Professional Bio

Jonathan H. Lack is the Founder and Principal of ROI Ventures, a strategic planning, fractional COO, and business coaching advisory practice focused on helping top real estate agents and team leaders work smarter, sell more, and build more scalable, profitable businesses. For more than 35 years, Jonathan has helped companies and leadership teams improve performance by bringing greater discipline to strategy, operations, financial management, organizational structure, accountability, and execution. His work spans more than 15 industries, including family businesses, finance, healthcare, high-growth companies, professional services, real estate, startups, technology, and turnarounds. His early business experience was shaped by his family’s Houston-based retail business, Lack’s, giving him a practical understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing entrepreneurial, privately held companies.

In residential real estate, Jonathan works with high-performing agents and team leaders who need more than coaching but are not ready to hire a full-time COO. He helps them clarify strategy, strengthen accountability, improve lead conversion, align staffing and compensation, manage financial performance, improve recruiting and role clarity, and build the operating systems needed to support sustainable growth. His work is especially focused on helping agents and teams move beyond reactive management, reduce chaos, and create the structure needed to grow without burning out.

Jonathan has advised a number of leading residential real estate teams and agents, including Carey Hagglund Condy Team, Dana Green Team, Kopman Adler, Neal Ward Properties, Sally Forster Jones, Stephanie Younger Group, The Coley Group, The Jamie McMartin Group, Trove Partners, and other high-performing teams across major U.S. markets. His approach applies management disciplines from multiple industries to the unique realities of residential real estate, where growth often depends on stronger systems, clearer accountability, better execution, and more disciplined financial management.

Jonathan is also a speaker and thought leader on business strategy, operational discipline, and how real estate professionals can run their businesses more like businesses. His speaking engagements include Performance Coaching’s Game Plan 2026 and the 2023 Compass Retreat. His sessions focus on helping agents and team leaders run their businesses more strategically, using objective audits, stronger operating discipline, and clearer execution systems to work smarter and sell more. [View speaking clips here.]

Jonathan is the author of You Can’t Scale Chaos: The Real Estate Team Playbook for Working Smarter and Selling More, Plan to Turn Your Company Around in 90 Days, and co-author of The Real Estate Team Playbook. He is also developing OFP: Own It. Fix It. Prevent It., a framework for building a stronger culture of accountability in an increasingly AI-driven, chaotic, divisive, and multi-cultural world. His real estate advisory work is grounded in frameworks such as SELL™ and the five critical audits — sales, competitor, brand, financial, and market — that help agents and teams gain a clearer, more objective view of performance, positioning, and opportunity.

Jonathan is also the host of ROI BizTalk, a podcast focused on leadership, operations, marketing, finance, and growth strategy for real estate professionals and entrepreneurial business leaders. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School, an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and a BA from UC Berkeley.