Over the course of her prolific career, Boise, Idaho-based Lysi Bishop Real Estate founder Lysi Bishop has earned too many awards to count. Recently, she’s been recognized as a Top Producing Realtor by the Wall Street Journal. She’s listed in the Idaho Business Review’s Power25 list of top influential people in residential real estate. At Keller Williams, she ranked #3 overall for top GCI (Groups). It goes without saying: She’s not only a Mega Agent, but one of the industry’s preeminent empire builders. In 2020, she and her team closed over $270 million of business and 414 units.
The Cost of Being a Top Producer
Bishop is a top performer through and through, but the accolades and results do not come without hard work and dedication. After entering the real estate industry in the early 90s along with her husband, Scott, as separate agents at an elite boutique firm, she dedicated herself to being a client-centric agent, often working herself relentlessly. In Treasure Valley, a huge swath of Western Idaho where five tributaries meet up with the famous Snake River and where a large portion of Idaho’s population live and work, she became known as the agent, but in the process, she worked up to 20 hours a day, leaving little time to enjoy the bountiful business she’d created.
A Bigger Life, Without Compromising Your Big Business
A fiercely independent personality, Bishop was at-first reluctant to join Keller Williams. But, in 2011, after attending top agent meet-ups, several mastermind sessions, as well as Family Reunion and its many breakout sessions, she saw “a whole other world” that offered strategies that helped her make tweaks and changes to relieve her work hours and burning of the candle at both ends. That was the year she joined forces with Keller Williams and started the Lysi Bishop Real Estate team. “Once we came over, it’s unbelievable how much they supported us. I realize now that I hadn’t known how to ask for the help I needed to grow a team and to operate at a high level as a business. Growing up in it, and having a lot of success through hard work, I just didn’t know how to slow down…I just worked, and worked tirelessly. I didn’t realize that a company and other agents would be so willing to share and pour into me at that level, and to share business strategies that made a substantial difference to creating balance and growing a business. That’s why I came and stayed.”
As newcomers to Keller Williams who were trying to navigate the Great Recession, Lysi and Scott were amazed about the free exchange of ideas and best practices that were coming from top producing agents in other parts of the country. They were the beneficiaries of collaboration and communication with agents and big thinkers who were overcoming the obstacles and struggles that the time period presented. Bishop says when the pandemic hit in 2020, her team was again able to pivot faster and more efficiently because they could tap into the collective brain trust of Keller Williams. “We didn’t have to spend valuable time trying to figure everything out on our own; our team and our clients benefitted from us being a part of a mastermind group, collaborating to navigate through the changing environment together.”
Creating Bigger Lives for All
Along the way, the biggest revelation for Bishop was that she learned through models and systems how to produce at the highest level without sacrificing so much time away from family in the process. That’s why her team’s mission is Bigger Lives for All. “Keller Williams gave me the tools to create a team, and help my team members have bigger lives, and in turn offer our clients better lives. I was able to do so much more with their support.” As her team grew, they needed operational strategies to grow with the business, and they desired to have growth opportunities that would benefit the team members as well. Bishop says, “When we created our mission of Bigger Lives For All we embraced it passionately because it covered everything we hoped: for our clients to have the best outcomes, for our agents and team members to work with a focus on excellence and efficiency, for our business to thrive with stellar client service, for our team members to have more opportunities for personal growth, and all of us to do work that we believe in.”
Now that they’ve been with the company for more than a decade, Bishop and her husband wonder where they’d have been without it. She reflects, “It’s hard to imagine how much Keller Williams has helped us – we’d still be successful, but doing nowhere near the kind of business we have now. The culture, the company, and Gary’s leadership saves you time getting where you want to go, and helps you course correct if you’re on the wrong path. It’s extremely valuable to be a part of this incredible network. It’s very much a win-win. I have so much gratitude for all that I have gained and all that I’ve been given for being a part of the organization.“