The skill that will scale your commercial real estate success.

CRE Success Principle: Your ability to grow depends on who’s around you—so build your team intentionally, with people who align with your vision and values.

If you want to build a commercial real estate empire, there’s one thing you can’t ignore—recruitment.

Because no one can overcome this simple fact:

You can’t scale a business all by yourself.

To take things to the next level, you must get the right people in the right seats.

That’s where recruitment comes in.

Many leaders in commercial real estate focus more on winning more deals than on building their team.

But here’s the truth: as your business and ambition expands, your ability to attract and retain top talent is more important than your capacity to close that next deal.

In the latest episode of Commercial Real Estate Leadership, I explore why recruitment feels harder than sales—and how you can apply the same skills to bring in high-performing employees.

If hiring the right people has been a challenge for you, don’t worry—you’re not alone.

Because with the right process, mindset, and effort, you too can build a team that drives revenue growth and frees up your time.

Ready to get your recruitment strategy right? Listen to episode 205 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership and take the first step towards scaling your success. 

Episode transcript:

Are you planning on growing your commercial real estate empire in 2025?

If you are fantastic, let's help you with that.

One way that you can do it, in fact, I believe probably the main way to do it is to enlist the support of others.

It's not something that you can really do all on your own.

So that means that recruitment, retention, and development of your people are critical to scale your success.

And in this episode, I want to focus on the recruitment piece.

Hello. Welcome to episode 205 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak.

Really appreciate you being with us for another episode, and I say that at the top of every episode, but I want you to know I really mean it.

I know there's so many other competing demands in your time.

There are literally millions of other podcasts and pieces of content that you can choose to consume, but you've decided to spend some time with us, and we really are grateful for that.

And I want you to know that I'm committed to help you to get the right people on your team, serving ideal clients inside a business that just works.

Last week's episode was about mindset, about perspective, about disposition.

I got some good feedback about that one, so thank you if you did send me a note.

I actually went through a little bit of a test of my own mindset and perspective and disposition, because after I recorded that episode or before I actually released it, I had something happen which it was really difficult for me to see the silver lining.

What happened was, I knocked over my ultra-wide monitor, which I've only had for about 4 months because my wife got it for me for Father's Day in 2024, which, if you're outside Australia, is actually in September here.

So, I've only enjoyed it if you take away holidays for about 3 months.

And what I discovered is, it's not like your phone, where if you drop your phone, you pick it up and it's all good to go.

These widescreen panels, these monitors are very sensitive and if you kind of just knock it, then one of the panels is destroyed and then the whole monitor's destroyed.

So, I had to get a new monitor, which was disappointing.

And I was having trouble really finding what is, like, the good news out of this.

But I found it, and it happened a couple of days later once I finally got around to installing the replacement monitor.

I got exactly the same model because there wasn’t an issue with the monitor.

And I couldn't for the life of me get the resolution right.

So, I knew that it was able to look like the correct aspect ratio when I extend my desktop between the widescreen and my PC, but I couldn't quite get it right with the new monitor.

So, I was troubleshooting how to fix this.

I got onto some forums and I just couldn't get it.

It was driving me a little bit nuts, and I was getting frustrated.

And here's the silver lining.

What I did was I just stepped away from it and I came back to it in around 24 hours.

And then I got on the ChatGPT and I started asking some questions.

It still wasn't giving me the right answer, and I got more specific and I explained the problem to ChatGPT and finally it gave me the answer that I was looking for, which was just an issue with the refresh rate.

I needed to change the refresh rate on the monitor, so then the screen looks right when I extend my desktop across to monitors.

So, I did find the silver lining. It's just sometimes it takes a little bit of time.

And, you know, I guess the silver lining there was that I didn't allow myself to spiral into a total feeling of helplessness and frustration.

I did get frustrated but I walked away from it. And then I came back to it fresh, with a new approach.

I knew I could figure it out. I just needed some time to step away and I did and figured it out.

So, big tick for me.

I also wanted to just check in about accountability for myself.

I mentioned in the last episode of 2024 that I was committing to write in my Resilience Project Gem Journal.

I recommended the book, The Resilience Project, as one of the three books to read over the holidays, and I said that I was going to, in 2025, write in my Gem Journal.

The Gem Journal is all about gratitude, empathy, and mindfulness.

And I mentioned that I'd bought this journal to practice my daily reflections, but I didn't actually get onto it in 2024.

I said, “Well, when we come back in 2025, we'll get started.”

And I kind of forgot about it. And then I got started and I've now done 5 continuous days, which is good. So, let's see if I can continue on and do the 30.

So, that's a little bit of accountability from me.

What do you need to be accountable for?

What did you set as your goals for 2025?

This episode's being released just a couple of days before the end of January, which is kind of wild to think about.

We're nearly 1/12 of the way through the year.

But that doesn't mean that it's too late for you to actually reset and recommit to the actions, to the standards, to the goals that you've set to have a great year in 2025.

Alright, so let's get into the topic for today. I want to talk about recruitment.

And one thing I was thinking about as I was planning this episode is the difference between recruiting when you work for somebody else versus recruiting for your own business.

And I think it's different. Because when you're recruiting for your own business, there's more on the line.

It's your company. And the people who work for you are a reflection of you.

Yeah, if you work for a company, also your team members are a reflection of you, but they're also a reflection of the company that you work for.

Ultimately, the buck stops with you if you are a business owner, and it's your money as well.

So, if you make a bad hiring decision, that costs you.

So, I think there's more on the line to get this right, and you need a plan.

So, you, you need a recruitment process.

I think we're going to need 2 episodes to talk about this.

I want to talk about why these matters, and then I want to talk about some specific things that you can do to set yourself up for success with recruitment.

Because recruitment is one of those things that I think a lot of commercial real estate principles do find difficult.

Most commercial real estate principles are fantastic at generating leads and executing for clients and getting deals done, but when it comes to recruitment, that feels a little bit harder.

And I want to preface what I'm about to talk about by asking you this question, how much effort do you put into recruitment?

So, if you find recruitment hard, ask yourself, “If you were to give yourself a score out of 10 for the effort that you've put into recruitment, what would that score be?”

And then I want you to compare, if you would give yourself a score out of 10 for the effort that you're putting into growing your business, what would that score be out of 10?

And I think with most commercial real estate principles, they're probably going to give themselves a higher score for the effort and focus that they're putting into growing their business as opposed to the specific activity of recruitment.

So, if you want to get better at recruitment, yes, you need to process, you need to understand why it's important, but also you need to put more effort into it.

And the truth is that you do have the skills to recruit.

The skills of recruitment are very similar to the skills of prospecting and winning new business.

It's just that instead of going after new clients, we're going after new potential employees.

And as I say this, I don't want to discount the difficulty or the challenges that come with recruitment because it is hard to find good people, they're not growing on trees out there.

And I think one of the problems is, is that we don't always get all of the information that we're looking for through the recruitment process.

So, I want to give you a bit more detail of how we can mitigate the risk of us not having all the information that we need in order to make the right decision.

Because if we don't make the right decision, what ultimately can happen is we don't have the confidence to pull the trigger and hire someone, or we hire someone who then ends up being the wrong fit, which means we're back at square one.

We've lost a lot of time that we've invested in the hiring process that didn't work.

And also, it can have a negative impact on your existing team members.

So, you might actually find yourself not just being back at square one, but maybe even going a little bit backwards.

And when this happens more than once, I think we can start to doubt ourselves or we can start to wonder, “Am I going to be able to find the people that are going to help me achieve the vision for my business and accomplish the financial goals that I've set?”

So, what I want to help you with is getting the right people into your business, having a choice of suitable candidates.

What we want to do is get all the information that we need to make the right or the best possible decision so we end up with people who are the right fit for the business.

So, what we're hoping for is a situation where there's no shortage of great candidates who want to work with us and for us to select from.

And if you think about why this is a relevant topic for you, I hope that encourages you to come back and listen to our next episode, because what I want you to have is more confidence to hire the people that can help you build your commercial real estate empire in 2025.

Now, if you would like to receive right now the hiring process that I've shared with my clients, we've got a seven-step process on how to get the right people into your business.

Then I want you to DM me on Instagram the word “RECRUITMENT”, and I'll send it to you.

So, if you want to know the process that I recommend for my clients to get more of the right people on their team so they can have more confidence to execute on the activity of recruitment, just go to @cresuccess on Instagram and just send me a DM with the keyword “RECRUITMENT” and I'll send you that process.

When we come back next week, I want to talk to you about roles and responsibilities.

I want to talk about the importance of hiring for attitude, attributes, and also aptitude, the need to have an alignment of vision and also values.

You may have heard the saying, ‘hire slow fire fast.’

Well, I think the reason why people hire slow is because they don't have confidence in their recruitment process.

So, I want to sort of challenge that notion of hiring slow and maybe give you some tools that enable you to execute more quickly, so you can get towards your goals faster.

So, we'll talk about that in our next episode.

For now, thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.