I’ll always remember the spring, summer, and early fall of 2024 as the most painful and difficult period of my professional life. From the outside, everything looked great. The Mark Siwiec Team had sold $92 million in residential real estate, and I was the most successful agent in the six-county region. Internally, however, the team was falling apart. I was under a level of stress unlike anything I had ever experienced.
Every morning, as I walked from the parking lot to the front door of our office, I felt a growing sense of dread. I knew I was about to spend eight hours in a toxic environment that, as the owner, I was ultimately responsible for creating.
I had effectively delegated management and culture to my remarkably kind office manager. In doing so, however, I had also relinquished something I should never have delegated: responsibility for the organization’s standards. The situation deteriorated to the point that, one day, I asked an employee to order a few white “SOLD” riders for our For Sale signs. Her curt answer was, “No.” When I asked why, she explained that if she ordered them, she knew I would eventually ask her to deliver one to a client’s house. That was when I realized that, to save the company, I would have to dismantle it and start over. I had abdicated responsibility for our culture, and I had created the culture I deserved.
Rebuilding Our Real Estate Company Culture
So I set out to build the business I had always dreamed of owning: a brokerage that was welcoming, collaborative, generous, and accountable. I wanted our executive staff and agents to be excited to come to work and genuinely engaged when they arrived. Accountability had to start with me. I needed to establish the standard and live by it. I also believed that our paid staff and sales team had to reciprocate. We needed a social contract in which everyone contributed to the overall good. Without that, the venture would fail.
One by one, I sat down with employees and prospective employees to explain my vision and expectations. A lack of commitment, a refusal to support our culture, or unkind behavior would not be tolerated. Anyone who wanted to enjoy a remarkable work experience would also have to participate in and protect it.
Although Elysian Homes is relatively young, we seem to have succeeded in that intent. The vast majority of our agents attend meetings. Our group text is robust: information is shared, and offers of help are acknowledged immediately. Team members remain at social events long after the scheduled end time. Most tellingly, in one-on-one reviews and anonymous surveys, my COO and I are consistently told that the thing people most want to preserve is our culture.
The Return on Investing in Culture
It isn’t necessarily easy. Like marketing, IT, and finance, culture has, in essence, become a department of its own. It requires significant time and money. But every week, we experience the returns on that investment through greater efficiency, retention, productivity, and discretionary effort.
When we began, I didn’t realize that authentically embracing your team could produce such a profound ROI. I invested in culture because I wanted to create a better place to work. I discovered that doing so also created a better business. But I suspect the second result depends on genuinely wanting the first.
Protecting Culture as the Company Grows
As Elysian Homes grows, our challenge will be protecting what we’ve created. As Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, describes in “Delivering Happiness”, culture becomes much more fragile when you realize that you don’t know the name of the person walking past you in a hallway. To that end, we’re creating a Culture Committee comprised of members of our staff and sales team. I’ll be sitting on the committee. We’ll have a budget and measurable goals that will help us to protect the social contract that got us here. Given what’s at stake, I know that we’ll continue to succeed.
Even without the financial return, however, I’ll still enjoy that which I had originally set out to accomplish: Everyone associated with Elysian will be convening at my home in Hammondsport next month to enjoy a day of crimson leaves and mulled cider. Come November, the pre-Thanksgiving meal that our team surprised me with last year will be enjoyed, once again. Then onto December and the start of what I know will be another remarkable year.
Two years ago, I set out to build a better business. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was building a better place to spend my days.