Dan Breault’s spent his whole career improving sales performance – and if it wasn’t exactly rocket science, it was a least pretty close to brain surgery: most of his career was spent convincing surgeons to use new medical devices and treatments. In the mid-2000s, he made the leap into real estate.
Two years later, he was already the regional director for one of the country’s (and the world’s) largest brokerages, heading RE/MAX’s operations in Indiana. Now he’s set to take New England by storm.
Dan Breault
Title: RE/MAX Regional Director for New England; Natick
Age: 52
Experience: Years of Experience: In sales, 31. In Real Estate, 7
Did you always have an interest in real estate?
Most everything I’ve done has been selling, training sales people, consulting – but always with high-performing sales organizations. That’s where my heart is. I had my own consulting practice for seven and half years, I expanded our business into Europe, worked in 68 countries, and that takes us back about seven years. My kids were in college, and I looked around and thought, could anything be different in our lives, in the time God gives us remaining? And I had spent my whole life on an airplane or in a hotel room… So I quietly began to close my consulting business [and] joined, in 2005, a local homebuilder – 40-year old company, family-owned. They were a really good group of people, and they didn’t know the market was about to collapse….I had two good years working there, all while the market was crashing, and long story short, I had a headhunter call me about RE/MAX… [The recruiter] said, ‘We want somebody who’s not just going to stop and wait for the market to turn around, and say we’ll wait for it to come back.’ At Johnson & Johnson, coming up, my experience was whether you had 10 percent market share or 80, [your goal] was to grow the business 15 percent. In real estate, you’ve got about a million realtors today, but RE/MAX is made up of that small percent that’s really full-time and really producers. And those people succeed whether the market’s good or bad. And that’s when I said, I want to be part of that, there’s a lot of opportunity there.
So what role did they have you in, when you first came over? Did you start out as an agent?
Nope. I started out as the head of the company in Indiana, the same role I have here in New England. There’s probably 15 of us around the country.
What did the agents think when you came in? You had some experience in real estate, but most of them had probably been in the trenches for a decade.
I’m sure it was probably a bit mixed. Positive on the side that they recognized I wasn’t sitting back – even in the worst of times, [I believe] there’s a lot of opportunity. So I brought that to it, and I think that was really fresh for them – “Oh, wow, we got a guy who’s not sitting around whining about the market, and is looking for way that we can grow.” Which we did. So I think that was the positive. But I think there was probably some skepticism also – “You never sold real estate? You never? You never…?!” Well, I don’t think anybody grows up thinking they want to be a real estate agent – truth is, most of us in real estate were something else beforehand. So they’re good about accepting other people who come into it – we’re a pretty generous lot in our industry.
So you started as head of a brokerage in the fall of 2007 – and actually managed to grow the company? How’d you pull that trick off?
Because we had 13 go-go years, it was easy for agents to be in the market, and broker-owners too, and houses were selling like that [snaps fingers]. I think we lacked discipline, because it was easy for so many years, and profitable for so many years. This may sound cliché to you, but we went after the discipline that a salesperson practices. In medicine, every Friday, the surgeons will have their M&M meeting – morbidity and mortality. Were there any patients that we lost? Were there any complications? They all come prepared to study that, and they review what deviated from the current practice – were there mistakes that were made? Were there things that we didn’t anticipate that deviated from that? Anyone who goes about their business in a professional way practices that. And in real estate we haven’t always done that…So we had to go back from being casual to really improving our practices and our discipline. And that worked really well for us – it led to an almost 20 percent increase in productivity, and our marketshare grew 25 percent in five years.
Considering what five years they were, that’s not bad.
I’m a little proud. And it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Could be as simple as, when you inquire about a home, you get a call back from that realtor within 30 minutes. We can be, in this industry, casual about those kinds of things – and a real pro is on their game about it. Knowing your neighborhood, what’s sold, what hasn’t sold, what are the kinds of improvements you need to sell this home in this neighborhood – those are the kinds of things that aren’t complicated but that it really takes time and effort to execute well.
The Top Five Things Breault Loves About New England …And Misses About Indiana:
- Love: The N.E. Landscape. “Everything in Indiana is flat and on a grid.”
- Misses: Indiana Driving “Our roads are so wide…you don’t even think about braking until you’re π off the exit.”
- Loves: N.E.’s Surprising Friendliness
- Loves: The food. Breault’s on a quest for the perfect lobster roll.
- Misses: His former hometown, where his Hoosier-born wife has deep roots.
