Let me ask you something, and I want you to sit with it for a second before you answer.
Think about the people you’re in business with right now. Your broker. The agents in your office. The “team” you’re supposedly a part of. Did you choose them? Like, intentionally, deliberately, strategically choose them? Or did you just… show up one day, sign some paperwork, and now you’re in business with whoever else happened to sign the same paperwork?
Because there’s a massive difference between those two things. And most agents have never stopped long enough to notice which category they’re in.
You Wouldn’t Choose Your Friends This Way
Think about your actual friends. The people you’d call at 11pm. The ones you’d trust with a key to your house. You didn’t get those relationships by accident. You earned them. They evolved. You chose them.
Now think about how you ended up at your brokerage.
Maybe you took a class with someone there. Maybe a friend referred you. Maybe it was the closest office to your house. Maybe you just Googled “real estate brokerage near me” and went with whoever called back fastest. And suddenly — boom — those are your people. That’s your tribe. That’s who you’re building your career alongside, whether you like it or not.
No interview. No vetting process. No “hey, are you actually a person I’d want to learn from and grow with?” Just… proximity and paperwork.
The Hidden Cost Nobody Talks About
Here’s where it gets expensive. And I don’t just mean financially, although it’s that too.
When you don’t choose who you’re in business with, you inherit their ceiling. You absorb their mediocrity. You sit in meetings with people who are totally fine closing 8 deals a year and retiring that way. And after a while, that starts to feel normal. Average starts to look like the standard. And slowly — not dramatically, but slowly — you start to shrink to fit the room you’re in.
I’ve watched this happen to good agents for 27 years.
The brokerage model wasn’t built to curate your environment. It was built to collect your splits. Who you’re surrounded by? That’s largely an accident of geography and timing.
What It Looks Like When You Actually Get to Choose
When I built my organization at eXp, I wasn’t just adding agents. I was selecting people. There’s a difference.
I’ve talked about this before — you want aces, not sixes and sevens. And the thing about aces is they tend to find each other, because they’re looking for the same thing. They’re not looking for a desk and a brand to hide behind. They’re looking for a platform, a peer group, and a future that actually has some upside baked into it.
The people in my world — I know them. I chose them, or they chose me, or both. We share a philosophy about how business should be built. We’re aligned on where we’re going. And when something goes sideways (which it always does), we solve it together and move on. That’s not an accident. That’s architecture.
Here’s the Honest Question
Do you feel like you’ve had a say in who you’re in business with… or did you just kind of end up where you are?
Not who you work for. Who you work with.
Because those are different questions, and the second one matters a lot more over a 20-year career.
The first question is about employment. The second one is about wealth, culture, and whether you’re building something or just surviving something.
If you’re being honest with yourself and the answer is somewhere between “not really” and “I’ve never even thought about that until thirty seconds ago” — that’s okay. Most agents haven’t. Because nobody ever told them it was an option.
It’s an Option
You can actually choose. You can be intentional about who you build with, who mentors you, who’s in your corner when a deal falls apart at 6pm on a Friday. You can be in a structure where the people around you are invested in your success — not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because the model rewards it.
That’s not a fantasy. That’s just a different decision.
And if you’ve never been shown that decision exists, now you have been.
Email hello@richtomasini.com and let’s have a real conversation about it. Not a pitch. Not a presentation. Just math, a few honest questions, and a look at whether what you’re building right now is actually what you want to be building.
The people you run with will define your ceiling. Choose them carefully.