Got the broker license. Not sure I want the office that comes with it

There is a middle step and you named it without noticing. You can be a solo broker with zero agents. Lots of people do exactly that and never recruit anyone. Your $3k of savings looks small but you're also comparing it to a cap you hit every year, so in a 20 side year you'd keep the whole thing instead of paying up to the cap again.

The supervision liability is the real cost and I wouldn't wave it off. Once you're the designated broker you're the one signing off on files and the requirements for that role differ by state, so read yours rather than a forum's version of it.

On managing people: don't. Not yet. Go solo for two years, build the file review habits on your own transactions where the only person you can hurt is yourself, then decide. Everyone I know who recruited on day one spent year one fixing other people's contracts and closed half their normal volume.

harrow is right that solo is the middle step, but I'd push back on the two years part. The thing that made me finally open a shop was realizing the fixed costs don't scale with headcount the way I assumed. My bookkeeper doesn't cost more because there are five agents instead of one. My E&O does, but not proportionally.

So the first two or three agents are where almost all the margin improvement lives. If you wait two years you're carrying $10k of overhead against your own production the whole time.

Your Saturday problem is real, though, and I don't have a good answer for it except that reviewing files got faster once I had a checklist that matched my state's requirements. First month it was two hours a file. Now it's twenty minutes unless something's wrong.