BusinessReport.com

When Mary Garner DeVoe was recruited by Johnette and Larry Champagne of Keller Williams Realty in Covington to head up a new office in Baton Rouge, they asked what she thought her life would be like in five years if she achieved success.

The Richmond, Va., native said in part that she’d be financially secure and drive a convertible, and that the people who worked with her would be better off for having done so, and vice versa.

One thing she doesn’t want now is for the people working with her to live the way she did when she first started selling real estate in Baton Rouge in 1989. While success came quickly (she moved $1 million that first year in a slow market), she had no clue how to balance work with the rest of her life.

“I didn’t know how to run my business. My business ran me,” she says. Even when her 2-year-old son begged her not to answer the phone in the evening, she felt she had to. Today, she feels grateful to have a great relationship with her two children, despite how hard she worked when they were very young.

“If somebody is running their business the way I did mine, then I have failed,” she says.

She opened the Baton Rouge office, which they call a market center, on Aug. 1, 2000, shortly after turning 40. At the time, she had four agents with her, and no furniture. They ramped things up pretty quickly from there, however, working the phones while sitting on the floor.

Today, 235 agents work out of the Baton Rouge market center, making it the largest single-company office in town, consistently ranking in the top three [and often first] among real estate companies in local market share. She’s also the operating principal of an office in Zachary and an owner of one in Denham Springs, both of which opened last year and serve nearly 150 agents between them.

DeVoe makes sure her new agents understand that they don’t just have a job selling houses; they’re opening their own small business. But she also wants them to know that doesn’t mean they have to work around the clock. Something as simple as a regularly scheduled phone call to a client, perhaps every Tuesday, will help ease the client’s anxiety and make that client less likely to call during dinner on a Saturday.

“I knew what people said,” she confides of opening the Baton Rouge office. People said it wouldn’t work, and that she didn’t know what she was doing. Real estate franchises had traditionally struggled here, DeVoe says, although she didn’t know that at the time. She’s convinced her success proves that being female, liking jewelry, laughing easily, and generally being “a little bit prissy” doesn’t denote a lack of business acumen. And she’s quick to tout the enthusiastic, family-focused culture of her company that she says helps new agents succeed and revitalizes veterans of the business.

“I know that this is where I’m supposed to be,” she says. And, in case you’re wondering, she did get that convertible.