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Let me start with a question, and I want you to actually answer it before you keep reading.

Would you rather have one hundred percent of one hundred thousand dollars?

Or ten percent of ten million?

Sit with it for a second. Because your gut probably jumped at that first one. One hundred percent. All mine. Nobody touches it. That feels like the win, right?

Now do the math slow. One hundred percent of a hundred thousand is a hundred thousand dollars. Ten percent of ten million is a million dollars.

So the person “giving away” ninety percent walked home with ten times the money.

That right there — that little math problem — is the whole reason your business is stuck. Not the market. Not your leads. Not your split. Your split is the thing you’re staring at while the real money walks right past you.

Because here’s what I’ve watched happen for years. Most agents fight tooth and nail for a few extra percentage points on a small pile of nothing, instead of building a machine that makes millions. They negotiate the fare like they’re haggling over a cheaper ride — cheapest thrill, cheapest seat — when a CEO isn’t shopping for a ride at all.

A CEO is buying the whole car.

Let me show you the difference.

An Employee Counts What Leaves. A CEO Counts What Comes Back.

There are two ways to look at every dollar that moves through your business, and which one you default to tells me everything about whether you’ll ever scale.

An employee looks at what’s leaving. What’s my split? What are they taking? How much of mine do they keep? Every conversation starts and ends with the number going out the door.

A CEO looks at what’s coming back. What am I learning here? What am I bringing in because of it? What can I grow into that I couldn’t reach on my own? The number leaving is just the price of the number returning.

Now hear me clearly, because I don’t want you twisting this. I am not telling you to ignore your numbers. I want you sharp on your numbers. Awareness of what you pay is part of running a real business.

But there’s a world of difference between being aware of what you pay and being ruled by it.

When you let “how much do I keep” lead the entire decision, you’ve stopped thinking like the owner of the business. You’ve started thinking like somebody who works there. And an employee mindset will negotiate its way straight into a ceiling — because it’s optimizing the wrong number entirely.

A CEO thinks infrastructure. Value-based architecture. Systems. When you’re sitting across from a coach or a leader who’s actually showing you how to build the thing, you are not paying a split. You are paying for a blueprint to wealth. And a blueprint to wealth is the cheapest expensive thing you will ever buy.

Hiding Inside “One Hundred Percent”

Lemme tell you why I would never hang my license somewhere on a hundred percent model as my main house — and I say this having interviewed with them, because I interview brokerages all the time just to see what everybody’s offering against my own.

I sat across from one of them and I asked a simple question. I said: if you’re running a business where you give away one hundred percent of the agent’s money… what exactly are you going to teach me?

Silence.

Because there wasn’t a good answer.

And that’s the trap. Think about what a hundred percent model is actually saying to you. It’s saying: we’re going to let you make money, and we don’t want any of it.

That sounds like a gift. But that is not how a business works. A business provides value in exchange for money. When somebody tells you they want nothing in return, understand what they’re really telling you — they have nothing to give you but the money you were already going to make yourself.

Here’s the mechanics of why that’s usually true, and this is the part nobody spells out for you. A brokerage that keeps almost nothing has almost nothing to reinvest. Their top-line revenue stays low, so they can’t afford to hire the best trainers, build the best systems, or study the market deep enough to actually move you forward. The math forces it. Low intake means low investment back into you.

So the agent thinks they’re saving money. What they’re really doing is robbing themselves of an investment in their own growth.

And I’ll show you the fruit of it. Most agents I see parked at pure hundred percent models never grow past that ten-million-in-annual-sales mark. Meanwhile the people running ninety, a hundred million? They paid their dues along the way. That paying-their-dues is exactly where they learned the business. They bought the lessons. And the lessons compounded.

The Real Question Isn’t “How Much Do I Keep” — It’s This

So let me hand you the only question that actually matters when you’re deciding where to hang your license.

It’s not “how much do I keep.” Throw that out as your lead question.

The real one is: does the value I’m receiving supersede the money I’m paying?

That’s it. That’s the whole test. The goal was never to pay nothing. The goal is to make sure what you get back outweighs what you put in — by a lot.

So when you walk into that interview, especially with a hundred percent shop, don’t ask about the split first. Ask the questions a CEO asks:

What support are you offering me as the agent and the business owner? What is your training calendar actually like? Are you teaching me database management, lead systems, business modeling — or are you just handing me back my own paycheck and calling it generosity?

If a brokerage has taken on the role of training you, pay very close attention to whether they’re actually good at it. Because when all things are equal, the split should be the last thing driving your decision — not the first. Percentages don’t tell you the real number. Value does.

And if the training’s going to be better somewhere else — from somebody who’s had the time, the resources, and the reps to flesh it out and actually study what moves the market — wouldn’t you rather pay for that knowledge than walk away with a hundred percent of a business that never grows?

This whole shift — from split-shopping to value-buying, from employee math to CEO math — is exactly why I built How to Start & Structure Your Real Estate Business. It’s for the agent who finally sees that splits are irrelevant when the business has no foundation underneath it, and it’ll walk you through the whole model at your own pace.

Why You Need Skin In The Game (The Part Most People Get Backwards)

Now here’s where I’m gonna challenge the thing you think you want.

You think you want zero cost. No skin in the game. Keep it all.

Let me tell you why that’s quietly killing your growth.

I’ve always heard “it takes money to make money,” and honestly, I don’t fully agree with that. But here’s what I know for a fact: you have to be invested in yourself to grow. And when you’re on a pure hundred percent model, you’re not invested — because you’ve got no skin in the game and nothing pushing you forward.

Let me show you the flip side with my own setup. One of the things I love about being at KW is the cap model. I pay in up to a certain point, and then I’m at a hundred percent for the rest of the year.

Watch what that does to me.

Five transactions. That’s all it takes to hit my cap. So when my year kicks off, I’ve got a fire under me to knock those first five out — because on the other side of them is my hundred percent. That pressure makes me work smarter. More efficiently. It makes me a sharper businessperson, not because I’m naturally disciplined that day, but because there’s a growth model behind me pushing me toward it.

A pure hundred percent model doesn’t give you that. You get everything from dollar one, so you never feel the pull to grow. And I know exactly what you’re telling yourself right now — “no, I’ll still push myself to grow anyway.” You won’t. I say that with love. We need pressure to grow. Take the pressure away and most of us coast, every single time.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s just how people are built. The wise ones design pressure into their environment on purpose instead of pretending they don’t need it.

And let me be fair, because I’m not here to bury anybody. I’m not saying hundred percent models are bad. I actually carry a license with a hundred percent brokerage in Connecticut, where I don’t run big business — so not growing hard in that lane is fine by me. The model isn’t evil. It’s just a tool, and you have to be honest about which job you’re using it for.

Fighting Over The Pie When You Should Be Building The Oven

Let me put the whole thing in one picture so it sticks.

Most agents spend their whole career fighting over percentages of a small pie. A little bigger slice here. A percent shaved off there. Elbows out over a pie that was never big enough to feed them in the first place.

Meanwhile the CEO isn’t fighting over slices at all.

The CEO is building the oven.

Because once you own the oven, you’re not begging for slices anymore — you’re baking pies whenever you want, as big as you want, forever. And I need you to really hear this next line, because it cuts through every excuse:

One hundred percent of a hustle is still just a hustle. A percentage of a system is still not the system itself.

You can keep all the money from a grind and still be trapped in the grind. Owning your whole paycheck from a business with no model is just a more expensive way to stay stuck. What you actually want isn’t a bigger cut of the chaos. It’s the system underneath it — the clarity, the structure, the growth that keeps producing after you stop pushing.

And nobody teaches us this going in. Nobody told me real estate was a business model I needed to actually learn. I got lucky — my first team leader coached me, poured the business into me, and that model still carries me to this day. It’s the exact reason I can turn around and help agents now. I’m not teaching you to just sell real estate. I’m teaching you to build a business.

If you’re a seasoned agent who’s been grinding for years and you’re still not where you want to be, please hear me on this one: your split is not the problem. You need a better business model. That’s the whole diagnosis. And the fix isn’t shaving two more points off your commission — it’s finally learning the architecture underneath a business that grows. That architecture is the entire spine of How to Start & Structure Your Real Estate Business, and if you’re ready to trade the hustle for a model, you can enroll and get moving TODAY!

You Don’t Have A Right To A Harvest You Never Invested In

Let me close with the line I really want you to carry out of here.

If you’re not investing in you, you don’t have a right to a harvest.

If you’re not pouring time, energy, money, and resources into your own growth, you will not grow. Doing real estate transactionally and keeping every dime of it feels like a win — I understand why it feels that way. But feeling like you’re winning and knowing you’re winning are two entirely different things.

I don’t want to just feel like I’m winning. I want to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I’m winning — and I want the proof to back it up. That kind of certainty doesn’t come from keeping all your money. It comes from investing it well enough that the returns speak for themselves.

So do me a favor this week. Start having these conversations. Don’t be afraid to look a brokerage dead in the eye — especially a hundred percent one — and ask what they’re actually doing to help you grow. Because wherever you hang your license, it needs to be worth being there. Anything less isn’t saving you money. It’s costing you the version of yourself you could’ve become.

If you take that class on How to Start & Structure Your Real Estate Business, I’m telling you — it’ll change how you think about your commission, how you choose a brokerage, and how you enter this industry entirely, so go grab it and rewire the way you see the whole game.

That’s it for me today. Go build the oven.

I’ll see you in the next one.

Coach Cheese 💕✌🏾