If you can accurately answer these questions, there’s no need to read this article.
- What percentage of your listing presentations did you win last year?
- What percentage of the buyers you worked with purchased a property?
- What is the breakdown of all sources of your business?
- What’s working for you and what isn’t?
So, how’d you do? Okay, you’d better keep reading then!
Don’t feel bad. Ninety-nine per cent of all real estate agents already know they should be tracking this information, but don’t. It’s because they spend too much time reacting and not enough time being deliberate.
But think about this: how are you supposed to make sensible business decisions without accurate data? If you make your business decisions by the seat of your pants, remember which body part fits inside the seat of your pants.
But, seriously…You don’t need any fancy-schmancy software to do this, and it won’t take more than two or three minutes a day if you do it consistently. Even when I was doing over 100 transactions in a year, a simple, sortable spreadsheet is the only business tool I ever needed to provide a clear picture of where to spend more (or less) time and energy, allowing me to run my business more efficiently.
It’s not only the four simple questions above. You’ll be able to answer numerous other critical questions about your business, and you’ll wonder how you ever survived without this level of insight.
All you have to do is write things down. In a simple spreadsheet. Consistently.
Think about your last two or three interactions with clients or potential clients and start a spreadsheet with all the pertinent information, including the date, business source, names, address of the property and notes about what worked well or what you could have done better.
Add a new row every time you have a new potential transaction, whether it results in a sale, or not. Recording missed opportunities are just as important as successes.
I urge you to set up a Simple Business Tracker Spreadsheet now and start using it. Then set yourself a daily alarm at the same time every day that says, “update business tracker.”
You won’t start to see the real benefit of this until you’ve recorded several entries, but believe me, once you realize the power of this simple tool, you will no longer need a daily reminder.
There’s a bigger picture to this. When you start taking care of business deliberately, rather than in reaction, you become more aware of all the moving parts of your business. When you feel on top of things, it reduces your anxiety and you’ll understand better where you need to spend your time and energy.
If you feel anxiety because you’re unorganized, stop running your business by the seat of your pants.
After Ted Greenhough’s first year as a Realtor, he earned between $590,000-$865,000 every year for 12 consecutive years, all as an individual agent, without ever once making a cold call, reciting a canned script or doing any other “salesy” stuff. Now he runs Agent Skills, an online learning program for agents across North America.
