The hardest thing about building a team is not what you think.
Every founder I meet talks about hiring the right people. Job ads, culture decks, "we only hire A-players." It's the wrong obsession. After twenty years of building brokerages — first in London, then in Dubai — I've learned the real problem isn't getting the right people in. It's keeping the wrong people out of the right roles.
Those sound the same. They're not. A bad hire is a visible, correctable mistake — you feel it, you fix it, you move on. The far more expensive error is quieter: a good person, a talented person, in a seat they were never built for. They don't fail loudly enough to be removed. They just quietly hold back the whole operation while everyone around them makes excuses for numbers that should be better.
The mistake founders make
You promote your best salesperson to run the sales team. It's the most natural decision in the world and it's wrong more often than it's right. The skills that make someone close deals are not the skills that make them build closers. You've now lost your best producer and gained a frustrated manager. Two problems, and you created both by rewarding someone for being good at a different job.
That's the number nobody puts on the spreadsheet. One misplaced leader doesn't just underperform — they leak. The good people underneath them feel it first, and the best ones, the ones with options, are exactly the ones who walk. You don't see it as a firing. You see it as attrition, as "the market," as bad luck. It isn't. It's one wrong person in one right seat, compounding.
What I actually screen for now
I stopped hiring for the CV a long time ago. In a brokerage, in any business built on trust, I'm screening for two things the résumé never tells you: character under pressure, and honesty when it costs them something. Can this person deliver bad news to a client instead of hiding it? Do they tell me the deal fell through the day it falls through, or the day I find out? Everything else — product knowledge, technique, market data — I can teach. Those two, I can't.
And I've learned to build slowly at the top and quickly at the bottom. Give people room to grow into the org, but be ruthless and fast about who you put in charge of other people. A weak junior hire is a rounding error. A weak leader is a tax on everyone they touch, and you pay it every single month until you fix it.
So by all means, hire the right people. But if you want to know what's really holding a business back, don't look at the empty seats. Look at the ones that are filled by good people who are in the wrong chair — and ask yourself who's quietly leaving because of it.
Saied Nazemi — Founder, TRPE Real Estate · Team-building across two markets since 2007