Don't Hire Another You: Roxanne Humes on Building a Team Like a Band

Guest BioRoxanne Humes is a real estate agent and team leader with Coldwell Banker in the Pittsburgh area. Before real estate, she spent years as a buyer for May Company (Filene's in Boston, then Kaufmann's in Pittsburgh), and later helped grow a wholesale apparel company to $40M in revenue — until the 2009 financial crisis, tied to the owner's real estate investments, ended that chapter. At 42, with her husband's blessing and her father-in-law's nudge, she got her real estate license and started over from zero, with no local network and no built-in client base. Fifteen years later, she leads a team of roughly 12 agents alongside her business partner Chris Ellison and regional VP John Perry, pacing to close in on 200 team sales this year while personally handling 50-60 units of her own.Show NotesTim sits down with Roxanne Humes, a Pittsburgh-area Coldwell Banker agent whose path into real estate started with a layoff, a career in fashion buying and wholesale apparel, and a blunt question to her husband: what do we do now? She got her real estate license at 42, was written off by nearly every broker she interviewed with for having no local friends-and-family network, and built her business anyway — first through relentless open houses and professional photography (a rarity in her market at the time), and eventually into a team built on a philosophy she compares to a band: nobody needs to be the lead singer, everyone just needs to want to make good music together.Roxanne walks through her three-question hiring filter (are you nice, are you actually nice, and are you interested in growth), why she brought on a business partner instead of "hiring another her," and where she believes most agents leak business — not from lack of leads, but from failing to categorize and follow up with leads by urgency. She's candid about not being the most tech-forward person on her team, but she's become genuinely dependent on AI for listing descriptions and reverse-prospecting the MLS, cutting tasks that used to take over an hour down to minutes. The conversation closes with a sharp insight from her partner Chris on why buyer-side commission is headed toward full decoupling — and Roxanne's take on why the 2020 industry lawsuit was actually the best thing to happen to the profession.In this episode:Roxanne's path from fashion buyer to a $40M wholesale apparel business — to starting over at 42Getting written off by brokers for having zero friends-and-family networkThe early differentiator: professional photography when no one else in her market was doing itHer three-question hiring filter: are you nice, are you actually nice, and are you growth-mindedThe band analogy: why she doesn't need agents who want to be the lead singerWhy "don't hire another you" was the advice that shaped her partnership with Chris EllisonRoxanne's A/B/C lead framework — and why most leaked opportunities are a follow-up problem, not a lead problem"We think about them 24/7. They think about us once — when they want to buy or sell."How AI cut her listing description process from 90 minutes to a fewReverse-prospecting the MLS: a 15-minute task now down to 1 minuteWhy her partner Chris believes buyer-side commission is headed toward full decouplingWhy Roxanne thinks the 2020 industry lawsuit was the best thing that happened to real estateReinventing herself at 42 — and finding work that finally felt meaningful