Pay Day

Every time I closed a deal, there was a PayDay candy bar taped to my commission check.

A sticky note on top of it said congratulations.

Here is the funny part. I don't like PayDays. I never ate a single one and I gave them all away. (I'm a Snickers gal). I appreciated every one of them anyway.

The notes weren't from my broker. The front desk staff wrote them, because they distributed our commission checks face-up in our open mail slots where anyone walking by could see the payout.

Success was meant to be seen.

That was the culture. Not a poster on a wall. A candy bar, a sticky note, and a number nobody hid.

The Culture I Left

Frank Muljat was our broker and owner.

Revered. Respected. Always in the office.

I could grab a chair, sit down across from him, and get real broker support on a difficult client or a transaction coming apart at the seams. His judgment. His professionalism. He was always in my corner.

He also demanded excellence.

Getting in the door required three references and an interview. The brokerage didn't take part-timers and it didn't take brand new agents. If your name wasn't on the deal board week after week, it was not a good look.

We had weekly sales meetings. You did not miss them. You did not show up late. Every one of us was a 1099 contractor, legally independent, and it still felt like we were managed.

I wore lipstick and pant suits.

They threw me three baby showers, one for each pregnancy. My kids would sometimes crawl around my office floor at the end of the day. Not all day. It wasn't a daycare. I was expected to be highly professional and focused on real estate, and I was.

The warmth was never a substitute for the standard.

In 2009 I was going through an awful divorce. Frank gave me a five thousand dollar commission advance so I could hire an attorney. Brokerages didn't do that then. There was no policy for it, no program, no form to fill out.

He did it because he saw me unraveling and he cared about me.

Frank died last year. I live out of state, and I didn't make it to the funeral, but I think about him often. I think about the experience he gave me even more.

The Scale That Delivered

eXp Realty was founded in the same town.

I left to go there.

They had around 200 agents at the time, and on paper the decision made complete sense. A capped commission model. Better splits. Stock awards for doing the transactions I was already doing. It was life changing math. A CRM, agent websites. Things my boutique just didn't offer.

I could see where the industry was going. I needed technology my brokerage didn't have and I was tired of cobbling it together on my own. I wanted room to expand beyond one market.

The office itself was already losing its purpose. Agents were working from the field, mobile and efficient, and everything that made that place work depended on people actually being in the building.

I still felt terrible.

I was leaving Frank and my peers to go build someone else's vision.

But I want to be clear about something. I wasn't running away from anything. I was joining something that was better for me, better for my business.

So were tens of thousands of other agents. They came from boutiques, from franchises, from market centers, from every model that existed. The economics were simply better, and the industry moved.

Scale delivered on its promise.

Agents can inexpensively build across state lines now. They can earn equity. They have technology no single office could ever fund on its own.

What they don't have is a bar.

Anyone with a license can join. That is the model. Volume is the strategy, so the front door stays open to everyone, and the people already inside are rewarded for bringing in more.

I once heard an agent proudly announce that he had recruited his Uber driver.

That was a point of pride. Not an accomplishment. A body count.

What Got Lost

Here is where I felt the disconnect.

I went from a place where three references got me an interview, to a place where what got celebrated was the size of my downline.

There was an insiders group for the biggest downline earners and leadership. Being in it meant access. That was the reward structure. Not production. Not craft.

Recruiting.

In the agent-led models, the person who recruits you carries most of what comes after. Your onboarding. Your questions. Your support. Which means the company itself rarely hears from you directly.

Leadership loses signal. Support flattens into a ticket queue. Onboarding becomes a checklist. Recognition gets automated.

The agent, however good they are at the craft, becomes a unit inside a growth engine.

And now the industry is consolidating.

Compass absorbed Anywhere in January, pulling Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Sotheby's, and Corcoran under a single roof. Around 340,000 agents across 120 countries. Real's acquisition of RE/MAX cleared its shareholder vote and is closing, which puts more than 180,000 professionals under one holding company. Rocket bought Redfin. eXp acquired NextHome.

Massive corporate brands in a sea of agents.

I am not going to argue that scale is bad. I helped build it. But when an industry reorganizes itself around platform size, the individual agent ends up further away from anyone who knows their name.

That is the direction. And it is accelerating.

The damage didn't stop at agents. It reached the profession.

Consumers watch all of this. They see agents dancing on roofs on TikTok. Lip syncing to trending audio in front of a listing. Costume skits about closing day.

Then they draw conclusions about all of us. Would your doctor post a dance video the morning of your surgery? Would your financial advisor? Your CPA? Meanwhile consumers are prompting AI to help them understand contracts, decide whether to submit an offer, and evaluate what a home is worth. And they are trusting the output over their local expert.

That happened because we spent a decade training them to see us as content producers instead of expert counsel. If your public presence is dance videos, why would anyone trust your read on a contract more than a machine that answers with confidence and cites sources?

Ask buyers and sellers what they actually value in their real estate agent and they name three things. Negotiation. Local knowledge. A trusted advisor who advocates for them.

Frank was all three.

Building the Foundation Back

When we set out to build ENRG, we knew we had to recreate what Frank gave me. We also knew we needed a blueprint to do it at scale, across state lines, for agents we would never share an office with.

Maslow was Peter's idea.

Peter is my husband, my business partner, and ENRG's co-founder. He has a PhD in cognitive science and cognitive psychology, and a certificate in mathematical modeling. He spent more than twenty years at Microsoft building elegant software solutions. Systems and human behavior are his special gift.

When we started designing this company, he brought a framework that had been sitting in plain sight since 1943.

Physiological needs at the base. Then safety. Then belonging. Then esteem. Then self-actualization.

You cannot skip levels. You cannot self-actualize without belonging. You cannot feel esteem without safety.

Most people know Maslow from a psychology class. What most people don't know is that he wrote a book about applying it to business.

In the summer of 1962 he embedded inside a manufacturing company in California and kept a journal. It was published in 1965 as Eupsychian Management. He wrote about trust between workers and management. The need for honest recognition. The importance of continuous improvement. He argued this was the ideal model for how organizations should be run.

That was sixty years ago. Our industry never picked it up.

Most brokerages spend all of their energy at the top. Recognition dinners. Awards programs. Personal branding coaching. Aspirational messaging about becoming your best self.

Meanwhile the base is empty.

Strip away reliable tools, real support, an accessible broker, and genuine community. Then hand someone an award. What you get is an agent who feels celebrated and abandoned at the same time. Their brokerage is calling them a top producer while their broker hasn't returned a call in a month.

Most agents don't have language for that feeling. They just know something is wrong.

Frank built the foundation without a framework on the wall. He kept his door open. He held a standard. He wrote me a check because he saw me suffering, and knew I needed financial support to feel safe.

What he couldn't build was everything above it. The scale. The technology. The reach beyond one market.

We are building both.

I am not asking anyone to trade backward. ENRG has the technology, the economics, and the national footprint that made me leave in the first place. The difference is what sits underneath all of it.

ENRG has a production requirement. We are not a fit for brand new agents. We want full time, committed professionals, and we say no to people who aren't. Our agents are in service to their communities, we are here to make the world a slightly better place.

We celebrate achievement through production, excellence and service. Not downline size. There is no insiders group here, and access is not something you earn by recruiting.

ENRG owns the recruiting conversations, the support, the onboarding, the training. Our agents focus on selling real estate and serving their clients and their communities.

That is the job. Everything else is ours.

Onboarding is where that starts. It is the most important conversation we have with a new agent, because it is how we learn what drives them, what they are building toward, and how they want to be recognized.

You cannot celebrate someone you never bothered to understand.

When someone closes a deal here, someone at the top knows about it. When someone has a question, they get an experienced expert on the phone. When something isn't working, we hear it directly from the agent.

The foundation is not the agent's job to build.

It's ours.

Most brokerages start with a growth model and ask agents to fit inside it.

We started with the agent.

I learned that in an office with a deal board, an open door, and a candy bar taped to a check. And I'm building it with my partner as if it was our destiny, for all of our past experiences have led to ENRG.

ENRG Realty. Building the brokerage agents actually deserve.