It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything here.

I’d love to tell you that was a deliberate content strategy.

A considered pause. Building anticipation, letting the last one breathe, all that.

It wasn’t. I’ve just been knackered. Which is, conveniently, what this one is about.

The wristband that grassed me up

A little while back I got myself a Hume band. Not for any noble wellness reason. I like data, and I wanted to see what was actually going on under the bonnet.

I’d like to state for the record that I paid money for this. I voluntarily strapped a small device to my own arm whose entire job is to notice things about me I was actively avoiding noticing, and then report them back with charts.

Fantastic. Brilliant purchase. 10/10, would be judged by a bracelet again.

Because here’s what it’s shown me, and I can’t unsee it now.

Sunday evening, my stress is low. Properly low. The lowest it gets all week.

Monday, it ticks up.

Tuesday, up again.

Wednesday, higher.

Thursday, higher still.

Friday, it peaks. The absolute summit. The highest point of my entire week and not once, not in an unusual week. Every week.

Then Saturday it falls off a cliff, Sunday it bottoms out, and on Monday morning we start the climb again like a very depressing theme park ride that I appear to have bought a season pass for.

It isn’t a bad week. That’s the thing. It’s a pattern. Five days up, two days down, repeat until further notice.

I didn’t need a wristband to tell me I was stressed. I’ve got a mirror. But I did need it to show me it wasn’t random. That it isn’t “just a busy month” or “just this quarter.” It’s the actual design of how I’m currently living, drawn out in a neat little line, in a colour I’ve come to resent.

The shape of the day

I’m not a morning person. Never have been. So I check in with Nest at half nine. So what?

I say that with my chest, but I know exactly how it reads. There’s a whole genre of business content built around people who are up at 4:47 am doing cold plunges and journalling their intentions before their kettle’s even had a chance. Good luck to them, genuinely. I hope the water’s lovely.

I’ll be along at 9:30, thanks.

From there I’m in and out on appointments or in the office until five, six. Then home, dinner, and the moment the plates are cleared the laptop comes back out.

And this is where the timeline gets embarrassing.

Midnight, usually. 1am, often. 2am, more than I’d like to admit in writing on the internet where my wife can read it.

Sleep at 1-2am. Up at 8am. Back in the office by 9:30am.

That’s a fifteen hour day. Not as a one-off. Not as a push before a big deadline. As the standing arrangement. The house style.

At first it genuinely wasn’t a problem. I could handle it, no bother at all. I’ve never been shy of hard work if a fifteen hour day is what’s needed, I’ll do it, and I’ll do it again tomorrow, and I won’t moan about it.

But there’s a difference between doing it and sustaining it. Surviving on that little sleep, carrying that much, is not something a human being does indefinitely. It just isn’t.

And I’m now very aware now, note the timing of the cost. To me.

Things I have told myself, which were not true

A short and humbling list.

“I’ll just answer this one email.” it was never one email. It has never once in recorded history been one email. It’s one email, which produces a reply, which produces a question, which produces a task, which produces a spreadsheet, and suddenly it’s 1:40am and I’m researching something that could comfortably have waited until a Tuesday.

“I do my best thinking late at night.” I do my most thinking late at night. These are different words. Some of the work I’ve produced at 1am has been genuinely good. Some of it I’ve opened the following morning and stared at like it was left there by an intruder.

“Six hours is fine, I’ve always been like this.” I have not always been like this. I was like this for a bit, decided that was my personality, and have been running on that assumption for considerably longer than the evidence supports.

“It’ll calm down after this.” This one’s my favourite, because it’s technically true every single time and yet somehow the calm never actually arrives. Something else has always moved into the space before I get there. I keep clearing a seat for a guest who never turns up.

The promise that made it harder

Here’s the bit that genuinely complicates things.

I made a promise, to myself and to my wife: weekends are protected. I don’t work them. I’m at home.

I stand by that completely. It’s the right call, it’s the only call, and I’d make it again tomorrow.

But let’s be honest about what a boundary actually does. Protecting two days doesn’t reduce the work it compresses it. Everything that would once have quietly leaked into a Saturday morning now has to fit somewhere between Monday and Friday.

So the week gets denser. The evenings get longer. The Friday peak gets sharper.

Which is, I suspect, exactly why that graph looks the way it does. I’ve built myself a beautiful, well-intentioned pressure cooker and then been surprised by the pressure.

That is not an argument for working weekends. It’s an argument for being honest that when you hold a line in one place, the water goes somewhere else. Mine goes into Tuesday night. And Wednesday night. And, if we’re being thorough, Thursday.

Why I’m doing it

Because I’m building something. That’s the whole answer.

Nest has had ups and downs as every business does. Some months harder than others, challenges the whole way along you know how it goes. But something’s genuinely shifted in the last few months, and alongside Nest there are other things I’m working on that matter to me.

Most of that work is front-loaded. It’s building towards an event later this year, and once that’s through, it should settle enough for me to find a stable level and put proper structure around it all.

So there is a reason. There is an end in sight. We are making progress, and I’m not going to be falsely modest about that it’s real and I’m proud of it.

It’s also still fifteen hours a day. Both things get to be true.

What’s actually keeping me up

It’s never one enormous thing. That’s what people misunderstand about this.

Nobody lies awake at 1am dramatically wrestling with The Future Of The Business. You lie awake doing admin in your head.

Where’s my next valuation coming from?

How do I make sure I’m working with people who genuinely want to sell, rather than someone who’ll be off the market in eight weeks having “had a think”?

How do I get no-shows on viewings down and what exactly is happening in a person’s mind when they book a Saturday appointment and simply do not attend, like the house isn’t standing there wondering where they are?

Why are solicitors making this harder than it needs to be right now, specifically, in a way that feels intentional?

And the one that gets under every agent’s skin… how did that house go on with that agent without us even getting a look in? We didn’t lose it. We weren’t invited. That’s worse.

None of it is dramatic. All of it is live at one in the morning, in high definition, on a loop.

The money, and the maths that doesn’t sit right

Then there’s the financial layer, which has its own particular flavour.

Being pulled from pillar to post. Increases arriving from every angle, all at once, from every direction hundreds, sometimes thousands, extra going out per month, because somebody, somewhere, in a building I’ll never visit, decided.

You absorb it. You rework the numbers. You find it.

And then you sit in a conversation and listen to someone moaning about paying £20 an hour for something to genuinely solve their problem. Or a seller having a proper strop about a £50 indemnity policy… fifty pounds… which happens to be the only thing standing between them and a completed transaction on a house worth half a million pounds…. (it happens way more then you think, and way more then it should).

And you say nothing. You smile. You explain it patiently, for the fourth time that week.

Because you’re the business owner, and that’s the job. Stay calm. Stay in control. Keep it moving forward, as you always have.

Nobody tells you that a decent chunk of running a business is just being professionally unbothered about things that are, in fact, bothering you enormously.

There is no manual for this, but there are plenty of people selling one

This is the frustration I keep coming back to.

There’s no book. No guide. Nothing that tells you how to grow an agency, build the other things you’re building, protect your weekends, and stay well, all at the same time.

What there is, is gurus. Left, right and centre.

Outsource this. Invest in that. Buy this bit of kit. Delegate. Systemise. Ten X it. Have you tried simply not having the problem?

And almost none of it comes with any evidence that it works for a business like mine, at the stage mine is at, in this market, with this cash position. It’s confidence sold as certainty. And when you’re tired, confidence is dangerously easy to buy.

I don’t have outside funding. I can’t hire a team overnight and lift 99% of these tasks off my plate. That’s just the reality.

But I don’t use that as an excuse not to do the work. It’s on me, so I make it happen. I always have.

Although and this took me embarrassingly long to notice “I always have” isn’t a strategy. It’s just a track record. And track records, by definition, are entirely about the past.

The podcast that made it worse (helpfully)

I was listening to a podcast this morning. A few agents talking honestly about struggles and challenges they’d come through.

One of them made the point about constantly improving. Constantly learning. How much it matters in this industry.

He’s right. He’s completely right. And my immediate emotional response was to add it to the list of things I’m not currently doing well enough, which I think tells you roughly where my head is at.

Because here’s the honest, slightly uncomfortable bit: in my day-to-day, I see how many people in this industry clearly don’t learn. Don’t improve. Don’t change anything, month after month. Year after year.

And it frustrates me. It genuinely does.

Which is its own little layer of stress being wound up by other people’s standards while quietly falling behind on my own.

I’ve always believed that when you stop learning, you limit your earning. Especially in this industry. And I have slowed down on it lately. I can feel it. Not through laziness, but purely through running out of hours: there is nothing left in the day for it.

So what am I actually doing about it

Something extremely unglamorous, I’m afraid.

This week I’m writing down every single thing I do. All of it. Every task, every check, every “quick” job that isn’t quick.

Then I’m splitting it into two columns: what genuinely needs me, right now and what could be asked of someone else.

That’s it. That’s the big intervention. No app. No framework. No system I’m about to package up and sell you for £997.

Just an honest list, written by a tired man, because I’ve never actually looked at the whole thing laid out in one place and I strongly suspect the answer to “why is this fifteen hours?” is sitting in there in plain sight, wearing a high-vis jacket, waving.

The aim isn’t to work less for the sake of working less. It’s to get the baseline down far enough that I enjoy the day to day again, and to buy back a bit of time for learning — because right now that time isn’t coming from anywhere.

I’ll report back. Even if the finding is just “turns out I’m the bottleneck,” which I’d put decent money on.

The one thing that’s genuinely helped.

I’ll give you the thing that’s actually made a difference, because it would be a bit rich to spend two thousand words complaining and offer nothing.

Her name’s Hollie. She’s an AI assistant I built, and before you close the tab… yes, I’m aware of how that sounds. I’ve named a piece of software and I’m about to tell you it’s improved my life. I’ve become the man in the pub telling you about his robot. I accept this.

But she knows my business. She knows how I work, what my conditions are, what actually matters and what’s noise. And she does two things that have quietly changed my day.

At 10am every morning, she sends me my to-do list for the day, in priority order. Not a dump of everything I’ve ever thought of the actual order I should tackle things in. That alone removes the twenty minutes I used to spend deciding what to do, which, if you’ve ever stood in your own kitchen at 9:45 mentally reshuffling a week, you’ll know is not twenty relaxing minutes.

Then at half two, she checks back in. What’s been done? She ticks it off. What’s left? We talk it through. What genuinely has to happen today, and what can wait until tomorrow without the world ending?

And crucially she’s not there to manage me. There’s no “well done Nick” energy about it, and I wouldn’t have built it if there was. It’s accountability and a nudge, nothing more. Because my real failure mode isn’t laziness, it’s the rabbit hole. I can’t tell you the amount of days i have felt non stop, really busy, done loads but yet feel like i’ve achieved nothing. So Hollie is to help me not look up at four o’clock having done something interesting, thorough, and entirely not the thing I was supposed to be doing. Half two is a hand on the shoulder before that whole afternoon disappears.

The other thing she does every morning is ask how I am, out of ten.

The rating covers two things at once how I’m feeling in myself, and how busy I am. So if I feel like rubbish and I’m buried, that’s a 1. If I’m in decent form and I’ve actually got some room in the day, that’s a 10. Most days sit somewhere in the middle and lie about it slightly. If i am on the lower end she will rejuggle what needs doing and push the rest onto tomorrow, removing some pressure.

It takes about four seconds to answer. But it’s four seconds of honesty I wasn’t giving myself before, and I’ve noticed the number knows things before I do.

Which means I’ve now got two separate systems tracking my wellbeing: one on my wrist that I have the ump with for now, and one on my phone that I’m quietly grateful for.

I’m choosing not to examine what it says about me that neither of them is a human being.

Where I’ve landed

I’m not writing this because I’ve solved it. Let me be very clear about that. I haven’t solved anything. I’m mid-problem, writing from inside it, with a wristband on that’s about to tell me this paragraph was stressful.

I’m writing it because I suspect a fair few people reading this are running the exact same week the same Monday-to-Friday climb, the same Saturday crash and quietly assuming they’re the only one who finds it heavy.

You’re not. It’s just that nobody posts the graph. Everybody posts the completion.

And for balance, because this hasn’t been the most upbeat thing you’ll read this week: I’m genuinely excited about what’s coming. Really excited. I’ve got more drive in me now than I’ve ever had, because I can see what we’re capable of, what difference it’ll make, and that it could get my family to the goals we’ve set ourselves.

I’m thankful. I’m grateful. I know how fortunate I am to be in a position where the problem is “too much opportunity” rather than the alternative, and I’ve had the alternative.

It’s just harder than I’d like it to be, at this particular step of the journey.

And I’d rather say that out loud than pretend the line is flat.

If your week looks anything like mine, I’d genuinely like to know what you’ve actually changed — not what a guru told you to change, what you did that made a real difference. Reply and tell me. I’ll be up.

I sat down on the Friday afternoon in a chair, in a forest, with absolutely nothing to do, and I could not stop bouncing my leg.

We’d got there nice and early. Me and my wife, three nights, no kids, a little one bed apartment, trees out of every window. We’d eaten. There was nowhere to be, nothing in the diary, nobody about to shout up the stairs. And I was sat there completely wired. On edge. Braced. Ready to spring into action for something.

Nothing happened.

That’s honestly the first thing I want to tell you about this weekend. I booked it last minute, after weeks of working most nights until 1am, five or six days a week, and somehow still not seeing the burnout coming. If you read my last post you’ll know all that already. What I hadn’t worked out yet was that I’d forgotten how to sit still without a reason to.

I did do one sensible thing before I left. I put a really clear auto-response on both my email and my WhatsApp. Not a vague one. A proper one. I’m away, I’m back Tuesday, I’ll come to you then.

About 70% of people read that, saw I was away, and left it there. Genuinely, thank you.

The other 30% read it and rang anyway. Called, texted, emailed.

So there I am on the Friday evening watching my phone light up on the arm of the chair, and for once I didn’t answer any of it.

Nothing happened.

On the Saturday we walked. Hours of it. My wife talked and I listened properly, which sounds like an embarrassingly low bar, and if I’m honest it’s one I’ve not been clearing for a while. Because that’s what home had quietly turned into. She holds all of it together. The house, the kids, the school runs, the appointments, the whole world turning around me while I sit in front of a screen until one in the morning. It works, in the sense that everything gets done. But it creates distance. It has to. And with five kids, “us time” is normally about thirty seconds long and it ends the second somebody shouts “muuuuuuuum” up the stairs.

I kept reaching for my pocket the whole walk. Not to do anything, just to check. Pure muscle memory. Twice I got the phone out and put it straight back without even unlocking it.

Nothing happened then either.

Somewhere on the Sunday I started properly chewing on the why. Why does a person read the words “I’m away until Tuesday” and ring you anyway?

And the answer I kept landing on is that a lot of people don’t really believe this is a job.

We can all talk the same rubbish, and I’ve said it myself plenty of times, that it isn’t a job it’s a lifestyle, blah blah blah. But let’s be real about it. It’s a job. And like any job, the people doing it need time off. Even the owners. Even the self-employed. Especially them, if anything. An employed agent gets to go away with “not my problem for seven days”, and that’s the end of it. It doesn’t work like that when you own the thing, and that puts you in a genuinely impossible position. Ignore those clients, and you potentially lose business worth thousands of pounds. Take the call, and you save it, but you never actually switch off. There isn’t a third option, and that’s the bit that grinds you down over the years.

But sat in a forest with nothing else to think about, the thought that kept circling back wasn’t really about them. It was about me.

I’ve called this a lifestyle for years. I’ve given my personal number out to every client I’ve ever had. I’ve taken the Sunday call. I’ve answered the 11pm WhatsApp and felt quite pleased with myself for being the sort of agent who does. So if people now behave as though I’m available at any hour of any day, that isn’t a mystery, is it. That’s something I taught them. One message at a time, over about 13 years.

Because what is there in our role that genuinely cannot wait a couple of days?

A real emergency, of course, a leak or something like it, and we have facilities in place for exactly that. But on the sales side of things, there is very, very, very little. We are not an emergency service. Nobody’s life is on the line because a question got answered on the Tuesday instead of the Saturday.

I know that. I’ve always known that. I just haven’t behaved like it.

Then came the last morning.

We’re sat at breakfast, and I’m telling my wife how much I’ve enjoyed it, and I meant every word. I’d switched off about as far as I’m capable of switching off. I’d enjoyed every second of it. And then, right in the middle of saying so, I got this rush of emotion out of nowhere and had to stop talking.

That, in the end, was the only thing that happened all weekend.

Not the calls. Not the emails. Not the deal I was so certain would fall over the second I looked away. Four days, a third of my contacts ignoring a clearly written message, and the total sum of what actually went wrong was nothing at all. The one thing that got me was sat at a breakfast table with a coffee in my hand, and it came entirely from the inside.

I’m still not fully sure what it was. I think part of me just didn’t want it to end. And I think the other part of me knew precisely what I was going back to, and didn’t want that. Which is a horrible thing to notice about yourself when you love your job, and I do love it. That’s exactly what makes it sit so awkwardly.

Do I love the life, or do I love the job? I genuinely don’t know yet. I’m not certain I want the answer.

I came back on the Tuesday and worked through the whole lot of it. Every single thing that couldn’t wait, had waited. All of it.

Three nights. Four days. A phone that didn’t stop. Nothing happened.

Except the bit at the breakfast table, and that’s the only bit I’m still thinking about.

I’ve always given my personal number out to clients. That’s going to have to stop, and I’m well aware that’s easier to type than it is to do.

Heres a strange little fact that none of you asked for, the longest ‘holiday’ or break ive taken in 15 years, is 7 days…

The longer period without working at all? 4 days. In 15 years…

At the end of the year I’m taking the whole family away for 5 days. Not 3 nights. 5 days, properly. I’ve got between now and then to work out how to be a person who can do that.

So if you’ve cracked it, tell me. Any tips at all, stick them in the comments, because I’d genuinely love to know how you did it.

And if you’re one of those people who rings four times back to back and never leaves a voicemail, you’re very welcome to leave a tip as well. Just don’t ring me about it.

If you asked me right now what was wrong, I couldn’t tell you.

That’s the honest answer. Nothing is wrong…

The business is fine, the plan hasn’t changed, the goals haven’t moved and we’re on track to hit them. In my head I’m as focused as I’ve ever been. There isn’t a single thing I could point at and say there, that’s the problem, that’s what’s dragging.

It’s just that everything is harder than it should be. Not physically. Mentally. Like every job in front of me now costs more than it used to cost to get the same result out the other end. And I’ve learned, slowly and mostly the hard way, that this exact feeling is the warning. Not the crash. This bit. The bit where you’d still tell anyone who asked that you’re fine, because look, the work’s getting done.

It’s also our job as the business owners right? we need to look calm, in control, like we aren’t worried aout anything, playing the stresses down, the wins up, and looking like you remain in control. We have to be in control enough to keep everyones faith in us, and to make sure nobody worries.

I say this alot through my substacks in the path, but when i start to worry about something, then those around me worry. Because i never appear worried so when i do, its usually something big. So making sure theres never a shred of concern or worry, about anything, including myself is important.

Lets look at June. I took a week off in June.

Well, that’s what I called it at the time. What actually happened was that I worked from home instead of going into the office. I attended sign ups. I sat on Zoom calls. I did the usual meetings that I always do, because they were in the diary and because they mattered and because it never occurred to me to move them. My team called me for various things, several times a day, every day, but i didnt have systems in place to avoid this or to set boundaries on this, i never discussed it with them enough to reduce it, So no, I didn’t take a week off in June. I just changed the room I was sitting in.

And that’s the bit nobody really talks about when they talk about burnout in business. Everyone talks about the crash, the big dramatic stop, the person who disappears for three months. Nobody talks about the long slow bit in the middle, where nothing is actually wrong and everything is quietly getting heavier.

Let me be clear about something first. I don’t think this is an ADHD thing. I have ADHD, and I write about it plenty elsewhere, but burnout doesn’t check your diagnosis before it turns up. It hits everyone. It hits the calmest, most organised, most balanced person you know. The only difference with something like ADHD is how long it takes you to climb back out afterwards, and I’ll come back to that.

Twelve years I’ve been doing this under my own company, and I still haven’t learned to spot it early. That’s the honest bit. Twelve years of running my own business and I’m only now getting decent at reading my own warning lights, and even then I’m reading them about three weeks later than I should be.

Part of it is the industry, if I’m honest. I don’t think anyone who does this job properly ever really switches off. You can take a weekend, you can take a day, but you’re still looking at your emails. You’re still glancing at WhatsApp. You’re still thinking about the marketing, or the strategy, or that video you saved to watch later because you want to be better at this than you were last year. There’s always something running in the background. And when you’ve got a mind like mine that actively goes looking for that stimulation, switching it off is even harder. It’s not that I can’t. It’s that some part of me doesn’t want to.

Last year it caught up with me properly. Coming up to Christmas I was in a bad way, and I didn’t see it, but my wife did. She watched me struggle with things that shouldn’t be a struggle. Normal daily bits. The stuff you do on autopilot when you’re well. And she made me promise that every three months I’d take a week off and actually take it as leave.

So in March we took the kids to Center Parcs for five days. Not quite a week, but a start, and I switched off more than I usually would. Not fully. But more. Then came June, and you already know how that one went.

Which brings me to now. All of July I’ve been sliding, and I can feel it. My sleep goes first, that’s usually the first flag. Then a bug of some form, could be as simple as a cold, but it lingers… Then things start feeling overwhelming that have no business feeling overwhelming. I get frustrated quicker, and I stay frustrated for longer. My diet goes. My motivation to do things I normally enjoy goes. And I go quiet, which is the one my family notices, because I get distant with everyone around me without really meaning to.

And from the outside, none of that shows. That’s what makes it so easy to talk yourself out of. Anyone looking at the business right now would tell you things are going well, and they’d be right. Anyone looking at me would say I’m on it, and they’d be right too. The direction is good. The work is good. It’s only from the inside that you can feel what it’s costing to keep it there.

And you can see it in what gets to you. Let me give you this week as an example, because it’s genuinely embarrassing how small the list is.

People not turning up to viewings. That got me. A broker lecturing me on why I don’t need to do AML checks, when legally we absolutely do, and I don’t tell him how to do his job so I’d rather he didn’t tell me how to do mine. Especially when his clearly wrong… That got me. Tenants not following the process for reporting repairs. That got me. A tenant who was asked to tidy their garden and didn’t tidy their garden. That got me. A piece of software that should be simple, breaking again. That got me too. Oh and meta’s silly overcomplicated system, with has absolutely no common sense, or logical reasoning to it at all… that one really got me.

None of that is unusual. That’s a Tuesday in estate agency. On a good week I deal with all of it before lunch and don’t think about it again. This past week every single one of them landed like a personal insult, and that’s not because the week was worse than usual. It’s because I am running on empty, and when you’re running on empty everything gets heavier.

So this coming weekend I’m going away with my wife. Three nights, four days, just the two of us, booked last minute. And I’m looking forward to it more than I’d normally admit, because I know what’s sat in front of me. There’s a lot going on at Nest at the moment, and there’s the other thing I’m working on outside of Nest with a friend, the one i wont talk about…yet, and the next three months are going to take a serious amount of time and energy. I’m not going into that on fumes. I just can’t.

What’s quite funny is that my friend, the one I’m doing that other thing with, is taking time off next week for exactly the same reason. Neither of us planned that together. We just both got to the same point at the same time, which probably tells you something.

Here’s what I’ve learned about what happens next, though, because there’s a trap in it.

When I get away, when I’m out of the office and out of the routine and looking at something other than my usual four walls, it takes about two days and then the ideas start flooding in. Not a trickle. A flood. What I want to do, how I want to do it, what order it needs doing in, who needs to be involved. And it comes with this surge of energy that feels almost instant, like someone’s flipped a switch back on.

Which sounds brilliant, and it is, but it’s also how I end up back here. Because I come home ready to run at everything at once, and I don’t pace it, and three or four months later I’m writing something like this again. Getting the break right is only half of it. Coming back properly is the other half, and that’s the half I’m still bad at.

But I know what the alternative looks like, and that’s really why I’m going.

If I didn’t take this break, I’d carry on. I’d push through, because that’s what I do. It’s what most of us do. And in a few weeks I’d come down with some bug that would flatten me for a fortnight, and the business would take the hit, and the stress of catching up would be far worse than anything I’m feeling now. That’s not me being dramatic. That’s just the pattern, and I’ve watched it play out enough times to recognise it. Once you actually hit burnout properly, you’re not talking about a long weekend to fix it. You’re talking weeks. Sometimes a couple of months. And if you’ve got something like ADHD in the mix, it can knock you sideways in ways that take far longer to undo than anyone expects.

So the last thing I’ll say is this, because I’m writing this on the Monday evening at half past 11 at night…and it’s very much on my mind.

I’ve got a four day week to get everything into a state where I can actually leave it alone. That’s the deal I’ve made with myself. If I prepare properly, I get the break. If I don’t prepare, I don’t get the break, because I’ll spend the whole time on the phone fixing things and I’ll come back more tired than I left. So there’s a strange bit of pressure sat on top of a week that’s already heavy, and the irony of that isn’t lost on me.

The lesson here? know your signals.

That’s genuinely the whole point of this. Not a system, not a routine, not a productivity method. Just be honest enough with yourself to notice when the small stuff starts landing like the big stuff, because that’s your tell, and it comes long before the crash does.

It’s a silent battle, this one. Most business owners are fighting it and almost none of us talk about it.

I’ll get there. As i always do, and stronger and wiser every single time.

Trust in business is the most important thing.

So I’m sure you know where I’m going to go with this one before I’ve even explained it, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past couple of weeks. Mainly because of something I’m working on, but also because it’s something I feel strongly about.

I feel trust is one of the most important factors in business. I don’t think it matters if you work for someone, work with someone, or work alone, you need to have trust.

For example, if you work for someone, you need to trust they can run the company right. Make the right decisions, run it sustainably, pay their bills, avoid overreaching, and manage a team. Otherwise, guess what? You’ll lose your job, either because the company will fold or they’ll just make cuts. So you have to trust, when you accept a role, that the company you’re working for has the future in mind. Otherwise all your plans stop.

And then it comes to working with people. Before I started my company, I was warned off partnerships, because I was told the reason it’s called a partner’ship’ is because, like a boat, it sinks every time. Or you’re waiting to be thrown overboard if it doesn’t (The same people who told me ‘there is no friends in business’).

I ignored that advice, and I originally planned on setting up with someone I worked with.

That didn’t last long… our aims weren’t aligned. I was putting every hour into building it, spending days on end delivering leaflets, ringing contacts and building a pipeline, while he came in and out like a hobby around another job he’d taken. I knew from the start it wasn’t going to happen, and it didn’t take long before we called it a day and I continued alone.

That put me off partnerships for good. Well. Until recently.

I’m sure some of you noticed when I got involved with the EAN with Jerry back at the start of this year. That trust I mentioned above, I had to have that in Jerry. I was investing a large sum of money into the company and dedicating a lot of time to it, so I had to have trust in Jerry that he’d keep us on the track we planned, and wouldn’t drive it into the ground, otherwise, my investment and time would have been pointless.

It required trust. It required going into a partnership with someone again… and I wasn’t nervous about that. Because I had absolute trust in him before we even started discussing things. He’d proven himself to me for years beforehand that he could be trusted.

Then recently I have had a recent turn of events, which has presented itself to me, to be able to invest in another business elsewhere as well, which pretty much means i can take over. But I couldn’t do it on my own. I simply couldn’t. I haven’t got the time realistically, and with everything I’m already taking on, I already have very little family time, and by taking this on alone, it would mean I wouldn’t have any. I’d be working 7 days a week. It’s just not sustainable.

So I sat thinking. Deep about the decision. And I was going to pass on the chance.

But this is the thing about me. I’m either all in or I’m not at all. There’s no middle ground, there’s no dipping my toe in, there’s no ‘I’ll give it a go’… It’s either I give it everything or nothing. It’s as simple as that.

And this was something I wanted to give everything to but knew I couldn’t. So I almost gave up.

Then I thought about it. I needed someone I could trust. Someone who has my back, someone who wouldn’t fuck my family or me over, someone I know would have their interest and mine in mind, and isn’t selfish in any way. Someone who has all the strengths to my weaknesses, and someone I knew would challenge my thinking without doubting me.

I have that person already. I’ve worked with him for 5 years, and he’s proven this to me countless times. I’ve also seen some of the things first-hand where he had a prime opportunity to do the wrong thing, to be selfish, to go for personal gain… and not once did he take it, because he always focused on doing the right thing.

And well, that’s where the conversation started. More on this to come…

So this is where I come to. I don’t think it matters if you work for someone, with someone, or in business with someone; there has to be trust there.

But it also works the other way. If you’re hiring someone, you need to be able to trust that they have the company’s interest at heart. That they care about what they do, how they do things, and how the company does. You need to trust they’ll work when they say they will without you micromanaging and that they’ll be loyal and not sell you out.

Trust is a huge thing in any industry. But I feel trust is not something that’s spoken about enough.

So maybe the boat analogy is right after all, just not in the way it was meant. A partnership can absolutely sink you. But the same boat, with the right person in it, is the only way some journeys ever get made. You just have to be very, very careful who you let on board.

I spent 12 years believing partnerships were a trap. And they can be. But what makes them sink is never the partnership itself; it’s the trust, or the lack of it. Get that bit right and the rest is just detail. Get it wrong, and it doesn’t matter how good the idea is; it’s always going down.

That’s why I take my time. Why I watch how people act when they think nobody’s looking, when there’s everything to gain from doing the wrong thing.

That tells you more than any pitch, any promise, any CV ever will.

So this week was something different for me.

It’s been a busy one. It started with dropping the kids off to woodland school, which I don’t really do, but given they’re homeschooled we’ve got them enrolled in a woodland school locally, and my wife and I went to drop them in on Monday. It’s amazing. Literally in the middle of the woods, letting kids be kids.

I’m a big fan of this type of learning. I don’t agree with notebooks, pens, tests and charts trying to get everyone to conform in a box and be alike (that’s the ADHD side of me coming through i guess there). It’s just not right. But I do like kids being able to be kids, have fun, make friends, explore, try new things and learn about themselves that way. The other stuff they just pick up on the way…

It was nice. We turned up, my youngest took me to where they put their lunch boxes and hang their coats up, and off he went one way, my daughter the other.

And there’s something strange with this. I love being in the woods. The smell is something I love, The quietness and peace of it. So seeing this made me really happy, and it was a lovely way to start the week.

Then sign ups, a couple of Zooms, and then… a webinar.

But a webinar with a difference. This one I was talking. Just me. Nobody to bat opinions off, nobody to talk and for me to listen to, just me explaining part of our business which has genuinely made a difference to income, and Jerry asked questions on behalf of those watching.

I was so nervous going into it. With the usual questions.

What if they hate it? What if they don’t like what I’m about to say, or think it’s nonsense? What if nobody turns up? What if people turn up and get bored and leave? All those thoughts go through your head. But the moment we started, I was fine.

I ran through everything. I made some slides, not to make it a death-by-PowerPoint webinar but more to keep me on track, on focus, and not covering the same thing twice. I work so much better with visual aids like that. Throughout it were a few questions, and a few at the end, some more challenging, but I tried my best to hold my own.

I got off the end of it in relief. Relief I’d done it, relief it was over, but also a level of sitting there thinking ‘I enjoyed that’… looking at the positive. Straight away I got a message from a member who was on the call thanking me for it and saying how helpful it was, then a few messages in the group about it. What a relief. I was so, so happy at this.

What people don’t always see is the time given up for something like that. Yes, they’re giving their time up too, but I’ve spent hours preparing, rehearsing, going over my slides and discussing it, and then that. What for? Just to help.

That’s it. I do it to help. To help other people learn and improve, to help me learn and improve who I am. It’s just about doing the right thing, and something I enjoy. And that for me is hugely rewarding. I’m sure that sounds like complete bullshit and cliche, but genuinely, I enjoy helping the members, helping them improve, and honestly, if one of them implements it and it helps their income, then job done for me. Everything was worth it. It’s part of the reason i do the self-employed role at my company and i actually prefer people from outside this industry coming in and learning, there is actually a huge, deep satisfaction from seeing them win.

Then onto another conversation later this week with another agent about sales progression. A discussion of them doing it themselves or outsourcing it. His theory was he didn’t want to pay for another company to do it, because it’s giving a cut of a pie away that he needs on completion.

In my view, sales progression is something that can take more of your time than it should, and it’s easy to make yourself busy and too involved with. That’s not me saying estate agents shouldn’t do it, but saving yourself a few hundred pounds to take up hours and hours of your time is simply putting you in a false economy. You’re doing it to save money, but you’re costing far more of your time.

For example, say you spend on average 20 hours on sales progression per sale. If you can reduce that by 50% by employing someone to do it for you, then you now have 10 hours per sale free. Which easily will generate instructions in that time, which would more than pay for it and add profit on top.

But refusing to pay for this sort of thing just puts you in a trap of saving £100s to lose £1,000s.

If I said to the same agent, give me £300, and providing you can work for me for one day, I can promise you £2,000 in return, they’d do it in a heartbeat… so why aren’t they? The answer is safety. Safety in feeling they know what’s in their pipeline. But it’s costing them a lot. Not only in lost chances but also stress, and the time lost due to stress is unreal.

That’s not me saying pay the money and sit and do nothing becasue then itll cost you, but if you pay for the sales progression to be taken care of, and use that time wisely to generate more business, you will be in a very, very good position.

And when I go away, what are 90% of the calls? Yep, that’s right. Sales progression.

I make no secret I outsource mine, and there’s a reason for it. My stress levels have dropped since doing so, but my service hasn’t.

So here’s something for you to think about. What in your business are you doing to save £100s but could be causing you to lose £1,000s, or even £10,000? Because I’m sure there is something.

If your strength is business generation, you shouldn’t be doing sales progression. You are costing yourself £1,000s for doing so.

That’s just my opinion, right? Absolutely. But bear in mind, I’ve been a self-employed estate agent now for 12 years. So it comes from experience. I’m not always right, but on this subject I feel strongly.

Then I finished the week with a meal out with a friend. A client who started as just a normal client and ended up being a good friend. Same age as me, business which is way ahead of mine but has very, very similar mindset, views and opinions on business. We went to a little pizza place in Leigh on Sea, nice little set up. I looked at the menu and every pizza was named something other than the normal choices I look at, so that was good fun working out which had pineapple on it. None of them, I was disgusted, so ham and mushroom it was. We spoke for hours and I came away thinking again about my big plan. My plan for my company, my plan with my family. It’s always good talking these things out, especially with someone who’s ahead of you or in a similar position.

And then, end of the week, well, I chose to avoid a school fete by staying at home with my teenage sons making jam and fresh bread. Rock and roll life of teenagers, ay… A nice way to end the week.

I’ve got a huge business meeting with Jerry on Monday, planning the next 3 to 6 months of the EAN. What’s coming, what we’re releasing, what we aren’t, how we’re doing things, events, you name it. We have a day of planning, so I’ll be bright and early on that train to Brighton and looking forward to a full day of it. Something I genuinely enjoy.

This week, I read something about mindset and focusing on ‘that’s good’ rather than anything else. For example, it’s always puzzled me when someone complains about being a 40% tax payer. That’s a good issue to have. Anyone focusing their energy on moaning about that is moaning about having to pay 40%, rather than being happy with the 60% they get to keep, that some people would give up that 60% just so they don’t have to pay the 40%. Bonkers, right?

But that’s my mindset when it comes to finances, but not with everything in life. So the last couple of days, and for the foreseeable, I’m going to try a lot more (I’m not ignoring the negatives), but to recognise and even say out loud the positives I see in the situations. It genuinely helps move forward, and hopefully stops any spiralling.

Focusing on the positive not the negative, and the input and not the output.

This is one of those subjects nobody really talks about, but honestly, it’s everywhere. Employed, self-employed, doesn’t matter. I’ve lived both sides of it. I saw it when I was employed before I started my own thing, and I’ve seen it plenty since going self-employed.

I’ll talk about the self-employed version, though, because that’s the one that’s the freshest for me to explain.

So here’s how it usually goes.

An agent starts out, fresh, buzzing, full of energy and motivation and that determination you have when everything’s new. And they graft. They prospect, and they prospect, and they prospect some more. And at first? Nothing. Tumbleweed. But that’s fine, they keep at it, because deep down they know it’s coming.

And it is. Stephen B says it all the time, something along the lines of “what you do today affects your next 60 to 90 days.” And he’s bang on.

So they keep grinding, and then it lands. One instruction. Then another. Then another. And suddenly, all those quiet weeks of effort are paying off all at once. They’re still motivated, still flying.

But then something happens.

They get busy.

And here’s the killer, because when you get busy, the first thing that slips is prospecting. But they’re not worried, are they? Why would they be? They’ve got listings coming out their ears, the pipeline’s stacked, life’s good. They can see the pipeline and the money coming. What they can’t see is the storm building behind them.

Fast forward three months. All those listings they won? They’ve sold. They’re completing. The money’s coming in, and let’s be honest, they’ve probably already mentally spent it. And why not? It’s a proper payday, and they’ve earned every penny of it.

The completions roll in. They’re loving life. Yeah, it’s been mad, yeah, the sales progression’s been stressful, but look at this, it was all worth it.

So they enjoy it as you should.

And then the next month comes around.

And... ah Shiiiiiiit.

The listings have dried up. The pipeline’s empty. And they’re sitting there going, hang on, how?

Simple. For the last three months, every ounce of their energy went into the deals they already had, pushing them through to completion. And the very first thing they let go of, without even really noticing, was prospecting.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And the maddening part is how easily it happens.

Sales progression is a beast. It’s relentless, it’s time-consuming, and it will quietly swallow your entire week if you let it. It shouldn’t, and it’s a role that shouldn’t exist, but some agents make themselves busy with it, 100%.

So now they’re in a dry spell. But they panic, realise they’ve got nothing left to sell, and throw themselves back into prospecting like their life depends on it. And three months later, guess what? Feast again. And then famine. And round and round it goes.

Sometimes it doesn’t go round, mind you. Sometimes people just get worn down by it, burn out, and walk away from the job altogether.

But most of the time, they just ride that feast and famine wave over and over.

And yeah, they earn well. But it’s not consistent, it’s not predictable, and it’s definitely not sustainable. And neither is the energy, because your head’s all over the place, riding that rollercoaster.

So how do you actually avoid it?

Genuinely, it’s simple. It’s discipline. That’s it.

You never, ever stop prospecting. Prospecting is your oxygen. It’s your water. Treat it exactly like that. Do it every single day, no matter how busy you are, and make it completely non-negotiable. And here’s the bit people miss: when you’re at your busiest, that’s when you need to be watching it most closely, not least.

The feast and famine thing is 100% avoidable. It really is.

And if it’s something you struggle with, then get someone to coach you. Go and sit down with someone who’s done this a long time. I’ve been at it 14 years now. Message me if you want, call me if you want, come by the office and ill happily give you my time, as many others would, and just ask. Most of us are happy to share.

But I’ll say this much.

If you’re going to ask for advice on doing it better, on being more consistent, then please, for the love of god, don’t ask and then completely ignore it.

Only ask if you’re actually willing to listen, keep an open mind, and have the discipline to give it a proper go.

Because if you’re finding yourself with a couple of months where it’s raining bank notes, followed by a few months living off your savings...

Then I’ve just told you exactly why.

But let’s be honest. You already knew why, didn’t you?

A quick honesty note before I start. This one isn’t a business tip with a bow on it. There’s no five-minute fix at the end, nothing to action Monday morning. It’s just a week that got on top of me, and the thing I worked out while it did.

Read it as that.

Somebody described running a business to me recently as being handed a life jacket. Only it’s not a very good one, and everyone around you keeps lobbing you life rings at the same time, as if that helps. You’re in the water, and you’ve got to hold onto all of them. Keep them all in the same place. Except they don’t stay in the same place. They drift, and the second you reach for one that’s floated off, another one’s already sliding away behind you. Ok, nobody described it to me that way. That’s just a metaphor I made up for effect. That’s genuinely how this week felt.

It started with the accountants, if a fifteen-round fight can be said to start anywhere. I’ve been with this firm a few years, and they’ve been quietly awful for months now. Something that should have been sorted back in January still isn’t sorted. They keep telling me when it’ll be done, and they miss those deadlines… I won’t name them (yet).

I like things done and dusted, filed away so my head can move on to the next thing. When it isn’t, it sits on me. I don’t shake it, I carry it. I raised it directly with the person at the top, the owner or CEO if you like… someone who writes on here about her business regularly, someone I assumed cared about the standard of their own company. Nothing. Not a word back. I’m moving to someone else now, someone proactive, but that doesn’t undo the months of carrying it.

Then the ordinary pile-on that business owners never post about. A piece of software I’ve been building, something that was going to make life easier at work, has a bug I haven’t cracked yet. I say yet, because I will. My daughter had an infection after her surgery. The dog needed looking at too. None of it catastrophic on its own. All of it landing in the same seven days.

And somewhere in the middle of that, the three-year plan I’d been quietly building in my head got served a curveball. Nothing that kills it, just a detour, a delay, a rethink of the route. It knocked me for about twenty-four hours. Not in a dramatic way. Just enough to sit there working out what I actually do next and seriously grill myself on whether I am capable of this, whether I’m putting myself out of my depth, whether I setting myself up to fail? why?… Well, everything about this pushes me out of my comfort zone… but secretly, I need that.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about running a business, and I mean nobody.

It isn’t one battle at a time, with a nice gap after each one to catch your breath and reset. It’s the accountant, then the bug, then your daughter, then the dog, then the plan taking a hit, one after another after another, most of them landing before you’ve even finished dealing with the one before it.

You don’t get to fight them in a queue. You get them all at once, stacked on top of each other, while you’re still expected to walk into the office smiling, still expected to sit across from a client on the biggest day of their life and be entirely present for them, like none of it is happening. That’s not a bad week. That’s most weeks. That’s the actual job, the bit that never makes it into the caption under the awards photo.

Here’s the bit I don’t say out loud often. I fall out of love with this business sometimes. I said it this week to a friend of mine.

The passion doesn’t die, it dims. Fire to ember. It’s never gone out completely, not once in fifteen years, but it drops right down, and when it does I’ve learned the only thing that brings it back is backing off for a bit and letting it recharge on its own. Days, sometimes weeks.

I talked to another business owner this week who described the exact same thing happening to him, like it was some private failing of his own, and I realised it isn’t private at all. It’s just not the bit anyone posts about.

Nobody puts up a video of the sale falling through, or the late night while the house is asleep on the laptop trying to sort something out for the team, or the seven-year phone contract you signed without reading properly and are still quietly overpaying on. Or the lack of sleep thinking about the choices you need to make and that the outcome of that choice is 100% on you.

They post the new listing, the award, the new listing paying them some silly exaggerated percentage while making us all look less superior to them like the Lord Farquaat of estate agency… or a video with the nice car while they are ‘smashing it’ …

Fair enough, it’s nice to see… sometimes. It just isn’t the whole picture, and pretending it is only makes the rest of us feel like we’re the only ones fighting all of it at once.

So there I was, mid-week, treading water, watching the rings drift, and something worked itself loose that had nothing to do with the accountant or the bug or any of it directly.

I built this business at twenty-three years old. An apprentice at a small letting agent in Brentwood first, then a smaller estate agent in Rayleigh that’s since closed that office, then out on my own before I’d really worked out what I was doing.

I didn’t start with any backing, financial support, lump sum or loan, or even savings really… Looking back, it was foolish, but I never wanted to.

I was clear that I wanted to do this the right way, naturally growing… I turned down people trying to buy into the company over the years despite knowing it could have led to accelerated growth…I never built it to sell it. It was never meant to have an end.

The plan, if you could call it a plan, was simply to do this until I retired, and maybe hand it to my kids one day, though I hope they go and do their own thing instead.

This week, for the first time in fifteen years, I let myself imagine an end point. Not a date, not a plan, nothing I could write down. Just the idea, properly considered for once, that this doesn’t have to be a life sentence.

That there’s a version of the future where I’ve built something, and then I get to put it down. I don’t know yet what to do with that thought. I’m not acting on it. But having it there at all, after so long without it, changes something about why I’m building.

I don’t know what I want to do instead yet. I have some ideas. My wife and I talk about our dreams and our peace so often, but I’m not in a rush to find out what my career is next. Estate agency it is, until I decide otherwise… but not forever.

The accountant is still awful. The bug still isn’t fixed. My daughter’s on the mend, and so, thankfully, is the dog. None of the things that piled up that week actually went away by the end of it. They rarely do. You deal with one, and another one’s already drifted towards you. That’s not a story with a tidy finish. It’s just business ownership, on repeat, week after week, and most of us are too busy holding the rings together to ever say so out loud.

So here’s me saying it. It is relentless. It comes at you in stacks, not queues. Nobody warns you, and nobody claps for the weeks you just about survive, because nobody outside your own head ever even knows they happened.

I went into this week just trying to keep my head above water.
I came out of it with a picture of what I’m actually building towards.
Nobody saw the week it took to get there. That’s fine. That was never the point.
I saw it. And I’ll take that trade every single time.

For those of you old enough, you’ll remember Avon.

The catalogue. Everyone’s mum either did it or had a friend who did. They’d drop a magazine off in a sandwich bag, full of products they were meant to sell, and earn a tiny bit of commission in between. Your mum picks which overpriced shampoo she wants and leaves the mag in the sandwich bag on the doorstep to be picked up and a week later, a knock at the door is her new friend with her order… IYKYK…

Was it ever enough to earn a living off?

Nope.

So what was the real focus? Recruitment.

They’d recruit other reps who’d do the same thing, and they’d earn off the back of them. Which meant the job was often 80% recruitment and 20% actually selling the products they were supposed to.

It’s the same in estate agency in 2026.

I see it all the time. Someone comments in a Facebook group or Linkedin about maybe going self-employed, and suddenly a swarm of self-employed agents spot an opportunity to earn a little off them and jump on that person like a swarm of seagulls to a chip at the seafront.

And it’s wrong. Totally wrong.

It’s people focused on growth in team numbers rather than results for clients. Don’t get me wrong, some of these companies have genuinely top-tier agents. But this one element, I think, is wrong. And it’s starting to make self-employment look like the Avon of estate agency.

And then there’s the lies.

I heard one recently. An agent very close to me. Ex of a well-known online agency for years, now self-employed at a brokerage, claiming to be charging 2% plus.

Absolute nonsense, especially in his location and target market, I’m so confident about that.

Bragging about the holidays. Bragging about how easy it all is. Lies.

The truth? Self-employment is bloody hard.

It’s hard.

Really hard.

We can’t play that down. The self-employed agents who’ve actually made it well have put some seriously tough, long, hard hours in.

They’ve spent family holidays hiding in the hotel room, making those “5-minute” calls that turn into 30 minutes of updating a client, or calming one down because a surveyor has worded something badly as a backside-covering exercise.

They’ve gone to the kids’ sports day and stood there stressed, knowing the catch-up they’ve got waiting for the second it finishes.

They’ve spent thousands on marketing with no idea if it’ll ever come back.

They’ve sat planning things out on the laptop until the early hours.

They’ve dragged themselves up at 6 am for the networking meeting they know they’ll probably get nothing from, and gone anyway.

They’ve put in more hours than they’d realistically be willing to admit. why? Because of the majority of it, they were likely earning less than they would admit, but it was an investment because they knew it would pay off.

And when they earn well off the back of it? Good on them. They absolutely deserve it.

But.

Selling someone the lifestyle that person built after five solid years of grinding, and dressing it up so their year one looks like that other person’s year five, is wrong on so many levels.

You’re playing with people’s lives to earn yourself a small bit of passive commission. It’s wrong. It’s greedy. It’s selfish.

Am I against recruitment in a self-employed estate agency? Absolutely not. Let me talk to you about the self-employed role my agency offers… no, seriously, I’m joking. let’s not discuss it.

I’m against lazy agents doing it and lying about it.

I’ve seen it myself. Someone goes self-employed, thinking it’ll be easy. They won’t door-knock. They won’t deliver leaflets. They won’t make the calls. They won’t do the grind. They won’t prospect as their life depends on it. They won’t invest money in marketing. They won’t invest time in training, improving, or levelling up. They just sit and wait for the handout vals.

Do they earn well? Sometimes. BUT often inconsistently.

Is it easy? It can be. If you want to earn an average living wage.

But if you do not want to be disturbed on holiday. Or take days off without the phone going. Or not have to firefight a deal because a surveyor popped one extra sugar in his coffee and handed you a 20k down-valuation. Then you need a real, proper support network around you.

And that support network comes at a cost.

And that cost comes from hard, hard work.

I remember seeing these Avon reps bragging about the new Mercedes. The holidays. All paid for by their earnings.

Only, in estate agency its not just that, they sell the myth of “work-life balance.” The school run, the holidays, the cars, the flashy watches, the piss-ups dressed up as networking. They push on the social and emotional leverage.

And by playing it down, you do a disservice to every self-employed agent out there, actually grinding.

So if you’re thinking of going self-employed, could you earn well? Absolutely. I’ve seen self-employed agents doing six figures a year with next to no overhead. In my own office. It’s possible.

But.

Be prepared to work hard.
Be prepared to grind.
Be prepared to work harder than you ever have.
Be prepared to sacrifice your spare time.
Be prepared for work and life to merge for a while.
Be prepared for the awkward calls in the hotel room while your family waits on you.
Be prepared to knock on doors. Be prepared to find motivation you didn’t know you had, and keep backup in the drawer.
Be prepared to invest your own money in marketing.
Be prepared to invest your own time in improving and upskilling.
Be prepared to take a huge risk.

And then, if you do all of that, be prepared to earn more than you ever have.

But if you want real, self-employed level, high income, but expect the responsibility of an employed agent? Good luck to you. Because it won’t happen.

And if that is you, stop reading this and get back on LinkedIn, trying to recruit another agent.

I’ll leave you with this thought. Rarely do you ever see any of the highly successful self-employed agents recruiting publicly, or bragging about who they are ‘mentoring’ or ‘sponsoring’ or whatever it’s called… rarely does that seem to happen. why? because they are earning a lot more from being an amazing agent.

I could talk all day about the mistakes I’ve seen people make in the past, and even the present in self-employment… I’ll circle back to that later.

There’s a fight that’s decades old… older than the Battle of Hastings, older than anything Russell Crowe would’ve fought in, and if he was there…. his name would have been Maximus Enquirus.

It’s the one between estate agents and conveyancers.

Before I go further, let me be clear. Because I do not want any of this misunderstood.

I think conveyancers have a genuinely tough job. I think they work long hours. I think their profits get squeezed and, too often, so do they personally. I think they get pestered half to death by sales progressors who like to look busy. I think they work hard to earn their qualifications, and I think they spend a frightening amount of time cleaning up after the other side, the one who clearly missed the module on common sense.

I take none of that away from them… None of it.

But there is one thing I think a lot of them massively lack. And I mean massively.

People skills.

I see it daily. Conveyancers being stroppy. Snotty emails sent for no reason. Emails that don’t get answered at all, or worse, the reply that simply says “my response is in dictation.” As if that means anything to the family waiting to find out whether they’re moving.

That’s the irritating part. But it isn’t the real problem.

The real problem is completion.

How is this still the standard in 2026?

I think it is genuinely ludicrous how long completions take, and how late in the day they’re left.

This week we had a completion on a single-property chain. One buyer. One seller. No links above or below. The buyer’s solicitor didn’t send the funds until 3:30pm.

3:30pm.

I don’t care how much golf you’ve got booked or what the excuse is. There is no reason, on the day of completion, that funds can’t go first thing in the morning. And if there genuinely is a reason, then the only honest answer is that you weren’t prepared enough in the first place.

It got better. The seller’s solicitor then didn’t confirm receipt of the money. We chased. We chased again. At 4:30pm we were told, and I’m not exaggerating, that we should “send an email to find out.” Then at 4:45pm they confirmed they’d received it.

So my question is simple. Why did it take over an hour to confirm receipt of a payment that had already landed? and why was this left to 15 mins before closing… and why no urgency is seen at 4:30pm…

And this isn’t a one-off. These are trends.

Exchanges and completions happening without the conveyancer telling the estate agent at all.

A buyer’s solicitor telling their own client to go and collect the keys from us, knowing full well we cannot release keys until the seller’s solicitor confirms we can.

“As long as it completes, who cares?”

That’s the line I can hear coming. As long as it completes in the end, Nick, what’s the problem?

No.

Because it isn’t you sitting with the people it happens to. It isn’t your office the buyer is sitting in, in tears, because it’s gone 4pm on the day they were promised they’d move and nobody can tell them whether they’re moving or not. They have no control. No information. No say. Just a phone that won’t ring with the one piece of news they need.

Do they blame us? No. They never do, because it isn’t our fault.

But here’s what I’ll say, and I’ll say it plainly. Estate agents carry far more emotional weight on this, day in and day out, than they’re ever given credit for. We’re the ones in the room when it goes wrong. We’re the face of a process we don’t control. A process which in 2026 makes no logical sense.

Fifteen years, and the only thing that changed was the payment method

I’ve been doing this fifteen years now. That’s a decent stretch. I know people who’ve done it far longer, and they’ll tell you the same thing.

In all that time, the only thing that has genuinely changed about completion day is that money moves via BACS rather than by cheque.

That’s it.

Nothing about the experience for the client has improved. Nothing has got smoother, calmer, or more certain for the people whose entire lives are sitting in that transaction. We’ve had fifteen years and we’re still finding out at 4:45pm whether a family gets to sleep in their new home tonight.

This cuts both ways

I’m not letting our side off either.

Sales progressors need to ease off chasing conveyancers every single day and let them get on with the work. I know it happens, because I’m on the receiving end of it too. I get chased daily by whole teams of progressors.

Honestly, I think it’s become a slightly silly role, because done properly, the job doesn’t need daily chasing.

So here’s the trade I’d happily make. Conveyancers get more organised and more structured around completion, and treat the agent and the client as people who deserve information. In return, agents stop treating conveyancers like a punchbag to be hit once a day for sport.

The only way anything in this industry ever changes is when people are held to account. Not blamed. Held to account. There’s a difference.

The client deserves to know what’s happening on the most stressful day of their year. That’s not a big ask. It’s the bare minimum.

And right now, too often, we’re all failing it.

Completion that late in the day, shouldn’t be a thing.

how to solve this? a simple fine. if a completion happens beyond 1pm (i say 1pm, because we all know the conveyancing industry switches their phones off between 1-2pm… because no move is going to interrupt their bagel)…

each conveyancer should have maximum 30 min slots depending where they are in the chain. for example, first in the chain has to complete between 9.30-10am, second in the chain between 10 and 10:30am.

Whoever misses their slot is fined (the client gets a huge discount on their fees).

and if it goes beyond 1 pm, then the conveyancing firm covers the cost; the removal company will start charging from 2-3 pm…

if that came in place, completions would change in an instant.

problem solved.

but what about the clients? can’t they be out by 10am? No. i understand that. everyone should have up to 3 hours beyond their completion time to be out of the property and hand the keys over. again, problem solved.

its more than possible, and I do not see any reason why it couldn’t be.

oh, and if you're a solicitor (or an agent) suggesting a simultaneous…. grow up. it’s literally the worst thing, the biggest risk, and any completion I have ever seen fail had been because of it.

I’ve been trying to post these on a Sunday morning lately, but given this Sunday is Father’s Day, and none of you should be reading my thoughts on a Sunday morning… I thought I would bless you with a Nickism this evening instead… really, no need to thank me… seriously.

I was away with Jerry recently. We had interviews the following morning (you already know who with), so we’d stayed over the night before, and we met at 8 am to walk and find a coffee before the day started.

It was a Monday. The high street was quiet. Given the industry we are both in, it’s impossible for us not to sniff out the estate agencies in town… all of them shut, as you’d expect at that hour. What I didn’t expect was how much they’d tell me about themselves with nobody home.

Because here’s the thing most agents forget. Your office never actually closes. The lights go off, the door locks, the team goes home, and the shop window keeps right on talking to the public. On a Sunday afternoon. At eight on a Monday morning. To two blokes walking past looking for a flat white.

So I did what your customers do. I looked in.

The good one, ruined

The first agency had spent money, and you could tell. Real nice branding. Modern, open office. A big bank of desks in the middle, clearly built to feel social and high-end. The sort of fit-out that costs real money…. a lot of money… and says, before anyone speaks to you, that this is a serious business.

No properties in the window. That doesn’t bother me, for what it’s worth. Some agents like cards in the glass, some don’t, and there’s a reasonable argument either way. I personally am against the properties in the shop window… for me it’s a sign of someone assuming people are looking in them for properties (spoiler alert…. they are not… the only people looking in them are nosey…if you don’t believe me, ask them… i did) BUT … That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that with no cards in the window, the whole front was just a wall of glass straight onto the office. And on the desks, on full display, were dirty cups and glasses. A half-eaten pack of biscuits. Used towels thrown by the window.

Somebody invested heavily in how that business looks. And it was being quietly undone by a Saturday afternoon nobody bothered to tidy up after before clearing off for their day off.

The bad one

A bit further down was a franchise office, and it was abysmal. Dirty. Untidy. Piles of files on every desk. Bins overflowing. Cables hanging down the backs of the tables. Cardboard boxes stacked everywhere.

The public walk past that. They look in the same way they look in any agent’s window, because that’s where the properties are. And whatever the team inside believes about themselves, the message through the glass was simple. We don’t really look after things here.

There was a third office too. Tidier. But virtually empty, which carries its own message. So out of three, not one of them was saying what the owner would want it to say.

What can’t be seen can’t hurt you

None of this is about being a clean freak. I’m not pretending my own office is a showroom at all hours. It isn’t.

Everyone gets busy, and a few cups and glasses around the place at lunchtime when the team’s clearly in and working is completely fine. That reads as a hive of activity, which is exactly what you want.

The difference is context. Mess when you’re plainly there and working looks like life. The same mess when the office has been shut since Saturday, and it’s now Monday morning, and nobody’s even in yet, looks like neglect. The public can’t tell the team had a manic week. They can only see what’s in front of them.

That’s the whole point. The first impression isn’t the one you give when you’re standing there shaking someone’s hand. It’s the one your office gives when you’re nowhere near it.

Two things I’d do, and they cost nothing

I think there’s a simple discipline in this, and it isn’t a system or a budget. It’s two questions.

First, stand outside your own window. Not as the owner who knows the place. As a stranger walking past on a Sunday. What can they see? Now go and remove it. If it shouldn’t be on show, it shouldn’t be on the desk when the lights go off.

Second, step inside, shut the door behind you, and just stand still on the spot for a moment. Look at what someone walking in actually sees. And remember who that someone might be. A buyer. A seller. A landlord. Someone arriving on the day they complete on the biggest purchase of their life. Untidy desks, stacks of files, overflowing bins, boxes shoved to one side. It doesn’t matter if those boxes are full of marketing material. It still isn’t nice to look at, and they don’t know the difference.

The fix is genuinely a five-minute job. A Friday reset (or a Friday Tidy as we call it), where the last fifteen minutes of the week are spent clearing desks before anyone leaves, so Saturday and Monday open on a clean slate. Whoever locks up on Friday/Saturday needs to be in charge of taking responsibility in making sure the office is reset. Anything that shouldn’t be on a desk goes on a chair and gets tucked underneath, out of sight. Tidy the cables once, properly, and you rarely touch them again. And once a month, give one person the job of walking the office and flagging what could be better.

The bit nobody checks

While we’re here. The same goes for the bathroom.

I was at an agency recently and needed to use theirs. It was filthy. Loo roll inners all over the place, a roll just sat on the floor, a sink that didn’t look like it had been cleaned in a long time. And the thing is, members of the public ask to use your toilet all the time. That’s a first impression too. You don’t get to choose which parts of the building say something about you.

I clear my desk every Friday. Even though we have a cleaner.

I make a point of this one personally. I’ve built the business in a way that means I don’t need to work Saturdays, and if I do, it isn’t from the office. So before I leave on a Friday, I clear my desk completely. Everything put away. On the desk, under the desk, the wires, the paperwork, all of it reset. And yes, I clean the desk myself, even though we have a cleaner. That’s a pride thing.

Why bother? Because when I walk in on Monday morning, fresh for the week, it’s a clean slate. Nothing left over from the week before to start on top of. Just a reset, ready to go. And I do the same for the office. A quick reset before you walk out the door really isn’t hard.

Here’s the thought I keep coming back to. Most of us spend more of our waking day at work than we do at home. You wouldn’t let your home get into that state, so why your desk? Why your office? This is your second home. It deserves the respect of being treated like one.

Why this is worth five minutes

I keep coming back to one thing. When a business has put that much thought, time and money into its branding and its office, the last thing you’d want is for a half-eaten pack of biscuits to be the bit that lets it down.

You get one shot at a first impression, and your office is out there making it for you around the clock, whether you’re in or not. So it’s worth knowing what it’s saying.

Go and stand outside your own window this week. Have a proper look. You might be surprised what the public have been seeing while you were at home with your feet up.

A quick honesty note, before I start. This isn’t a piece with a lesson bolted onto the end. No five takeaways, nothing to action on Monday morning. It’s just a couple of days that ended up mattering more than they had any right to. Read it as that.

I went to Grantham last week to film some videos. That was the whole job. Sit on a sofa, answer some questions, get the train home, done. What I didn’t expect was to spend the journey back counting the number of things I’d done for the first time.

The plan, which should have been the first warning.

It was simple. Train from the sunny old Essex coast to St Pancras, a station I’d somehow never set foot in and was quietly looking forward to seeing (and a secret pleasure of trains and architecture). Jerry coming up from Brighton to meet me there. Then the two of us heading north to Grantham together, like proper professionals with a plan.

Then a sinkhole opened up on the line during Jerry’s leg of the journey, and he ended up stranded at Gatwick.

So I went home, got in the car, and drove two and a half hours to Gatwick through traffic that can only be described as a personal attack. Picked Jerry up. Then four more hours up to Grantham. A day that should have been a relaxed train ride turned into the best part of nine hours on the road.

And here’s the strange part. It was one of the best bits. Jerry and I talked absolute nonsense for most of it. Not work. His past, his travels, the things you only find out about someone when you’re trapped in a car with them and nowhere to be. I came away knowing him better, and I thought he was a legend beforehand, but the most i heard, the more respect I had.

I never did see St Pancras. Hold that thought. It matters later.

The first nobody saw, including me.

We got to the hotel around 10pm. It sits in the centre of Grantham, and the building dates back to something like 1205, which, if my maths holds, makes it over eight hundred years old. It was old, quirky, a bit medieval, and I loved it. I wasn’t expecting much for £60 a night, but… actually £60 was an absolute bargain, and I would say i would’ve paid 3x that easily.

Jerry asked if I fancied a walk around town to explore. Normally that’s a yes from me. That night I was shattered, so I said not tonight, I’m knackered and went to my room.

Here’s the thing I haven’t told many people. I have never stayed in a hotel on my own. Not once. In my entire adult life I have never been away without family in some shape or form. So there I was, on my own, in an eight-hundred-year-old building in a town I’d never been to. I made a tea. I got comfortable. I FaceTimed my wife and kids, and I watched some rubbish telly and nodded off. It felt strange, and then it felt completely fine, which was stranger still.

The morning, and a question I couldn’t answer.

We met at 8 and walked into the high street to find Chris at his family butchers. Which is also mega mega old. I won’t lie, the prices alone were worth the trip. An apple turnover for less than £1…. the country should be queuing up at those prices.

On the stroll afterwards we bumped, entirely by chance, into another huge name in the industry. Someone I’d never met. I won’t name him here, but he turned out to be one of the poshest-sounding people I’ve heard speak in a long time, and an absolute gent with it, really pleasant to listen to. Nice and chatty, some small talk, a shake of hands and then the three of us went for a coffee and chatted about nothing in particular before heading off to the sofa.

Now, I’d met Chris once before, briefly, in a bar before an event. We’d spoken on the phone too briefly. Always polite, always pleasant. But my guard was up, because I didn’t really know him and online, his, well…. how can I put it, he likes to challenge people sometimes and is known for being a tough debater (in a good way). Sitting down and actually listening to him changed that fast.

The man’s passion is infectious. He’s bold, he’s sharp, and he’s genuinely funny.

Then, in the middle of it all, he stopped and asked me something.

“Nick, outside of property and your family, what are you into? What are your hobbies?”

Two things hit me at once. The first was surprise that someone like Chris would even ask. Why would he care?

He does, obviously, or he wouldn’t have asked. The second was that I didn’t know what to say. The honest answer is that I don’t really have one. I have loads of small things I dip in and out of, so that’s what I told him.

But the fuller truth, the one I didn’t say out loud because it sounds like a typical cliché line he has heard 1000 times and would never believe, is this. I’m obsessed with estate agency. I love this industry, and I love this job. I love running an estate agency… but I didn’t want to say it because it sounds like the sort of thing people say. The difference is I actually mean it. Those who know me know I never switch off, I never stop, always thinking, always playing with ideas, always learning, and always listening… because I love it.

The couch.

After a tour of Grantham’s highlights, including a statue of a long-dead local that a Wetherspoons is named after (it was the other way round, but i did find this explanation funny… top drawer dad joke material), we headed to the studio and met the PVS team. Chris, Matt and the rest.

I’d watched these lads on videos and heard them on podcasts for ages, but never met them. From the second we walked in they were chatting, positive and welcoming. Genuinely nice people who clearly care about what they make.

Then the sofa. I’ll be honest, I was nervous. An industry giant about to ask me questions, on camera, in a format I’d never done.

Jerry handles this sort of thing like he’s out walking the dog. For me it was a first, and there was a moment where I felt out of my depth. A couple of answers I know I could have given better. But Chris was brilliant. He asked, he challenged a few of my answers, and he even backed up a couple of the points I made. That helps more than he probably knows.

I'll admit to a thought I'd been carrying in the back of my head all day. That Chris couldn't really care less about me being there. That he was doing this for Jerry, that he wanted to talk to Jerry, and that I was the bloke tagging along, clinging on for the odd question and happy to be there for the ride. I’m just an Estate Agent in Rayleigh, one brand, one small team, and young…ish.

Jerry has never once made me feel like that. He tends to push me forward to share my views, not stand in front of me to cover mine. But I half expected Chris to see me that way, and I'd have understood it if he had.

He didn't. He aimed questions straight at me, and even when Jerry answered something, he turned and asked if I wanted to add anything. A small thing, maybe. It didn't feel small. It felt genuinely respectful.

The last first.

I dropped Jerry at the station and started the drive home. Two hours on my own with nothing but the road, which is usually where my best and worst thinking happens.

I have more respect for Jerry now than I did before, and I already had plenty. I’ve always seen him as a friend and a colleague. Now I’d add that he reminds me, weirdly, of my closest mate, the best man at my wedding, who is an absolute legend of a man. That’s about the highest compliment I’ve got.

Chris, I’m just a fan. He’s genuine. He cares about people, and he’s curious about them, not for cameras or content, but because he actually wants to know. That goes a long way in life. His knowledge of the numbers is unreal, his respect for his competitors is impressive, and his eye for detail is something else. I hope I get more time with him in the future, and I’m sure I will.

And the PVS lads. Approachable, welcoming, and serious about their craft and the care they put into it. I’d work with them tomorrow. Well… maybe not tomorrow, but I will be looking for a reason to work with them in the near future, I feel.

Here’s the first I didn’t see coming. Not the hotel on my own. Not the couch. I left Essex to film some videos and treat it as a job. Tick it off my list of to-dos for this week. I drove home with more fire in me, and more motivation. A trip I’d boxed off as work quietly reminded me why I do this, and showed me the kind of people I want around me as I keep going.

I never did get my first look at St Pancras. The one first the whole trip seemed to owe me, and the sinkhole kept it. Funny thing is, I didn’t mind in the end. I came back with better ones.

So, a series of firsts. First trip away without any family. First time in Grantham. First time in a proper interview. First time meeting a good few people I’d only ever watched on a screen. And the one I genuinely didn’t see coming. The first time I ever enjoyed that sort of process.

I was nervous going up.
I felt massively out of my depth.
I felt that little imposter gremlin sat on my shoulder the whole way.
But boy, did I enjoy every second of it.

If you don’t know who Spencer is, he’s one of the best estate agents in the UK. Just before we went live, I joked that whenever I hear him speak, it sounds like estate agency poetry. He has this way of wording things that makes everything land.

His response: “It’s because people tend to overcomplicate things.”

And he’s right. People do tend to overcomplicate things. Sometimes you say more with less. He’s mastered that art. But still, the only man i have spoken to yet, who can make a talk about training sound poetic.

Out of my league

I’ll be honest about something. I was nervous going on. Proper nervous.

It wasn’t my first webinar. I’ve done a couple now. But this one had a bit of imposter syndrome attached to it. In the lead-up, I kept thinking: should I really be speaking alongside this guy? He’s leagues above me in what he does.

The best way I can describe it is this: imagine you’re someone who’s been to your average golf driving range a few times, and suddenly you’re paired with Rory McIlroy for a round. That feeling. You’re convinced you’re out of your league and everyone watching is about to find out.

Then the first question came; I answered it- not great, but I answered it. That’s the thing about imposter syndrome nobody tells you: it rarely survives contact with actually doing the thing.

The fee conversation

The webinar itself was about confidence in fees. How to maintain confidence in your worth, and how to demonstrate that worth to clients.

Here’s the bit I think matters beyond estate agency.

Martin Lewis has, over a couple of generations, trained the British public to be financially savvy. Cautious about what they spend. Always hunting the best deal. And that’s a good thing… genuinely.

But it gets taken out of context when people look at estate agents.

They see one agent charging 0.5% and another charging 1.5%, and they assume they’re comparing the same service at different prices.

They’re not.

They believe they are comparing apples to apples, but they aren not. They are comparing apples to kiwis.

And here’s what actually matters: not what the agent charges, but what the seller walks away with at the end. If the agent at 1.5% achieves several percent more for your home than the agent at 0.5%, you walk away with more money. Despite paying the higher fee. Because of paying the higher fee, arguably.

That’s the bit people miss when they’re trying to save in the wrong places. Cheapest fee and best outcome are not the same conversation. They aren’t ever in the same room together, really.

After we finished, someone I know and respect in the industry sent me a private message to say I’d held my own. I won’t pretend that didn’t mean a lot. Driving-range golfer survives a round with McIlroy. Didn’t even lose a ball.

Why I keep banging on about the EAN

The webinar was part of the Ethical Agent Network hosted by Jerry, who founded it. These sessions are closed to members only, and what gets shared in them is hugely valuable.

The thing I love most about the EAN is that it’s full of agents who don’t compete with each other, openly sharing what they do and how they do it. No guarding. No posturing. In an industry not exactly famous for generosity between agents, that openness is rare. I’ve been doing this nearly fifteen years, and I’ve not experienced anything like it.

A birthday, a train, and a camera.

On Sunday it’s my son’s fourth birthday. And I’m being a wonderfully responsible parent by disappearing halfway through the day to get a train. yep. Don’t worry though, no ‘he popped out to get the milk and didn’t come back’ happening here… ill be back the following day.

I’m heading into London to meet Jerry at St Pancras, then up to Grantham, overnight in a hotel, and a full day of filming the next day with Chris Watkins and his couch… and before you make the jokes, get your head out the gutter! … It’s for an interview, questions, the lot.

Two things about this. First, I’ve never done a filmed interview with someone that big in the industry before. Second, and this is the bit I find genuinely funny, I’ve never travelled anywhere on a train on my own before. Let alone into central London with several changes. 35 years old, 15 years in business, and the train journey is the part putting me out of my comfort zone.

But here’s what gets me. If you’d told the agent I was in 2017/18 that these opportunities would be coming his way, he’d have laughed at you.

A lot has changed since then. The business has changed dramatically. What we focus on and what we’re aiming for has changed. It’s been some journey.

Then I’m stopping

After I travel back Monday, I’m taking the rest of the week off at home.

Not for any particular reason. No holiday booked. I’ve just learned, with the help of the Oura ring I’ve been wearing all year, which regular readers will know has a habit of calling me out, that there are certain points in the year where I need to take a break to stay consistent. If I don’t, it leads to burnout. And burnout isn’t fun for anyone, and it lasts a lot longer than a few days off.

I fell into the trap for years. Working as many hours as there are under the sun, as many days as the week would give me. Wearing it like a badge. But a few days out of the business changes nothing. Nothing fails. The business doesn’t burn down.

Every business owner, me included, carries this irrational fear that everything goes wrong the moment they step away. It never really does.

Although, and I say this with total certainty, there will be a leak in a rental somewhere next week. There will be some level of emergency. Murphy’s Law has an estate agency edition: the moment you book time off, something happens. It’s just the nature of the industry.

It can wait until I’m back. Mostly.

Full circle

So that’s the week. A webinar I nearly talked myself out of deserving. A fee conversation I think every seller should hear. A train journey I’m weirdly more nervous about than the filming at the end of it.

The common thread though, is growth and the people around you. Everyone I’m surrounded by right now is continuously improving and pushing each other to improve. Agents promoting agents. Networks lifting people rather than charging them for a badge.

Fifteen years in this industry in August. And honestly, it’s unlike anything I’ve experienced in my career to date.

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I saw something on social media recently that I have thought about since i read it.

Someone had written, more or less: if you think “that’s good enough,” the chances are it isn’t.

I read it. Sat with it for a moment. And thought: yes! That’s it exactly.

Because I’ve spent fifteen years watching this industry put out work that somebody, somewhere, looked at and decided was fine. Listing photos so dark you can’t tell if the room has a window. Angles so bad you can see the agent’s muffin top or shiny shoes reflecting in the wardrobe mirror, no apologies. Items left on floors that a thirty-second tidy would have sorted. Descriptions that read like they were written in five minutes, because they were. (If you use the word ‘boasts’ or ‘sought after’, please, just… stop.)

And the thing that used to drive me mad wasn’t the bad work itself.

It was that someone looked at it, thought ‘that’ll do’, and sent it out into the world anyway.

I used to let that frustration point outward.

At everyone else. An entire industry doing it wrong, and me over here watching it happen, wondering how nobody else seemed to notice.

What I’ve come to understand, and I’ll be honest, it took longer than it should have, is that outward is the wrong direction.

In 2020, a colleague of mine, Dan, came into the business from a completely different industry. No estate agency habits to unlearn. No assumptions about how things are done here baked in from years of doing them wrong. And one of the things Dan has consistently, quietly pushed me toward is looking inward instead of looking out.

It sounds obvious. It really isn’t. Not when you’re running a business, and every instinct you have is pulling your attention somewhere else.

What looking inward actually looks like, for me, day to day:

When I lose a potential client to another agent, I don’t sit there thinking ‘they just told them what they wanted to hear or they made promises they can’t keep.’ or ‘they did a cheap fee so I never stood a chance’ Even when that’s probably true. Because that line of thinking is comfortable, it protects the ego, and it makes you the same person the next time.

What I do instead is ask: where could I have done better? What felt unsteady? What did I rush, or miss, or not explain well enough? What do I need to read, or hear, or who do I need to speak to, so that I’m better prepared next time it matters? every. single. time.

If I take photographs of a property and I’m not happy with them, I go back. I retake them.

Yes, it costs time. Sometimes a lot of time. But that is the cost of learning, and I’ve made my peace with it. And if the second attempt still isn’t right, that’s useful too because now I know exactly what I need to work on before I get there again.

If a client leaves and, thankfully, it is rare, I don’t move past it quickly. I sit with it. What happened? What should we have done differently? What needs to change so it doesn’t happen again? My job is to run a business so good that clients don’t want to leave. When they do, that’s not just disappointing. It’s instruction.

Dan has helped me get a thousand times better at this. Mainly because he won’t hold the punches; if I slip up, or could’ve done something better, he will 100% tell me, not out of ego or competition, but from a place of respect and genuine desire to want to improve collectively.

The instinct used to be to look outward and find the explanation that kept me comfortable. Now the instinct is to look inward and find the thing I can actually do something about. That shift took time. It still takes effort. And I won’t pretend it isn’t exhausting some weeks.

But it has to happen.

(One thing I will add here: there is a saying along the lines of ‘If you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room’ I’m sure many of you have heard. But I feel there is another here equally as important: if it isn’t claimed, I will claim it! It’s ‘If you are in a room where nobody challenges you, or will call your bullshit out, then you're also in the wrong room ‘)… Dan is absolutely that person for me, and i see him as a close friend now. I have huge respect for him, and the way he holds me to account… anyway, back to my point.

So why don’t more agents do it?

I think it comes down to one of two things.

Either they genuinely don’t see it. They look at the dark photo and it looks fine to them. They haven’t looked hard enough at great work, haven’t asked enough hard questions, haven’t sought out the feedback that would recalibrate their eye. That’s not comfortable to say, but it’s at least a kind of explanation.

Or they see it, know it’s not quite right, and decide the effort of fixing it isn’t worth it.

That second one is harder to forgive.

Either way, those agents have a shelf life. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next. But clients are getting sharper. The gap between fine and exceptional is easier to spot than it used to be. And the agents who’ve built their practice on that’ll do are standing on ground that gets less stable every year. They’ll go. Eventually, they’ll go.

I’ve said this before and I mean it.

I never set out for Nest to be the biggest. Not the most dominant. Not first on any pie chart. Not with the most offices, or agents, or with the flashest ego-driven marketing campaigns, or with the boards in every single street. That is never the goal.

The goal was to be the best we could possibly be, and to be the best place for local agents to work. That is it.

On the first… for seventeen consecutive months, we’ve been achieving the highest percentage of asking price in our town, every single month, according to GetAgent.co.uk. I won’t pretend I’m not proud of that. Not because it’s a number to put on a slide, but because it’s evidence. It shows the effort is real, and that it compounds. You don’t get there by accident. You don’t keep it by accident either.

On the second, we’re not done. We’ll never be done. The team aren’t leaving, which I’m choosing to take as a reasonable sign, but building the best place for agents to work isn’t a destination you arrive at. It’s a standard you either keep meeting or quietly start to let slide.

I’ve accepted that. That’s the business I chose to build. Which means I’m never in a position to say that’ll do. What I can say is either: I couldn’t have done better there, or, I need to work on this, and here’s how I’m going to.

There’s nothing in between those two.

Some people are building a company real big, real quick, to make as much money as they can and cash out. Not me. I’m here for the long haul; I want to enjoy what I do, and who I do it with, for a long period of time. Then when I retire, the person who takes over from me will be someone I choose; they will be taking over and then taking it further than I could. That’s my aim.

Next week, I’m getting the train to Grantham. Something i’m nervous about, ive never got a train to central London by myself before, so with my wonderful ADHD’ness, this could be fun. The last time I went on the tube, I was with my wife and for some reason i just completely froze and shut down while staring at the train I was meant to be boarding, my mind just melted and complete shut down happened… so this is something I’m nervous about, but I am also looking forward to challenging myself in small ways like this.

I’m going to meet Jerry from the EAN in central London before getting the train up to Grantham with him to be interviewed by the one and only OG of Estate Agency interviews… Chris Watkins. Someone I have a great deal of respect for, and we’re filming it. It’s well outside my comfort zone. I’m not a natural in front of a camera, and someone like me doesn’t find these opportunities coming in their direction very often. I’m nervous about it, genuinely. But I’m going.

Because the agent I was ten years ago wouldn’t have been offered any of these opportunities.

That’s not false modesty. It’s just true. The opportunities that start coming your way when you’ve spent years refusing to settle, they don’t arrive on a schedule. They don’t announce themselves. They just turn up, quietly, and if you’ve been doing the work, you’re ready for them. (or at least need to pretend like you are!).

I’m looking forward to it. And I intend to enjoy every moment.

‘That’ll do’ was never, and will never be, part of the plan.

I’ve run this business for twelve years.

For twelve years, my wife has been there for it. The late nights. The weekends that weren’t really weekends. The lunches where I was physically present but mentally somewhere else, running through a client list, composing emails in my head, wondering whether I’d replied to that thing I definitely should have replied to by now.

She’s pointed it out, gently and then less gently, more times than either of us can count. “Switch off. Take a break. You don’t have to be on all the time.”

And like most business owners, I didn’t.

About five months ago I started wearing an Oura ring.

If you haven’t come across one, it tracks sleep, recovery, and stress levels, the things you don’t notice building up until they already have. It takes time to calibrate. For the first few weeks it’s just collecting data, learning you. And then slowly, it starts showing you a picture of yourself you didn’t know was being taken.

What mine showed me, over the last few months, is a stress line that only goes one way.

I could feel it too, if I’m honest. That low-level tension that sits behind everything. Not loud enough to stop you functioning, but present enough that you never quite switch off. Like a shadow you can’t see but can always feel.

The data just gave the feeling a number…

Guilt

The guilt thing is hard to explain if you haven’t felt it. But other business owners tend to get it immediately.

When I leave the office early, even when there’s no reason to stay, it feels like I’ve done something wrong. Like I’m bunking off. I genuinely used to bunk lessons at school, and this is the exact same feeling. That specific mix of freedom and wrongness. Like I’m getting away with something and someone’s about to notice.

When I’m not working and I could be, the guilt is there.
When the team are in and I’m not, it’s there.
When I take a lunch and don’t eat at my desk or skip lunch entirely, it’s there.

I’m writing this at 11:40pm, which probably tells you everything you need to know about how deeply the habit runs.

The logic, when you pull it apart, goes something like this: I should be working because the business needs to grow. It needs to grow because we have a goal as a family, somewhere we’re trying to get to, a version of our life we’re working toward. And if I’m not working constantly, we won’t get there. And it’s on me to get us there.

That’s the guilt. Not laziness. Not indulgence. Just the weight of something you really want to build.

Theres a old saying “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard” … I don’t see myself as talented. So hard work is a non-negotiable by default.

This bank holiday, something shifted.

I didn’t plan it. I just… stopped.

Saturday: very little. Sunday: even less. Monday: the same.

What I did instead was actually be here. A bbq in the garden. Conversations that weren’t interrupted by my own head. Listening to my wife properly, not the half-listen I’ve been passing off as attention for longer than I’d like to admit. Playing with the kids without half my brain somewhere else.

It sounds small. It isn’t…and nothing burned down.

Nothing fell apart. No client abandoned ship. No crisis emerged that only I could solve. We are not an emergency service, and the business survived three days of me being an actual human being, which made me think.

There’s a distinction I’ve been sitting with since the weekend: the difference between ‘here’ and ‘there’. I was watching a TV series on Apple which made the following impossible to shift out of my mind.

‘There’ is where we’re going. The goal. The version of our life we’re working toward. The reason the late nights feel worth it and the guilt feels justified.

‘Here’ is now. The kids as they are today, not as they’ll be when we finally arrive somewhere. My wife, who has quietly held this whole thing together and deserves more than half my attention over a Saturday lunch. The view from inside what we’ve already built, while we’re busy trying to build it bigger.

I’ve been so focused on ‘there’ that I’ve been missing ‘here’. And ‘here’ matters. ‘Here’ is the point.

I’m not good at saying this stuff out loud. I joke with the kids more than I tell them things. I show up and play pranks and jokes rather than sit them down and explain what they mean to me. That’s just how I’m made.

The Thought.

I haven’t been able to shake this out of my head since the weekend.

People die suddenly. Fit, healthy, no warning. I hope that isn’t me. But it could be.

If it were, my kids might eventually read things I’ve written — the drafts, the notes, the bits I’ve never published. And they’d find out, through the reading of it, that I cared deeply. More than I ever showed. That every late night and missed weekend was an attempt to build something for us.

But what’s the use of them knowing that when I’m not here to see them know it?

They deserve to know while I’m still around to tell them, and I deserve to be present enough, actually, to enjoy it.

Permission.

This bank holiday gave me something I didn’t know I was missing: permission.

Permission to switch off without the guilt following me out the door.
Permission to enjoy a weekend instead of just recovering from a week.
Permission to sit at lunch and actually be at lunch.

My wife has been asking me to give myself that permission for years. She’s carried more than her share of all this, the business, the family, the weight of a partner who’s always half-elsewhere, and she’s done it without complaint. That kind of support deserves more than distracted evenings and guilt-ridden lunches.

I came back on Tuesday feeling different. Not fixed. Not suddenly sorted. Just slightly adjusted.

The camera is still pointing in the same direction. The goal hasn’t changed. But the focus has shifted, just a fraction, to take in more of what’s already in frame.

There’s a good picture here, right now. I’m going to work harder at seeing it.

I’m going to be upfront with you.

I started writing here because estate agency, as an industry, gives you a lot to work with. Professionally speaking, it’s a target-rich environment. I’d walk into a valuation, hear something genuinely baffling, come home, and think: someone needs to know about this.

That part hasn’t changed. I’m not suddenly diplomatic. The industry remains what it is, and occasionally, I will not be able to help myself.

But here’s the thing I didn’t expect when I started.

After about fifteen years of being an estate agent, and running an independent estate agency for 11.5 years in Essex, not a franchise, not a corporate, just us, trying to do it my way. I’ve realised that the more interesting story isn’t what everyone else is getting wrong.

It’s what I’m getting wrong.

Or right. Sometimes right. Usually, some version of both in the same week.

Because running a business you actually care about is pretty demanding… Not a bad demand. Not “I wish I’d worked for someone else” demanding. But the kind where you’re making decisions with incomplete information, trying to lead people well, figuring out what “doing this right” actually means in practice and occasionally sitting in a car outside a house, wondering if you made the right call back in 2014.

(You did. Mostly… Moving on.)

What I want to write about from here is that stuff. The thinking behind the decisions. The judgment calls that don’t have a textbook answer. The things you only understand six months later, when the situation has resolved, and you can finally see it clearly.

Not tactics. Not frameworks. Not “here are seven things I do every Monday morning.” or some 5 am club bullshit (I’m never, ever going to be part of that gang) or the ‘get up and dunk yourself in a freezing cold kids pool it’ll set your day up right (tried that, it doesn’t, it just makes you regret your choices earlier in the day… like why am i standing in shorts in my garden about to do this)… I am not going to do that to you.

What I want is to write honestly about what it’s actually like to build something, in this industry, with this team, with these values, and see what happens when you refuse to cut corners even when cutting corners would be the easier, faster, more profitable thing to do.

My aim with Nest has always been simple… to be the best agency in this area for the people we work with. Clients and team alike. That’s a longer game than most agents are playing. I don’t care about market share, or how I can tinker a Rightmove pie chart to make me look number 1, I’m not interested in vanity stats, what I am interested in is do people enjoy working at Nest and are we getting the best results for our clients.

Most of what I write from here is what that game actually looks like from the inside.

If you’re a business owner, estate agency or otherwise, some of this will probably land. Not because I’ve figured anything out, but because the experience of caring about the thing you’ve built is a reasonably universal one.

And occasionally miserable. And occasionally brilliant.

Usually in the same afternoon.

The rants will still surface. I’m not suddenly lost that bit and become a calm monk over a bank holiday weekend. If something genuinely baffling happens in this industry, I will tell you about it. You have my word.

But the main thread from here is the journey. Where we are, what we’re working through, what I’m learning, and what I still genuinely have no idea about.

Still Nick. Just talking a bit more about what i’ve learned, and a bit less about what’s wrong with this industry (ok, a little bit less)

Let me tell you about something that happens regularly in this job… more than it should. More than most people outside the industry would probably believe.

Someone calls up. Urgency in their voice. “We’d love to view it, when can we get in?” Great. We booked it in. A confirmation lands in their inbox and hits their phone within minutes. The night before, another reminder. The morning of, another one. Three touchpoints. Three opportunities to say “actually, we can’t make it.”

And then they just don’t come. No text. No call. No email. Nothing.

It happens enough that we’ve accepted it. And that’s the part that should bother everyone, agents, sellers, and frankly, the people not showing up, because nobody ever talks about what it actually costs.

Let’s start with the homeowner. Because this one genuinely gets me.

When someone books a viewing, it’s not just an entry in the diary. For the seller, that booking is a possibility. It might be the person who buys their house. Or at the very least, its feedback is useful, real feedback that tells them something about their home and how it’s landing with buyers. Both of those things matter. A lot.

So they clean. Not a quick wipe-down… they clean. They move things. They declutter. They do the things they’ve been putting off for three weeks. They spend a couple of hours making their home look its best, because someone is coming and it matters.

And then they go out. Because that’s the done thing. Sellers leave during viewings, it makes everyone more comfortable. So they go out. Sometimes that’s easy. Sometimes that’s packing the kids into the car, driving somewhere, trying to keep three children entertained in a Costa car park while watching the clock.

I’ve seen this. I’ve pulled up to properties and spotted the family car around the corner. Mum or dad in the front seat. Kids are bored, squabbling, and the youngest one is crying. Windows slightly fogged. Stress levels visibly through the roof. Sitting there because someone said they were coming at two o’clock.

And when I call to say the viewer hasn’t shown up?

The look through that windscreen. That’s the bit nobody talks about.

Now let’s talk about the agent.

Because the common assumption is that a no-show is annoying but manageable. It’s just a twenty-minute appointment. They’ll live.

Here’s the actual breakdown.

They leave the office fifteen minutes before they need to be there. Then they need to get there early, unlock the doors, quick walk-through, make sure it’s all as it should be, so add another ten to fifteen on top of that. That’s thirty minutes before the appointment time, already invested.

The appointment time arrives. No one’s here. Fine, they might be stuck in traffic.

They wait ten minutes, then call. No answer. They wait another ten minutes, just in case... Nothing.

We’re now fifty-five minutes in, and there’s still the homeowner to call. That conversation is, in the nicest possible way, a disaster.

You’re telling someone who spent hours cleaning and sat in a car park with three children that the viewer didn’t show up. And then you’re spending the next ten minutes reassuring them that you sent every reminder possible, that you’re equally frustrated, and gently deflecting any implication that somehow this is on you (because the trust is, it isn’t on you, and everyone on that call knows that).

Then fifteen minutes back to the office.

That’s an hour and twenty minutes. Gone. For nothing.

And that’s not just time in the abstract. Depending on the level of the agent on that viewing, that time is worth hundreds of pounds. To the business, potentially more. Time that could have been spent on a new valuation, chasing a sale through that needs attention, doing something that moves something forward.

Instead: car park. Phone to voicemail. Awkward call to a stressed-out seller.

Here's what I always find interesting about this.

In 2023, I was on my way to a viewing. I got T-boned on the way there, 40mph, a guy was indicating, I pulled out, bang, turns out the indicator was left on my accident, and he never slowed down (and it did really, really, hurt). Proper accident, the kind where you sit for a second and check that everything still works. I called the viewers immediately. Explained what had happened. Apologised. Rebooked.

They were still unhappy. One of them rang the office, voice raised, we drove forty-five minutes for this. Fair enough, I get it, genuinely, but I was in a car that had just been hit by another car.

Flip it around. The viewer doesn’t show. Agent calls, gets voicemail. Calls the seller, apologises, and manages it as professionally as possible. What happens? Nothing. It’s absorbed. The agent is silently furious but won’t say anything. And the seller, who’s just been told their two o’clock isn’t coming, stares out the car window at a car park they’ve been sitting in for an hour.

I can promise you. We absolutely think things we don’t say.

Now, I do understand that genuine emergencies happen. Of course they do. And here’s the thing: every actual emergency we’ve ever had results in a call or a text. Always. People in real emergencies still manage to find thirty seconds to let someone know. They apologise, they rebook, and they show up at the new time. Almost every single time. That’s how we can tell it was genuine.

What doesn’t result in a call or a text is a 9:30am Saturday morning booking that someone looked at on their reminder, thought, actually, we can’t really be bothered, went to bed, woke up feeling fragile, and decided that their ‘emergency’ is some Paracetamol. A pint of water. Back to sleep. (yeah, we know, and we also know you know, we know, which makes it worse).

That’s not an emergency. That’s a Saturday.

And that’s fine, life happens, plans change, you’re not obligated to want to see a house you put in your diary three days ago.

But the silence isn’t fine. The ignoring of three separate reminders isn’t fine. The hour and twenty minutes of someone’s working day isn’t fine. It’s disrespectful at best.

Imagine this.

Would a £50 refundable deposit fix this? Paid when you book, returned within 24 hours when you show up and provide feedback?

It would absolutely plummet no-show rates. I have no doubt.

Will it ever happen? No. Because the seller wants to sell, the agent wants to sell, and both of them will keep absorbing the risk of trusting that people will show up, because the alternative is creating friction in the viewing process that might put buyers off before they’ve even set foot through the door.

What about a red flag system? A no-show goes on record, and next time they try to book through any agent in the area, they get prioritised at less convenient slots or told there’s a waiting list until they’ve demonstrated they’ll actually turn up.

Also won’t happen. For the same reasons.

So the solution isn’t a system. It’s just people being decent about it.

It’s not much to ask, it really isn’t.

If you book a viewing and something comes up, anything, text. WhatsApp. Email. Call. Do it as soon as you know. Not ten minutes before. Not after the appointment time has passed. As soon as you know.

It takes 15 seconds. It saves everyone involved a significant amount of time, money, and stress. And it means the person sitting in the car park around the corner, with the three kids, the Costa she didn’t actually want, and the phone blasting out some YouTube video in an attempt to negotiate peace between the kids, all because she’s trying not to stress. Well, all of that could be avoided.

That’s it. That’s all.

Show up or let us know. It’s not a lot to ask.

Share Nick Cheshire

This is something I’ve thought about writing for a while.

I’ve always been quite vocal about it, and I will probably continue to be, because it is something I feel strongly about. (unless of course the brown envelope is big enough….. no serious i am joking there!).

I love my job. I really do. I am lucky in that sense. But I also know I have shaped the job around me. My style, my way of working, my standards, my way of doing things.

Like anyone, I still have days when I don’t want to go in. Days when I think, “Why am I doing this?” Usually, around the time someone asks if we can “just test the market” at a price only their mum would believe.

But most of the time, it is not the job itself that frustrates me.

It is the industry around it.

Every industry has its big names, and estate agency is no different. If I listed half a dozen people, most agents reading this would probably know who I mean. There are a few dozen names that seem to appear again and again.

On stages. On podcasts. On videos. At events. In photos together. Having the same conversations. Saying the same things. Usually with a microphone, a branded lanyard, and the kind of confidence only estate agents seem able to produce in unlimited amounts.

And I have a real issue with the commercialisation of “help” in this industry.

A lot of these people talk about wanting to improve the industry. Improve standards. Improve the perception of estate agents. Help agents do better.

Lovely stuff, very polished, very LinkedIn, very “we are all in this together”, said shortly before someone sends you a link to book a discovery call.

But I have noticed something. They never really speak badly of each other. They do not call each other out. They do not challenge bad behaviour. They do not say, “Actually, I think that is wrong.”

Why?

My theory is pretty simple. It is either ego or money.

A lot of these people move in the same circles. They speak together, record together, interview each other, recommend each other and promote each other.

So why would they call anything out?

If one person calls bullshit on another, they might lose the chance to be invited onto the podcast. Or the stage. Or the video. Or the panel. Or whatever event has been dressed up as “raising standards” but seems to feature the same group of people clapping each other every six months.

So they stay quiet.

Even when they disagree, they stay quiet.

They pat each other on the back, smile for the photo, and go again. That is why you keep seeing the same names everywhere.

Let’s use an example.

Say you have a public platform. Maybe a TikTok profile, a podcast, or let’s go old school and say an email newsletter. Maybe you go live every week and interview agents, share tips, build an audience and do something that genuinely helps people. Good on you.

Then someone/some company sponsors it. That sounds great, doesn’t it?

But what happens if that sponsor turns out not to be a great person? What happens if they treat staff badly, treat clients badly, tie people into awful contracts or behave poorly?

Could you call it out? Technically, yes.

Would you? Probably not.

Because that sponsorship would be pulled quicker than you could say “free no-obligation valuation”.

And that is where it gets awkward, because I do not think this is always simple. People have families. Businesses. Mortgages. Bills. It is easy to say someone should be honest when there is no cost attached.

It is harder when honesty directly affects your income.

But that is also the problem.

Too much of this industry is now built around not upsetting the people who might give you your next opportunity.

There are agents I know who are still properly on the tools. Agents who are still valuing homes, launching properties, dealing with owners, speaking to purchasers, handling chains, managing fall-throughs and taking the late-night messages that make you briefly consider farming goats in Wales instead.

Some of these agents can deliver more value in a single WhatsApp message than others do in an hour on stage. (I can promise you that… I witnessed it only a week ago).

They do not always shout about it. They are not always chasing the spotlight. They are not always putting their face on a carousel telling you the “three secrets to winning more listings”, which usually turn out to be “be good, follow up, and charge more”. Revolutionary stuff. Someone alert Harvard.

But when these agents are asked for help, they give it properly.

Not a teaser. Not a fluffy overview. Not a vague “you need to improve your process” with no actual process shared.

They tell you what they do, why they do it, how they do it, what went wrong, what they changed, and what they would avoid next time.

They give you the full sales funnel, not force you into one.

That is actual help.

But a lot of the louder voices in the industry do not do that. Not from what i see.

They give you a snippet.

“You need to be doing X, Y and Z.”

But they do not tell you the detail.

They do not tell you how to set it up. They do not tell you when to do it. They do not tell you what to say. They do not tell you what happens when it fails. They do not tell you how to make it work when your day is already full and your seller is asking why the viewing feedback has not arrived within six minutes.

Why?

Because either they are worried people will copy them, or because the real answer sits behind a paywall.

And that brings me to the bit that annoys me most.

People who are in a position to help other agents, but seem to put almost everything behind a paywall.

Five years ago, the industry felt very different.

There were webinars, Facebook Lives, WhatsApp groups, online communities and people sharing ideas properly. Templates, advice, scripts, tips, things that worked, things that did not.

People seemed happy to help. Not always for praise. Not always for attention. Sometimes just because they liked the industry and wanted other agents to get better.

Now?

The Facebook groups that were once active are mostly dead.

The WhatsApp groups are still there, but often quiet.

The meet-ups usually have another agenda (to quote a famous rapper … will all the estate agency coaches please stand up…or something like that)

The webinars often feel like a funnel to a course, a membership, a mastermind, a coaching programme, or whatever new name we are giving “please pay me monthly” this week.

And to be clear, I am not against people charging for training.

Not at all.

I paid for a course myself that, in my view, saved my career. Good training has value. Good advice has value. Experience has value. Although I only paid that money to listen to 1 person speak, who I genuinely believe delivered exceptional value.

But there is a difference between charging for something structured and useful, and turning every bit of basic help into a sales funnel.

There is a difference between sharing value and dangling it.

There is a difference between wanting to raise standards and wanting to build an audience of people you can sell to later.

That is the bit nobody wants to say out loud.

We talk about standards all the time.

Minimum entry levels. Qualifications. Regulation. Training. Professionalism. The same topics get rolled out again and again, like an industry buffet where every dish is slightly cold but everyone pretends it is lovely.

But very few people talk about attracting the next generation into estate agency.

Very few talk about helping newer agents understand the actual job. Not the shiny version. The real version.

The pricing. The negotiation. The judgement. The communication. The awkward conversations. The emotional side. The mistakes. The things you only learn when you have done the job long enough to know that “just get the offer agreed” is often where the real work starts.

There are people in this industry with 20-plus years of experience who give absolute gold away for nothing. Not because they are trying to fill a course. Not because they are warming people up for a subscription. But because they care.

Those people do not get mentioned enough.

And I am guilty of that, too, by not naming them.

Instead, the same names keep getting promoted, booked, praised and recycled.

The same people appear on the same podcasts, at the same events, giving the same advice, while everyone nods along like we have not all heard it before.

Nobody calls it out.

Nobody says, “Are we actually improving anything here, or are we just creating an industry echo chamber with better lighting?”

And so the merry-go-round continues.

One of the things I genuinely love about the network I am involved in, without turning this into a plug, is that there is very little of that. If something is nonsense, it gets called out. Agents share what works properly, with the detail, not just the headline. The whole point is to help each other improve.

That is what I think the industry had more of a few years ago.

Helping each other seemed to come before speaking opportunities and brown envelopes.

Now, too much of it feels polished, protected and commercial.

Maybe in ten years, some of these circles will have faded out. Maybe the same people will have retired. Maybe the weird little cult within the industry will finally be replaced by people who are less interested in protecting the room and more interested in improving the job.

But I would rather not wait ten years.

Because if we genuinely want higher standards, we need more than slogans.

We need people willing to say the uncomfortable bit.

We need people willing to share properly.

We need people who can challenge each other without worrying about losing their next invite.

And we probably need to stop pretending every stage, podcast, panel and webinar is automatically helping the industry and worth listening to.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is just the same people selling different versions of the same thing to the same audience.

Maybe that is why nobody wants to be honest.

Because honesty is useful.

But silence is often better paid.

I’ll leave you with this.

Take a moment to think about the last time you saw one estate agency provider publicly promote another.

When did you last see one CRM openly compliment another CRM?
One content creator properly promote another content creator?
One social media expert tell people to listen to another social media expert?
One regular industry speaker use their platform to say, “Actually, you need to be listening to this lesser-known agent instead”?
When did one network positively promote another network to its members?
And while I’m already annoying everyone, when did one podcast tell people to go and listen to another podcast?

Not privately. Not in a “they’re a good person” throwaway comment. I mean publicly, clearly and properly so it gives the other person promotion and presence because people listen.

And here is the bit that matters.

It only really counts when someone publicly compliments and supports a competing business, and neither side benefits financially afterwards.

No referral fee. No sponsorship. No course. No speaking slot. No “book a call” link hiding in the bushes like a LinkedIn gremlin.

Just one person saying, “They are good. You should listen to them, too.”

The last proper example I can think of was Chris Watkins and Jerry Lyons, with their boxing match parody.

Two competing titans in this industry. Two people with their own platforms, audiences and influence, using all of it to promote themselves and their rival at the same time.

No questions asked. No money changing hands. No obvious event, funnel or commercial angle waiting afterwards.

Just a funny campaign about two middle-aged men preparing for a boxing match, absolutely milking it, and somehow promoting each other more than themselves. What happened? Everyone saw it, most laughed, but we all knew about it… It worked for them both, and i’m sure it was fun doing it.

And that was years ago.

Yet those two, in very different ways, still deliver huge value to the industry and expect very little back.

That probably says everything.

And it proves my point better than I could.

This is a lesson I learned the hard way.

The agency I worked at before I started my own company felt amazing when I joined. I had a two-stage interview, chased for the decision, and when I finally got the nod, I was genuinely excited to start.

On my first day, I turned up nervous as hell but also excited. There was a real energy in the room, and I enjoyed ‘most’ of my time there.

I honestly felt like they were some of the best agents to be around. When I looked at the stats, we were always battling for number one with another agent in town and doing really well. The owners would go out, win most of the business they saw, and everything seemed to be working.

Then the culture shifted, and I got out.

I started my own company, carrying the confidence they’d built into me. I felt unstoppable. I was going to valuations and winning almost every single one. Business was coming in left, right, and centre, and on the surface, it all looked like it was going well.

Then 2017/2018 hit, and things got tight. I had more completions coming in, but less money left to actually pay the bills. I took out two business loans back-to-back, and it was on the second one that I knew something wasn’t right.

How does that even make sense?

That’s when reality hit me. I wasn’t an amazing agent. Yes, I was winning instructions, but my fee was £1,500. Locally, others were charging double that. So was I actually good, or was I just cheap enough that any flaws in my process didn’t matter? (That’s when I understood why the previous agency I worked at won so much… for that same reason.)

I’d like to think it was a bit of both, but if I’m being honest, we both know the answer.

I was in a dark place. Working every hour under the sun, still struggling to make ends meet and pay myself. I felt lost, confused, and like I’d completely missed something.

I remember one night, a video popped up of an estate agent in a roll-neck jumper. You know the one (IYKYK).

My first reaction, shaped by the culture I’d come from, was immediate: “Who is this idiot? Thinks he knows it all. Talking nonsense.”

But I watched another video. Then another. Then another.

And the penny dropped. This guy actually knows his stuff.

(Genuinely, hand on heart, I was ready to walk away, and this man in the video saved my career. I met him in person in 2018, and I’m grateful I did; otherwise, I would not be in the position I am now. I owe him a lot, and even to today, I genuinely believe he is one of the best agents in the UK).

The more I watched, the more I noted down, and the more I realised how much I didn’t know. I started to understand not just what he was saying, but why it worked. It completely shifted how I looked at everything I was doing.

Then I reflected on my own career. Two owners, completely different personalities, ran that agency I came from, but neither of them was learning. No courses, no events, no networking, no improvement. They’d go to a valuation, come back, watch a few videos of cats playing chopsticks on YouTube, compare fake watches they bought from China, and go home.

And the uncomfortable truth was, I wasn’t any different. I’d gone four years picking things up along the way, but I wasn’t actively learning or improving.

So I changed it. There and then.

I went to courses, meetings, and events. I learned as much as I could from anyone worth listening to. Within 12 months, I had easily doubled my fee, if not more, and my results improved massively with it.

That’s something I’ve never stopped doing. Now, if there’s a webinar worth watching, I’m there. If there’s someone worth listening to, I pay attention. I read blogs, attend events, and constantly challenge myself and my team. We train regularly and share knowledge in the office all the time.

But I still see it now. So many agents don’t do this. They skip the important webinars, don’t invest in improving, and then complain about fees, income, and costs.

It’s easy to focus on the output and stress about costs, but if you focus on the input, prospecting and sales, the costs stop being the issue.

And the same excuse always comes up: “I’m busy. I haven’t got time.”

I even hear it in my own team sometimes. “I haven’t had the time.”

No. You have.

We all have the same number of hours in the day. If someone said, “I don’t want to prioritise it,” fair enough. That’s honest. But “I’m busy” isn’t an excuse. It’s avoidance.

If you want to be better, you’ll make the time. You’ll protect it. You’ll find ways to work smarter so that time exists.

Put it in your diary like a valuation. You wouldn’t miss a valuation, so why are you missing the thing that actually makes you better?

So ask yourself this. When was the last time you learned something new? When did you last look at your process, admit something wasn’t good enough, and actually fix it?

If you can’t remember, you’ve been making excuses.

What I can say with confidence is this. The best agents I know, the ones I watch, listen to, and respect, they ALWAYS make time to improve.

That’s the difference.

And it’s not about awards, market share, or shouting about how busy you are.

The agents who focus on improving get better results for their clients, enjoy the job more, and make more money.

Think about it.

Over the last 15 years in this industry, I’ve seen just about every situation you can imagine, and probably a few you wouldn’t believe even if I told you. (seriously)

This business loves throwing curveballs, so I stay open-minded, but there’s one pattern that comes up again and again.

Homeowners micromanaging their estate agent.

Now, to be fair, it usually starts in the right place. People are thorough when choosing an agent (If anything, I’d say most people still aren’t thorough enough at that stage), but once they’ve made the decision and given the agent the go-ahead, that’s where things start to go wrong.

Because instead of stepping back, they step in

That’s where it starts costing money.

Let them do their job during marketing

A simple one to start with...Photos.

So many homeowners stay at the property while photos are being taken, following the agent around, making small talk, and watching everything.

It sounds harmless, but it’s not.

You’ve got an agent trying to think about angles, lighting, reflections, composition, how the property is going to look online, while also trying to hold a conversation out of politeness. It splits focus, and the end result suffers.

Most of my clients go out for a couple of hours. They go for a coffee, do the weekly shop, see a friend, whatever. Give me the space to focus properly, and the marketing is better because of it.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, then there’s a bigger issue. It means you don’t fully trust the person you’ve chosen.

Where micromanagement really kicks in

Once the photos and marketing come back, that’s when it ramps up.

“I don’t like that angle.”
“Can we remove that photo?”
“Can we change the order?”

Look, if something genuinely doesn’t sit right, say it. That’s fair. But too often it’s based on personal preference rather than strategy.

A drone shot is a good example. An owner might think it makes the house look smaller. But what they’re missing is that it shows the plot, the spacing, what’s behind the property, and the setting. That’s what attracts buyers.

It’s not about what you like. It’s about what works.

The same goes for descriptions. I regularly see owners wanting to add everything in.

Every detail.
Every feature.

But buyers don’t read listings like a shopping list. They look at photos first, then video or floor plan, and the description comes last, if at all.

So why fill it with things people can already see?

No one needs telling there’s carpet or a radiator. What they need is context. Lifestyle. What it’s like to live there. How far the station actually is in minutes, not some vague “walking distance” that means something different to everyone.

You are not the buyer

This is where it gets uncomfortable for some people.

You’re not the buyer.

You’re emotionally attached to your home. You’ve lived there, built memories there, and raised a family there. Of course, you think it’s better than the one down the road.

But the market doesn’t work like that.

I had a couple recently who’d been in their home for 40 years. When we were looking at comparable properties, everything came back to “ours is better because of this” or “ours is better because of that”.

And I get it. I genuinely do.

But buyers don’t see your memories. They see what’s in front of them, and they compare it to everything else available.

That’s why pricing, positioning, and strategy matter more than personal opinion.

Trust the process or question the choice

Here’s the blunt truth.

If you’ve picked your agent properly, you should trust them.

If you don’t trust them, then you’ve picked the wrong agent. It’s that simple.

That doesn’t mean you blindly follow everything without question. If something isn’t working, challenge it. If feedback comes in that contradicts the plan, bring it up.

But jumping in early, changing things based on personal preference, second guessing decisions before they’ve had time to work… that’s where it starts to unravel.

The real job is choosing, not controlling

Most homeowners put their energy in the wrong place.

They rush the decision on which agent to use, then spend the next few months trying to control the outcome.

It should be the other way round.

Put all your effort into choosing the right agent. Look at their strategy, their track record, how they think, how they explain things, how they handle pressure.

Then once you’ve made that decision, give them the green light and get out of their way.

Because when the right agent is left to do what they’re good at, that’s when you get the best result.

And funnily enough, that’s also the part most people struggle with the most.

And all of this aside, let’s be honest… you’re probably not sitting there thinking, “I’d love to spend my afternoon following an estate agent around making small talk about light switches.” You’ve got better things to do. So be thorough, if anything too thorough, when choosing your agent. Ask the questions, challenge them, make sure they’re right. Then once you’ve made the call, point them in the direction you want to go and step back. You’re still in control, you’re just not in the way, and that’s usually where the best results come from.

Imagine two estate agents sitting in your living room.

Agent number one says your home is worth £500,000. Agent number two says £550,000.

Which one do you think usually wins the instruction?

It’s rarely the one quoting the lower figure. Even if they’re the one telling the truth.

The Valuation Game

Most homeowners believe they’re choosing the agent with the best strategy.

In reality, many end up choosing the agent who gave them the number they liked hearing most.

That’s not meant as an insult. It’s human nature.

If you invite three agents round and one of them tells you your house is worth significantly more than the others, it’s very tempting to believe they’ve “seen something the others missed”.

Sometimes they have. Often they haven’t.

Why Honesty Loses Listings

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about valuation appointments.

If an estate agent were completely honest about everything they saw in your home, the conversation might sound something like this.

“Mrs Smith, the builder clearly DID NOT build this house for himself. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have turned that cupboard into bedroom three.”

Or:

“I know you feel this is the biggest plot in the street, but Land Registry and the surveyors who measured it suggest otherwise, but they are wrong… obv.”

Or even:

“You’re asking £50,000 more than the last one sold for… just last week… and the stairs carpet needs replacing and the house hasn’t even been prepared for viewings. You have also known ill be coming round for 2 weeks now and haven’t even run the hoover around… and do you know what that big crack is?”

Now imagine saying that during a valuation.

You’d probably be shown the door.

Sellers Don’t Invite Honesty

Most sellers don’t realise this, but valuation appointments often become a strange performance.

The seller wants reassurance. The agent wants the instruction. And somewhere between those two things, honesty sometimes gets diluted.

Because the agent who tells you exactly what you don’t want to hear is very unlikely to win the job.

When Honesty Costs You the Instruction

I experienced this recently.

A property I was marketing was getting consistent feedback. Every viewer said roughly the same thing. The house felt half finished.

Rooms weren’t fully completed. Some design decisions confused buyers.

Presentation was poor. Things like unfinished doors, poorly fitted blinds, and a huge breakfast bar sitting awkwardly in the middle of the dining room.

None of these things are impossible to fix.

But buyers noticed them immediately. So I told the owner exactly what the feedback was.

Honestly. Directly.

Not to offend them — but because the goal is to sell the property.

The response?

The property was taken off the market.

The owner told me they were going to move the bathroom to fix the issue. I explained that moving the bathroom would likely solve one problem and create three more.

Shortly afterwards the property appeared online with another agent.

What Did I Do Wrong?

Nothing, really.

I just told the truth.

And sometimes the truth loses you the instruction. Which proves my point.

Was I saying this to offend him? no. Was I saying this to be a douche? no. Was I saying it because someone took the last viscount from the tea room, and I missed out? maybe…. I’m joking. no. I told him this because I wanted to sell the property, and he needed to know what to do, so I could help sell it.

Did he take it that way? clearly not.

You instruct me for my knowledge, expierence and advice in the role I’m in to ensure you get the best price for your home. If you get offended by what I say with feedback, you're making it personal. IT IS NOT PERSONAL! I have a job to do, and I am making sure i am doing that.

The Incentive Problem

This is one of the uncomfortable realities of estate agency. The system quietly rewards optimism over accuracy. The agent who promises the highest price often wins the listing.

Even if that price eventually has to come down. Even if it delays the sale. Even if it wastes months of the seller’s time.

The honest agent often loses before the property even hits the market.

Why This Matters

People often say estate agents should be more honest.

And they’re right.

But honesty also requires something from sellers. A willingness to hear things that aren’t always flattering. Sometimes the best advice an agent can give is uncomfortable.

Your home might need work. Your expectations might be too high. Your pricing might be unrealistic.

None of that is said to win an argument. It’s said to help you achieve the best result.

A Simple Reality

The best estate agents aren’t the ones who tell you what you want to hear.

They’re the ones who tell you what buyers are actually thinking.

Even when it’s awkward.

Especially when it’s awkward.

One Final Thing…

If every agent you meet tells you exactly the same thing about your home…

That’s probably a good sign.

But if one agent’s valuation is dramatically higher than the others…

It might not be because they’re better.

It might just be because they told you the story you wanted to believe.