Tip for Success

"Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan." Thanks, Margaret Thatcher! That's our point exactly. One of the most important ways to ensure success is to plan for it. As a real estate agent in today's competitive market, creating a plan for growing your business is absolutely essential.

Your Plan Keeps You Motivated

If I decide that I want to lose weight, I may be able to do so. However, I'm much more likely to reach my weight loss goals if I develop a plan. For example: I'm going to lose 2 lbs. per week for 5 weeks to lose a total of 10 lbs. Further, I'm going to lose this weight by exercising at least 45 minutes each day and cutting out my white chocolate mochas from Starbucks. Weight loss is a goal; my 2 lbs/week for 5 weeks is a plan.

This same principal can be applied to real estate. Your goal can be to close more sales, but there are a lot of things you need to plan in order to achieve this goal. For example, you can plan to make 5 cold calls per day, door knock/leave flyers on one block, send local market data to 3 past clients, touch base with clients getting auto-notifications of new listings to check if their search criteria need to be defined, etc.

Trying to reach goals is intimidating enough. It becomes much more manageable when you break that goal down into steps and make a plan to achieve each of these steps. "I don't have to get from Point A to Point Z 500 miles away, I just need to get from Point A to Point B, then Point B to Point C . . . and so on."

Your Plan Saves You Time

In her blog post, "The Biggest Time Saving Tip of All Time," Laura Vanderkam recommends making a spreadsheet with 168 hours (an entire week) on it. The space after each of these hours is blank. Her point: in our free society, your time is your own. You can do with it what you will. But to do the most, you need to plan how you will fill these hours.

Functioning at the highest level requires efficiency. And efficiency requires planning. This means coordinating errands. For example, if you have a listing presentation, a meeting at your brokerage, and you need to meet a client for a signing, you should definitely plan your day. You may be able to schedule the meetings closely together so that you're not sitting in your car listening to NPR or wandering into Banana Republic ("But it's right next door to my next meeting!") while you wait for your next appointment.

You can incorporate technology into your plan to help you safe even more time. To save you the time of extra trips for document signings, for instance, you can consider a solution for digital signatures. To save you the time of digging through your address book and searching your inbox for information about your clients, consider CRM.

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