Everyone wants to be successful. Certainly, every real estate agent I’ve ever met wants to be successful. And they expend enormous amounts of energy pursuing success. They hurry from prospecting activity to prospecting activity in search of their next success.
What they often don’t do is define exactly what success might mean for them. This makes their pursuit of success a little blind, a lot inefficient, and often very ineffective.
So what’s the solution? A business plan.
It may sound scary to consider, but your business plan doesn’t have to be the sort of thing you’d submit to a bank to secure a loan. All it really needs to be is an explanation—to yourself—of what you want your personal success to look like. If you have trouble getting started, consider putting on paper two simple elements:
- An analysis of last year’s business
- Where did your clients come from?
- How many listings did you have?
- How many buyer-assisted sales did you close?
- Which marketing efforts produced results? Which did not?
- How much money did you make?
- An projection for next year’s business
- How will you target clients this year?
- How many listings will you get?
- How many buyer-assisted sales will you close?
- What marketing efforts will you engage in?
- How much money will you make?
That’s it. You can write it on the back of an envelope, if that helps you. Organizing your thoughts will help you come to a better understanding of what, exactly, you mean when you strive to be successful. After all, it’s a lot easier to reach a goal if you know what it actually looks like. As the end of the year approaches, I will be sitting down with each of my agents to help them analyze their last year’s business and make some goals and plans for the next year.
