We fell into the traps discussed in the article about 4 or 5 years ago, and sure enough, the assistant left and took some clients with him. This was good and bad for us, as we had written into their employment contract that they would owe us a referral fee on anyone that they dealt with who had originally been our client, for the next 5 years. A couple of things that I've done to preserve the contact with clients, while they still deal with assistants: Tell the client right off the bat that they will be talking mostly with the assistant, but then give them my cell-phone number and tell them to please call me directly at any time they feel the need to. This step alone seems to defeat the other agent's telling people that they'll never deal with me if they hire me (the most common thing I hear from people, as we're the only agents in town with assistants) When setting up the email account for the assistant, make sure that a copy of every email to the assistant also comes to my own inbox, so I can see at-a-glance the ongoing communication between client and assistant. This not only allows me to monitor the quality of service the assistant is giving, but also to keep a finger on the pulse of the client, and step in when I feel it is necessary. We pay our assistants a crappy hourly wage, but also pay them 5% of the GCI on each transaction that we do. This performance-pay is a big incentive to them. Hire licensed assistants who like different clients than we do: I only work with techno-enabled clients, so I need someone to work with non-techno-enabled clients. Both my partner and our licensed assistant are uncomfortable with technology, so we have a great mix, and can serve a much larger clientele than if I were a single agent, or if we all preferred to work only with techno-enabled assistants. Milk the available technology, such as SOAR MLS, for all it's worth, to eliminate the need for assistants to do the most mundane of 'grunt-work'. Looking forward to hearing other responses.

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