John Kitchens Coach Podcast Experience

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 both of her parents through the end o...

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 how shifting from “best agent...

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 freeing up her ...

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 dual perspective — balancing a...

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 what it actually takes t...

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 trenches,...

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 file. We get into w...

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, the moment she took ...

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 through why...

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 miles, then took his family on a three...

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 old life behind. She brought a...

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 bringing o...