Most books in this series are not about real estate. I read them from the broker's side of the table and translate what they mean for our work. This one is the exception. Rod Santomassimo wrote Brokers Who Dominate about commercial real estate brokers specifically, after profiling top producers like Bob Knakal and Faith Consolo and reverse-engineering what they share.
He found eight traits. I'm not going to list them. Most brokers read a list like that, nod, and change nothing. Instead I want the one trait that holds up the other seven, because it's the one almost everyone skips.
Every top producer in the book runs a business. They just happen to run it inside someone else's firm.
You already own a business. Most brokers act like they don't.
Here is the line from the book that should stop a broker cold: "Employees never work on their business; just in it. They don't have a business, they have a job."
The legal reality is that most brokers are independent contractors. You are already the owner. But most brokers behave like staff. They show up, work the deals in front of them, chase the next commission, and call that production. Santomassimo's dominators do something different. They allocate part of every day to working on the business itself: the marketing plan, the human capital plan, the operations plan. The deals are the output, not the job.
That reframe changes one decision more than any other: where you choose to hang your license.
The split is not the platform.
When brokers think about moving firms, they compare two numbers: the commission split and the lead flow. That's the employee question. It assumes the firm hands you a job and you negotiate the pay.
The book is blunt about why that backfires. Higher splits are usually higher for a reason, often because the supporting resources are thinner. And every move resets you. There is a down period after any change, no matter how solid you think your relationships are. The brokers who navigated their careers well, like Caulley Deringer with the same firm and phone number for 25 years, moved with purpose or didn't move at all.
So the split is the wrong lead question. The real one: which platform best launches the business I'm building? Santomassimo's words for what the dominators do with their firm: "They use their brokerage firm as a platform to launch their personal success."
A platform is judged by what it lets you build on it.
If you're the CEO of your book, evaluate a firm the way a founder evaluates infrastructure. Does it let you go deep in a niche and become the expert clients seek out, or does it pressure you to do it all? Does it give you the support to build a team, which is the only real path from a six-figure book to a $500K book? Does it back the slow, consistent presence work that pays off in year three, not month two?
Those are platform questions. They have almost nothing to do with the split.
This is also why, when I'm recruiting, I'm not selling a lead page. The brokers who make it aren't the ones who got the best leads. They're the ones who treated the work as a business and used the firm to scale it. A platform that hands you fish makes you dependent. A platform that helps you build the boat makes you an owner.
The decision this should change
If you're weighing a move right now, stop opening with the split. Ask what the platform lets you build over the next five years: the niche, the team, the presence, the book that's yours and travels with you. Then judge the firm against that, not against a number on page one of the recruiting deck.
Santomassimo borrows a line from Zig Ziglar that fits: "The lessons work, but only if you work the lessons." The trait is learnable. The decision is yours.
If you're a commercial broker thinking about your next move and want to pressure-test it against where you actually want to be in five years, I'm happy to have an honest conversation. Schedule a conversation.
