Your team have names your clients ask for. Richard, Ryan, Georgia, Lydia and the rest are part of why people come back. So the conversion is not a payroll exercise, it is a trust exercise. Get the process wrong and you risk both the people and the goodwill. Get it right and most of them end up better off and more motivated than they were as employees.
[to confirm] We have taken the names above from the reviews on your website to make this feel real. Please correct the actual team, who is a fee earner and who is support staff, before this is shared. The distinction matters, see below.Who actually changes
Not everyone. The conversion only applies to "fee earners", meaning anyone who values, appraises or lists property. Those people become self-employed. Your admin and support staff, the negotiators who are not listing, stay exactly as they are, employed by Flying Keys. So your first job is to sort the team into those two groups.
Why an agent is usually better off
The honest pitch to your fee earners is not "please take on more risk to save me money". It is that self-employment inside eXp genuinely pays them more and gives them more.
- They keep a far bigger share of the fees they generate than a salary ever gave them.
- They get the same five income streams you do, including stock in eXp and revenue share of their own.
- They can claim legitimate business costs against tax, which an employee cannot.
- They own their own client relationships and build something that is theirs.
The flip side is real and you should say it plainly. No sick pay, no holiday pay, no employer pension, and they carry their own tax. The whole of the next section is written for them to settle exactly those worries.
The conversation to have
Do not spring it. The worst version of this is a room full of people finding out at once that their jobs as they knew them are ending. The best version is a series of honest one-to-ones, early, where you explain why you are doing it, what it means for them, and that you are bringing in help to make it smooth.
Lead with the why
Explain where the business is going and why the old model runs out of road. People follow a reason more than an instruction.
Show them their numbers
Sit down with each fee earner and their likely income under the new split. Abstract worries shrink when they see a real figure.
Be straight about the trade
Name what they gain and what they give up. Trust comes from you saying the hard part out loud, not from you skating over it.
Do it properly, this is a legal process
The rules once they are self-employed
For someone to be genuinely self-employed rather than an employee in disguise, you have to let go of some control. You cannot dictate their hours, you cannot tell them which areas they must work, you cannot set their holidays. This is a real shift in how you manage, and eXp helps you stay the right side of it. Your support staff, being still employed, carry on being managed as before.
The support to offer
The agents who make the jump best are the ones who feel backed, not pushed out of the nest. Practical backing looks like this.
- An accountant introduction, so nobody is guessing at their first tax return.
- Time and training on the new CRM and tools before go-live, not after.
- The Real Agency Club community and coaching around them, so the mindset shift has company. That is what the next section is for.
- You, still there, still leading, just leading differently.
The timeline from here
The technical onboarding into eXp takes roughly four weeks, mostly data migration and the website rebuild. Start the team conversations now, ahead of that clock. The order that works is to talk to people first, bring in the workforce consultancy, agree splits, and only then lock the go-live date. Rushing the people to hit a technical date is the classic mistake.