Michael Bean
Title: Chief Executive Officer, Bean Group; Portsmouth, N.H
Age: 44
Experience: 11 years
Michael Bean moves quick. After spending a career in tech sales, he saw opportunity in real estate – and less than two years after getting his license, he launched his own brokerage.
Now nine years old, Bean Group has expanded from its Portsmouth, N.H. base to four New England states, helping to land it on Inc. Magazine’s 2012 list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies in the country.
And Bean’s got his eye on expanding in Massachusetts.
Q: Did you start out in real estate?
A: I was in sales for most of my life – first computer equipment, then internet bandwith. It was around 2001 when I decided to go into the real estate business. We had been house hunting around that time, and the process didn’t make a lot of sense to me – it looked like there was a lot of opportunity to do a better job. I started this company in the beginning of the summer of 2003. [Bean Group] was a group of me, at the time. But the name was available. I think the first agent who joined me was in early 2004. He’s still with us, he’s now head of operations.
Q: What about your own home search made you think the industry was ready for change?
A: IDX was pretty nascent back then. We were going on sites like Realtor.com, trying to find an agent to get back to us, and having a difficult time. We were renting a house seasonally, looking for something else – and after going through the whole search process we ended up buying the house we were renting. We had an agent to help us on the buy side, and I remember going to the closing and looking at that commission check, and said, hmmm. I just thought, if you do it right, you could really add value to this transaction.
Q: So was improving search what you focused on when launching your own brokerage?
A: [Our company] was meant to be lean, with heavy online marketing, right from the start. [Even our print ads], they were designed to lead people back to the online presence, because that’s really where you can provide some really in-depth information.
We got so much traction with our website early on, it became a point of curiosity for other agents. We had been working [with a small web development company] that had about 100 clients. About two years in, we merged with them, and brought in some pretty significant talent. I think we had about 18 or 20 agents at the time, and then we brought in technical talent, operations talent. And that really helped us grow the company, create a fresh, clean, initial brand image. We could offer websites to all our agents, so if they didn’t have one they could come to us, and so long as they worked with us it was complementary. That really launched our growth back then, and we grew pretty rapidly after that.
Q: These past few years you’ve grown quite a bit.
A: Yes, we now have eight offices in New Hampshire, one in Vermont, one just over the bridge in York, Maine, as well. And about 18 months ago we opened our first office in Massachusetts, in Newburyport with Ed Ridolfi …From New buryport, this year we added Winchester, Andover, and Mashpee …we’re looking at opening up another three to six offices in the North Shore and Metrowest in 2013. But a lot of that comes from finding the right management team – we want to grow intelligently, not too fast, not too slow.
Q: Do you feel like how you run your brokerage is different from the more traditional brokers out there? Or is it more a case of being more adept at those traditional things?
A: We are different in a lot of ways. Starting from scratch helped with that. Instead of setting up an office with an administrative person and having agents do uptime, we generally use voice over IP to pull everything back to our central number, where we have full time administrative staff who can connect them right to the agents. There are a lot of duplicative costs that we were able to eliminate from our overhead through things like that. Our idea is to be able to have a full-time agent who we can support anywhere in the field. … [As a new agent myself coming into the business] it was like, “great, you’ve got your license. You want a website? Go find a good website vendor. Go find an e-fax vendor. Go find a phone company. Set your email up on your own, figure out where to go for your print media.”
The independent contractor concept had just been leveraged to the point where agents were completely on their own. It made more sense to me to say, “okay, I want to have a broker that will go out and find those tools and put everything in front of an agent so they can spend less time trying to figure out the mechanics behind the business and more time working with the clients and being an expert in their marketplace.” Which I think is really the value the agent brings to the table… It’s not a rocket science business by any means. I think the core thing is to find great agents and service the hell out of them.
Michael Bean’s Top Five Things To Love About Portsmouth:
- Taking a run by the ocean.
- The tight-knit, friendly community. “It’s a small town, but there’s a lot of college kids, and a lot of turnover, and people are really open to meeting new people.
- Being able to go from the beach to the ski slopes in less than two hours.
- The nearby woods. “We’ve got a great urban forestry center right behind our house where we love to take walks with our dog.”
- Boston’s only 50 minutes away.
