From Small Brokerage to Top Solo Producer

Most agents who hit a plateau assume they’ve found their ceiling.

Jamie Lemons, a top solo agent, found out she’d only been working in a bubble. After more than a decade at a small, family-owned brokerage doing foreclosures, short sales, and sign calls, she watched that model shrink and made a decision that changed everything. She bet on herself and made the move to Keller Williams.

We sat down with her for an honest, unrehearsed conversation about how it happened, and what other agents can take from it.

The move started with an honest look at the future. Jamie loved her broker and the people she worked with, but she could see where the market was heading. The sign calls were drying up, foreclosures were shrinking, and she asked herself the question every growth-minded agent eventually faces: What am I going to do to keep growing?

An invitation to a lender-sponsored event gave her a first taste of the agents at our office, and once she started digging into what Keller Williams actually offered, she did what she always does: analyzed it, decided, and moved. As she put it, she’s not the type to sit on a decision and still be talking about it years later.

The numbers are why her story is worth hearing. In 2025, Jamie was the number one agent in Orland Park in units and number two in volume, as a true solo agent, closing 94 deals, including rentals, 90 in resale, for a little over $30 million. For context, the average agent closes somewhere around four to five units a month. Jamie has been tripling that. And when we asked her for the key, she didn’t point to a magic lead source. She pointed to time blocking, discipline, and treating the business like a business.

The building blocks are ordinary, and that’s the point. What stands out is how few agents actually do the simple things. Jamie talked about the health of her database, knowing not just names but spouses and birthdays, so she can genuinely stay engaged. She talked about her four buckets of business:

• Database
• Client referrals
• Agent referrals
• Social media

She also adds her long-held niches in probate and divorce.

She talked about a color-coded calendar where everything lives, because as she puts it, the day you tell yourself something isn’t on the calendar is the day three hours disappear and you haven’t returned a single call. None of it is flashy. All of it compounds.

She’s honest about the fear most videos skip. Walking into a room of strangers at a much larger office, she wondered if she was ready, whether rebranding was the right call. Tammy’s take, that fear and excitement feel the same in your body, clearly landed, because what Jamie found on the other side wasn’t overnight success. It was a decade of planting seeds, finally coming together, supported by a culture she describes as real family, not the “drink the Kool-Aid” kind, where agents openly share what’s working and operate from abundance rather than scarcity.

The real payoff was bigger than production. Maybe the most compelling part is what the change brought Jamie beyond the numbers: the discipline to protect one full day for her family, the time blocking that lets her run real volume without running herself into the ground, and, in her words, a business that didn’t just change professionally but changed her family’s life, from trips to Europe to investment properties.

If you’ve ever wondered whether a move is worth it, her answer is worth hearing in full.

You can watch the full conversation above, or feel free to skip to the moments that matter most to you using the timestamps below:

00:00 — Meet Jamie Lemons
00:50 — Before Keller Williams
06:09 — Success Takes Time
08:51 — Keller Williams Culture
10:14 — Jamie’s Production Numbers
12:55 — Business Source Now
13:51 — Worth the Move
16:00 — Advice for Agents

If you’re an agent weighing your next move, or just wondering what running your business differently could look like, we’d love to have an honest conversation, no pitch, no pressure to change anything. Call or text us at 708-906-6377, email us at tammy@our1thing.com, or visit growth.our1thing.com.