Transform2021

Transform 2021: that’s a wrap

This year our Kolmeo team got to experience Elite Agent’s Transform 2021 event from both sides. Scott as presenter, Brock as coach and Kathryn as participant, share the latest insights on all things property from this 30-day learning and networking extravaganza.

100% value

It’s Brock’s second time appearing as coach and presenter at Transform, and Kathryn’s first as one of 300 real estate professionals taking part this year. From both all our perspectives, it’s an event designed to deliver a lot more value than your typical industry conference.

For one thing, barriers to entry, in terms of both dollars and time, are really low. This might sound odd when it’s an event that lasts for a whole month. But for most professionals in our industry, taking two or three consecutive days away from daily duties can be problematic. That’s usually the time commitment you’re having to make for an industry event, with a day for travel, plus a day or so for the event itself. With Transform, you make time to take part around other commitments and it’s completely up to you to decide what you have capacity for and interest in.

This is the other beautiful things about the Transform way of delivering a learning experience. You get access to a whole lot of content and activities for your registration fee. Yes, there are two live training sessions each week and most people commit to making time for these. But even if you can’t, everything is recorded for you to access later as a learning journey you can travel at your own speed.

On top of these, there’s a daily challenge you can do solo or jump on social channels with fellow Transformers to make it more interactive. And for the more competitive among us, you can put all your business intelligence and Transform insights to work on your strategy and pitch to turn a fictional troubled real estate business into a powerhouse of profits and high performance.

Reflect and connect

If you can make time for all that in the space of 30 days, great. You’ll get CPD points and a crack at thousands of dollars in prize money. Even if you dip in and out of the Transform flow as time allows, you’ll still pick up plenty of industry wisdom and, perhaps most importantly, get the chance to apply it as you go.

This is why the longer event format helps in extracting the greatest value from what you’re downloading. A three-day multi-day conference can be intense and inspiring. Before you know it you’re back on the tools, with no time to digest what you’ve just taken in, let alone put it into action. Alternatively, over the course of the Transform month, you can put in a little effort to try out new things you’ve learned. And if you’re prepared to put the work in and share what you’re getting out of it, you’ll be getting lots of positive reinforcement from the leaderboard too.

The leaderboard is just one element of the very engagement that’s maintained during the course of Transform. With so many ways to access the content and respond through Q&As and forums, delegates and coaches are all getting amongst it. Everyone helps each other out, so you get this almost cult-like sense of a community who are all in it together. The amazing bonds and friendships that happen is one reason why many people keep coming back to Transform from one year to the next.

Learnings for the coaches

Although coaches like Brock and Scott from Kolmeo are there to share their wisdom, they also get to pick up their own insights from the Transform experience. The idea capture cards, for example, provide insights to help coaches lift their own game. One fellow presenter called out how hard it usually is to get feedback using the usual form passed around at the end. By asking delegates to record ideas sparked during a live session, presenters get to know what people actually learned and where there are gaps to fill in their material.

In 2020 we had so many questions about team management, things like how to do one-on-one meetings more effectively. And that’s great to hear because people management is a learning journey that never ends. That’s partly because it’s much harder to know what success looks like when you’re managing your people well. There’s a lot of focus on numbers and metrics to gauge success in property management, but measuring results from better interpersonal skills is harder. I guess that’s why our Transform delegates look for guidance in this, because they find it hard to judge how well or poorly they’re doing at this relationship-building stuff.

Insights from the audience

From the delegates point of view, there were three themes in the event that really lit up the audience and the social channels afterwards:

Taming social media

As you’d expect, getting the most from your digital presence and social media management hacks were very popular. Presenters covered a lot of ground here on things like what platforms work best and why. They also delivered a well-structured outline of what to do on particular days to help the audience get into the habits it takes to build a strong profile online.

Let go of perfection

A key lesson from these social media sessions was to let go of every post being a ‘unicorn’ – some perfect combination of image and word. If you discard something 28 times because it’s less than ideal, this will wreck your confidence as well as waste your time. This highlights another theme that came through loud and clear during the event. Not only is being human and authentic a lot less exhausting than striving for perfection, it also allows people to connect with you as a real person.

Be more you

So next time you’re getting hung up on what the competition are doing, try to focus on what you to have to offer instead. All too often in real estate, brands project this idea that being passionate about property is all there is to it. At Transform there was a real sense that being driven by that passion and nothing else just isn’t realistic. Instead, delegates were scoring themselves on lots of different measures of wellbeing, not just their most successful moments at work. We couldn’t be happier to see this more inclusive, balanced view of working life gaining popularity in the very demanding profession that is property management.

Transform 2021: Back to Basics

The next iteration of Elite Agent's Transform program is themed "back to basics" and designed for newcomers to the format. If that sounds like you, you can register your interest today.