What About Me?!
He promised mentorship, delivered extraction, and taught me everything not to become.
The first thing he ever said to me was, “I can’t help you.”
The last thing he ever said was, “What about me?”
Everything in between was proof that some people don’t build teams—
they drain them.
By the time I left television in early 2018, I was done.
I was exhausted.
The industry was showing early signs of collapse, even if not everyone could feel it yet.
I did. I saw what was coming—shrinking budgets, longer hours, pay that never moved.
And that’s why I started to leave.
Real estate looked like a way out.
A broker who’d sold apartments to people in my family invited me to join his team at a new type of brokerage.
He gave the perfect pitch: Join my team. I’ll show you everything. You’ll learn fast. I’ll be your mentor.
That last word—mentor—was the hook.
It’s what I’d been chasing my whole career: someone to see the raw parts of me and help shape them.
So I walked away from a steady six-figure job and started over.
I showed up on my first day eager, pressed suit, polished shoes, ready to begin.
I stood there waiting for him to extend his hand and show me around—
not just the office, but the life I’d been promised.
He didn’t.
He barely glanced up.
Then he said, “I can’t help you,” and turned back to his screen.
That was it.
No welcome, no guidance, no map.
Just a line that landed like a door slamming in my chest.
A few minutes later, one of the younger agents — younger than me but the closest in age — walked over.
He looked me up and down, not unkindly, just… puzzled.
“You left a six-figure job for this?” he asked. Then, after a pause:
“I need to take you out for a drink and tell you what you just signed up for.”
It wasn’t a congratulations. It was a warning.
A prophecy, really — one I didn’t understand yet.
I went home that night and sobbed.
The sound startled even me.
Out loud, to no one, I said, “What did I just do?”
That was the moment the floor dropped out.
Every promise of mentorship vanished the second he’d gotten what he wanted—my signature, my slot on his team.
Weeks passed, and the picture filled in.
His splits were brutal—far above the norm.
Every commission bled upward; every bit of credit belonged to him.
He sold opportunity, but the product was extraction.
The team itself was a revolving door.
Faces appeared, smiled tightly, and disappeared within months.
The rule was simple: feed his ego or get out of the way.
The only real contact any of us had with him was the weekly “sales meeting.”
He demanded everyone’s presence like it was church.
We’d file in early, coffee in hand, waiting for the sermon to begin.
He’d stride in with that clipped, overconfident cadence, prepared with his “lesson of the day.”
But it was never about teaching us anything.
It was about proving how right he always was.
Every meeting was a performance: Hear my voice. Watch my success. Bask in it. Now get the fuck out.
He’d talk at us for half an hour, maybe forty minutes, then dismiss the room like he was doing us a favor.
It wasn’t mentorship—it was maintenance of control.
And the people sitting in those chairs made the dysfunction visible.
There was one woman on the team who was sweet, polite, and a great cook.
She was also so catastrophically bad at selling that she couldn’t have moved an apartment if people were paying her to take it.
Then there was the youngest guy—thin, blond, conventionally attractive, always performing confidence like a costume.
He carried himself like success was a birthright, chest out, all surface and zero substance.
Every conversation punctuated with lines about his “FAs”—that’s what he called his financial advisor buddies—
“They’re just crushing it, man. They’re all absolutely crushing it.”
Eventually, he went back to join them. Just another bro in a different uniform.
And then there was the guy who thought he was the star: maybe closed one or two deals a year, but he ran a local real-estate Facebook page with a few thousand followers and believed that made him untouchable.
He especially hated that I lived in his neighborhood—like I was trespassing on his little digital fiefdom.
After a few months, when a handful of those early team members had finally had enough and left, I watched him bring in two new agents. They were sharp, confident, already managing large rental portfolios of their own.
I saw him through the glass office doors, doing the same rehearsed handshake—the firm nod, the practiced smile—and I thought, They’ll be gone in weeks.
They were already making too much money to tolerate him.
And sure enough, they vanished even before I did.
The first real crack in his façade came in an ordinary moment.
I walked into his office—his private glass box where only his administrative staff usually sat—and looked him dead in the eye.
A client’s mother had died.
I told him directly, expecting a flicker of recognition, a brief pause, something human.
One of his staff members nearby gave a soft, instinctive sigh—the kind of sound people make when they hear loss.
He just stared at me.
Blank.
No movement. No change in his face.
Nothing.
I held his gaze, waiting for a beat that never came.
Then I looked at the person who’d reacted, as if to confirm that yes, we were both standing in this strange vacuum together.
It was shocking—but somehow not surprising.
By then, I think I already knew.
That was when I finally understood what those sales meetings were really about.
You can’t teach connection if you don’t have any.
That realization sat in my chest for weeks like a bruise.
I stopped asking him questions.
I stopped expecting guidance.
I started counting the exits.
A few weeks later, after the illusion had completely fallen, I was giving him an update on a deal I was working on.
It wasn’t about the client—it was about the other agent, the opposing broker on the deal.
I was explaining how I’d had trouble trusting them, how they’d said one thing and done another.
I looked at him and said it out loud, like a small piece of borrowed wisdom:
“People tell you exactly who they are. Believe them.”
He nodded, pleased, like he agreed completely.
“Of course they do,” he said, and reached out his hand.
I didn’t take it.
Instead, I told him we needed to talk.
I pulled him into another office, closed the door, and told him I was leaving.
He didn’t ask why.
He didn’t ask what I was doing next.
He didn’t even pretend to care.
He just looked at me and said, “What about me?”
“The same man who had begun with ‘I can’t help you’ ended with ‘What about me.’”
That was the bookend.
Everything between those two sentences was just proof.
I walked out shaking—part fury, part relief—but steady for the first time in months.
A few months later, word spread through the office.
The brokerage—still in a feverish hiring spree—had asked him to leave.
People couldn’t believe it.
They fired him?
During expansion?
He must have been unbearable.
The gossip didn’t sting; it validated everything I’d already lived.
He didn’t build teams; he consumed them.
He’d even recruited people like me just to trigger sign-on bonuses the brokerage was offering to team leads.
Once the bonus cleared, our usefulness was over.
Hearing he was gone didn’t make me angry.
It just made sense.
When I left television, I thought I was escaping a collapsing system.
Instead, I ended up watching a smaller one implode in real time—
one man, perfectly built for the old order, finally running out of people to drain.
I used to believe success came from finding the right mentor.
Now I know it comes from becoming the person you needed back then.
He taught me nothing about real estate.
But he taught me the cost of selfishness.
And from that, I learned the only rule worth keeping:
The best way to find the help you need is to become the person who would have given it.
