets, and I wish you all the best, and thank you again for being our fabulous guest speaker today. Thank you so much for having me. Take care, everybody. And again, for anybody who is looking at um getting more involved, see where Canadian Women in Real Estate. We are here for you. Reach out, we look forward to helping your business soar to the next level.