What if the most important person in your real estate business isn’t the agent, but the admin behind the scenes?
Chris Cook sits down with his long-time admin and operations powerhouse, Olga, to uncover the real engine driving a high-performing real estate business.
What starts as a conversation about hiring quickly evolves into a masterclass on systems, ownership, and operational excellence. Olga shares how identifying inefficiencies, centralizing data, and leveraging automations, not AI, transformed a chaotic workflow into a scalable machine capable of handling massive deal volume with minimal errors.
The discussion highlights the critical difference between task-based admins and high-level operators who think strategically, take initiative, and build systems that support long-term growth. From “quiet accountability” to the importance of integrating platforms like Airtable and Follow Up Boss, this episode reveals how structure creates freedom and how the right admin doesn’t just support the business, they elevate it.
Listen For
3:33 What repetitive tasks first revealed the gaps in Chris’s real estate business operations?
5:20 How important is it for an admin to take a leadership role rather than just complete assigned tasks?
7:33 Why isn’t Follow Up Boss enough, and when should a team add a project management platform?
13:44 What separates a high-level systems admin from an entry-level task-based admin?
16:26 How do you build a real estate operation that can handle 50 to 75 deals with one admin?
Connect with guest: Olga Parovyk, Administrative Assistant | RE/MAX Hallmark ®
Connect with Chris Cook, Sales Representative | Team Lead at The Haylard Group – RE/MAX Hallmark ®
Read the Summary Below
From Tasks to Systems: Olga Parovyk on Building the Engine Behind a High-Volume Real Estate Team
In this episode, Chris Cook sits down with Olga Parovyk, his admin of four years, to pull back the curtain on the operational infrastructure that allows their team to handle 50–75 deals a year with a single administrator.
Olga traces her entry into the role to one defining moment: asking Chris what support systems he had in place to set her up for success — a question he’d never been asked before. What drew her to the position was that Chris had already documented procedures and training, something she found rare across the real estate teams she’d interviewed with. Still, within six to eight weeks, she identified significant gaps — client data scattered across multiple platforms, constant manual updates, and no connective tissue between tools.
The bigger operational revelation came when Olga was introduced to Zapier and Make. What followed wasn’t AI-driven transformation, as Chris had assumed, but a disciplined build-out of automations linking platforms like Follow Up Boss, Airtable, and others into a coherent system. The distinction matters: Follow Up Boss manages client relationships, while a project management tool like Airtable handles the admin workflow — and treating them as interchangeable creates chaos.
The two also dig into what separates a high-level admin from a task-based one, the concept of “quiet accountability” — where systems keep agents on track without constant check-ins — and why Chris and Olga rarely need formal one-on-one meetings to keep the business running smoothly.
The core takeaway: systems remove guesswork, automation drives real efficiency, and the biggest differentiator in an admin role is the willingness to take ownership of the whole picture — not just the next task on the list.
Full Episode Transcript
Chris Cook (00:00):
Where would you rank the importance of having the ability to be able to take a leadership role in these parts of the business?
Olga Parovyk (00:07):
If I haven’t set those things up, well, first of all, my job would be really difficult and I wouldn’t be able to handle as much volume. There would just be a lot more mistakes because again, there would be a lot of repetitive tasks that need to be done.
Chris Cook (00:34):
Welcome to this week’s episode of Mind Your Real Estate Business. This week, I am really excited to have surprise guest Olga, who is my admin and superstar of my real estate business. Somebody that has joined me. How long ago did you come and join us, Olga? Was it four years ago now?
Olga Parovyk (00:57):
Four years ago,
Chris Cook (00:58):
Yeah. Four years ago. And somebody that, it’s one of those things that you don’t really know what you’re missing until you get it. And so I remember when we were interviewing … Well, first of all, welcome Olga. I’m so happy that you … I mean, air quote, agreed to be on today’s podcast. It was a little reluctant. This week, one of the things that I really wanted to talk about was the role that you’ve taken on within the company. I think when we first interviewed you, you asked a question that nobody has ever asked me, which is, what do you have to support me and to make sure that I’m successful in this role? I’d never come across an admin that had asked that question before. And luckily for me, I actually had an answer. But I think what we had at the time versus what we have now is years, light years apart.
(02:06):
Just to start, what was it about what we had built at that point that made the role attractive for you versus some of the other jobs that you had been looking at?
Olga Parovyk (02:17):
Well, you definitely had an outline and procedures built out for the job. So there was training built out for that. So that was definitely a difference between other admin positions, different real estate companies. So yes, that’s one of the reasons why I proceeded to take the job.
Chris Cook (02:49):
And I think it was something that really opened my eyes to that this wasn’t something usual, that I don’t think a lot of people have those operations in place. And ultimately, I think what ends up happening is you have to become a mind reader. You’re coming into a role where you don’t know what the expectations are and you sort of have to go on this roller-coaster ride of trying to solve problems.
Olga Parovyk (03:15):
A hundred percent. Yeah.
Chris Cook (03:16):
Yeah. And so here’s the thing I think that was really too fortuitous for us because we actually got a little bit slow after you joined and you saw a lot of gaps in things that were repetitive in what we were doing.
Olga Parovyk (03:31):
Yes. Yes. What
Chris Cook (03:33):
Were the first things that sort of bothered you about not what we had, but the repetitiveness of the business?
Olga Parovyk (03:41):
Well, I mean, it started off by learning the platforms that your team was using at the time, and that’s kind of how it began. And then I just sort of noticed how the client’s data was stored and how there was just a multiple place … The data was stored in multiple different places and it was manually had to be updated constantly. So that’s one of the gaps that I’ve noticed at the very beginning.
Chris Cook (04:14):
So I think one of the differences that you educated me on this, which I’m forever grateful for. I always sort of referred to a lot of the things … I confused automations and AI. And you’re laughing because I think a lot of people do confuse those things, but they think that a lot of our job is becoming AI. And I think one of the things I’ve learned from you is that it’s actually, it’s not so much AI, it’s automations and connectivity between the different platforms, that that’s not actually AI.
Olga Parovyk (04:53):
Yes, yes, yes, that’s correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Cook (04:55):
I’d hate to be after four years, I’d hate to still be wrong about that. But I think that the important thing here is that I didn’t direct you to take those things off of your plate. Those were things that you did where you started to take a leadership role in the position.
Olga Parovyk (05:18):
Less. Yes.
Chris Cook (05:20):
How important do you think that is from an admin’s perspective? Because you’ve helped hire admins. You’ve worked with me on hiring admins for other teams. Where would you rank the importance of having the ability to be able to take a leadership role in these parts of the business?
Olga Parovyk (05:37):
Well, it’s very important. I mean, it reflects back in the way I’m doing my job now, because if I haven’t set those things up, well, first of all, my job would be really difficult and I wouldn’t be able to handle as much volume. And there would just be a lot more mistakes because again, there would be a lot of repetitive tasks that need to be done and human error is just inevitable. And it really comes down to building out a proper database. And it’s just really important to look at how the data is stored and structured and how it relates to other platforms that you’re using. And it’s important to look at it as a big picture. So when I first started off, I was … I mean, well, actually, I kind of learned all the applications that I know now. I didn’t know these applications, and I kind of started off with just learning Follow Up Boss.
Chris Cook (06:46):
I guess to be more specific in the question, if you were to start in a role, let’s say we dropped you onto another team right now, how important do you think it is? We use Airtable as an example. So there’s Airtable, monday.com, Asana, the platforms that are for your operating systems, and then there’s Follow Up Boss, which are two different platforms. They serve two different uses. If you were to start right now with a new team that maybe just had Follow Up Boss, how important do you think it would be to implement something like Airtable or monday.com or Asana right from the beginning?
Olga Parovyk (07:33):
Very important. I mean, if we’re talking about Follow Up Boss, Follow Up Boss isn’t the place for project management. It’s not intended to be a project management tool, and that’s why you would want to take a look at one of those other platforms like Airtable or Asana to build out a proper workflow for the admin day to day.
Chris Cook (07:55):
So that’s a good segue actually. So the next part, I was always intrigued by this because it was something that you took a little bit of direction at the beginning. We had everything built out in Thinkific, all of our different admin roles, the things that we were doing, but it took you, I think, all of maybe about six weeks, eight weeks before you started to take some ownership of the platforms instead of waiting for that direction. Is that an accurate timeline? Do you think it was probably four to six weeks before you started to look at ways to plug those platforms together? Yeah.
Olga Parovyk (08:44):
Yeah, I guess so. I guess, yeah.
Chris Cook (08:46):
Okay. And for you, was it just a pure frustration at that point where you’re
Olga Parovyk (08:52):
Like, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just saw how it could be all put together, especially after I learned what Zapier and Make. When I got introduced to those platforms, I’m like, oh, this is actually really, really helpful. If it’s put together, it would take a lot of time, bring a lot of available time for really admin if it’s put together.
Chris Cook (09:17):
Okay. So here’s the next thing, and you and I chatted about this a little bit before we jumped on the call here. Anybody that’s watching it, Olga, you’re one of the shyest, but also very assertive person. And things have to be done a particular way for it to work into your workflow. But I think in the last … You’ve worked with me now for four years, but you were involved in real estate for a number of years before that. How predictable are real estate agents? On a scale of one to 10, one being they’ll make it up every day different and 10 being
Olga Parovyk (10:06):
Very low number,
Chris Cook (10:07):
I’d say. It’s a very low number, right? Yeah. And so I think it’s interesting that you have chosen a profession of working with some of the people that are the least accountable in terms of what they do on a day to day. And then you built this agent accountability platform basically, not just agent, but it keeps the whole business accountable on track and moving in a really interesting direction. I mean, I find it interesting that you, just given your personality and how exact things need to be, but also that ultimately somebody that is as … You’re a soft spoken, but assertive type person and that you managed to keep me and the team on track. Do you think that that’s all credit to the things that you built?
Olga Parovyk (11:12):
Yes, I guess. Or
Chris Cook (11:16):
Do you think it’s your judo skills? Don’t mess with Olga, she can flip you. We’ll get a submission out of you one way or the other. Either comply or I use my judo.
Olga Parovyk (11:29):
Yeah. I mean, to answer your question, I guess you do have to be, if you’re in this position, you need to be able to help direct the team so that if there’s things like that shiny object, if you notice that, then it’s good to point out so that the team still keeps on track and just give a reminder like, “Hey, you’ve done this in the past and you’re doing this now again. Are you sure?”
Chris Cook (12:07):
Yeah. “Are you sure this is the direction you want to go?
Olga Parovyk (12:10):
” Yeah.
Chris Cook (12:11):
And that was something that I’ve come to appreciate big time is that when we do, we’re able to talk about things from a high level like this, “Hey, we want to make this change. This is the thing that we want to do. How does that fit into everything else that we’re doing?” But if we do decide that we’re going to make a change, that we’re going to implement something, then the question is, how does it fit into all the other things that we’re doing? I think that it does, maybe we can coin a phrase as quiet accountability. These things either they either work in the system that we’ve built or we have to rebuild the system.
Olga Parovyk (12:55):
What’s
Chris Cook (12:55):
One of those two things we want to undertake at this particular time. And I think ultimately the answer is always it has to fit into the system. We’re not going to rebuild what we’ve just spent four years building this program. So here’s the next question because I think you know, and we agree, you are what I would consider to be a very high level, very high skill set level admin, but what separates somebody like yourself from an entry level admin to say somebody that’s coming in at, let’s say, $20 an hour or something like that. What’s the difference, do you think, for an agent that’s looking to fill this role?
Olga Parovyk (13:44):
I think the part of taking ownership for what I’m building and doing, and then the responsibility, it’s much higher than just a task admin that would be just doing tasks because again, I look at the big picture and help with making sure that everything fits together and that the things that the agents do within the team, it is reflected within the way things are put into the system and in the backend. So if there’s anything that needs to be built out or expanded or changed or adjusted, even the company structure of how accounting is done, because everything’s connected at some point. It has to be like, yeah, you’re just doing the transactions or you’re just inputting client information, but it does relate to other parts of the business as well. So making sure that everything works together is what, I guess, differentiates the job or the position that I’m taking on versus just tasks, just remember tasks.
Chris Cook (15:18):
I also think if I was going to make a note on it, I also think that I think it opens up your ability to be able to function in multiple parts of the business.
Olga Parovyk (15:30):
We’ve
Chris Cook (15:31):
Talked about this, your ability to be able to take on other, not every day roles, but things that come up every now and again. It frees up your time to be able to do a lot more. You mentioned it at the beginning, your ability to be able to handle more volume of business. And we’ve talked about this before, I don’t think there’s too many teams out there that could do between 50 and 75 deals with one admin, with one person handle it. And I think that would be a stretch without having all of the background stuff. I’d obviously view you as being really competent, but if I put 75 deals in front of you without these platforms that you built, there would be too much. There wouldn’t be enough hours of the day to get the work done
Olga Parovyk (16:25):
And not, yeah, absolutely. …
Chris Cook (16:26):
Sort of stuff. So this is my last question for you, and I appreciate that this isn’t your wheelhouse, sitting and chatting with a camera and all that stuff. So I will have some mercy, but I do have one question for you and take your time on this. I’ve never asked you this before, but if you left tomorrow, and please don’t, but if you left tomorrow, what do you think would break first? If we were to replace you with somebody that doesn’t have the competency with the different platforms that you’ve built, what would go first?
Olga Parovyk (17:07):
I think right now there isn’t enough training that we have that would help navigate through just the daily tasks, I guess. That’s number one. Number two, I’d say there isn’t a way to … Or if anything breaks in terms of the actual backend automations and stuff, you would need to find someone who would know how to fix that. So there’s just from the admin perspective and then also from the automations and also going forward, if you were to want to expand on what you already have, you won’t be able to, but the system will work. I mean, in terms of that won’t break in any way, but the structure of how it was set up that you will have.
Chris Cook (18:18):
So I promised you that would’ve been the last question, but it made me think of something else. Do you think other admins, if you asked somebody to build something like what you’ve built, to have all the training pieces in place, to use the systems, build the systems, essentially make the position replaceable. If somebody were to leave for any reason, whether they quit or fired, they don’t want sick leave or whatever, do you think that admins feel threatened by that?
Olga Parovyk (18:57):
Maybe. Well, I mean, that’s actually something I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make it more replaceable. I mean, that’s kind of my end goal, but also back to the point that you’ve asked or the question before, the reason why, for example, we don’t have training is because things are so moving so quickly that anything that you … Any training pieces that you do now will be outdated so quickly. So there’s really no point to build out right now, but that’s kind of, I guess what we’re working towards is to make this job more replaceable.
Chris Cook (19:35):
What do you think my understanding is of what you’ve built? You’re not going to insult me because I know what the answer is, but again, with the one to 10, how much do you think I really understand about how the admin portion of my own business operates?
Olga Parovyk (19:58):
If you were to actually do it or just
Chris Cook (20:02):
Just a general understanding.
Olga Parovyk (20:03):
I think you have a pretty good general understanding of it. No?
Chris Cook (20:07):
I don’t think I do. I’ve never logged into Airtable myself.
Olga Parovyk (20:12):
Well, that’s what I mean. If you were to actually do the job or do, yeah, I think I could learn that. You wouldn’t know. No.
Chris Cook (20:19):
Reasonably intelligent person, but I think what my point is, is that I didn’t build these things. You and I talked about structure and what we wanted to do and how I want the client experience to be. We talk about that stuff regularly, but it’s not me going in and doing it. That’s you going in and doing
Olga Parovyk (20:42):
Those
Chris Cook (20:42):
Things. It’s you’re a mirror of my ideas. You reject some of my ideas and rightfully so you’re like, “No, we can’t do that and we don’t want to do that and this is
(20:54):
Why.” But I think one of the things that really makes us strong businesses that you have particular lanes, you’ve got people that are very proficient and there’s a moment of collaboration and then we stay in our lanes. My lane is clearly talking and meeting people and growing the business, meeting people that want to buy and sell houses. And your job is to make their lives as seamless as possible through that process to really different parts of the business. But where I think a lot of people go wrong in this is that they’re not enabling the position to its fullest, which I can understand that that would be a hard thing to let go of. And there’s a lot of trust that is built over time. I trust a lot of things are going to happen. I would think you and I don’t really talk that much.
(22:06):
It’s really about UFOs and theories. When we do talk, it’s usually on Mondays or we’ll
Olga Parovyk (22:15):
Talk
Chris Cook (22:16):
Another time during the week, but for the most part, you operate the operations side, the business runs, the clients are being taken care of. Emails are CC’d. There’s not a large requirement for us to communicate.
Olga Parovyk (22:31):
Yeah, we don’t have one on one meetings or we don’t need to.
Chris Cook (22:35):
No. And it does free up our time talking about more interesting things anyway. So I will end your suffering here. I really appreciate you taking the time to meet with 23 minutes just like that, Olga. You’re amazing. Thanks for taking the time and chatting with me. Top three things from this week’s episode. Number one, systems over guesswork. I learned that having clear systems and processes in place removes all confusion and sets people up to succeed right from the start. Number two, automation beats AI hype. I realized that real efficiency in my business comes from automation and connecting tools, not relying on AI. Number three, ownership drives growth. I learned that the biggest difference maker is taking ownership, thinking beyond tasks and improving the business as a whole. If you liked this week’s episode, please do like, subscribe and share this episode with somebody that you think would benefit from the series.
(23:44):
Take care. Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next week.
