Reason #994 That You HAVE TO Have A Plan For Your Real Estate Career

Yesterday I was at a Sotheby's office, having a meeting with a Broker/Owner that I respect very much. I've known him for a long time and we don't just have meetings to talk business, but also talk about the industry, where we see it going, new technology trends, and also things we just find interesting.

We got to talking about a luxury yacht website he was on that particular day (he loves boats), and he mentioned a quote he read in a post on their blog, and how much he thought it applies to many, many things, including real estate. The quote was this:

"If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there."

I'm actually familiar with this quote. It's actually a line from George Harrison's "Any Road,"which was essentially a paraphrase of an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Alice In Wonderland.

What he pointed out though is so true. So many Realtors® tell us, "I want this" or "I want that." Our response to them is always, "If you get that, what does it mean to your business?"

More often than not, they don't really have an answer for us. So at the end of the day, they want what they want, but don't actually have a reason for it. Is this a bad thing? Technically, yes. Officially, no, because so many agents are in the exact same boat. The trick is breaking yourself of this habit and only doing things that will be meaningful to your bottom line, with purpose. This requires planning.

Realtors® are such busy people, they spend most of their time reacting to things and not planning. This is the main reason that so many things they embark on, be it marketing practices, business practices, or even listing management practices fail.

If you are planning a successful real estate practice and you want to be long for this world, you need to plan EVERY aspect of your Real Estate Business.

For example:

MARKETING PLAN: Whether it's inbound or outbound marketing, you have to determine SPECIFICALLY who your ideal customers are and how you are going to attract them. If you don't do this, you are simply marketing, "for the sake of marketing," and you are just wasting your money.

CRM: If you sign up for a new real estate CRM and want to make the most of it, you NEED TO have a plan on what you need to automate in your business, what tasks can be automated that you do not want to deal with in your day to day business, and what things literally do not deserve your attention and can be solved without your involvement.

POSTCARD MARKETING: You need to decide how it is that your postcards are going to attract your IDEAL customers, and what messages and calls to action you are going to use on those postcards to attract those ideal people.

WEBSITE: Simply having a website is NOT ENOUGH. You need to have a website with the idea of attracting your ideal clients as visitors and turning those visitors into qualified leads. Otherwise, you just have a pretty website online that is doing nothing for you.

And this is just scratching the surface. I've said it before and I will say it again. Real Estate is HARD. If you didn't have to go over all these individual issues and get them in line to succeed, and suffer through it, the job would be considered easy. If everyone realized it was easy, there would be a million Realtors® out there competing with you.

So my point today is there are no free lunches in this world. If you have a plan though, and enact that plan on every part of your real estate practice, you are going to be wildly successful, beyond your dreams.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.