Opportunities Can't Be Equal with Dustin Oldfather | Ep 067

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Apr 29, 2025

Dustin Oldfather, leader of The Oldfather Group, shares insights from his 20 years in real estate, emphasizing responsibility-centered leadership and meritocracy. He reveals innovative strategies like pairing local agents with international VAs to enhance performance. Dustin delves into the importance of continuous training and adapting recruitment to changing market demands. He discusses the value of fostering a supportive culture over traditional hierarchies, highlighting the emergence of new skills necessary for success in the evolving real estate landscape.

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INSIGHT

Responsibility-Centered Leadership

Leadership determines culture: lead with responsibility and care rather than reward and distance.
Dustin says leaders must solve the complex problems and model caring to shape the organization.

ANECDOTE

From Nuclear Navy To Real Estate Founder

Dustin left the nuclear navy, studied molecular biology, and moved to the coast where he met his wife and found real estate.
He built his business from two people to over 100 across related companies.

INSIGHT

Opportunity Multiplies Success

Opportunity plus skills and effort drive success; agents fail when opportunities are missing.
Dustin credits early internet lead sources for saving the business during the 2008 downturn.

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Over the past 20 years, Dustin Oldfather has connected with and been coached by the best in the real estate business, including several of our guests on Real Estate Team OS.

As a result, he’s experimented with different methods and models - with VAs, ISAs, training cadence, lead distribution, and more.

The top-ranked real estate team in Delaware, The Oldfather Group is an 80-agent team driven by responsibility-centered leadership, opportunity meritocracy, and interactive, one-on-one training.

Dustin walks us through how they’re pairing local staff paid 15% above market with international VAs to improve performance and reduce vulnerability, how they’ve added meritocracy and agent voice to their model, why they’ve both insourced and outsourced the ISA function, and exactly how they deliver training day by day.

Watch or listen to this conversation with Dustin for insight into:

- Responsibility-centered leadership vs reward-centered leadership

- Being humbled in the Nuclear Navy

- Providing opportunities for a growing team at the dawn of online leads

- How to mitigate risk and vulnerability by partnering stateside and international team members together

- Testing an agent assistant model for agents doing 6 or 9 transactions per month

- What agents need and want in this market in terms of skills, efforts, and opportunities and how it affects their recruiting and retention

- Shifting to a meritocracy with three agent levels - Pilot, Captain, and Commander

- The pros and cons of insourcing and outsourcing your ISA function (and what works best for them) and the importance of live transfers

- Exactly how they do interactive training Monday through Friday, including specific topics covered, one-on-one time, live role plays, and accountability check-ins

- The cultural benefit of helping people move on, especially in the face of “demonstrated unreliability”

At the end, learn about Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind IRL, John Wentworth, redundant JBL speakers, pushing back on Gary Vaynerchuk, and a specific structure for a healthy day, week, and year.

Guests mentioned in this episode:
- Howard Tager https://www.realestateteamos.com/episode/howard-tager-ylopo-ai-artificial-intelligence
- Jon Cheplak https://www.realestateteamos.com/episode/jon-cheplak-real-estate-teams-traditional-brokerages
- Tom Ferry https://www.realestateteamos.com/episode/tom-ferry-differentiation-accountability
- Mike Schumm (coming soon!)

Dustin Oldfather:
- https://www.instagram.com/dustinoldfather/

- https://www.instagram.com/oldfathergroup/

- https://www.facebook.com/DustinOldfatherPublic/

Real Estate Team OS:

- https://www.realestateteamos.com

- https://linktr.ee/realestateteamos

- https://www.instagram.com/realestateteamos/