Live Coaching — Adrienne Sherwood: Turning Soccer Field Friends Into Your Go-To Agent Reputation
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This episode is a live coaching session. Adrienne Sherwood, a Bolst agent with a decade in the business, applied to work through a real challenge on the show: she wants to become the go-to real estate expert in Smyrna, the community she moved to three years ago, but hasn't been able to convert her deep local relationships into actual business.
A Career Built on Different Models
Adrienne has worked solo, tried building a small team, joined someone else's small team, and is now solo again. Her takeaway after ten years: she thrives with a good amount of autonomy paired with some outside structure, and prefers contracting out specific needs over managing staff directly. Her business has always been built on personal relationships rather than cold outreach, dating back to when she got her license without knowing a single other realtor in her own sphere.
The Real Problem: Relationships Without a Bridge
Since moving to Smyrna, Adrienne has done real community building: her son's sports teams every season, the elementary school foundation board, a monthly class play date she started that a teacher later credited with making the whole class feel special. People like her. What's missing is the bridge from that warmth to being seen as a real estate resource. Her own words: it doesn't come up naturally in conversation, and she doesn't want to come across as salesy or start emailing people without their consent.
Diagnosing Activity Before Prescribing a Fix
Before jumping to tactics, Justin pushes Adrienne to separate two very different problems: are people in her new sphere simply not moving, or are they moving and working with someone else? The fix is completely different depending on the answer. If people aren't transacting, no amount of relationship building manufactures a sale. If they are transacting and going elsewhere, the fix is becoming the obvious choice before that decision gets made.
Phase One: Let Real Estate Come Up Naturally
Justin's first practical step is simple: let real estate surface organically in conversation, not as a pitch, but as visible proof of activity. In a role play at the soccer field, Justin models answering a casual how was your day with a genuine, specific story about showing houses that morning, which naturally opens the door for the other person to ask questions or mention their own situation, like considering a move closer to town.
Phase Two: A Personal Touch Plan, Not Just Marketing
Justin distinguishes between marketing, which matters but rarely closes anyone on its own, and a genuine personal touch plan: real follow-up texts referencing something specific from a real conversation, sent consistently over time. Adrienne already has a rough version of this in place, roughly 30 touches a week, mostly to past clients, but lacks a system for people she's met but never transacted with.
Phase Three: A Reason to Invite People In
Rather than framing events as a marketing tactic, Justin pushes Adrienne to find something she'd genuinely want to host regardless of business outcome, something sustainable because it fits her actual personality. Adrienne lands on a moms-only game night, separate from the kid-inclusive gatherings she's already good at running. The point isn't the event itself; it's that declining an invitation still opens a natural, low-pressure door to reach out again.
The Sustainability Question Most Coaching Skips
Midway through, Adrienne raises something rarely addressed directly: this kind of intentional relationship building takes real energy, and in her late thirties with two young kids, she has less of it to spend than she used to. Justin's answer isn't a productivity hack, it's permission. He encourages Adrienne to pick one recurring activity, purely for herself, with zero business intention attached, something decided once so it never requires weekly willpower to protect. The goal is a space that genuinely refuels her rather than one more relationship-building obligation in disguise.
The Belief Underneath All of It
Justin closes with the philosophy the whole approach rests on: relationship-based business isn't about using people to generate leads, it's the belief that nobody will care about a client's outcome more than an agent who genuinely does the work well. The relationships aren't a means to an end, they're the reason people deserve to know Adrienne is available to help them.
