Dominique Duque lives for the present. After a lifetime spent traveling the world, growing a family, and building her own business, the Miami-based Sales Manager knows how important it is to follow your bliss, seize your moment, and focus on the things in life that really matter to you.
As a Compass Sales Manager, Dominique oversees a portfolio of 300+ agents, and she urges them everyday to be mindful of these same life-affirming principles. Empowering agents to do their best work and live their best lives is the essence of Dominique’s role.
To hear Dominique tell it, Sales Managers are required to don many caps throughout the course of their day: counselor, therapist, executive, life coach, friend, confidant, even parent.
“My job all comes back to the same thing, which is giving back,” she says. “It’s about helping other agents become the best version of themselves.”
Her work requires a nurturing nature and generous spirit, and a quick conversation with Dominique immediately reveals why she’s so eminently suited for the job: she exudes warmth, openness, honesty, and just the right mixture of confidence and self-deprecation.
Yet while the role seems a perfect fit for Dominique now, becoming a Sales Manager for Compass was not always in the cards. A desire for lucrative part-time work first led Dominique to the real estate world fourteen years ago, when she first secured her license and became an agent. She subsequently built a successful business servicing the Miami Beach and Aventura markets before making the move to Compass in 2017.
A self-professed lover of all things technology and marketing, Dominique was originally drawn to Compass because of the brokerage’s unique platform and reputation for being on the cutting-edge of real estate. She also wanted to build her own team of agents and felt Compass would offer her more support in this endeavor than other brokerages.
Like many agents who migrate to Compass, right away Dominique’s business experienced that fabled Compass “glow up.” Within three months of joining Compass, she went from having an inventory of three listings to twenty! She was doing big business and making her mark, yet something wasn’t quite clicking for Dominique.
“Chasing the next deal, focusing on volume of listings and sales, it stopped being exciting to me,” Dominique admits. “What I found myself being really excited about was helping other agents.”
Though it was the Compass platform that first brought Dominique to the brokerage, it was the Compass culture that kept her there.
“I fell in love with the culture here,” she says. “Collaboration is the first word I think of when I think of Compass. I’ve been at other brokerages that were competitive to the extreme. Compass is not like that. The agents here are competitive, but they also want to help each other out, they want to help each other grow.”
Dominique herself personifies Compass’s collaborative culture. Indeed it’s precisely because of generous, good-natured sales managers like Dominique that Compass has garnered a reputation in the industry for being the brokerage that cares about its people and puts its agents first.
Within the halls of Compass Florida, Dominique herself has earned a reputation for staying fiercely committed to her agents. When meeting with her one-on-one, agents know they command Dominique’s full attention and complete focus.
“When I’m talking to them, I never look at my phone, I’m never checking my email. I’m very mindful of their time and I’m focused 100 percent on them.”
And while Dominique is happy to talk shop all day long with the agents she manages, she also uses their intimate conversations to remind them to always be thinking about the big picture in life, to always be mindful of how important it is to stop and smell the roses once in a while and just be present in the moment.
“Life can change in an instant. If you have something to say to somebody, say it now. If you want to do something in life, do it now. It all comes down to being a little more present in the moment. I always tell my agents, if you tell me a year from now ‘I took that great vacation,’ or ‘I spent more time with my family this year,’ that will make me much happier than saying, ‘I just made $3 million.’”