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Picture two farmers who each get handed the same ten acres on the same morning.

The first one is proud. He knows he’s smart, he’s got two good hands, and he refuses to ask anybody for anything. He wants to prove the land is *his*. So he figures out the soil by himself. He guesses at when to plant. He learns which corner floods only after the flood takes his first crop. He learns the frost dates by losing seedlings to them. By year three, he finally has a rhythm — but he paid for every lesson in dead plants and lost seasons.

The second farmer walks his ten acres straight over to the man next door who’s been working that same dirt for twenty years, harvesting fifteen hundred bushels a season, and says: “Teach me your land. I’ll give you a cut of my first harvests while I learn.” And that neighbor shows him the flood corner before it floods. The frost dates before the frost. Which seed goes where. By the time the first farmer is still guessing, the second one is already three seasons ahead — and the little he gave away at the start doesn’t come close to what he saved.

Same acres. Same start. Wildly different outcome.

That second farmer? That was me. And the harvest was three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a single year.

I got a question on YouTube from a young lady, asking simply: “Should I join a team?” I’ve answered this before. But I want to walk through it with you slowly this time, because the way I answered it for myself is the reason my whole career turned out the way it did.

So grab your pen. Here are the three reasons a new agent should at least *consider* joining a team — and the mechanics of how to do it right.

Momentum Matters More Than Money In The Beginning

Let me tell you exactly how this went down, receipts and all.

I got my license in October. Didn’t officially start working until January. Between January and April, working on my own, I got some momentum going and landed two closings — deals I found myself, before any team was in the picture.

Then the team opportunity showed up in April. And I asked the team leader a plain, uncomfortable question: “If I join *before* these two deals close, do I have to share the revenue with the team?”

She said yes.

I signed anyway.

Now watch the math, because this is where new agents get it backwards. This woman was doing fifteen hundred transactions a year. Fifteen hundred. The sliver of commission I gave up on two closings was a rounding error next to what I was about to learn sitting under someone operating at that altitude. I don’t even remember what the split was. I genuinely did not care. I knew that the moment I learned, I’d take off — and I’d make that giveaway back a hundred times over.

That is the lesson your first year is trying to teach you: do not get so gripped up about the money that you trade away the *experience* that generates all your future money. Protecting a few thousand dollars today at the cost of a mentor is like refusing to spend a dollar on seed to save yourself from a barren field.

And understand — the game has changed since I started. Ten years ago you didn’t need a team as badly, because the office was full, we worked shoulder to shoulder, nobody walked alone. Now everybody’s on Zoom, everybody’s “so busy,” nobody has twenty minutes to actually meet you. So a brand-new agent going solo today is more isolated than one was a decade ago. And isolation kills momentum fast. You’re absorbing rejection alone. Untangling a contract alone at midnight. Sitting in your car after a showing that went nowhere, wondering if you’re even cut out for this — alone.

You don’t need a cheerleader on the sideline. You need somebody in the arena walking the next step *with* you — through the negotiation, through the transaction, through the mindset block that’s whispering you should quit. That shared energy builds a momentum you simply cannot manufacture by yourself.

Here’s the practical move: when you’re evaluating a team, ask what the *first thirty days* actually look like. Do they pair you with a producing agent? Do you shadow live appointments, or just get handed a login and a “good luck”? Momentum comes from proximity to someone winning — so make sure proximity is built into the structure, not just promised in the interview.

If you want to turn that raw momentum into an actual system that runs whether you feel motivated on a given Tuesday or not, that’s the whole point of my free masterclass on the Path to Leverage & Profit inside our Skool community. Come pull up a chair.

Compression Of Time Is The Whole Game

Real estate is hard. Learning it alone is exponentially harder.

When somebody has already walked the road you’re on — and they’re willing to teach you — you get to skip the entire reinventing-the-wheel season. You learn more in less time, because a good mentor doesn’t just teach you *what* to do, they teach you what to *ignore*. Half of a new agent’s year is wasted on things that felt important and moved nothing. A mentor deletes that half for you.

Here’s the tangible stuff a real team plugs you into on day one, so you can weigh it honestly:

→ Their marketing systems — the templates and campaigns that already convert, so you’re not designing from a blank page.

→ Their contracts and lead tracking — so you’re not googling “what form do I use for” in front of a client.

→ Their listing systems, buyer intake forms, and transaction management — the operational spine of a deal, already built.

→ Very often, an admin or transaction coordinator who handles the paperwork mountain so you don’t lose three months buried in it.

That’s compression. You plug into a working machine instead of welding your own from scrap.

But let me be honest with you about where a team’s help *ends*, because this matters. A great team will teach you the sales side beautifully — how to run a pipeline, how to move a lead from cold to closed, how to have the hard money conversation with a seller who’s overpriced and in denial. Real skills. You need every one of them.

My vantage point is a different one. Mine is the business infrastructure *underneath* the sales — the part that decides whether you’re still standing in year five or burned out and back at a nine-to-five. A team teaches you to close a deal. I teach you to build a business that doesn’t collapse the week you stop hustling. Those aren’t the same thing, and confusing them is why so many agents have a good year and then quietly disappear.

So my real advice: let the team teach you sales, and don’t wait on them for the business architecture — because most of them don’t have it to give. That’s the exact gap I built my course around. How to Start & Structure Your Real Estate Business walks you through the CEO mindset, your economic plan, your systems and funnels, and your lead generation, so the foundation is solid before you ever scale on top of it. Learn the sales craft from a team; learn the business from me.

Protected Focus Is The Reason You’ll Actually Grow

Most new agents aren’t failing from lack of effort. They’re drowning in the wrong effort.

Drowning in Canva graphics. Drowning in which CRM to pick. Drowning in website builders, paperwork chases, social media calendars, logo colors. All the stuff that *feels* like productivity and moves not one dollar in your direction. It’s motion mistaken for progress.

A good team hammers all of that out for you — which frees you to pour your energy into the *only* two things that actually grow a real estate business: lead generation and building real relationships with clients. And to me, those two are one and the same thing. When your time is protected from the busywork, you can finally build a solid back end and a firm financial foundation instead of decorating a business that isn’t making money yet.

But hear me on this, because it’s the whole point: a team is not a crutch. It’s a launch pad.

If you’re trying to join a team just so somebody spoon-feeds you leads, you and I are built different. When I joined my team, I didn’t even *know* their lead structure. All I knew was this girl sold fifteen hundred houses in a year, and I had never sold *one*. So if somebody at that level was checking for me and willing to teach me — guess who’s signing up? Because if you teach me what you know, the evidence proves I can do what you did, or more. The lead flow was never the draw. The education was.

And here’s the part nobody tells new agents: you don’t just take from a team, you bring something *to* it. When I walked in, I saw a top-ten producer board on the wall. I told them, straight up, “Give me three months, I’ll be on that board.” Three months later, my name was on it. I didn’t just join that team — I changed its trajectory. People started working harder just because I was in the room, showing up hungry. That’s what happens when a believer walks in with real energy — we shift the whole atmosphere, baby.

Practical version of this: when you interview, ask yourself what *you* are contributing, not just what you’re collecting. A team is a covenant, not a vending machine. The agents who win are the ones who make the whole room better — and those are the ones a team leader pours into hardest.

Let’s Clear Up The Split Confusion, Once And For All

I already hear it. “But why would I pay fifty percent to a team? That’s robbery.”

Let me break it down so plain you’ll never wonder again.

If a team *gives* you a lead — one they generated, paid to attract, and handed to you warm — on my team, that’s a fifty-fifty split. And that fifty percent is not vanishing into somebody’s pocket. It’s paying for your admin. Your compliance. Your marketing. Your transaction coordination. All pooled together with the other agents so it’s affordable. You’re buying a whole back office you would otherwise be building and staffing yourself at two in the morning. When you look at it that way, fifty percent on a lead you didn’t have to find is cheap.

And here’s the nuance most people miss: most good teams, mine included, run a *different* split when you bring in your own lead. Curate it yourself and your cut goes way up, because you didn’t use the team’s lead machine to get it. So when you interview, don’t just ask “what’s the split.” Ask, “what’s the split on a team-provided lead versus a lead I bring in myself.” That one question tells you whether a team rewards agents who build their own book of business — which is exactly what you should be doing.

Which brings me to the deepest truth in all of this. On my own team, I don’t hand out leads at all. Why? Because I don’t do traditional lead generation. I think it sucks.

I teach my agents to build a database and a relationship-based business, so they close transactions without feeling like they’re out hunting prey every single morning just to eat.

If you’ve been through my Database to Databank course, this language is already in your bones. There’s a hunter, and there’s a farmer. The hunter has to make a kill today or he doesn’t eat today — every meal is a fresh scramble, nothing is guaranteed, and the anxiety never turns off. But the farmer? The farmer plants and predicts. He puts the seed in the ground today and trusts a harvest tomorrow — and that harvest is systematic, strategic, and reliable, because the ground already knows what to do with the seed.

He’s not chasing. He’s cultivating. That single shift — from hunting to farming — is the difference between a business that drains you dry and one that quietly feeds your family for years. If you’re worn out from the hunt and ready to finally plant something that grows on its own, Database to Databank is where I hand you the exact system, row by row.

Do This Before You Decide Anything At All

You don’t have to join a team. That was never the point of any of this.

The point is: *explore your options.* You are a business owner — and you’re a business owner on day one, license still warm — which means you owe it to yourself to actually see what’s out there before you commit to walking alone out of pride.

So here’s your homework, and I want you to actually do it:

→ Ask ChatGPT to draft you a full list of questions to ask a potential team leader — split structures, lead sources, admin support, mentorship, the thirty-day onboarding, all of it.

→ Interview at least two or three teams. Not one. You need contrast to see clearly.

→ Walk in as a business owner deciding what infrastructure best supports *your* vision — not as a beggar hoping to get picked. That posture changes the entire conversation.

→ Be honest about what you actually need, and let them show you exactly how they’d support it.

And know this going in: interviewing is not committing. You are simply exploring what’s available to you, which is one of the most important habits a real estate business owner can build — always, always, always explore your options before you decide.

Then, if a team fits, partner with them for a season. And when it makes financial sense to move on — the way it did for me once I hit fifty transactions a year and finally knew the business cold — you move on with gratitude. Don’t join and bounce the second you think you know better. Join. Help the team grow. Leave blessing them on your way out.

Because if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go *far*, you go together.

I look back now and I know God set certain people in my path at exactly the right moment to pour into my cup — mentors who taught me how to manage leads, run a pipeline, and even run a team by first letting me *be* on one. That wasn’t luck and it wasn’t a coincidence. That was grace, arriving on time, dressed up as a team interview. Your season of being poured into might be sitting in a conversation you haven’t scheduled yet — you plant that seed now, you trust the harvest later.

Go explore, baby. You don’t have to decide a single thing today.

You just have to be humble enough to look.

Coach Cheese 💕✌🏾