The Boutique Broker’s Guide to Delighting Agents and Winning Star Talent

Building a flexible do-it-all staff

Everyone on staff full-time at West + Main Homes has been hired from within, says Staub. This is especially useful because they’re also licensed agents who have other talents, so they understand all about real estate and also specialize in different areas.

For example, the company’s Chief Operating Officer and compliance manager has a background in transaction coordination and restaurant management; Staub describes her as hyper-organized, with a customer service and hospitality mindset. She started at West + Main as an agent, but Staub decided she’d be a perfect fit to handle operations. “Her taking over the contract review was huge for me, and it freed me up to do so many other things. Now she hires for her teams.”

West + Main also employs a full in-house creative staff; Staub’s business partner is a graphic designer with an agency background who’s built that team to create the brokerage marketing materials and knit everything together. “They put together the entire layout of the magazine, do the photo shoots with a local photographer, and we do all the writing in-house. Everything you see that was created for West + Main.”

The in-house design staff also helps them turn requests around very quickly, and their level of expertise with the basics means that they can spend some time working on passion projects. “Everything from templated requests, from open house fliers, social graphics for listings, a blog post—those things they can do in their sleep now, so their creative bandwidth is saved for things like the magazine, special requests for agents, events, donation drives, with all the assets they need to really create a beautiful experience.”