‘I Can’t Imagine Doing Anything Else’ – Selina Galanis on Why She Coaches

WSS coach Selina Galanis‘ experience in real estate is far from “typical.”

From residential and commercial property management in Florida to leading a top-producing team in New York state to running franchise real estate across seven east coast states to helping negotiate the Cingular Wireless/AT&T merger in 2004, Selina has earned extensive experience in the industry. 

Many people in real estate don’t necessarily intend to end up there, and in a certain sense this is Selina’s story as well. Rather than following clear objectives, Selina’s career has often been steered by opportunities from key mentors, something she is quick to acknowledge. 

But on the other hand, real estate seems like the ideal fit, the only thing Selina was meant to do. She has always enjoyed being part of big things and developing others, and has an ideal mindset for large-scale success in the industry. “Most of my strength lies in systems and processes,” she says. She is the first to say she probably wasn’t “born to sell” the way the stereotypical agent is, but she was born for building organizations that last and finding the best solutions to recurring problems.

That impulse to build and improve, which had led Selina to success in the corporate world and franchise real estate, would eventually lead her to Mark Boyland’s team in Westchester County, New York, where she assumed a team leader position recruiting and developing new agents. They were a top-10 team in their market, but they had hit a plateau. “We couldn’t get to the next step,” Selina says. “We were stuck where we were.”

When, some time later, Selina and Mark saw Verl Workman speak at a Boomtown event, Selina knew the systems he was talking about were exactly what her team was missing. “I was like, ‘Oh, we need this guy!'” When they got back to the office, Selina and Mark scheduled a call with WSS to talk about getting coaching.

But there would be a twist. A week after their initial consultation, Selina says they were surprised to receive a call from Verl, asking if Mark would be interested in becoming a coach himself. “He’d been recommended, and Verl had forgotten that he’d spoken to us the week before,” Selina says. “It was kind of funny.”

In the end, Mark agreed to become a coach, with Selina as his “implementor” making sure they were employing the same systems Mark was coaching. And they saw results. By 2020 they had tripled their annual closings and were doing $80 million in volume. They were the top team in their market. But Selina’s trajectory in her career would be making an unexpected change.

For her entire career, Selina Galanis had been a woman on the move. She had helped negotiate massive mergers and built and managed teams all over the east coast. At times she had been on the road four days a week while raising five children, and worked 60-hour-plus weeks. She had been satisfied with her career so far, and all indications were that she would have kept it up. But a health scare in early 2021 forced her to reconsider her career path. 

“It was a definite wake-up call,” Selina says. She recounts sitting on the beach at Hilton Head, thinking about what she should do. It was clear there needed to be a change if she was going to stay healthy, and fortunately she saw a meaningful path forward. Having taken on some of her own coaching clients already, Selina decided she would move her family down to South Carolina, step away from the busy world she’d spent over 20 years in, and take up coaching full-time. And she’s not convinced she’ll ever go back.

“I found a kind of joy in coaching that I didn’t find in sales,” Selina says. “I feel like I’ve made more of an impact coaching than I ever did [recruiting] individual agents and bringing them onto the team.” And it’s not just about the business success her clients achieve. Selina relishes helping them find the kind of balance in their lives that she’s built in hers. 

“I’ve got a few clients where most of our calls are spent with children screaming in the background. But I’ve had five kids, so I’m like, ‘That’s a Tuesday!’ They love that I can tune that out and that I’m not there telling them, ‘You need to double your business.’ Lots of them want to grow their business, but others just want a person who understands where they are and can help them stay on track.”

It’s this perspective – the importance of maintaining a healthy, balanced life – that has motivated Selina’s choice to focus on coaching. “Had I not found Workman, had I not seen this possibility and found something that really speaks to my heart, I might not have made the change that I made this year,” she says. Her role as a coach restored her own life balance, allowing her to focus on areas of her life that she couldn’t before. “Now I’m there when my son gets off the bus, and I couldn’t do that with my other kids. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

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