In the last article on team founding at Engel & Völkers, you learned of the advantages of being self-employed with a business partner in the real estate franchise and how you can find the right co-founder for your endeavor. The second part of our small series should help you to incorporate many aspects of team formation into your business planning and make the right preliminary considerations before you start your own business as a real estate agent. If you follow the instructions in this article, you are creating the best conditions for a joint, successful career as a franchisee at Engel & Völkers. Learn more!
If you decide to open a real estate shop as a team, a situation arises in which it is not initially regulated how the responsibility for the new company is divided between the founders. In order to avoid ambiguities or internal conflicts in case of doubt, you should make a number of arrangements beforehand to preventively reduce the risk of such situations. If you and your co-founder have agreed on clear framework conditions for your jointly managed real estate company, you should definitely write them down so that you can refer to them if necessary. Engel & Völkers now presents the most important aspects that you should take into account.
As a suitable starting point when planning your joint franchise company as Engel & Völkers real estate agent, it is advisable to determine who brings which partial services into the team project: You should assign clear areas of responsibility, activities and decision-making powers so that there is no overlap in the operational process. Here you can ask yourself, for example, who should be responsible for hiring additional employees, who should be responsible for marketing and who should be responsible for accounting. In this process, you can also determine the fixed amount of investment each business partner will contribute to the establishment - each will take over an equally large part, or choose the path of a main founder who will cover most of the costs, while the other partner will make a smaller contribution. These considerations can guide many other decisions!
Based on the responsibilities that have now been distributed, you can coordinate with your co-founder how the shares are to be allocated. As a rule, this is made dependent on the distribution of the investment sum and the internal functions of the business partners. On the basis of this share allocation, the participation in your joint financial company success as a real estate agent is directed, also in the case of a license sale or corporate liability, the fixed shares play an important role. Engel & Völkers recommends: proceed as carefully as possible to cover all conceivable situations in which the distribution of shares could become important and make clear arrangements for the event of an occurrence.
In addition, you should make additional preliminary considerations that could become relevant in the course of your joint real estate agent career. This includes, for example, a regulation in the event that one entrepreneur wants to withdraw from the franchise business at an early stage, but the other intends to continue working there. Other temporal and process-related components also need to be taken into account: What period of time is the collaboration initially planned for? When should a possible expansion be considered, what are the requirements? How much time is invested in which operational processes?
Certainly not every eventuality of your franchise career can be recognized in advance - the successful entrepreneurial team is characterized by being able to deal with unpredictable challenges. Nevertheless, comprehensive cooperation planning helps you to make your work significantly easier, so you should take the opportunity to do this as focused as possible.
If you are aiming for a joint career as an independent real estate agent, our experts will be happy to share our in-depth experience in team-building with you. Throughout Europe, we have an attractive selection of unique license areas available to you. The Engel & Völkers real estate franchise helps your team to be successful - if you are interested, we look forward to your call at +49 (0) 40 36 13 10. Alternatively, you can also fill out our contact form, which you can click on the red button on the right-hand edge of the screen to call.
