The Part Nobody Warned Me About When I Left My Team
The money was the easy part to explain. When I tell people I left my team and moved to eXp, they nod along to the numbers. The split made sense to them. What I don't usually talk about is how scared I was in the weeks leading up to it.
I got licensed in 2022 with an eight month old at home. I joined a team because I needed someone to teach me how any of this worked, and they did. They picked up the phone when I had no idea what I was doing. They walked me through my first few deals. By the time I was thinking about leaving, that team had become the thing I measured safety against.
So leaving didn't feel like a business decision. It felt like walking away from the people who caught me when I was new.
I want to name that, because I think it's the part that keeps a lot of agents stuck. We talk about splits and caps and structure like it's all math. But the reason people stay too long usually isn't the math. It's the fear of being the one responsible for everything. The fear that without the team name behind you, clients won't trust you. The fear that maybe you were never that good, and the team was the reason it worked.
I had all of those.
The week before I made the call, I kept finding reasons to wait. Maybe after this escrow closed. Maybe after the holidays. Maybe once things slowed down (they never slow down, by the way, which is a trap I had to stop falling for). I was doing the thing where you convince yourself the right time is always a little further out.
What finally moved me wasn't a pep talk. It was a quiet afternoon where I looked at my own pipeline and noticed something uncomfortable. The clients were mine. The relationships were mine. The late nights and the weekend showings and the hand-holding through inspections, all mine. I had been telling myself I needed the team to function, and the evidence in front of me said otherwise.
That didn't make the conversation easy. Telling my team lead was easily one of the hardest things I've done in this business. (I felt like I was breaking up with someone who had only ever been good to me.) I cried. I overexplained. I worried I was being ungrateful.
What I wish someone had told me then is this. Leaving a team that served you well is allowed. You can be grateful for a season and still outgrow it. Those two things sit together just fine.
The first month on my own, I braced for the floor to fall out. It didn't. My clients stayed. My referrals kept coming. A seller I'd been nervous about called me, not the team, because she'd always thought of me as her agent. The work was the same work it had always been, except now I wasn't watching a huge piece of every check disappear before it reached me. The competence I thought belonged to the team had been mine the whole time. I just hadn't let myself believe it.
I'm not saying it was effortless. There were small things I had to learn that the team used to handle for me, paperwork flows and vendor contacts and the rhythm of who to call when. I figured them out faster than I expected, mostly because I had to. Necessity is a good teacher when you stop waiting for permission.
What I found at eXp, through Powerhouse, was that I didn't have to choose between independence and support. I'd assumed those were opposites. Turns out you can have people in your corner without handing over a third of your income for the privilege. The women I build alongside now want me to win, and they don't take a cut when I do.
If you're sitting where I was, doing the math but frozen by everything that isn't math, I'll say this plainly. The fear is real, and it's also lying to you about how much you actually need the thing you're afraid to leave. You are probably more ready than you feel.
I'm not interested in talking anyone into a decision they're not ready for. But if you ever want to talk through the messy emotional side of a move, the part the recruiting pitches skip right over, I'm happy to grab a coffee or hop on a call. I've been on that side of the fear, and it helps to hear from someone who has.