The year was 1996.

• Dolly the cloned sheep was born
• The Top Song was Don’t Speak by No Doubt
• The Movies to Watch included: Jerry Maguire, The English Patient, Michael and Mars Attacks!
• Red Bull energy drink entered the US Market
• Doug Lytle got his real estate license

Ever had one of those life changing experiences that you look back on and just think, ‘What the hell was I thinking?!’

I have. It involved a little classified ad in the paper that I found after graduating from Sir Sandford Fleming College. I was 21 years old and looking for work. I saw a very small, very innocuous ad with the simple question: Ever thought of a career in real estate? Why no, I hadn’t, as a matter of fact. 

Indeed, I had absolutely no idea what a real estate agent actually did. My parents had owned a number of homes and we moved quite often when I was a child, but, as all children are, I was only involved on the periphery of these moves. My exposure was limited to packing my stuff and getting in the car and helping to unpack. I had very little say in the matter and was completely unaware of the process or any details of the sales.

What I did have was a recent certificate in Entrepreneurship from college. That and a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit that I inherited from my mother. She’d run a small goat farm, a dog breeding business, and had run a high producing cosmetics sales team over the years, so I’d at least seen some of what a business owner goes through. Her father was also a business owner – after a career working for the city of Scarborough, he’d moved to a small rural community and started an oil burner service company. 

So, responding to that little classified ad, I went for an interview with Carl Oake, venerated local real estate mogul. Carl was polite to this kid with long hair and absolutely no experience with real estate ownership. He told me a bit about the business and what Century 21 did, and most importantly, how agents get paid. I was intrigued.

I called my parents and talked it over with them and after a further discussion with my girlfriend, now my wife of over 25 years, I decided I’d give it a try. I was young enough that a failure wasn’t going to be fatal and I could always try something else later. So I cashed in my savings bonds, left to me by my godmother, and went to get my education in real estate.

I started with Century 21 Carl Oake Ltd. in February of 1996. And I was a failure.

But I didn’t quit.

There were so many great people at this company that truly wanted to help me. Too many to name, but they helped me. They’d add me to a listing, or share a buyer lead with me and I’d work on these as best I could. But I still wasn’t having any success on my own. 

I had one prospect say to me, “You’re just a kid! What do you know about real estate?!” What I wanted to say was, “Hey, I’m the guy with the license and the best available education, that’s what I know”, but I didn’t say that. I kept my mouth shut and took it. Man, was I ever insulted by that guy. I’ve never forgotten that, and I’ve never said anything so uncouth to a young person just getting started.

And so it went for about a year and a half. Stumbling along, taking courses, and trying to get started. I nearly left the business. Then, one day, a gentleman named Bill Pyle stood up at our sales meeting to talk about this thing called ‘commercial real estate’. Bill was a company man through and through. He had so many leads that he was leaving business on the table. He simply couldn’t handle the number of requests he was getting. He knew it wasn’t good for the company to have that image of not following through and he wanted to do something about it. When Bill approached Carl about this, Carl suggested that he talk about it at the next meeting and see if anyone was interested in learning more. So that’s what he did, and it changed my life.

After that meeting I approached Bill and asked how I could get involved. He sized me up pretty quickly, a young guy with zero commercial real estate experience and next to no real estate experience at all, and suggested that I go get yet more education. So, I went back to the Ontario Real Estate Association and took an elective course titled: Introduction to Commercial Real Estate. My mind was blown. I’d heard of this thing in the first course to get my license, but it was literally a short video clip of three people on an escalator pointing at something off-screen with a voice over that said, “And there’s this thing called commercial real estate, but back to selling houses”. I wasn’t prepared for the journey I was about to embark upon.

When I got back to the office after that course, the very first thing I did was go to see Bill and ask, “What next?” Foreshadow: this was about to become a theme.

Bill handed me a yellow sticky note with a name and phone number on it and told me that this lead was looking for some industrial space and I should call them to set a meeting. So that’s what I did. I headed to my office, made the call, set the appointment, and then headed back to Bill’s office. 

“What next?”, I asked.

He looked a little dumbfounded, fumbled with some more notes, and handed me another yellow sticky note. “Call this one. They want some retail space. See if you can set an appointment.” So I headed back to my office, made the call, set the appointment, and then headed back to Bill’s office.

“What next?”

He laughed a little and told me to cool my jets and work on these two first and we’d see how it went. Well, it went pretty well. Over the next several months, Bill brought me on more and more appointments. On one particular listing appointment for some vacant retail space that needed to be leased out, he simply introduced me to the property manager as his partner. 

We split everything 50/50 for the next 13 years. Really.

I like to say that we changed the face of Chemong Road. We brokered deals for Chemong Park Plaza – the new owners took on a complete remodel and updated the plaza, the new Walmart, the Shopper’s Drug Mart, and the Hyundai dealership deals for the sale of their old location and the land deal for their new one, among other things like retail leases up and down the strip. 

We sold most of Neal Drive one year. The UPS warehouse, the old Canadian Tire warehouse, buildings once owned by Nefab, and other industrial properties, among some rather large scale industrial leases.

We did development projects from Petawawa to Windsor and institutional sales like convents, churches, and large school campuses. 

I found my groove. More importantly, I found my mentor and a big brother. Bill taught me so much about the real estate industry and he taught me more about being a man.

• Lesson one, in all of life and business: Always start with questions. Don’t assume anything and don’t take it personally. Ask questions. Learn what you can about your client’s needs and then, and only then, offer solutions.
• Lesson two: If the thing you want to say in the heat of the moment won’t add to the solution or if it will inflame someone’s anger, don’t say it. If you feel like you ‘just have to say something’ because you’ve been wronged, this rule especially applies. If it won’t add to a solution, don’t say it. This is called, ‘Taking the high road’.
• Lesson three: Life is too short for a$$holes. If you don’t have a value match with your would-be client, you’re in for a bad time. Cut ‘em loose and move on. 
• Lesson four: Take more time off. We went from working all the time to taking at least six weeks of vacation each per year. Every time we doubled our time off, our income doubled. You do the math.

For years we worked on and in our business successfully. And then it happened. We were denied an opportunity to even bid on a project because we were seen as too small. ‘You’re with a residential company, why would we even give you the RFP?’ Then the market fell apart in 2008/9. I nearly left the business again.

At this time, an old friend of mine, Richard Whitney, whom I’d taken my real estate courses with years before, reached out and strongly encouraged me to stay in the business. So after some soul searching and discussion with my wife and Bill, I decided to leave Century 21 and start another company with my old friend. Again, my learning took off. I’d never owned a company before, I was just a sales guy. This was new! And we did some business and had some serious fun doing it. 

After some time, though, I was approached by yet another brokerage to see what I had in my plans for the future. Would I be interested in coming to manage their company? Interesting, I thought…

Again, more discussion with my partner and my wife, and I took on this new challenge. And again, my learning exploded.

In this new role, I had to recruit agents to a largely residential real estate company with offices in three jurisdictions. I grew that company by about 35% in a year. But recruiting was the hardest thing I’d ever done in real estate. Also, in this new role, I had to train and mentor our existing agents – something I hadn’t done before, but I took it upon myself to learn how. I lifted ideas from my own mentors and devoured everything I could about training and mentoring residential agents and, somewhat surprisingly to me, individual productivity went up across the company. It was working.

Then, in 2013, another opportunity arose. I learned that Century 21, the company I’d started at, had lost its manager. I approached Carl and Constantine, the broker of record at the time, and told them that they needed me. Bold move, eh? But it worked and I’ve been managing here since then. I have to say, it was like coming home when I arrived back at C21.

Here’s the interesting part, while I was at my last brokerage as a manager, I was approached by agents from other offices who’d heard about my work, and asked if I would coach them. I was flabbergasted. Utterly flattered and floored. Never in my life had someone asked me for this kind of help. I was actively trying to learn about coaching and was applying what I’d learned to our staff, but to have someone bypass their own manager and go outside like this? What the what? 

Naturally, I took this on too. Note: I’m starting to see a pattern in my business life. Take on the new challenges when they come knocking, but have a plan to abandon them if and when necessary.

So that’s how I got started coaching. Part of my pitch to Carl when I went after this job, was that I could coach agents and help them grow their productivity. It was a long journey from my start in real estate to becoming a coach. But that’s who I am now. A coach. I can’t believe it took me this long to realize that this is who I should have been all along. But I suppose you can’t skip steps. If I hadn’t taken that circuitous route, I wouldn’t have arrived at this point. 

The year is now 2023, and it’s been quite the ride to this point.

I can’t tell you how much satisfaction I get from coaching business people, in particular real estate agents. Working with someone who actually wants to get better, but needs someone to hold them accountable and to help them find what it is that they need to do to get better at what they do.

I don’t reinvent the wheel with my agents; I take a look at what they’re already doing, and together we just make it better. Sometimes, oftentimes actually, that means stopping doing a lot of things that just don’t add to the bottom line but ‘feel’ productive. It usually also means just getting a little bit better at a small number of things. Getting over rejection, learning how to overcome objections, and disconnecting from the outcome are where the real magic happens.

I simply love doing this job!

January 5, 2023 – Doug Lytle, Managing Coach