Lisa Chinatti built her team from the ground up. In 2017, she had 8 to 9 agents. Today, her team has close to 140, plus 25 W-2 staff supporting them.
Growth like that changes more than the size of the org chart. What works as a team leader with 10 agents doesn’t automatically translate to a team of 50, let alone 100 or more.
Lisa broke down the differences in a conversation with Luke Acree on the Stay Paid podcast.
Here’s what changes as a real estate team grows, from how well a leader can know every agent to whether starting a team makes sense in the first place. Some of it comes down to mindset. Some of it comes down to who you hire and when.
Let’s start with something a lot of team leaders assume they’ll keep doing no matter how big the team gets: knowing their own agents (on a personal level).
Why Knowing 10 Agents Well Doesn’t Scale to 100
With 10 agents, a team leader can know each person well. Closeness like that looks like knowing a spouse’s or plus one’s name. Knowing their kids. Knowing what makes each person feel valued. Knowing when one of your agents is struggling and understanding why.
How well one team leader can know 100+ agents is different. Because attention can only scale if time and energy allow it.
Here’s how Lisa puts it:
“It’s very easy to really know 10 people. It’s difficult to really know a hundred people. And knowing the names of everybody’s spouses or plus ones and their kids, knowing the things that make them feel good, is really easy when you’ve got 10 people, and it’s a lot more difficult when you’ve got a hundred.”
Growth doesn’t lower how much a leader cares about each agent. But it does reduce how much personal attention any single agent can get. Attention becomes more diffuse, by necessity, or more focused on professional needs as the number grows.
What Culture Has to Change at 100 People
Lisa talks with other team leaders about a principle that becomes necessary once a team gets big: fair treatment, not equal treatment.
Here’s how she puts it:
“One of the things we always talk about in our group is that you can be treated fairly but not equally. That’s got to become a part of the culture, fair but not equal.”
Treating every agent the same might feel like the easier path. At 100 agents, it stops being possible, and it stops being fair to the agents who need something different.
There’s another change that goes beyond policy. Every decision a team leader makes at scale ripples out further than they might expect.
Here’s how Lisa describes coming to terms with that:
“Being able to internalize the fact that every single decision you make doesn’t just affect you, it doesn’t just impact your staff, it doesn’t just impact your agents, but it impacts the children and the spouses and the friends and the family members of every single person in your organization. Being able to take that weight and understand that even the stupidest decisions can have such a big, long-lasting impact is not lost on me anymore.”
The Leadership Skills That Change at Every Breakpoint
Being a great agent doesn’t guarantee someone becomes a great team leader. Being a great leader for a small team doesn’t guarantee the same skills carry over to a large one.
Here’s how Lisa puts it:
“You can be a killer agent. You can be the most amazing agent and a great team leader for a small team, but there’s a very big difference at all of these break points.
“The leadership skills that get you to managing 10 people are very different than the leadership skills you need to manage 50, and those are very different than what you need to manage a hundred.”
Lisa saw this play out in her own business in 2024, when a leadership breakdown led to dozens of agents exiting the team to join a competitor. That experience proved in a uniquely painful way that the skill difference between headcounts is real and consequential.
Which Seat to Fill First as You Grow
There’s no single playbook for a team leader’s first hire. It depends on where that leader wants to spend their time.
Two common patterns Lisa points to:
- A leader who gravitates toward the sales seat should hire out operations first.
- A leader who prefers operations should hire out sales first.
Here’s how she puts it:
“That one’s tough to answer because it depends on the individual team leader. For me personally, I was much happier sitting in an ops seat versus a sales seat when I was starting out, so it was more important for me to fill the sales side right away because I didn’t want to have to do that. But I think there’s a lot of folks who naturally gravitate toward sitting in the sales seat in the short term, and for them, the smarter hire is hiring out the operations seat first.”
For most of her company’s history, Lisa has always had to fill some seat herself. Only this year has that changed.
“This is probably the first time in the history of the company where I’ve felt like I don’t have to sit in one of those seats. I get to bop around and sit in any seat that strikes my fancy for a particular quarter. Up until probably March of this year, there hasn’t been a period where I haven’t sat in a seat.”
When to Start a Team and When to Wait
Luke asked Lisa what advice she would give to agents thinking about starting a team. She led with two conditions that, if true, set up a would-be team leader for failure.
Don’t start a team if:
- You’re chasing easy money
- You don’t have at least 12 months of personal and professional expenses saved
A team doesn’t pay for itself right away. In the early months, a team leader pays for lead costs and tools long before new agents are trained enough to produce. This timing problem is exactly why Lisa ties her advice to a savings cushion instead of a feeling of readiness.
On the flipside, Lisa offered two compelling reasons why an agent may be well-positioned to start building a team.
In her words:
“Don’t start a team if you are just looking for easy money and you don’t have minimum 12 months of personal and professional expenses in the bank, period, because you will lose money in your first 12 months. I don’t know anybody who’s done this and who’s been truly profitable in their first 12 months.
“And then do it if you are truly maxed at your own personal production and still feel like you’re leaving opportunity on the table.”
Maxed out means an agent has hit a real ceiling on personal production, one no amount of extra hustle can push past alone. Hiring becomes the only way to capture the business already sitting on the table.
What to Build Before You Need It
Every one of these five changes arrives faster than most team leaders expect. The jump from 10 agents to 50 sneaks up, then hits all at once. Building the right culture ahead of growth beats waiting for the cracks to show.
So does building the hiring plan and the leadership skills to match it.
Look at your team today, whatever size it is. Which of these five changes have you made, and which are you still putting off?
For team leaders needing to answer this question, being in proximity to those who’ve been through it and have grown their teams sustainably, learning along the way, can speed your growth in a way nothing else can. Which is why this year’s BAM Camp is for team leaders looking to scale to $100M and beyond. Lisa will be there, along with Byron Lazine, Tom Toole, George Laughton, Luke Acree, Amy Stockberger, and others, including Gino Blefari.
Join us on September 22-23 in Scottsdale, AZ, for an event you won’t find anywhere else.
This is a closed–door, in-person event with a limited number of spots (by design), and tickets are almost sold out. Learn more and lock down your spot while you still can.
