From Sales to Sisterhood: Revolutionizing the Real Estate Industry

Imagine harnessing the dynamism of a real estate titan with a track record as stunning as $1.4 billion in sales. That's exactly what we discuss in our latest episode, where Karen Cooper, leader of the Platinum Group Real Estate team, joins us to distill her 22 years of industry savvy. She lays out the blueprint of her leadership philosophy, chiseled from the cornerstone of 'less talking, more doing.' Karen emphasizes the crucial aspect of individualized goals and motivations for her team's triumphs, paralleling the tender balance of teaching with accountability to nurturing growth in both children and agents.

 This episode is a celebration of women's empowerment in real estate, spotlighting the inspiring ascent of team members and the collective aspiration to lead a joy-filled, balanced life. Come connect with us and a community of like-minded individuals, as we continue to support and inspire each other through the exciting, ever-evolving real estate landscape.

Connect with Dionne Malush

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Transcript

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Real Estate Resilience, Leadership, Success

Dionne Malush 0:02

Are you ready to be inspired by stories of resilience , leadership and success in the real estate world ? I'm your Dionne , Malush , and today on Shine On Success podcast , we're diving into the journey of a remarkable Karen , Cooper , a wife , mom of three and the panel house behind the Platinum Group Real Estate team in Northern Virginia . Karen has not only navigated her way to closing over $1.4 billion in sales volume , but has also passionately paved the way for women in the industry through her empowering women in real estate platform . Let's discover how Karen's story and insights can inspire us to reach new heights . And remember , if Karen's story resonates with you , connect with us on social media to continue the conversation . So welcome Karen .

Karen Cooper 0:46

Thank you so much . I am honored to be on your show and happy to have a conversation with you today .

Dionne Malush 0:51

I'm so excited because , as a real estate owner myself , you know it's really cool to have someone else in the country that I can talk to , and I'm looking forward to getting to know you even better . And sounds like you're doing a lot of amazing things in a very short period , so I'm excited to hear some of your . You know tales of success and you know some things that may have happened along the way . So my very first question to you , first of all , to the listeners have you ever wondered what it takes to lead a team of 38 phenomenal women and one very brave man to over $1.4 billion in sales ? Let's find out . So can you share a little about your journey in real estate and , because it's really inspiring and I'm super excited to hear it Can you share a pivotal moment that set you on this path and how you navigated the challenges along the way ?

Karen Cooper 1:36

Yeah for sure . So you know I've been in business for 22 years now and I like to say that I've held every role there is to have in the country . I started out on a traditional Rainmaker team . I was there for six and a half years . I was a solo agent , I've been a managing broker and , of course now I've been a team leader of the Platinum Group Real Estate team for just about nine years now and you know , when I think back over my career , where I am now and how we've developed the team that we have now really started . From the very beginning there were a lot of things that I loved and appreciated and still do about that first team experience , but there were also a lot of things about it that I didn't love and we really took that and use that to kind of build what we have now . So it's been a quite the journey .

Dionne Malush 2:27

It sounds like it . So , of all the roles that you've had , is this your favorite ?

Karen Cooper 2:31

For sure , this is definitely my favorite . It is the most stressful one , but it is , but it is definitely my favorite .

Dionne Malush 2:39

Yeah , so our brokerage we have about close to 180 , 185 agents right now . So we have a lot of agents . So I totally understand it is very stressful and there's so much positive that happens every single day . You know that we can pull out of all the negativity and all the chaos of the real estate market . So have you ever read Think and Grow Rich ? I have , yes , so awesome . So leading such a successful team is no small feat . How do you incorporate Napoleon Hill's principles of success into your leadership and team dynamics ?

Karen Cooper 3:10

Well . So there's multiple different facets of this . You know , for us , the way we lead our team is it is really all about the individual and getting to the heart of what makes them tick , and getting to the heart of what makes sense for them and what their goals are . You know we are not in order for someone to really thrive in any environment and , I think , to really kind of tap into their drive , they have to really understand their why . And you can't do that if you are dictating from the top how much volume someone needs to have or how much business they need to do . And so instead we really try to get to the heart of the matter , of what makes sense for each one of our team of agents .

Karen Cooper 3:55

You know we're all in different seasons of life . You know I have three teenage sons . You know I just turned 50 last year . I'm in a very different place than I was 22 years ago , you know , as a young mom . So you know that changes . And I think , as a leader , the more I can understand what drives each team member and helping them to sort of customize what makes sense for them from a goal-setting perspective . I think that really makes all the difference .

Dionne Malush 4:25

So let's talk about your family . So you have kids and you have agents , right ? Yes , so there are similarities between that , like raising a child , and training agents to be a better version of themselves .

Karen Cooper 4:37

For sure . There's a lot of parallels all the time . You know when you're , when you're raising children and when you have agents that work with you . It's about accountability , you know . I mean my job as a leader is to certainly to teach right , to share my experiences , to share what I've learned , to share the lessons , but I also kind of have to hold you accountable . To a certain point . I mean , there's only I can only show you so many times Our team motto this year it's less talking , more doing .

Karen Cooper 5:08

Because I think a lot of times and this happens with kids too we fall into that trap of I'm going to talk about my problem over and over again . I'm going to talk about what I'm going to do over and over again , I'm going to talk about you know what I'm going to learn and what book I'm going to read , but there's actually no implementation of any of the learning right . And it doesn't matter how much you read or how much you , how many classes you go to or how many webinars you go to . If you're not actually implementing any of that in your business , then it's all for nothing .

Dionne Malush 5:40

I agree with you 100% , and sometimes we get caught up in that learning right . We just want to keep learning and learning and I also am a victim of myself because I love to learn but if you don't come back and start to implement , then all of that really is just like you're filling your mind with stuff and as much right , and you can fill it up with as much stuff as you want , but you really need to start to do it . So , watching what you're doing , now you have this team and then you started this empowering women in real estate . What a remarkable achievement . And that's what excites me most about talking to you today , because we , we learn so that we teach . Right Now you have a platform to do it and a podcast yourself , so can you talk a little bit ?

Karen Cooper 6:20

about that ? Yeah , so 10 years ago I was in a very different place . I was a manager broker and I was in a role where I felt very lonely . You know , I was surrounded by agents all day , every day , and my job , you know . Agents would come to me pretty much when they had a problem , right . So if they were talking to me , it's usually because it was an issue . And then other agents didn't necessarily want to talk to me because they were afraid I was just going to try to recruit them , and so I found myself just in this very kind of lonely place , and so I got , you know , as a shower idea those are the best ideas and I had the idea I was craving something , I was craving a community , and I thought you know what ? I don't think this exists , so I'm going to create it . And so that was 10 years ago . Okay , and Powering Women in Real Estate started as a Facebook group . We are now over 36,000 women all across the country . Did you say 36,000 ?

Dionne Malush 7:16

36,000 . Amazing , oh my God , that is unbelievable .

Karen Cooper 7:21

Thank you , it is like it is . I get so excited when I think about what has happened through this community and through what just implementing this one idea has done . You know , over time we started a podcast , so I'm now on . We're getting close to 300 episodes of the primary ones broadcast . We have a monthly membership coaching program that's been around now for almost five years where I'm able to teach the principals and the things that I do with my real estate team . I'm able to teach in a different way . We have monthly meetups , groups that gather in different cities all across the country . I mean , it's just really grown and evolved in a way that I never thought of expected . It wasn't even on the radar screen when I hit publish on that Facebook group 10 years ago , but I'm so glad it did .

Dionne Malush 8:10

So tell me about the monthly membership , because a lot of the people that are listening maybe in real estate . So talk about that , because I've been involved in quite a bit of coaching over my career and I believe that you need to be coached . Everyone should have a coach , right ? So talk about that a little bit . So are you coaching them or how does it work ?

Karen Cooper 8:28

Yeah , no , I'm already asked . So again , we took a different approach with this , also because , as we have grown our real estate team , the thing that has worked so beautifully and so well with our real estate team is we have a marketing system that works . We do business primarily by referral . We call it our Client and Community Care Program . When agents join our team , they see 184% growth within two to three years , and what was happening is agents were coming to me all the time wanting to join our team because they wanted access to this program . They wanted to have this system that we had .

Karen Cooper 9:04

But you can't take everyone right and we all set up in a way where we could have hundreds of agents on our team or we were only in just a couple of states , and so we decided to launch this as a group coaching program . We call it our Inner Circle within Prime Woman and Real Estate , and I basically roll out and provide every month the entire marketing plan that I do myself , my personal business and my real estate team does . So it's from as simple as templates to conduct your business for your monthly postcard email newsletters . Like you know , pop buys event invitations to mastermind sessions that we do once a month to access to training . With my team I do weekly quick lessons , so it's a very comprehensive program and we've had a lot of fun with it over the years .

Dionne Malush 9:57

So do you have people from all over the world that are listening in and a part of your inner ?

Karen Cooper 10:03

circle . We do . We do . Right now we have 184 members in our inner circle . We have women that are all over the US . We have some in Canada . We even have a couple of men that are part of our program . You do .

Dionne Malush 10:17

Thank you Three men is in the word woman , right , it's not a thing .

Karen Cooper 10:22

I just love that .

Dionne Malush 10:23

It's really fun . Marketing is marketing , right , it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman , but it's kind of cool what you're doing and I love seeing you empowering other women and it's such a great place to be , because I was always that tomboy , that boy kind of girl and finally in the last couple of years , I realized the power in being a woman and I love it . I love this so much and just watching you succeed and just what I'm learning about you is so impressive . So , also , like myself , you have an investment portfolio , so do you want to talk a little bit about that ? So you're this powerful owner of a real estate company and now you have this empowering woman in real estate . You have enough to do and you have children , and now you have investment properties . Talk about that

Real Estate Investments and Time Goals

Dionne Malush 11:05

.

Karen Cooper 11:05

Yeah . So my husband and I bought our very first investment property about seven years ago I think it's been now and we started slowly . We started with just one property . We had it for a few years and then we kind of more rapidly ramped up . So we own seven properties now One that we live in , five that are rentals we have tenants in place , and then one is that it's a piece of land . What is fun , what I love about this , is four of our five rental properties that have tenants in place are all in the neighborhood where I grew up . I grew up in a tiny little town called Love It'sville , virginia , but we have 500 addresses , postal codes . I know that because I farm to them every single month and have four years and I grew up in this little townhouse community of 44 houses , of which now I own four , including the one that I grew up in .

Dionne Malush 11:59

Wow , that is so cool .

Karen Cooper 12:01

Yes , and so hopefully more to come .

Dionne Malush 12:04

So I feel like we're mirroring each other a lot , because we also started in 2020 to get rental properties and we had a goal to have 20 doors by the end of the year , during the pandemic , and we did it . So we had 20 doors . Now we're up to about 36 doors and my husband's doing the property management and we're taking good care of them , so that we're really good landlords . We want to be good ones so that people want to rent our properties .

Karen Cooper 12:27

I feel that way , one of the things that I have when I think about the properties that we own and the tenants that we have in place right now . Two of the tenants that we have in place are family members , and it's a blessing to be able to offer this option to these family members in these certain times in their lives . And the other properties that we have we have almost exclusively not on purpose , but it's been single moms , women that are totally of who I have been a challenge , and so I really look at these properties as it's like a blessing . Not just , obviously , it's an investment , and it's a financial investment for my family , which pays dividends , but it's also serving and helping other families , which I mean it's not something that I expected when I thought about becoming a landlord . It's not that at all .

Dionne Malush 13:19

Well , you're doing an amazing job and I am so impressed by that . So you have a successful career . You're a mom and a wife All of this including your business , your rental properties . You have so much going on . How do you keep organized and keep your time ? Do you have time for yourself ? How do you do your time management in your life ?

Karen Cooper 13:40

Yeah , actually , I love to talk about time . I am all about planning , organizing . I'm not always great at it , but there are a couple of things that I think I do pretty well that work for me . One of them is my morning routine . I have followed a morning routine the same routine now for probably close to 15 years . The same thing , pretty close . Yeah , I do adjust what I do in the morning a little bit based on my season , but I'm usually up around 530 .

Karen Cooper 14:19

I take care of the animals with dogs and cats , and make the coffee and do the dishes and whatever , and then I sit down and I write and I have written blogged in our time group five to seven times a day for 10 years and it's like my therapy . It's what I love and I enjoy , and I spend my morning doing things that fill my cup for about an hour and a half to two hours , because once the kids get up and chaos ensues , right , so the phone starts ringing . So I have this hour and a half , two hours in the morning . That is just what is going to fill my cup and it's right now . What is really filling my cup is creation . I love to create things . That's tapping into that feminine energy . That's the creation , and so I love to create content for social media . I love to create . We're dreaming up some new things for our team , and so I'd love to spend a lot of that time doing that . There have been other times where I've spent most of my morning reading , be it blogs or whatever , so it kind of ebbs and flows with the season .

Karen Cooper 15:27

Something else that works really really well for me from a time management perspective is something that I call my daily business builders , which is my kindler , gentler form of prospecting .

Karen Cooper 15:36

I have this system of these things that I have done for years in my business and I prioritize that every week , even though I am not in production I have not been in personal production for almost five years now I still produce business .

Karen Cooper 15:53

I produce a lot of business every single year , and clients are served by my team from this thing that I do . I think that's a challenge that a lot of team leaders have is they think that they're going to get out of production and they're just going to stop , but what happens is it doesn't really work that way . It doesn't really work well that way , because some of your production is still needed to kind of keep the gears running , the fuel for the team , and so if you don't keep prospecting , that business dries up . I mean it doesn't matter , I don't care how much real estate you have sold in your career Personally , I would average 50 to 60 transactions every single year . It doesn't matter how much of that you do . The minute you stop prospecting , it drops off a cliff and you've got to keep it going , and so I do , and so that is another really strong habit that I have , and I think those are probably the two most important things that I do on a free basis .

Dionne Malush 16:50

So I don't know how much you know about me , but my father passed away less than five months ago , so I don't know what's happening to me , but I have been more creative in the last few months than I have ever been in my life . So prior to owning this real estate company , I owned a graphic design business . So very creative I've always been . I went to art school , got out , started my own business immediately , so I've been self-employed most of my whole adult life , except for a couple of years where I tried to work at a hospital in their graphic design department and I realized I just couldn't be told what to do . It was not me .

Dionne Malush 17:20

So we have so much in common . I just sitting here thinking , wow , it's amazing to see two women that are I don't know . The only thing that's different is I don't have kids . So and that's a whole area that I don't even know how you do it I give you so much credit . I just look at parents thinking how do they still do everything and have children ? So let's look forward to the future now with you and your family and your business . What are some goals that you're aiming to achieve personally and professionally ?

Karen Cooper 17:53

Yeah . So I have a lot in mind and I'll be honest , one of the things that I think has been a struggle for me is dreaming past one year , and I don't know why . I don't know if it's because I have been too much in the weeds and too thick for too long , but now we're starting to think longer term and I think it's because of the ages of my children , and so I'm at that phase of life where I can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel , right . So I'm working on kind of like a five year plan is sort of how we kind of think

Empowering Women in Real Estate

Karen Cooper 18:28

about things . And what I'm really interested in doing the next five years is I am obsessed in helping other women my team members , the people in my circle , the people in my world to build a business that doesn't sacrifice their quality of life , and I feel like that's what I have . Haven't always done it well , but that's what I have always drove to do , and I don't think enough people talk about that in our industry . Our industry is largely female , but it's the male voices that are the wildest , and so I want to help women . We're with our team , we're constantly helping our team members to try to figure out other ways to grow , whether it's sponsoring agents , whether it's adding team partners , little teams within our team , whatever it is that helps them to kind of build . One of our team members , robin , she bought a beach house last year . Like these are the kind of things that I want to help other women to do and that's kind of my big career goal .

Karen Cooper 19:31

At this point . It's not so much anymore about how big can the team get and how big can this get , it's how many women can I impact to have what they want to have . And from a personal perspective , I want to live the life that I and it most fulfills me and my family and for me that doesn't work . Look like we're tiring . That works . That looks like working , maybe for a few hours a day , maybe for more , doing things that I love , things that most excite me . I'm tired of the weeds . I don't want to be in the weeds anymore . We had an operations meeting this morning with our executive director and I forget what she was talking about and I was like you know what ? I don't even want to know , I don't even want to know about it , I don't even want to hear about it , I don't even want to see it Like you kind of get to that point where you know what I do let some of that go .

Karen Cooper 20:27

So that's what I'm seeing . I want to raise men that are my husband . We joke all the time because I say that I want to raise independent children . Right , I want to raise independent men and my husband's like , but I think we did it too well because they don't need us for anything . And that's what I want . I want them to be independent . I want them to spend time with us because they choose to , because they want to , not because they have to or they feel like it's their obligation , and those are my goals for you .

Dionne Malush 21:01

So do you like to have fun , or is this fun for you ?

Karen Cooper 21:04

This is fun for me . I'm probably very boring . I'm doing this , or I'm walking my dog , or I'm reading the book , or I'm doing my thing .

Dionne Malush 21:14

I mean there's not much else I know and I try to think about what is fun . My husband and I were talking about that today , what is fun ? And I'm like I don't know . Like it is fun helping other people and I look forward to that every single day . My motto is I want to help make someone's day more successful every single day . So I want to do what I can every day to help people be more successful and I think having a real estate brokerage allows me to do it . It's sometimes a little harder because real estate is not easy like it is on HGTV Right . There's a lot of pieces and parts like going to running a real estate business . I'm hiring women for real estate . How can they connect with you online ? Tell us a little bit .

Karen Cooper 21:56

Yeah , so if you're not already your listeners are not already in our group and Powering Women in Real Estate on Facebook . We would love to connect with you there , so you can just search for the group on Facebook . Me personally , I love connecting on Instagram . It's the platform where I'm having the most fun . Right now On Instagram I am at Karen W Cooper and I'd love to get to know you and see how we can collaborate in the future .

Dionne Malush 22:20

So what a journey you have been on . It's very nice to have you on today . I really appreciate your honesty and it's wonderful to see you supporting women . So you've been leading a successful real estate team and Powering Women nationwide . Your story is a testament to a determination and passion can achieve If you're inspired to learn more or start your own journey in real estate . Don't hesitate to reach out and follow both of us on social media and , karen , if there's anything I can ever do to help , I would love to put you in front of our brokerage and our agents , because there's a lot of women in the brokerage and I'm sure they could use a community like yours .

Karen Cooper 22:51

Well , thank you so much . I appreciate it All right .

Dionne Malush 22:53

Thanks a lot . Have a great day everyone . Bye .