Why building a successful real estate team starts with a long-term view of people
Joe Schafbuch didn't walk into real estate with a license, a playbook, or even a desire to sell homes. He walked in at 45 years old, with seven kids at home, having just quit a job that was going well, and bought a brokerage where, as he puts it, "half of them could spell real estate and the other half were difficult." Twenty years later that company is in the top 10 of all Century 21 franchises in the nation and has been named a top workplace in Iowa four consecutive years, finishing number two in the country in 2024. The reason isn't a secret system. It's a philosophy: build with your people, not on them.
What hitchhiking across the Midwest taught Joe about leadership
Before any of that, Joe was a college student at UW-Stevens Point on a wrestling scholarship, majoring in what he calls "wildlife management", which is to say he was more interested in the road than the classroom. He started testing how far he could hitchhike on weekends and still make it back for class. Eventually the weekends got longer. What he picked up on those rides wasn't just geography. It was how to build trust fast, how to actually listen, and how to make someone feel heard in the first two minutes of a conversation. "You don't want them uneasy either when you're making a new friend," he told Ben. Those skills, trust, curiosity, presence, turned out to be exactly the ones that would define his leadership style decades later.
How early adversity sharpens entrepreneurial instincts
Joe's entrepreneurial instincts showed up early. He and his brother fished golf balls out of a pond near their dad's first post-college job and sold them back to golfers. In junior high he was buying candy at the grocery store before school and reselling it out of his locker at recess. "There is opportunity everywhere," he said, and that lens never left him. But it was the harder seasons, 13 years in the auto industry, three years in the restaurant business, watching companies extract value from the people doing the work, that gave him the clearest picture of what he didn't want to build. Hardship, Joe argues, is a better teacher than early success. "Success is a terrible, terrible teacher." The people who grow fastest are the ones who fail, stop, assess what actually happened, and adjust, not just their tactics, but their attitude.
The real ROI of investing in your team
When Ben asked Joe for the top three things a new business owner must do to build a strong team, Joe didn't lead with systems or hiring frameworks. He led with vision, purpose, and the willingness to invest time in other people the same way you'd invest money in any other asset. "No different than it is your kids at home, you invest time with them, you get a better result." He pointed to Bonnie Leage as a living example: a hire who came in under her ceiling, grew visibly past her role, and eventually built something significant on her own. Joe's response wasn't to hold her closer. It was to name what he saw out loud and give her room to become it. That, he says, is what most operators miss, they see talent that threatens the org chart and tighten their grip instead of opening their hands.
The stories we tell ourselves versus the story that's actually true
One of the more honest stretches of this conversation came when Ben pushed Joe on the gap between the external story and the internal one. Joe admitted that humility, something he values deeply, can become a way of not taking up the space you've actually earned. "I don't want people to think that I did that. Like, this took a lot of people and a lot of time." Ben's response was direct: calling a win a win isn't bragging. It's like watching a sunrise and refusing to comment on it. The leaders who build the best teams are usually the ones who can hold both truths at once, I did this, and I didn't do it alone.
Mentors you meet on a page
Joe has been a Strategic Coach member for 11 of the last 15 years and credits Dan Sullivan's frameworks with some of the most significant mindset shifts of his career. Before that, Michael Gerber's E-Myth Revisited gave him permission to be a shareholder instead of trying to be the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur all at once. Simon Sinek's Leaders Eat Last reinforced what Joe had already learned the hard way: that the leader's job is to protect the people doing the work, not to be protected by them. He reads constantly and makes no apologies for it. "If you're not growing, you're dying", and he's not interested in dying.
