“Want to wow your clients without even trying?”
Chris Cook dives into the secret sauce behind consistent, scalable, and client-pleasing real estate operations: standard operating procedures (SOPs).
From a last-minute scramble caused by not having proper systems in place to a passionate breakdown of how SOPs transform a chaotic business into a flourishing one.
He shares how he segments his business, empowers his team, avoids repeated mistakes, and elevates client experiences — all through clear, intentional documentation.
Listen for:
1:13 Repeat-Proof Your Business
4:35 SOPs by Business Segment
6:15 The Art of Exceeding Expectations with SOPs
8:52 Automate, Delegate, and Scale with Confidence
Connect with Chris Cook, Salesperson and Executive Director of The Halyard Group of RE/MAX Hallmark®
Read the Summary Below
Standard Operating Procedures That Make Clients Feel Like They Have No Needs
In this solo episode of Mind Your Real Estate Business, Chris Cook shares why Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are the key to running a smoother, more scalable real estate business—and why he’s recording solo in the first place: a lack of backup systems exposed a gap, and it became the perfect lesson.
Chris explains that SOPs exist to keep your business consistent no matter what—whether you’re slammed, slow, or caught off guard. They ensure tasks don’t get missed, expectations are clear between you and your team, and clients receive the same high-level experience every time. Without documented procedures, new hires (like admins) will inevitably do things differently, which leads to mistakes, misalignment, and inconsistent service.
He breaks down a simple way to start building SOPs: list the major parts of your business (buyers, sellers, landlords/tenants, marketing, etc.), then document the steps you take in each one—from listing prep to handoffs between agent and admin. This creates accountability, makes delegation easier, and removes mental load so you can focus on what you do best.
The biggest point: SOPs aren’t just operational—they’re a growth engine. When you consistently meet and exceed client expectations, clients stop feeling anxious and start becoming raving fans who refer you aggressively. Chris sums it up with his guiding principle: he doesn’t just want to anticipate client needs—he wants clients to feel like they have none.
He closes with an invitation for agents (especially within Max Hallmark) who want to scale without spending heavily on lead gen to reach out for a discovery session, where he helps document and implement SOPs that reflect what makes their business unique—and repeatable.
Full Episode Transcript
Chris Cook (00:00):
I don’t want to anticipate my client’s needs. I want them to feel like they have none. And what I love about Standard Operating Procedures is that I can start to anticipate what my client’s needs are, meet them before my clients ever feel like they need to ask the question. Welcome to this episode of Mind Your Real Estate Business. Today, I’m here solo, and it’s interesting that I’m here solo because I’m here by myself today because I didn’t have a really great set of procedures set up to load up guests, to have backups, to have things in place in case something goes wrong. So I was thinking about this as I was scrambling around trying to fix this particular problem, and I thought, what better to talk about on a podcast about your real estate business than standard operating procedures? In my business, I have a couple of things that I try to live by, and the first one is that I never make the same stake twice.
(01:13):
If I can get through my business, if I can get through my day and limit the mistakes that get made and intentionally make improvements to my business, then within a short period of time, I’ll start seeing really, really big changes happening. I’ll see my business start to actually blossom. And what’s amazing about standard operating procedures for me is that there seems to be no end to it. This is one of the problems is that you can put standard operating procedures in place, but if they’re not followed, then there are no use. So what I want to do is I want to talk about why do we need them, okay? We need them to be able to keep our business operating in the way that we want it to operate. We want to behave in our business the way that we would like to see somebody else replicate what we do.
(02:09):
We want it when we’re busy, but we also want it when we’re not busy. If we don’t have really close fixed attention on something, we want to make sure that things don’t get missed because we have a bit of a nonchalant attitude. So busy, not busy if you’re caught off guard, if you have to do something and it’s not at a typical time. We also want to make sure, as I had mentioned, if somebody is coming into your business to help you like an administrative assistant, we want to make sure that somebody else can operate your business. The way that you would do it, and this is really an important thing, is if you don’t have your business set up and documented by standard operating procedures, then don’t be surprised if somebody comes in and does it differently and maybe not to your liking and maybe more mistakes end up happening because the way that you would do it, the client’s expectations and what your administrative assistant or somebody may be another team member get it wrong.
(03:18):
So it has to be documented. This is the power of having standard operating procedures in place. So I guess the next question is, what else does it do? And I think the thing that misses for a lot of people that I talk to when it comes to this is your ability to intentionally grow. So here’s how I start with the standard operating procedures. This is how I started. I wrote down all of the different segments of my business, so landlords, tenants, buyers, sellers, marketing, all these different areas. I just put headings and then I started filling out underneath each one of those headings, all of the different things that I do. So if I’m going into a listing appointment, I’m going to make sure that I have this set of documents that I’m prepared with this information once I go to that appointment. If I get the listing, then I know what the next steps are, and I know where my job ends and my administrative assistant’s job begins.
(04:35):
And more importantly, she also knows where those things begin and end, and there’s an expectation from her to me that I’m going to do things in a particular way. What this does is it allows, like I said, for me to intentionally grow. I can do more if I’m passing off information with confidence that I know it’s going to get done the way that I want it to get done. I also create accountability for myself. So if I behave outside of those set of expectations that I set up, then when things fall apart and I’m going to be responsible for that. The other thing, and this is probably one of the biggest parts, and the take home for anybody that’s listening here, is I talk to a lot of people about how to grow their business and it’s not going out and meeting new people.
(05:39):
It’s not only that that is of course important, but one of the most powerful things you can do is to meet and exceed your client’s expectations. So if you can create confidence with your clients so they can see the path that you’re going on, you articulate that path and then what you said was going to happen, came to fruition. All the things that you said you were going to do happened, and not only did they happen, they happened when you said they were going to happen, there were no surprises. And this is the part, I can’t remember where I heard it, but I love the saying is, I don’t want to anticipate my client’s needs. I want them to feel like they have none. And through standard operating procedures, what I love about standard operating Procedures is that I can start to anticipate what my client’s needs are, meet them before my clients ever feel like they need to ask the question. If you aren’t intentionally building your business off of this sort of intentionality, then you’re going to be always in a position where you’re having to refill your pipeline with new people versus having raving fans that understand that you are a professional. You know what you’re doing, you’ve delivered exactly what you said you were going to deliver. You removed all of the anxiety or most of the anxiety from your client to get to a place where they will refer you aggressively to other people.
(07:23):
So if you’re playing around with this idea of getting started, it’s really not that complicated and it is built off of your experience. I think this is something, when I talk to other real estate agents, I get the distinct sense that there’s this ownership of something that has been built over time. And it’s true that as your business evolves, as you get better at this business, there are things that you offer your clients that are unique to you. And I can think of nothing more wasteful than developing something that was really unique, special, a reflection of you and the way that you do business. You develop this thing and then you don’t drop it into your standard operating procedures and it doesn’t get delivered every time, and then maybe it’s a good idea that gets lost somewhere. If you had a place where you could document these things, fill out the calendar for every client to receive what’s unique and good about you, then you can start to have really a flourishing business and something that I think everybody wants, but they stopped short of documenting.
(08:52):
Now, at the beginning of this, I talked about losing standard operating procedures. Like you write it down, it goes somewhere, and then it doesn’t get done. And so one of the most essential parts about growing a business is outsourcing, automating and delegating, making sure that as your business grows and complexity and size and profitability and all those great things, as it starts to develop, you have to start to realize that you can’t be everybody. You have to look for opportunities to outsource things that are not your highest and best use, or they’re not in your wheelhouse. There are things that other people can do better, and if you have a standard operating procedure already in place for that, then you can delegate it. You can get it off your plate, and you can know that that thing is going to get done at a very high level. It’s consistent with what you would have done if you had the time to do it.
(10:09):
So because this is just me talking, I don’t want to dive too much. I don’t want to just blather on about this. I do want to make this one a short and sweet, and I do want to put out a call to action because this is something that I’ve spent the last four years, five years of my career thinking about how to create standard operating procedures for my own business, to implement them into action, to have them stored in a place that they’re accessible, to deliver them to the people that I’m outsourcing and delegating to.
(10:50):
I have built the systems and operations so that I can scale, so that I can get more time to do the things that I love and to do the things that I’m best at. So the call to action here, and I hope that because this is a shorter podcast, I’m hoping that people get to the end here and take me up on this. If you’re hearing this, my role within Max Hallmark is to connect with agents that are looking to scale, that are looking for opportunities to grow their business without having to spend a lot of money. This isn’t lead conversion, this is client conversion. This is building a proper business that’s established from the things that you do best, that really highlight who you are as a person and as an agent, and then make sure that you do more of that more consistently. So Max Hallmark agent that’s listening to this and is thinking that they can make improvements to their business, I would invite you to reach out to me and do a discovery session where we sit down and understand what it is that you do, how you do it, and start to look for ways to start documenting and building out your own standard operating procedures for your unique business.
(12:30):
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please do leave a rating, subscribe, share with a friend, and of course, join me on the next episode of Mind Your Real Estate Business.
