The real lesson here is focus, not scale

Students who have been through my Sales classes would probably recognise the name Alex Jordan.

I’ve used his story for years. But after watching a much fuller version of his own talk recently, I realised that what I had been telling students was really only one chapter of the story.

The part I most often used in class was the farming lesson: how big should an agent’s market really be?

A lot of new agents assume the answer is simple. If you can cover all of Brisbane, why limit yourself to one suburb? If more listings are available, why not chase all of them?

But Alex Jordan’s story points in the opposite direction.

What changed his business was not making his territory bigger. It was finally making it smaller, then serving the same people more deeply.

Alex Jordan's first 12 years were already full of hard work

Alex entered real estate in 1999. He didn’t start out in sales straight away. He began as an office assistant, putting up For Sale signs, taking property photos, and doing the basic groundwork that keeps an agency running. Only after about six months did he move properly into sales.

In his first year, he completed 56 transactions. On paper, that sounds like a solid start. But when he later reflected on those early years, he described himself as a transaction agent for the first 12 years.

He cold called. He door knocked. He ran direct mail campaigns. He did the sort of prospecting work most people complain about.

And he didn’t do it half-heartedly. By his own account, he had dropped more than one million flyers over those years.

That’s why this story matters. Alex wasn’t lazy. If anything, he was working harder than most people would be willing to.

Even so, his best year in that period produced only around $380,000 in GCI.

For readers outside the industry, GCI stands for Gross Commission Income. In other words, it is the commission revenue generated before splits, staffing, marketing, admin costs, franchise fees and the rest of the business overheads are taken out.

So the issue wasn’t a lack of effort. The issue was that he was putting enormous effort into a model that didn’t compound very well.

In 2011, life forced him to rethink everything

The real turning point came in 2011.

Brisbane was hit by flooding, and his pipeline nearly dried up. At the same time, he developed spinal problems. A specialist even told him that, if things deteriorated, everyday tasks such as driving or tying his shoes could become increasingly difficult, and suggested he think about changing careers.

His wife was pregnant and preparing to stop working. Rent still had to be paid. Car repayments still had to be met. In the end, Alex had to borrow $5,000 from his parents just to get through that period.

I think that is how change often works. People do not usually change because they suddenly become enlightened. More often, life corners them until the old way no longer works.

Alex later joined McGrath and started closely observing agents who were genuinely operating at a high level. What stood out to him was that many top performers were not trying to be everywhere. Instead, they worked a very small farming area, but they worked it deeply.

Shrinking down to 770 homes changed the whole business

Alex had previously been working across multiple suburbs, covering tens of thousands of households.

Later, he narrowed his core market down to just 770 homes.

Yes, only 770.

To many people, that sounds like making the business smaller.

In practice, it did the opposite.

Within that small patch, he eventually achieved about 68% market share. That farming area alone reportedly produced around $1 million in GCI. From there, he kept building, and his team eventually grew to more than $10 million a year in GCI.

That is why I have always liked using this story in class. You do not need an entire city to know your name. What you really want is for those 770 households to think of you first when it is time to sell.

And it wasn’t just the size of the area that changed. His whole service model changed with it.

Before, the question was: where do I find the next customer?

Later, the question became: what value can I keep giving to these 770 homes?

That is why his marketing shifted away from generic self-promotion and towards useful local information: what sold in the area, where prices were moving, average days on market, and what was happening around them.

When he door knocked around a listing, he wasn’t opening with a hard sell. He might simply let neighbours know there would be an open home on the weekend, that parking could be busier than usual, and that they were welcome to have a look.

Neighbours came. Relationships formed. Contact continued. Some people ignored him dozens of times, but years later, when they were finally ready to sell, they still remembered him.

What agents waste most is often not ad spend, but past contact

That is another reason I keep returning to this story.

A lot of agents spend their days asking where the next lead is going to come from.

But often, what gets wasted is not the advertising budget. It is the people you have already touched.

A buyer asks about a property, gets a couple of replies, then disappears.

A tenant is treated as nothing more than a tenant.

A neighbour walks through an open home, then is never spoken to again.

A buyer settles on a purchase, and the relationship ends there.

But people do not stay in the same category forever.

Today’s tenant may become tomorrow’s buyer.

Today’s buyer may become an owner.

Later on, that owner may become your next vendor.

So when I look back at Alex Jordan’s story now, the most important lesson is not just that he shrank his patch to 770 homes.

The deeper lesson is that he had already worked incredibly hard for 12 years. The move from roughly $380,000 in annual GCI to a team generating more than $10 million in GCI did not happen because he suddenly became more hardworking. It happened because he changed the way the business itself was built.

At first, he kept reaching outward for more people.

Later, he focused on serving a smaller group of people so well that they remembered him.

That is why this has remained one of my favourite stories to teach. And now that I have heard the fuller version in Alex’s own words, I suspect I will be talking about it in class for even longer next time.