By creating a solid strategic plan, you’re able to take stock of where you are with respect to money, people and time to see what’s working and what’s not working.
Once you know where you stand in these areas, you can figure out what you need to do on a day-over-day basis to make the necessary changes to achieve the outcomes you seek in improving your business.
From there, you can put your long-term plan together to reverse engineer your plan to current-day activities so that you’re working on the things that will get you to your goals in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of money spent in doing so.
Without a strategic plan in place, your business becomes more of a “ready, fire, aim” approach.
While doing this can net you some “bullseye’s”, it’s not going to help you hit the target with any sort of consistency.
Benjamin Franklin said it best: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”
2. You don’t know where you’re spending your money.
It’s one thing to spend money to grow your business. It’s an entirely different thing to know where you’re spending it and what your return on investment (ROI) you’re getting.
I’ve spoken with tens of thousands of agents who’ve spent money on different lead generation strategies, technology platforms, marketing ideas, and even people on their team without realizing whether or not they were getting a good ROI on those expenditures.
Then, only after I asked them to look at it -- and they did -- were they horrified that they had spend thousands of dollars on things that brought them no profitability.
I’ve also worked with agents who spent money on these same items and, even after they determined there was no ROI, continued to spend money “hoping” that things would turn around...only to have them not.
Unfortunately, when it comes to improving your business and putting your money to work, hope is not a strategy.
In order to have your business perform optimally, you must know where your money is going and what you’re getting in exchange for it.
Sadly, many agents don’t.
As a result, it either leads to them having to exit the business earlier than they had planned or work way, way harder than they need to in order to get results.
Simply employing a budget and then tracking what results come from those expenses would keep everyone from either overspending or spending foolishly (which, as I write this, I realize is just another form of overspending). 😀
Make the commitment to create a budget, stick to it and stop spending money on things that just don’t pay dividends in your business.
Your bank account will thank you.
3. You don’t know where you’re spending your time.
This one is a tough one for virtually every person who becomes a real estate agent.
Real Estate is one of the few industries where you nether have a product to sell nor prospects to sell to when you get started.
What’s even tougher is that once you sell a home, you’re often in the same boat.
You’re only true commodity is time and it’s what you do with it that counts.
Unfortunately, most agents aren’t trained properly on the right things to do, the right order in which to do them and how much time should be spent on doing them.
As a result, they have trouble getting their business to sustain consistent results in production and profitability.