2 Real Estate Business Planning Mistakes Solo Real Estate Agents Make
Why most real estate agent business planning is a waste of time?
If you're a real estate agent getting ready to do some business planning for your upcoming year, you want to read this article to see the 2 major mistakes that I believe real estate agents, especially solo real estate agents make when it comes to their business planning.
If you do have a business plan, good for you! A plan is better than no plan.
Making a grocery list and then forgetting it at home is still probably better than not making a grocery list at all.
A study in the journal of management studies found that companies that plan grow 30% faster than those that do not plan at all. But, unfortunately, another study found that the majority of entrepreneurs that do create a plan, never even look at their business plan after that.
Two biggest mistakes solo real estate agents make, and why they fail in their business planning.
1. You're just way too specific.
If your business plan is a workbook, if it got pages, it's probably the wrong business plan.
Keep in mind, we're talking about solo real estate agents here.
Now, if you're a giant team, if you're a large brokerage and you have departments and you have managers and different people oversee, totally get that.
But when it comes to being a solo real estate agent, you want to keep things small. You want to be able to use your greatest strength, which is being able to be nimble. You want to be able to do things quickly. You want to be able to adapt. The big teams can't do that so don't follow the same type of business planning and patterns that they do. Make a business plan that makes sense for you, to your competitive advantage.
Be nimble. Be quick. Don't make it giant. Don't make it so specific.
2. Too activity focused with their business planning.
It's more about tracking. They're measuring, they're identifying how many calls they need to make, or the number of doors that they need to knock or how many touches they need to make with their sphere or their database.
The more important thing that you need to focus on than activities is what is your overall strategy.
Keep it simple. Focus on the strategy that you have in mind. In fact, I don't even think you should think about it as a business plan. Think about it as strategy creation and then action planning
DARIN’S TAKEAWAY…
The big overall takeaway that I want you to have from this is that a yearly business plan is probably not the best thing. It would be more effective to look at creating a 90 day strategy and what action steps do you need to take to hit that 90 day strategy. From there, create your next 90 day strategy. You should be nimble. You should be quick. Use that competitive advantage.
Also realize that in today's world, digital world, the real estate market, everything taking place, things are moving very quickly.
You probably couldn't have accounted for what was going to happen with Zillow and their iBuyer program a year. But if something was built into your business plan to try to take advantage of that or develop your own buyer, iBuyer program or to use your brokerage's iBuyer program, maybe that would have been an entire waste of time, waste of energy, waste of money, waste of resources. The furthest that I think you really need to look out when it comes to business planning is 90 days.
Don't get that twisted. Don't get that mixed up with having a plan for your life, of having an overall vision for what you want your life and your career to look like.
But when it comes to what actions are you going to take? I think planning for a year is overkill.
Focus on 90 days at a time.
Here’s 4 things you can do right now:
1. LEADS (GET TO 6 FIGURES): PROGRAMS & COURSES
2. LEVEL UP (GET 6 FIGURES+ ): COACHING
3. LEVEL UP ACCELERATOR: ONE DAY DEEP DIVE
4. LEVERAGE (TIME BACK FOR 6+, 7 FIGURES): LET DARIN DO IT