I have made a lot of business decisions that could not be justified by a spreadsheet. Some of them were the best calls I ever made.
When I founded The Agency in 2011, I was not optimizing for immediate return. I was building something. And building something real means making investments that do not pay off this quarter or even this year. It means betting on things you believe in before the numbers back you up.
That is a hard case to make in a budget meeting. It is an easy one to look back on.
Prioritize culture first, even when you can’t afford it
In the early days, people told me to focus on revenue and worry about culture later. Get the business right first. I believed the opposite.
I was intentional about who we brought in, how we treated our agents and what kind of place we were building, before we had the scale to justify it. There was no ROI formula for that.
But culture compounds quietly, and what we built in those early years became one of our greatest competitive advantages. It still is.
Some of the agents who were sitting next to me when we were just getting started are still here today. That kind of loyalty does not happen by accident. It is what culture actually looks like when it works.
If you wait until you can afford to build culture, you will never build it. You will just build a business.
Build brand before reputation
When we launched, we invested in design, identity and marketing at a level that looked disproportionate to our size. We looked bigger than we were. People questioned it.
But in luxury real estate, perception creates reality. Clients making significant decisions are not going to trust a brand that looks like it is figuring itself out.
That early investment in the brand, made long before it produced a measurable return, became the foundation on which everything else was built. And it disrupted the industry in ways I did not fully anticipate.
Competitors took note. Many of them started emulating what we were doing. That is when I knew we had gotten it right.
Nobody remembers what you saved on marketing. They remember how you showed up.
Turn down some business
This one still costs money every time. Turning down the wrong listing. Walking away from a deal that does not feel right. Parting ways with someone who produces but damages what you are building.
I have a client I have walked away from more than once: unrealistic on price, resistant to advice and more interested in being right than getting the result. Each time, I made the call to step back. And each time, after months on the market with no traction, he came back. Not because I chased him, but because the market told him what I already had.
That situation has played out a few times now, and there is a lesson in it beyond the obvious one. Saying no is not just about protecting your time or your sanity. It is about trusting your expertise enough to let the outcome speak for itself.
The clients worth having are the ones who respect what you bring to the table. Sometimes, they need to learn that the hard way before they are ready to actually work with you.
The deals you do not take define your reputation as much as the ones you do. There is no formula for protecting your integrity, but there is a very real cost to compromising it. I have seen it play out both ways enough times to know which side I want to be on.
Hire people before you need them
Some of the best hires I have ever made were people I brought on before I had a clear role for them. I could see what they were capable of and I did not want to lose them. That is a hard case to make on a balance sheet.
It comes down to having a discerning eye, recognizing the kind of talent and skillset that is going to push the business forward before the business is ready to absorb it. That instinct is something you develop over time, and it is worth developing.
The leaders who have shaped The Agency are rarely the ones hired to fill an immediate gap. They were hired because I saw something in them, believed in what they could become and wanted to build something together. That kind of bet on people, made on instinct and relationship rather than org charts and job descriptions, has returned more than almost any other decision I have made.
What I know now
This industry rewards speed. There is always another deal, another market, another metric. And those things matter. But they are not what built The Agency.
What built it were the decisions that did not make sense on a quarterly basis. The ones made with a longer view, a willingness to absorb short-term cost and a belief that how you build something matters as much as how fast.
The investments that do not show immediate ROI are the hardest to defend in the moment. They are also, in my experience, the most worth making.
You just have to be willing to wait for the proof.
Mauricio Umansky is the founder and CEO of The Agency in Los Angeles. Connect with him on Instagram.
