The key takeaways from Austin Cheviron's live coaching sessions, and a living place to keep your own notes as each module lands.
Where we are in the course, and where we are heading. This is the spine you add to each week.
Austin sets the tone before any content lands.
He starts on time and ends on time, and he records every session, which he says he normally never allows, because a recording gives people a reason to miss the live call. He sends his own notes too. For the next six weeks the ask is simple: put more in the pot than the pot can hold. Drop the excuses (busy, travelling); everyone is busy, and leaders carry a little more for a short spell, staying up a bit later and doing the extra work.
He holds this group to a higher standard, with a lower tolerance for slack, because they are the top people. And he asks for an open cup: don't say "I've heard this before" or "I agree". Come to learn, and let him pour in.
Sharpen the saw three times, cut once.
Austin ChevironWhat got you here won't get you there.
Austin ChevironA boat pivots quickly. A ship takes about half a mile to turn. Your company is one or the other depending on its size, and if you treat a ship like a boat it capsizes. Resetting direction takes time, so allow for it, or people jump off and the culture breaks. The target Austin sets: have the new structure in place by 1 January 2027.
And when you steer, always err a little more on the team's side than your own. He frames that as a piece of leadership insurance: give the team the benefit of the doubt on the turn.
Culture and expectations is 60% of the whole programme. It is the foundation everything else sits on, and if you get it wrong the rest crumbles. When Austin fixes a company, whether it is one agent or three hundred, he always goes back to culture and expectations first.
Raise the team up to your level; don't drop down to theirs. Operating at their level is exactly why standards feel lower. Cast a new vision and invite them in: "I'd love for you to come with me. Any time you don't like the training I provide, I'll release you." The biggest value on the team is the leader's wisdom, systems and processes. Interview at the right level too, because a company built of part-timers won't become a full-time company.
Around a hundred hours and tens of thousands in legal fees sit behind the team contract, and it is free inside the programme. Read the whole thing by the end of next week. It holds the culture, the expectations, and what happens when someone tries to take advantage. Don't copy it and slap your name on it: read it, highlight what is missing from yours, and add those pieces.
We don't always need more. We need to do better with what we have.
Austin ChevironYou are the one letting the weeds grow among the flowers.
Austin ChevironThis session covered who does what, how you do it and when you do it, because that is part of culture too. Draw your org chart even if your own name sits in seven boxes. Identify every role now: legal support (do you even know who you would call?), a bookkeeper, office and admin, each job on the chart. Name them all while you are the smallest you will ever be, so you can hand them off as you grow.
Most team meetings are bad. You wouldn't sit in your own meeting if you didn't run it. So make it worth their time. If no one shows up, either it isn't worth their time, or you hired the wrong people, or you set the wrong expectations at interview. A professional gets in and out, of the call, the appointment, the meeting. Start on time, end on time.
The sixty-minute team meeting, run to a fixed agenda:
Start positive, and give latecomers a buffer so they don't miss the key content.
Onboarding, to welcome new members, and offboarding.
The company's stats: transactions, income, deals.
People forget what's coming; your job is to help them see ahead.
Rates moved, a deal blew up: what do we do about it.
The one thing to work on this season. For Austin right now, higher accountability.
Meet twice a month, in the first and third week of the run cycle, roughly every other week. The company exists to serve you, so don't trap yourself in weekly ninety-minute meetings you don't want to attend. Ask how little you can meet, and in how few minutes, to get the most out of it.
And offboard well: have the person who is leaving come into the next meeting and tell the team why they are going. Austin has offboarded around thirty agents, and all but one left on good terms, through open, honest conversations and by helping them leave. Imagine that culture.
Everyone on one call, phones to ear, making calls, so the leader can see them. If your company can't build its own business, you are paying for it: the leads, the tech and the accountability add up to a second company inside your company. Teach agents to win their own business and expenses fall, they are grateful, and everything gets better.
Bring in different people, from Austin himself to his therapist. Invest in your closest group and make them the best.
The transaction coordinator drops onto the call and runs every deal, around a hundred in fifteen minutes. Agents finish lead gen knowing exactly where each deal stands, then go and work.
A lion hunting alone succeeds about a quarter of the time. Wild African dogs succeed far more often, because they hunt as a pack, three to five times more successfully. Build a culture of hunting together. Many great agents were built as lions, very good on their own; the new path brings them into the pack to hunt with the team. An agent who won't hunt with the pack is a lion, and the success rate on their own is much lower.
Hunt in a pack.
Austin ChevironIf they won't hunt with the team, they're a lion.
Austin ChevironCome with the open cup. The willingness to be taught comes first.
The one that holds the culture together. Say it to the group, not just the leader.
Show up to the rhythm and do the work you signed up for.
The commercial commitment that comes last, once the first three are in place.
Communication is the one that protects the culture. If an agent has four closings today and says so to the whole group, not just to the leader, that is fine, because he communicated it. Telling only the leader creates a "James is special, he doesn't have to" problem. Repeatedly missing while communicating becomes a balance conversation, but the communication keeps the culture intact.
The team business runs three weeks on, one week off: a run cycle. Rest weeks sit in grey on the calendar, with no meetings and no lead gen. People pay more and are happier working three weeks a month than four. The trick to rest is to run hard: fewer distractions, on point and on task, fifteen-minute calls that really are fifteen minutes. Then you pull back and recover.
Rest weeks are for recovery and maintenance, of body, mind, house, car, family, kids and finances, clearing the pile that builds up behind you while your head is down. Protect the week: when someone asks for a meeting on it, offer dates before or after ("would the 12th or the 21st work?"). Incoming calls are your choice to answer. Get your financials right and it matters far less if you lose the odd one. What you really need is your sanity, not another transaction.
You need your sanity, not another transaction.
Austin ChevironMake it rain when your head's down, then choose your time.
Austin ChevironHold a quarterly event with spouses and family. The job beats you up, so bring the family into the culture and let them see the good side. Twice a year, run a mid-year trip and an end-of-year trip. Austin calls them a rumble strip: by mid-year people have only veered so far, and the trip pulls them back to the centre of who you are, what you do and why. Fun and education together. Skip it and you lose the culture, and then the people, over time.
Austin ran the team on about seventeen thousand US dollars a month, and he will show exactly where it went. He can afford to pay for trips and retreats when they are a good investment in the culture, precisely because he isn't buying leads, tech or extra accountability. Lead generation is the next module; the full financials come later.
One member hadn't watched Module 1, and he was having a genuinely hard week at home. Instead of putting it on him, Austin put it on another member, Jamie: "By next week, make sure he watches session one. If he doesn't, you and I have a different conversation." That is accountability at work: the member doesn't want to let Jamie down, and Jamie doesn't want to let Austin down.
Austin keeps asking Jamie the four C's, because Jamie couldn't answer earlier in the week, so Jamie becomes the four C's guy. The best athletes have the hardest coaches. As Austin puts it, let me point out where you're weak and make you strong.
A place to capture what landed each week. Type straight into the boxes below, or download the PDF and write on it. This grows with the programme.
"Put more in the pot than the pot can hold."
Austin Cheviron"Raise them up to your level; don't come down to theirs."
Austin Cheviron"The trick to rest is to run hard."
Austin Cheviron