About Kinder Reese
There are plenty of so-called real estate experts out there teaching agents how to succeed even though they haven’t sold a home in decades, if at all. But Kinder Reese is different. Founders Jay Kinder and Michael Reese have collectively sold more than 6,270 homes over the past two decades, they still have thriving real estate practices, and they love sharing their proven systems and processes with other agents who are serious about growing their business.
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Why every agent needs a strategic plan to grow their business
Published by Jay Kinder
There’s no arguing the fact that being a successful real estate agent takes hard work...and lots of it.

That said, just working hard isn’t going to get you the exact (and best) results in your business.

To truly excel at becoming the true CEO of your business — a business that can take care of you and your family on a year-over-year basis — you need to have a plan.
But not just any plan. No, you need a strategic plan that takes into consideration not just what you’re doing today, but how what you’re doing today ties directly to what you want for the future.

What is strategic planning?

In a nutshell, strategic planning determines exactly where your real estate enterprise is going over a specific period of time (we like 10 years) and how it's going to get there. A strategic plan is a coordinated and systematic way to develop a course and direction for your company.

Growing your business without a strategic plan is like finding your way around someplace you’ve never been before without a map. And without that map, you are lost in a fast-pace, superbly competitive industry that will very likely throw challenges your way and even gobble you up.
A good way to think is this: if there’s anything you’re uncertain about the future regarding your business, then you must have a strategic plan in place.

What does a strategic plan look like?

Your strategic plan details what the future looks like for your company so that everyone on the team - even if it’s just you - is clear on exactly what’s happening and for that matter, is on the same page. 

At the end of the day, a good strategic plan helps identify what your organization is, specifically what it does, and why it does it, with a specific outcome of optimizing your results for the future.

Strategic plans often include:

Your mission, vision and purpose statements

Mission: Entrepreneur magazine explains mission statement this way: A mission statement defines what an organization is, why it exists, its reason for being. At a minimum, your mission statement should define who your primary customers are, identify the products and services you produce, and describe the geographical location in which you operate. It’s a necessity for all businesses to succeed, no matter how small or big they are.

Vision: It’s a statement of what you want the future of your company to look like. It’s almost a roadmap within a roadmap of the way you want things to be.
Purpose: It’s why you do what you do. The best purpose statements are those that talk about how you’ll achieve your goals by helping others achieve theirs.

A SWOT Analysis

True transformation exists only on the other side of complete and total honesty. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) will tell you exactly what the good, the bad and the ugly are about your business and your market. The key to completing a great SWOT analysis are as follows:
1. Strengths and Weaknesses are internally related. The speak specifically to you, your business and what’s happening in what you do daily.

2. Opportunities and Threats are externally related: It’s all about what’s happening outside your business, in your marketplace and in the market environment in general.

3. Be super honest when identifying each element of your SWOT. You can’t make changes and improvements if you’re not honest with yourself as to what’s working and what isn’t.

Action plans for the near and long term

It’s been said you can’t eat an elephant all at once...you need to eat it one bite at a time. The same can be said about your strategic plan. You need to determine what you want in the long run by giving a clear picture of what it all looks like. Then, from there, you reverse engineer what you’re going to do over the one-, three-, five- and 10-year periods to get to where you want to be.
As part of the reverse engineering process, you’re going to identify “bite-sized pieces” or benchmarks of what’s going to happen at each interval so that you know 

1) that you’re making progress and 

2) that you’re headed in the right direction.

The key to this part of the strategic plan is to take into consideration your resources of time, energy, money and people. You can only accomplish what your resources will allow you to accomplish.

For example: If one of your outcomes is to hire an ISA (Inside Sales Agent), but if you have neither the money nor the production and lead sources to put an ISA effectively to work, then you need to plan for it accordingly and work towards it.

The great thing about reverse engineering is that since you know what your outcomes are along the way, you know what you need to achieve before you can move on to your next initiative.

Quarterly priorities

This is where the rubber meets the road.

One of the biggest questions we get from agents is: “What should I be working on right now?”. And, if you take that question into consideration of accomplishing near- and long-term goals, it’s super important to be working on the right things in the right order.

The way we determine what the right thing to do — and in what order to do it — is to create quarterly priorities that tie into the next benchmarks on the plan.

For instance, if I need more money in my business to buy more leads, then my quarterly priorities would be centered around that, i.e, collecting an admin fee, collecting marketing support from vendors, increasing your average commission per deal, etc.

Once you’ve implemented those strategies and have achieved your results, you create new quarterly priorities that guide your activities to get you to the next level.

There are other elements of the strategic plan that tie into what I’ve discussed here, but these are the main building blocks of a successful, long-term plan.

It's not a business plan

Don't confuse a strategic plan with a business plan, which is a much broader plan that includes your strategic plan as well as marketing, financial and operational plans. 

To say it another way, a business plan is much more of an aspirational document, covering what your business is about and why it has value in the market. The strategic plan, conversely, contains an action plan with specific objectives and due dates as well as setting out who is responsible for what .

If you’ve never done a strategic plan before, it’s never too late to do one.

You can click here to get a copy of ours.

If you want to accomplish great things in your business and do it faster, better and cheaper, then you need a strategic plan in place. It will take you some time to complete, but it’s the best compass for your business’ destination...whatever that is for you.

About Author: Jay Kinder

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