How This Second Generation Realtor Scaled Her Way from a 5-Person Operation to a Multi-Location Team — Interview with Beth Nordaune

Beth Nordaune grew up in real estate. 

Still, she never imagined she’d one day lead her own team. After an established career in corporate training at TGI Fridays, she ended up taking on the role of assistant helping her dad on a condo project.

“I thought, well I’m a hot shot. I can do this,” she laughs. Little did she know.

After hustling as a solo agent for a couple of years, Beth started building her own team in 2010. Since then, she’s grown steadily, moving to a team of ten after the first couple of years, and a regional team with three offices throughout southeast Minnesota a couple of years after that.

“Ten years ago I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I hate paperwork and I'm terrible at it. I just want someone to answer the phone and take care of paperwork.” But soon enough, it was clear to Beth that the ad hoc hiring had to stop.

As the team grew, it became less agile. If she really wanted to build her business, she’d need to let go of ad hoc hiring, get off the hamster wheel and focus on the things that move the business forward, not least: her team.

Here’s an inside view of how Beth uses smart lead management and tracking systems to drive scalable results for her and the entire Enclave Team.

Table of Contents

• Get Out of the Way: Success for The Team Starts With You
• Airtight Lead Management: What to Track No Matter What
• Making Leadership Job #1
• Personalize Your Conversations, Boost Your Conversions
• What’s Next?
  

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Get Out of the Way: Success for The Team Starts With You

“Stepping to the side and coming alongside your team to see what you can do together in collaboration… that's magical,” says Beth.

In the competitive world of real estate, the idea of an arm-in-arm approach might seem a little soft. But for Beth, working together is the only way to make sure every member of the team can become a rainmaker in their own right.

First, you have to be willing to quiet the voice in your head. You know, the one that tells you, “You don’t want to hire people that are as smart or smarter than you. What if they’re better than you?” 

It’s a small mindset shift that can make a big difference for your business.

“Too many people say ‘I love this person, she’s just like me’—but do you really want to hire someone who is just like you?” Beth’s all about hiring people who are going to challenge you to continue upping your game. (And yes, it’ll sting sometimes.)

After that, it’s all about the quality of your training and onboarding. 

Drawing from her background in corporate training, Beth scaled down her own production to just 15 transactions per year and shifted her focus to building scalable processes to help set their new hires up to win. 

Here’s Beth on how to get out of your head and find the right structure for your team:

Airtight Lead Management: What to Track No Matter What

Beth’s hard-won team building lessons also brought some important insights for the business’s front end.

Before having a set system, she knew leads were coming in. She just didn’t know what was really happening after that.

The game changed completely when she zoomed out and started tracking the entire lead journey, including:

• Number of leads and opportunities generated per month 
• Number of those that convert to booking an appointment
• Of those, how many met with agents
• How many agreed to work with you
• Number of those that make it to closing 

According to Beth, you can unlock a goldmine of intel simply by tracking how leads move through your system and if/when they stop. 

Think of it as a simple trickle-down effect. If one piece of the process is broken, leads won’t make it to the next step.

In Follow Up Boss, you can visualize your lead pipeline kanban style or drill down into agent or lead source based conversion rates.

“Literally, you can see.” says Beth. 

She uses simple tracking reports for both herself at the strategic level and at the tactical level with the team. Everyone can see with perfect clarity why she’s making the decision she’s making. “The first year we did this, 50% of the people that we signed up didn't close. That seemed huge to me,” Beth remembers.

With a helicopter view of her entire lead conversion flow, Beth avoids the tunnel vision trap. Rather than assuming one part of the system as reflective of the whole, she can narrow in on breakdowns and opportunities across the business and lead her team with focus.

And when it comes to holding agents accountable? She knows one thing for sure.

“The people who are the highest producers of the team send about three times as many emails, text messages, phone calls.”

The proof is always in the data. When you have it in black and white, there tends to be very little drama. Agents know exactly what they need to do to get back on track. 

Here’s how she sees it:

Making Leadership Job #1

Now that her systems are in place, Beth can focus on leading.

For her, that’s a full time job. “Nobody wants the rockstar and the minion,” she laughs. “It’s a collaboration.” 

Beth makes room in her schedule each week to work with new agents, sit down with her ops director, and develop her leadership team. She also carves out time to write, train, and prep for meetings. But one thing she isn’t doing is producing. At least, not much.

“It's really funny to think of real estate as my side hustle, real estate has become my side hustle,” she jokes.

These days Beth spends her time working on all the fun strategic stuff she never had time for when she was a full-time producing agent. You can follow her leadership adventures on Instagram.

Another big focus for Beth is building relationships with potential clients and partners who can help her grow her business. 

But old habits die hard. Beth uses a visual aid to help keep her on track to hitting her leadership goals. In her office, she keeps a string of paper rings around the window. “Each rung is two hours of prospecting or meeting to grow a new business. Every time I complete that, I get to click a ring off and I know when I get to the end I will have reached my goal, and then I have a reward planned. So my goal this year is to finish this paper chain,” she explains.

In typical Beth fashion, she ran the numbers and set a goal. The paper rings are just another small way to hold herself accountable for taking the daily micro-actions that will add up to the big results over time.

Beth also loves music. She usually starts her day with a playlist she created called ‘A Powerful Day’. She also keeps at least one book on her nightstand at all times.

“Principles by Ray Dalio is one of my favorites and Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. That is one of the best books you should check out if you're thinking about building a team.”

At The Enclave Team, Beth makes sure she surrounds herself with people who understand her vision and bring it into everything they do, both on the back and front ends of the business. 

But she’s also ready to be challenged. She welcomes open feedback from the team—especially, when it comes to slowing down and building a repeatable process everyone can benefit from.

“Sometimes it feels like a fork in the eye,” she laughs. “But I know in my heart that it's going to be amazing in the end because we’re going to create something everyone else can use and I just have to have the patience and stay committed to building something truly scalable.”

Personalize Your Conversations, Boost Your Conversions

In 2018, Beth spotted a big breakdown in lead management.

The team’s blanket follow up strategy just wasn’t working. So Beth created two different pipelines:

1. Past clients and SOI
2. New online and open house leads

Beth and her team created tags inside Follow Up Boss for past clients and SOI. They also sort leads by stage to pull lists and customize their follow up messaging to different groups of people based on where they are in the buying or selling journey.

“Making that separation for agents seemed to be really helpful. Instead of treating it all as one, because they are very different groups. How we treat them, how we communicate with them, our conversion out of it is really different.”

The team also uses long term Action Plans for past clients and Smart Lists for contacting their database or past clients quarterly. “It’s a different conversation with people we know vs. people we have not worked with before. It’s also a different conversation between someone who is buying now, buying someday, or when the ‘right’ property comes up,” she explains.

With leads automatically tagged and segmented inside Follow Up Boss, agents at The Enclave Team always know which conversations to have and when.

“Having a team and having a lot of changes, people get really fatigued. Having something that you need and can grow into without having to switch is key. There have been times we’ve looked at and researched other platforms but the way Follow Up Boss communicates with different lead sources and helps with tracking is really phenomenal,” says Beth.

Beth leans into the idea that there’s never just one way to do things. She is consistently re-evaluating how she manages her team, who she needs to hire, and how she uses tracking to improve her agents and client experiences.

What’s Next?

Today, Beth spends her days training her team and connecting with exciting new business partners as part of her ongoing journey towards steady, intentional growth.

It’s a good life, but it definitely didn’t happen overnight. If she had to do it all over, Beth says she would spend less time taking advice from other people and more time figuring out what works for her.

“Trying to do a one-size-fits-all [approach to building your business], that would be like saying everyone in every restaurant should just eat hamburgers, and everyone likes hamburgers so let's just all go out and build hamburger stands,” she laughs. 

She’s grateful for the mentors, coaches and friends that have helped her move her business forward but ultimately, she believes no one knows what’s best for your business better than you.

“Listen to your gut and do what really works for you.”