It started with saying, "Yes."

Back in December 2017, I said "yes" to Julie Dorger. I had run into her at a Haven Home Staging event. We both have a long, amazing relationship with the owner that company and their staff. Julie is great about creating spaces for other brokers to collaborate and learn. I had secretly been wanting her to come over to my previous brokerage. Actually, it's not a secret if I was asking her, but they had not wanted to jump ship. I basically was betting them to work from our office every chance I saw them. A handful of amazing LGBTQ agents were all working from the same office. I had joked, "If Sara and Julie come and work here, it will be like the gay Realtor AVENGERS! We all our successful in our own right, but together... we are unstoppable.

Julie, at the time, wouldn't leave their brokerage for mine, but for whatever reason she left for Keller Williams. I was curious. At the time, I still loved my former brokerage, but I had begun questioning if it was going in a direction that benefited me. Around the same time, another brokerage backed by venture capital had just started coming to town and offering agents hefty signing bonuses. There became a pissing match between a handful of brokerages as my former brokerage had the largest market share. They paved their success by running it very much like a wildly, large team.

However, I wondered if they had grown so big that they were losing the culture that I had grown to know and love. Those that had also been around the last decade saw how it gained its #1 marketshare by recruiting agents from other brokerages. Sometimes if the agent didn't fit the culture, they were solely selected for their production. And what no one ever realizes is that being a part of the #1 brokerage does not determine YOUR success. It determines theirs! To me, I realized I could continue paying "rent" annually to someone else for their tools that I may/may not use, or I could go to Keller Williams and essentially pay a "mortgage" where I owned the office with every agent in the office via profit share.

There is a fixed flat fee every year and 100% commission seemed like a no brainer when you start to think any successful, professional agent is giving most brokerages six figures every year for the business we bring them. With profit share, that minimal flat fee would go away over the years so we could truly be independent and able to run our businesses on our terms. This is why every broker at Keller Williams is called an agent partner. We are all in business together. We protect who we let in by making sure we only are working alongside extremely collaborative individuals. Partners.