Think about what happens when you take a week off. Not a working holiday where you're still fielding calls and signing authorities from the beach. A real week off, phone down, properly disconnected.
For most principals who are still selling, the answer is uncomfortable. Enquiries get missed or mishandled. Appraisals get delayed. The team, without your energy and direction, operates at a noticeably lower level. And you come back to an office that has drifted rather than advanced.
So you stop taking real holidays. You tell yourself it's just this season, just this market, just until you get the right team in place. But the right team never quite arrives, because you never quite have the time to recruit properly, train properly, or lead properly. You are too busy selling.
This is the trap. And if you're like most principals reading this, you are already in it.
The financial cost is the obvious one. If your personal production stops, for any reason, the agency's income stops with it. Illness. Injury. Family crisis. Burnout. Any one of these events, none of which are unlikely over a career, would expose the fundamental fragility of an agency built around a single producer.
But the cost that accumulates quietly, year after year, is the cost of the business you are not building.
Every hour you spend on your own sales is an hour you are not spending on recruitment. On training. On the systems and structures that would allow your team to perform at a higher level without you in the room. On the strategic work that separates a business from a one-person operation with staff.
Your team can feel this, by the way. When you are too busy to invest in their development, too consumed with your own clients to sit down and work on theirs, they notice. And the talented ones, the ones you most want to keep, start asking themselves whether this is really a place they can grow. Most of the time, the answer they arrive at is no. And they leave.
So you hire again. And the cycle continues.
Most principals know, somewhere beneath the busyness, that something needs to change. The harder admission is that the person standing in the way of that change is usually themselves. Letting go of personal production feels like a risk. In reality, holding on to it is the greater one.
Consider what becomes possible when your agency is not dependent on your output.
You have time to recruit deliberately, not reactively. You can attract the right people, not just available people. You can invest in their development with the attention it requires, which means they stay longer, perform better, and contribute to a culture that attracts more good people.
Your income stops being tied to your diary. The agency begins producing results whether you are in the office or not. You can take a holiday, handle a personal emergency, or step back from day-to-day selling without the business skipping a beat.
Your profit margins improve. This surprises most principals when they first encounter it, but a well-structured agency with productive team members and the right commission model will outperform the same agency built around a single producer. The maths favours leverage over individual effort every time.
And your business becomes an asset. Not just a job with a good income, but something with genuine value, capable of being sold, scaled, or operated with reduced personal involvement. That is what a business is. What most principals have built is not that.
Steve Allen of Allen Property came to Smartre Training at a point of frustration most principals will recognise. He was the number one agent in his region. He was also trapped. Without his personal productivity, he had no business, and he knew it.
Over the years, he had hired and let go of numerous salespeople, unable to find anyone who matched his commitment, let alone his output. The problem, as it turned out, was not the people he was hiring. It was the absence of a system to recruit, train, and retain them properly.
Within two years of working with Smartre Training, Steve had recruited three salespeople, trained them under the Smartre Sales System, and developed them into genuine performers in their market. His personal production, through his own choice, dropped significantly. His agency's production increased substantially. His profit margin moved from 20% to over 35%.
Steve now runs his business rather than running from appointment to appointment. That is not a minor adjustment to how he works. It is a fundamental transformation in what he has built.
The three elements of the Smartre Management System that drove this transformation were Control, Recruit, and Team.
Control gave his agency structure and clarity, including a reworked commission model that ensured his salespeople were properly rewarded for their production while the business remained commercially sound.
Recruit gave him a roadmap for identifying the right people, not just candidates who interviewed well, but people with the genuine capacity and willingness to perform. It gave him a process for onboarding and training them, and the skills to retain them once they were performing.
Team gave him the meeting structure, the planning framework, and the leadership discipline to keep a sales team focused and developing without consuming his entire week. The right meetings, run well and purposefully, are one of the most underrated management tools available to any principal.
If any part of what you have read has made you uncomfortable, that discomfort is worth paying attention to. It means you already know that something needs to change.
The Smartre Management Seminar runs in Melbourne, July 19th – 23rd. Five days designed specifically for principals who are ready to stop being the ceiling of their own business.
Over the course of the seminar, you will learn how to recruit the right people, not just find available ones. You will understand how Smartre Training takes the burden of ongoing training off your shoulders and embeds it into the structure of your business. And you will leave with a clear framework for building an agency that supports your growth without requiring your constant personal production to sustain it.
Five days is a large commitment. So here are our commitments to you:
1. You will learn in these five days what most principals fail to learn over five years.
2. If the content in the seminar is not of value, you leave without having to pay a cent.
3. The seminar has regular breaks throughout each day to allow you to remain productive. Five days away from your agency, yes, but not five days off. Think of it as five days working on your business while still working within it.
Tickets are $3,950 + GST for up to two people. If you have a business partner, office manager, or simply the person you want alongside you as you build this next version of your business, bring them along.
Book your tickets to the Smartre Management Seminar now – remember, you don’t need to pay a cent now. Reach out to the Smartre Training team directly, and let's get you in the room.
Think about what happens when you take a week off. Not a working holiday where you're still fielding calls and signing authorities from the beach. A real week off, phone down, properly disconnected.
For most principals who are still selling, the answer is uncomfortable. Enquiries get missed or mishandled. Appraisals get delayed. The team, without your energy and direction, operates at a noticeably lower level. And you come back to an office that has drifted rather than advanced.
So you stop taking real holidays. You tell yourself it's just this season, just this market, just until you get the right team in place. But the right team never quite arrives, because you never quite have the time to recruit properly, train properly, or lead properly. You are too busy selling.
This is the trap. And if you're like most principals reading this, you are already in it.
The financial cost is the obvious one. If your personal production stops, for any reason, the agency's income stops with it. Illness. Injury. Family crisis. Burnout. Any one of these events, none of which are unlikely over a career, would expose the fundamental fragility of an agency built around a single producer.
But the cost that accumulates quietly, year after year, is the cost of the business you are not building.
Every hour you spend on your own sales is an hour you are not spending on recruitment. On training. On the systems and structures that would allow your team to perform at a higher level without you in the room. On the strategic work that separates a business from a one-person operation with staff.
Your team can feel this, by the way. When you are too busy to invest in their development, too consumed with your own clients to sit down and work on theirs, they notice. And the talented ones, the ones you most want to keep, start asking themselves whether this is really a place they can grow. Most of the time, the answer they arrive at is no. And they leave.
So you hire again. And the cycle continues.
Most principals know, somewhere beneath the busyness, that something needs to change. The harder admission is that the person standing in the way of that change is usually themselves. Letting go of personal production feels like a risk. In reality, holding on to it is the greater one.
Consider what becomes possible when your agency is not dependent on your output.
You have time to recruit deliberately, not reactively. You can attract the right people, not just available people. You can invest in their development with the attention it requires, which means they stay longer, perform better, and contribute to a culture that attracts more good people.
Your income stops being tied to your diary. The agency begins producing results whether you are in the office or not. You can take a holiday, handle a personal emergency, or step back from day-to-day selling without the business skipping a beat.
Your profit margins improve. This surprises most principals when they first encounter it, but a well-structured agency with productive team members and the right commission model will outperform the same agency built around a single producer. The maths favours leverage over individual effort every time.
And your business becomes an asset. Not just a job with a good income, but something with genuine value, capable of being sold, scaled, or operated with reduced personal involvement. That is what a business is. What most principals have built is not that.
Steve Allen of Allen Property came to Smartre Training at a point of frustration most principals will recognise. He was the number one agent in his region. He was also trapped. Without his personal productivity, he had no business, and he knew it.
Over the years, he had hired and let go of numerous salespeople, unable to find anyone who matched his commitment, let alone his output. The problem, as it turned out, was not the people he was hiring. It was the absence of a system to recruit, train, and retain them properly.
Within two years of working with Smartre Training, Steve had recruited three salespeople, trained them under the Smartre Sales System, and developed them into genuine performers in their market. His personal production, through his own choice, dropped significantly. His agency's production increased substantially. His profit margin moved from 20% to over 35%.
Steve now runs his business rather than running from appointment to appointment. That is not a minor adjustment to how he works. It is a fundamental transformation in what he has built.
The three elements of the Smartre Management System that drove this transformation were Control, Recruit, and Team.
Control gave his agency structure and clarity, including a reworked commission model that ensured his salespeople were properly rewarded for their production while the business remained commercially sound.
Recruit gave him a roadmap for identifying the right people, not just candidates who interviewed well, but people with the genuine capacity and willingness to perform. It gave him a process for onboarding and training them, and the skills to retain them once they were performing.
Team gave him the meeting structure, the planning framework, and the leadership discipline to keep a sales team focused and developing without consuming his entire week. The right meetings, run well and purposefully, are one of the most underrated management tools available to any principal.
If any part of what you have read has made you uncomfortable, that discomfort is worth paying attention to. It means you already know that something needs to change.
The Smartre Management Seminar runs in Melbourne, July 19th – 23rd. Five days designed specifically for principals who are ready to stop being the ceiling of their own business.
Over the course of the seminar, you will learn how to recruit the right people, not just find available ones. You will understand how Smartre Training takes the burden of ongoing training off your shoulders and embeds it into the structure of your business. And you will leave with a clear framework for building an agency that supports your growth without requiring your constant personal production to sustain it.
Five days is a large commitment. So here are our commitments to you:
1. You will learn in these five days what most principals fail to learn over five years.
2. If the content in the seminar is not of value, you leave without having to pay a cent.
3. The seminar has regular breaks throughout each day to allow you to remain productive. Five days away from your agency, yes, but not five days off. Think of it as five days working on your business while still working within it.
Tickets are $3,950 + GST for up to two people. If you have a business partner, office manager, or simply the person you want alongside you as you build this next version of your business, bring them along.
Book your tickets to the Smartre Management Seminar now – remember, you don’t need to pay a cent now. Reach out to the Smartre Training team directly, and let's get you in the room.
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