The Agent Attraction Playbook Podcast with Jon Pugh

Latest episode

14 Sep 2026 · 56 min

John Tsai: $80K in Debt to 1,000 Agents

In 2008 John Tsai was $80,000 in debt and went six to eight months with essentially no sales. Instead of quitting real estate, he decided he was a beast and worked seven days a week, 12 and 14 hour days, for the next decade. Then March 2009 arrived and he closed 33 deals in a row. In this conversation with Jon Pugh, John explains why he never let himself forget that hole, and what beast mode has to mean once the fear is gone and you are already comfortable. John is direct about the mechanics too. He tells agents that five conversations a day will not carry a business and the real number is…

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Earlier episodes 9 most recent

1. 

   E8 · 31 Aug 2026 · 59 min

   Andre LaFountain Built a 1,340 Agent Organization With Zero Followers

   Andre LaFountain has roughly 1,340 agents in his revenue share organization and averages about $30,000 a month. He has no personal brand, no following, and no content strategy. He got relicensed at 48 years old so he could join eXp in 2019, and he has run the same two appointments a day ever since. Jon Pugh takes Andre through the whole build in this episode. The nine years he sold real estate by day and worked a night shift at a pharmaceutical plant. The independent brokerage he ran for a decade and a half while training up agents who kept leaving to become his competition. The decade he…

2. 

   E8 · 3 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 14 min

   Curt Shewell Says "Don't Recruit Me" First (Here's Why)

   When Curt Shewell joined eXp Realty in 2018, there were 26 licensed agents in the entire state of Michigan. His organization today sits just under 4,000 agents and closed $13 billion in sales last year. In this conversation with host Jon Pugh, Curt lays out how he did it, and none of it is what most agents expect. He starts with a chess board. His father taught him the game at six years old, which meant he spent his childhood in conversations with adults, learning that the less he talked the smarter he sounded. That became the philosophy behind everything he does now: tell them nothing, ask…

3. 

   E7 · 20 Jul 2026 · 59 min

   How Gogo Bethke Attracts Agents She's Never Met

   Gogo Bethke landed in this country at 21 with $200, no English, and not a single person she knew on the continent. Today the Team Gogo organization has closed more than $15 billion in real estate, did $2 billion year to date in what she calls three real selling months, and agents name her as their sponsor before they have ever spoken to her once. On this episode of the Agent Attraction Playbook Podcast, Gogo tells Jon Pugh exactly how that happens, and it starts with a line she refuses to soften: "I don't recruit, I attract." She walks through the mindset reframe she learned from Tony…

4. 

   E6 · 13 Jul 2026 · 35 min

   Veronica Figueroa: Why I Walked Away From the #1 Team in the World

   Veronica Figueroa built the #1 team in the world two years in a row, and the second time it gave her a pit in her stomach. In this episode of the Agent Attraction Playbook Podcast, Jon Pugh sits down with the eXp powerhouse to unpack the season where success on paper left her stripped down and on her knees, how faith and authenticity rebuilt her business, and why she now says being real attracts the right people and repels the wrong ones. Today Veronica leads more than 2,700 partners worldwide with nearly 10,000 transactions in the last 12 months, and she shares exactly how she thinks about…

5. 

   E5 · 6 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

   How Noelle Nielsen Doubled Her Organization After Leaving eXp

   In this episode of the Agent Attraction Podcast, Jon Pugh sits down with his close friend Noelle Nielsen, who built a 600 agent organization at eXp before making the difficult decision to leave and start over at Real, where she has since grown her org to over 1,300 agents. Noelle shares her unusual path from attorney to wedding photographer to realtor to cloud brokerage leader, opening up about the vulnerability of asking agents to trust her again after a brokerage change, the hidden work behind rebuilding from scratch, and why she stepped back from flashy social content to focus on…

6. 

   E4 · 29 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

   How Hank Avink Built $3M in Rev Share on 5 Hours a Week

   What if you could build a multi-million-dollar income on just five hours a week - and then choose to do less? In this episode, Jon Pugh sits down with Hank Avink, one of the most respected coaches in real estate and the man who sat one seat ahead of Jon in the global agent-attraction rankings at eXp. Hank breaks down the "Math vs. Drama" philosophy that's made him over $3 million in revenue share since 2016, why most big teams quietly net less than a solo agent, and the "36-to-Life" model he uses to give agents leverage without the chaos of scale. It's a candid, tactical, occasionally blunt…

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