We recently connected with Holly Meyer Lucas and have shared our conversation below.

Holly, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?

In 2015 I started my real estate company kind of by accident. My husband played professional baseball and we were living in an area known for being the home of many professional athlete families – Jupiter, Florida. During the off-season of 2015, I started helping my baseball wife friends with their housing needs in the Jupiter and Palm Beach area, since so many were relocating here. One thing led to another and all of a sudden I realized there was a real need for a real estate company in Palm Beach County, who fully understood the life of professional athletes, particularly the wives who juggle being moms and the grind of maintaining multiple homes in season and out of season, and the quick moves that happen in the pro athlete and coach life.

So I started my company and realized quickly that selling real estate is a team sport. For me to provide an amazing level of service to my friends and clients, I needed to hire a team to help me with the volume of inbound inquiry.

I hired my first employees and team members within a year and had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea who I was as a leader or really what I was as a company at first. It took me about four years and some brutal hiring misfires to really get my feet under me as a leader and hone in on what I needed help with, what I should delegate, and what I needed to do as the owner of the company.

My business has a unique, niche clientele with very narrow, high expectations. That’s not to say my clients are high maintenance or stuck up (the stereotype that many people always run to), it just means our timeframes are shorter, there are typically more people involved in a transaction. The stakes are higher because of both of those dynamics.

Due to the complexities and caliber of my client base, training my real estate agents and employees on every single aspect of real estate has always been of the upmost importance. I take our level of service, brand consistency, and delivering on our promises very seriously. Businesses like mine rely heavily on maintaining internal training platforms, homegrown resources, mentorship, and recruiting talent. It can be a juggling act if you don’t have your shit together.

I have a chief of staff – Hallie Rosenthal – who has been an absolute game changer for us in terms of juggling all those things.

Holly, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Ah my previous answer can probably be broken into this one.

I own a luxury real estate company and a marketing agency based in South Florida. Our clients are luxury home sellers and home buyers, real estate investors, developers, and real estate agents. My real estate company has a niche clientele of working with professional athletes and their families and when I first started selling real estate in 2015, that is what I was best known for.

I spend most of my time training and mentoring our agents so they an deliver elite home sales and marketing services to our clients.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In May 2020, when the world was on its axis and the real estate market was on fire, I had a baby, my husband left for the baseball season and couldn’t come back for months (covid bubble rules in Major League Baseball were intense that year) and nearly my entire team left my organization for a competitor.

We were on fire as a company, revenue wise, and when I took a step back and unpacked what had happened, it became more and more clear that I had accidentally created an environment where I was leveling up and scaling at the speed of light, but I wasn’t checking in on my people to see if they were comfortable with our new procedures, policies, and with the changes I was making to accommodate our growth. I had fully stepped into my power as a leader, and was full throttle growing and scaling, and my own personal glow up created resentment and had created a toxic work environment overnight.

As a leader, blindspots like that are easy to miss because we are constantly told what we want to hear until its too late. I had turned a blind eye to the people who had signed up to work with me in an entirely different environment than the one I was building and if I’m being honest, as our growth exploded and I stepped into my power, I didn’t care. During that time my perspective was level up with me, or get out of my way. And so that’s what happened. Those who leveled up stayed and those who wanted to do something different left.

Looking back on it, I am so grateful for that sophomore season of messiness and growth. When a personnel slate is wiped clean like mine was, especially when you are so misaligned internally, it is a total gift. It enabled me to lean into our glow up and hire talent that was aligned with the direction we were heading.

There are so many amazing books and podcasts that talk about this messy middle of business (in fact, one is called the messy middle and I highly recommend it) When you start a business and hire people it’s so important to maintain focus on the fact that you are hiring people for jobs and a set of tasks for one version of your company and as one version of yourself in your leadership journey. And if (when) your business is successful, it is very likely that you will evolve into another version of yourself as a leader, with new circumstances, policies and procedures. I have some amazing people who leveled up right alongside me and helped me grow this thing to where we are now. And I am grateful for the ones who left. They played tremendously valuable roles in our early stages and I hold those memories near and dear.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

In 2021 I sold a $28 million home on the ocean in the Palm Beach area and I am so proud of the journey with that sale. I had worked with the seller on an investment property that he owned in Jupiter and through that initial sale there was an opportunity for me to do something quasi sketchy that would have benefited me significantly (monetarily I mean). I am an honest person through and through, and take pride in always opting to do the right thing. I called out the potential discrepancy and he was impressed with my integrity. (Meanwhile, another agent on the deal lied and forged records to double down on the same exact thing and was caught a few weeks later. That’s a story for another day but for curious eyes, the full story on that is documented in the country court records. They lost their court case over it. I digress.)

A few months later, the aforementioned investor told me he was thinking about selling his personal home on the ocean, and invited me to market the property as a pocket listing. I wanted the full listing more than I’ve wanted anything in my entire life. A $28 million listing can be life changing for any real estate professional. However, as badly as I wanted the sale, I knew I had to bring in an agent with deeper experience to do right by the seller and the listing itself. I asked the seller if he would be open to me partnering with another broker, whom he had also granted pocket listing access, and he said yes. We won the listing, a few weeks later found the buyer, and after a tough negotiation, closed it. I sold one of the highest residential home sales in the United States, and am one of the youngest agents to ever do so, because I did the right thing. Twice.

Contact Info:

• Website: Meyerlucas.com
• Instagram: Holly.meyer.lucas
• Facebook: Hollygracemeyer13
• Linkedin: Hollygmeyer
• Twitter: Hollymlucas

Image Credits
Magda Photo, Eve Greendale, Pelican Pix