John Kitchens Coach Podcast Experience

Blake Berfelz is one of the five owners behind the Benson Crew, an Ontario team formed just over a year ago when three businesses merged into one. In this Coffee and Coaching hot seat, Blake joins me to unpack what it really takes to lead a merged real estate team through a market nobody in Ontario has seen before. Blake came into real estate from the restaurant industry 14 years ago and helped bu...

Most agents and team leaders are chasing tactics, tools, and the latest shiny object. In this Expert Mentors Live conversation, I sit down with DJ Fairley, who closed $93 million in production last year, finished number one in Pennsylvania for eXp Realty, and is on pace to top it this year, to break down the four fundamentals that decide who wins in this market: clarity, consistency, relationships...

Your background is not a liability. In this episode, I sit down with Jerry Van Leeuwen, a former paramedic turned real estate team leader out of Waterloo, Canada, who took every skill he built on the hardest days of other people’s lives and turned it into a serious competitive advantage in this business. We get into Jerry’s origin story, from growing up on a farm to running EMS calls to walking in...

Laura Justice has done just about every job real estate has to offer. She has spent over 30 years in this business, 17 of them in leadership and coaching. Today she leads the Incorvaia Team, 69 agents on pace to close over 600 units this year, with a goal of 100 agents by the end of next year. But this hot seat isn’t about the growth. It’s about what that growth is costing her. Laura’s constraint...

Travis Wright came from 14 years of meth addiction, two shootings, and a rehab program in Cache, Oklahoma, where he started over from nothing. Three and a half years after getting his real estate license, he is an eXp ICON agent, a Top 250 producer nationally, and closed 47 transactions in 2025. In this episode, I sit down with Travis Wright, a fellow Lawton, Oklahoma native, to unpack what taking...

This market isn’t moving in one direction, and that’s exactly what’s catching agents off guard. In this episode, I sit down with Stacey Lambright, a 29-year veteran, eight-time ICON Agent at eXp, and one of the most connected operators in the Midwest, to talk about what’s really happening on the ground right now. Stacey is seeing listings that still sell in 30 days with multiple offers sitting rig...

What do you do when you have all the pieces of a great business but no clear horizon to aim them at? On this episode of Coffee and Coaching, Renee Velasquez is back on the hot seat. Renee has been in real estate since 2008 and has built an 18-plus year sphere-based business, plus an investment portfolio of seven short-term rental properties with an eighth potentially on the way. After caring for b...

In this episode, I sit down again with Rodolfo Carvalho and Nuno Batista, the first eXp Icon agents out of Portugal, for a five-year check-in on the discipline, consistency, and marketing obsession that took them from 35,000 in GCI to a projected 10X this year. Rodolfo and Nuno break down exactly what changed in their mindset and their daily habits, why they call it the honey badger approach, and...

In this episode, Lindsay and I dig into the balancing act of running a team while staying in production, why quality of hire matters more than headcount, and how leverage, not more hustle, is the answer when you’re stretched too thin. Lindsay opens up about her struggle to delegate, the ego that gets in the way of letting go, and the shift from one-on-one coaching to small group “pods” that’s free...

In this episode of the John Kitchens Coach Podcast Experience, John sits down with Ryan Smith , combat veteran and CEO of the Ryan Smith Home Selling Team, for a conversation on leading through adversity, hiring for grit, and why AI is about to separate the agents who thrive from the ones who get left behind. With nearly 20 years in the business and close to 4,000 transactions, Ryan brings a rare...

In this episode, I sit down with Nick Bergman, one of the five owners behind the Benson Crew, a team formed just over a year ago out of three merged businesses in Ontario, Canada, now chasing a $2 billion production goal by 2034. Nick’s path here started far from real estate — he was a heavy machinery mechanic before a rough experience selling his own home pushed him to get licensed. We get into w...

In this episode of the John Kitchens Coach Podcast Experience, John sits down with Blake Sloan — Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and founder of Sloan Realty Group — for a raw, unscripted conversation about surviving what Blake calls the toughest real estate market he’s seen in 21 years. Blake breaks down the “Domination Matrix,” the four-pillar framework he just taught his own team: winning in the tren...

Cindi Featherston-Shields is back for her fourth appearance on the show, and this time she’s showing us exactly how far she’s taken AI inside her real estate business. Cindi’s built out an AI executive assistant named Emily, who runs her calendar, her inbox, and her daily reporting, and an AI transaction coordinator named Tracy, who replaced a five-person TC department without dropping a single fi...

In this episode of Coffee and Coaching, I sit down with Andrea Mapel — a solo agent out of Medina County, Ohio, who’s done something most agents only talk about. She niched down, cut her marketing spend to almost nothing, and this year alone she’s doubled her units and grown her sales volume five times over. In this Hot Seat, Andrea puts it all on the table: her burnout leading a 20-agent team, th...

In this episode of the John Kitchens Coach Podcast Experience, John sits down with returning guest Fred Butts, co-founder of Arch & Pillar Group in New Hampshire’s Seacoast region, to unpack how he and his business partner (and spouse) Elaine are breaking into a luxury real estate market that’s been dominated for decades by legacy brokerages like Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Compass. Fred walks thro...

What do you do when ten years of building your own brokerage leaves you completely burned out? On this episode, I sit down with Sam Basel, a real estate agent in Estes Park, Colorado, since 2002 who spent a decade running his own boutique brokerage, Alpine Legacy, before hitting a wall. Sam walks me through how he pulled himself out of it with a 365-day streak of pushups, situps, and treadmill mil...

What happens when you take twenty years of fight-camp discipline and point it at real estate? On this episode, I sit down with Sarah Howell, a former professional MMA fighter who spent two decades in the fitness industry before walking into real estate and hitting Icon status at eXp in her very first year, then landing in the top 1% nationwide with Veterans United in 2025. Sarah didn’t leave her o...

We’re bringing back Coffee and Coaching — the live, no-script coaching format that built this show’s foundation before it hit 800+ episodes. In this episode, John Kitchens sits down with Robyn Rhein, a solo agent who’s been in real estate since 2004 and produced 76 transactions in a single year, live in the hot seat. Robyn breaks down exactly how she broke through her production ceiling — from bri...

This is, on record, the toughest real estate market in at least two decades, and most agents are still operating on habits built during the easy years. In this episode, John Kitchens sits down with Brandon Town, who has built one of the largest Canadian organizations within eXp Realty over the past decade, mentoring hundreds of agents while leading a high-performing team across Ontario. Brandon To...

Most people live in a circular world, running the same Groundhog Day over and over instead of moving in a known direction. In this solo episode, John Kitchens breaks down straight line coaching, a framework for getting yourself and the people you lead out of that cycle and moving from point A, where you are, to point B, where you want to go, as fast as possible. John unpacks why a coach or leader...

Episode Overview What happens when 25 years of retail sales leadership collides with real estate? Paul Durbin, team leader of the Durbin Home Team out of Newark, Ohio, found out firsthand. In just two years in the business, he's closed more than 70 transactions and over 20 million dollars in sales volume, including a six-figure month in real estate before finishing his third full year. In this epi...

A Fan-Favorite Rebroadcast: This episode is a rebroadcast of one of our fan-favorite conversations — originally released as Episode 661. We're bringing it back because the strategies Alex Piech shares are just as relevant today as they were then. In this episode, John Kitchens sits down with Alex Piech, a top-producing agent with EXP Realty in the highly competitive Dallas-Fort Worth market, for a...

In this episode of the John Kitchens Coach Podcast Experience, John sits down with Phil Stringer, former COO of one of North Carolina's top real estate teams and now a full-time AI educator reaching an audience of over five million people. Phil built a six-figure business as a teenager, became a top worldwide sales agent at eighteen, and has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, F...

Episode Overview: Learning to hire the right people is the difference between a business that depends on you forever and one that runs without you. In this episode, John Kitchens sits down with Georgia Tusch, a top-producing realtor and team leader at Twiss Real Estate Group in Ontario, to unpack her journey from solo agent to CEO. Georgia shares the hiring lessons that took her team from chaos to...

Your business will never outgrow your leadership. In this episode, John Kitchens continues the coaching and leadership series with the five core principles and practices that separate coaches and leaders who create real transformation from those who don't. Building on the fundamentals, the coach-client relationship, the Coach Code results framework, and emotional intelligence covered in earlier ep...