Unlocking Real Estate Success: Jill Barclay’s Journey to Team Leadership

Erika (00:01.262)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pro Show. I’m your host, Erika, and today I have Jill Barclay joining with me of the Jill Barclay Group. She’s been making some serious moves in the real estate industry. It’s so great to have you here, Jill.

Jill Barclay (00:16.893)
Thank you, Erica. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be a part of your podcast and offer any information that I can that could be helpful to the audience.

Erika (00:27.426)
I think our listeners are really going to love to hear your story and how you’ve built a team. So let’s dive right in. Can you tell us a little bit more, those of us who aren’t familiar with you, how did you get started?

Jill Barclay (00:35.113)
Sure.

Jill Barclay (00:41.075)
Well, I’ve always had a passion for real estate since I was young, but while I was in graduate school, my brother-in-law, who was a top real estate agent in the Peoria,

Illinois area, he needed help desperately, SOS, because he had a couple of agents going out on vacation. One was going out on maternity leave, so he called and said, Jill, you had been a supervisor before of mine. And I’ve always loved his leadership. He is always creative, highly successful. So when he called and said, Jill, will you get your real estate license over the summer?

your help the obvious answer was yes and so

got my license and dove right deep dove into helping him. And you know, at that time I had no training. He literally would write a notebook, a legal notebook. He’d fill up most of that notebook every morning of things and tasks that I had to complete. I had no idea what I was doing Erica, but I learned quickly with a lot of phone calls to him, a lot of questions at the time to some of the office staff and there I was.

It was an eye opener. It was hard because he is so fast with his volume and had highly scaled to the pinnacle point of real estate. And so I was just kind of being drug along at first. I was his little peon licking envelopes. know, internet was just coming out and we had to mail a lot of any new MLS. We get these buyer alerts. Now we can send them automatically through email.

Jill Barclay (02:26.187)
And back then, you know, we had to print off the MLS sheets, put them in an envelope, write out the address and send them to his clients. So a lot of my mornings were of that.

Technology was just starting to be used at that time. So did that for a summer and then was offered a head coaching women’s basketball job at a college and a teaching position. So I did that for 15 years. It was fantastic. It was competitive. Our teams did very well because I went after the right student athletes. We were in the top 20 of the nation, but I always had this itch for real estate and this desire to go back to real estate. So I knew in 2009 I was in great Ben Can.

in the middle of nowhere, one stoplight, one movie theater, I think a few different restaurants, maybe a different gas stations, I thought, you know what, if I’m gonna go into real estate, because I do, didn’t wanna be there, even though we won the conference, I got Coach of the Year, it just didn’t, it wasn’t an area in the middle of Kansas and in the middle of farm fields that I wanted to be, great people, but I just, I thought, you know, if I’m gonna change,

I had some job offers. I’m going to do real estate now.

And so in 2009, we know what the market was like, right? The market was from 2004 and five, the highest listing prices up to that point in America. And 2008 and nine, we’re starting to see the crash of real estate. And so I thought, you know, if I’m going to do real estate now is a better time as any, because if I can be successful in 2009, I know I’ll be able to be successful. So called the managing broker that I’d worked at previously with him and

Jill Barclay (04:11.159)
told her I was coming in seven months. I showed up in May and I ended up that year getting Rookie of the Year, but it was just because I just worked. I think I was so scared.

that I wasn’t going to be successful, that I just ultra hyper focused on just contacting people. And then I was highly coachable. Whatever someone successful had done previously, and if they just told me one little thing to do that day, I would implement it and just do exactly what they said. I wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. I just wanted to emulate what they were doing that seemed to be successful at the time. So that’s what I did and it worked, but really just

It was a numbers game in 2009, just talking because there’s so much inventory on the market, unlike now in comparison, that I let a lot of times my investors teach me, my own clients teach me. And then I was just aggressive with just following up, making sure that my people got into homes. And so that year after that, I realized this is something I could do forever, as long as I wanted to, because it was very similar to basketball.

I was very competitive as you know, the real estate market’s crazy cutthroat competitive. But I needed that because I was coming from the basketball all those years of coaching. I needed that fire. So that’s how I got started. I don’t want to look back at what could have been. So I’m just very appreciative that I have the life and the business I do now.

Erika (05:52.152)
That’s awesome. When it comes to Jill Barclay Group itself, tell us more. What markets are you guys focusing on and how did you build your incredible team?

Jill Barclay (06:03.366)
Thank you so much for asking that. So we’re in Peoria, Illinois, and we focus within, I would say 45 minutes to an hour, just depending on who the client is, radio. So there’s about 10 to 12 different cities that are in the Peoria metropolitan area. We have a river that divides most of those, and there’s about an even amount on each side. So we really focus in its dense center in between St. Louis and Chicago.

So two hours north to two and a half hours north south. So we’re right in the middle. And then in our area, because we’ve been spoiled when you’ve seen over the years, sometimes the Southern Belt, the East Coast, the West Coast, you see those markets hit harder.

with either a depression or inventory or foreclosures. We’ve been isolated because we’re really part of the transportation hub. So we’ve had a better market, I would say, over the time and it’s given us more opportunity. But the group got started not because I initially wanted it to, but I had some vendors and contractors that I had worked with when I was an individual agent for many years that kept asking me, hey, let’s

form a team, let’s do a team. And I just didn’t have time because I was so busy trying to wear the hat of a listing agent, marketing manager, compliance manager, closing coordinator, you know, go out and show homes, but try to, you just, can’t effectively as an individual agent, in my opinion, and most.

as an individual agent, if you’re going to do high volume, you really need systems, operations. So I allowed a couple of those folks that had been asking to form a team to come in and try it out. And I haven’t looked back since. It was the best thing I ever did. Because I was able to finally really just focus. It gets crazy busy, you know, on a daily basis, but I was really able to focus on having someone focus on

Jill Barclay (08:03.741)
closing, coordinating, someone focusing on marketing, someone focusing on listings and the marketing of listings, and then someone focusing on buyers and there’s marketing with buyers. So there’s a lot of different hats that we’re able to have leverage now with forming the team. So first, second, third, I’ve been privileged to say that Jill Barkley Group with everyone involved, we’ve been voted America’s best of the best.

know, top one and half percent of nation, those things, that’s what I’m proud of because it’s not me, it’s just the name. could care less.

When we developed the name, I could care less what the name was, but because I had been in real estate, they wanted to piggyback off of that for the previous clients that we had previously. So we went to the Jill Barkley group. could care if it’s John Smith. I could care less, right? But I’ve been fortunate that when we’ve had people come on, like Stephanie Miller, she graduated right from Bradley University, came right into the Jill Barkley group. I tried to tell her to go interview at other properties, and then she came back a month later and said, that’s it, I’m doing real estate.

And she does an incredible job. Shelly Cox, she worked at the Dunlap schools. I recruited her and now she’s been with us for, gosh, almost nine, ten years. Stephanie, ten years. then, so she does the Insight Sales Associate position. And then Sherry West, she’s been with me for over ten years. And she was one of those contractors that kept calling me for two years. I tried to send her to other teams saying, hey, go interview with them. You know, I’m just too crazy busy.

you

Jill Barclay (09:36.553)
Thank God she didn’t do that because that would have been the worst thing in the world, but they they’re all very different so the four of us plus Some other folks that y’all talk about we’ve all as real estate agents. They’re now senior partners They’re now making just as many decisions. We all get together. We have great chemistry when there’s something we’re thinking about doing They you know I talked to them because I trust them so I get to come to work every day with the best people Literally in the business that I trust with

my life, I trust with my kids. It’s just something that I personally have not seen at any other real estate office. And here’s what’s special about that. When we have a new person come onto the team, like Mary Tisdell, who delivered both of my children, but she was in medicine 30 years, Mary gets not just me, that’s usually what it is with team leaders, right? She gets Stephanie Miller, Sherry West, Shelley Cox. You know, these are, these are.

high volume producers over the years that are able to share their wealth of knowledge and there’s no other there’s no other team in our area that

If you look at all the experience that has the experience that the Jill Barkley group has. And so, you know, if I’m looking at coming on to real estate, I want to be where someone’s been there and done that before. And they’re all, they all do something better than I do. Sherry does something better than me, Stephanie and Shelley. And then, know, Nikki Randit says she’s been with us for three years. Chelsea Boswell has been our closing coordinator for three years. We have referral partners like Lauren Gerdes, who’s been with us for over

three years and then we have Linda Callahan she’s been with me for over a year so it just works and now we have Chuck Beatty he’s come on and he’s doing amazing so there’s just there’s just a lot of things with the group I don’t know how the stars have aligned but the chemistry is right.

Erika (12:38.936)
I love it. So with the team that you’ve built and all the experience that you had, I’m sure you have a story to share. Every agent and investor has had a moment where things got deal, maybe a deal that went sideways or you had the pivot and change your plan or strategy really quick. Can you share a moment like that?

Erika (16:11.438)
I love it. It really shows your determination and you know that you’re gonna have the personal touch that you’re gonna marry them if that’s what it comes down to.

Erika (16:38.08)
Yeah, yeah. So what do you see on the horizon next for you and Jill Barclay group? do you get to tackle?