My Recent Revelation about Business Planning For Real Estate Agents
This week I want to tell you about an amazing revelation I’ve had when it comes to business planning. Just the mention of writing up a plan of attack conjures up nightmares for most agents, let alone all small business people. It’s just so much easier to tell somebody that you just want to sell houses, so what’s the need for all the planning… after all if we get stuck doing all this writing, aren’t we all theory and no paycheck?
Real Estate is Dangerous Without a Plan
Well simply put, that’s a very dangerous way to approach the subject. So why not start by looking at agents that are most successful. Yet that’s even harder to figure out because there is a big difference between sales success and profit success… for me, I’ve had enough of the “get the trophy” attitude and I’m much more interested in how much I really have left at the end of the day after all expenses are paid especially my real partner… the Tax Man!
Google Helps Fix My Business A.D.D.
Now of course we would all do some planning if it were easy… so I finally got fed up enough and started Googling. After sorting through every “fill-in-the-blank Business Plan I could find, it hit me. What if I just simply mapped it out? After all, I know what I’ve done that has worked and I certainly know what I’ve done that hasn’t worked. If I could lay it all out and sprinkle in a little room for growth and change driven by technology and market shifts, I could perhaps end up with a living breathing plan to follow and tweak every day if I wanted. More importantly, to conquer my business ADD, I would no longer have a stroke of genius only to write it down on a piece of paper and then lose it in the car.
Xmind.net Cures My Problem
So here’s what I did. I downloaded a $FREE.99 mind-mapping software from Xmind.net and it changed everything. Now without getting into everything I go over with our coaching clients, we simply started with marketing; picked a geography with 50K-100K population, then tiered out to 3 price ranges, next we split into buyers and sellers and then branched into all the ways we generate leads. Just imagine being able to do that with all aspects of your business. Yes, business planning is finally fun.
P.S. Without a map you’ll never really find that treasure you’re after!