Using Simple Rules To Build Your Team

Reaching the top as an individual producer takes hard work, a bit of eccentricity, and real persistence — and the view from the top tends to be a lonely one. The instincts and on-the-fly decision-making that got someone there often become liabilities the moment a team starts to scale, because those decisions now ripple through other people's work, not just one person's.

One underused management tool for scaling a business built by a strong individual producer is the simple rule. In Simple Rules, author Don Sull describes them as "a handful of rules that are tailored to the user and task at hand that balance concrete guidance with the freedom to exercise judgment." Checklists work well for highly defined tasks — setting up a file, for example — but they don't hold up for judgment calls like prioritizing workload or negotiating a concession.

Every professional already operates from an internal set of rules, shaped by values and experience — but that internal logic rarely gets pulled out of one person's head and made explicit for a team. Statements like "customer first" sound good but don't actually help a team member make a real decision without checking in first.

Where Simple Rules Help Most

Prioritizing team workload — timing rules: purchases first, prioritized by closing date; purchases from key referral partners ahead of everything else; touch a file once and work it through to the next step; escalate any deal-breaker immediately.

Managing leads — prioritizing rules: no lead is ever left behind; the freshest leads get a call within the first hour; committed work on a contacted lead finishes before moving to the next; the lead report stays 100% accurate at the end of every business day.

Handling loan file issues — stopping rules: deal-breakers escalate to the loan officer immediately; every other issue gets documented and handled concurrently; any file with an open deal-breaker gets worked daily until resolved; no file sits more than a week on a deal-breaker without every party involved.

These examples may look obvious — a seasoned team member is probably already operating this way instinctively. The real leadership work is institutionalizing that instinct: writing the rules down, testing them, rolling them out, and letting the team run with them independently.