Zillow Preferred (formerly Flex) coach vs. independent Operating Partner.

A coach helps you find your own answer. That's the job, and it works for a lot of people.

A consultant tells you what the answer is, hands you a plan, and steps back. That works too, if you have the bandwidth to run the plan yourself.

I don't do either. I take the operating seat and own the weekly work with the owner.

Taking the seat looks like this: the right person ends up in the right role, not just a good person in whatever seat was open. There's a meeting structure that runs without you chasing it down every week. And when a Zillow policy shifts, a market turns, or your best agent leaves, the team has a documented process for it, because the business was never built to depend on any one person.

Goes agent by agent through your actual Zillow data. Finds where the funnel is leaking: connection to contact, contact to appointment, appointment to met, met to offer, offer to contract, contract to close. Fixes routing, capacity, and accountability, not just individual agent behavior.

Then goes deeper. Recruiting strategy and actually doing the recruiting with you. Internal sales trainings your agents use. Accountability systems that hold without daily oversight. Decisions about which markets to enter, which to double down on, and what the team structure needs to look like six months from now. Takes the seat inside the operation instead of advising from outside it. Is in the room for owner-level calls and takes vested accountability in the outcomes. Builds a system your leadership team can run without needing the engagement to continue indefinitely.

If your agents need better scripts or sales fundamentals, that's closer to traditional coaching. If your advisor has already told you what's wrong and your team still isn't executing on it, that's an operating problem, not a training gap. Most teams that reach out to me are dealing with the second one.