Ready for rapid growth?

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Of course you want your business to grow—but are you prepared for that growth? Now and always, you need to be thinking well beyond your current status toward the success you want to have, because if you are not prepared when it comes it will bury you.

What would it be like to be a million dollar agent? And if you have already reached that level, what would it be like to be a $2 million dollar agent? Wherever you are, plan to be bigger and better. It is your personal vision of success that will drive you to achieve. Everything else that comes up will be secondary.

Your greatest indicators for growth are knowing and reaching milestones. The first milestone is when you are making 30 transactions a year. This leads to putting on your first assistant.

Hiring an assistant is vital to your continued growth because they make it possible for you to focus on the work that matters most—namely, prospecting and meeting appointments. The assistant will do all the other necessary office tasks such as sorting and replying to emails, and maintaining the database and entering data. The next level assistant will come on when you reach your next milestone making 60 transactions a year, and this person will be able to handle basic buyer work, overflow prospecting, open for inspections and running campaigns for you.

Having great assistants also means you can take those much needed holidays off before you reach burnout, and know that your open for inspections and continuing campaigns will be properly run, vendors will be taken care of, and basic prospecting will continue. One of the truest milestones of a successful business is when the business continues to run smoothly when you aren’t there.

Successful growth is a decision. Decide what your vision is, decide to create it, decide when to put on that first assistant–and then the second–and then decide to let go and let it grow.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Succession Planning

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Having a succession plan for your business will help you define your vision for why your company exists and what your target for growth will be. You need to decide if you plan to sell a portion of the business, or the entire business at some point in the future. The people who work for you will also want to know if they might aspire to become an owner inside of your business as part of their career with you. As a business leader, establishing your vision for the company and sharing that vision with your team is important.

First you need to build a viable business that is a saleable asset. If the business is not big enough, then selling a small portion of it will not be an attractive offer to any buyer. You want to build a large enough business that a small ownership in it will offer a substantial return on investment. In the process, you also don’t want to lose your controlling interest in your business by selling off too much of it. And you can decide not to offer voting right to your owners; they can be shareholders.

You also want to wait for your business to gain reasonable maturity before you start selling portions of it. Give the business time to grow and expand. This will help ensure that you will have a substantial offering. There’s a big difference in ROI between owning 10% of a million dollar company, or 10% of a 10 million dollar company. This also allows your people to know the right time in their career to consider becoming an executive director or business owner inside of your business.

Planning for succession will involve knowing what you want to accomplish, and what will need to be in place for the growth you need to occur. Consider the size of your company in 10 years, how many business partners you will need, branch offices you want to set up and how many employees you want for each of those, and evaluate the worth of your current salespeople.

Of course, you may not want to sell any part of your business at all, and that’s fine. Keep in mind, however, that your best people are likely to leave your company at some point in order to set up their own businesses elsewhere, and they can very well become your biggest competitors. So if you aren’t going to sell an interest in your company, then focus on creating great talent through hiring and training quality assistants and junior agents who can step up as your senior agents move on.

Whatever you choose to do, be clear about exactly what you want to build and how you’re going to do that as well as your proposed timeline. Also consider planning for acquisitions of other property managements to help expand your business so it is ultimately big enough to share portions of it without losing control. Structure your vision around what you are creating and who you need to have around you to help with the process. The better your planning and resources, the better your outcome will be.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Growth, Leadership and Management Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next month.

Important Work First

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Every successful workday begins by doing the most important work first. As a real estate agent, your most important work is making calls and setting appointments. Of course, as soon as you step into your office you are faced with distractions—files on your desk, notes on your computer, messages to return and unfinished tasks. The challenge is to let all that go until you finish making those all-important morning phone calls. Nothing is more important than prospecting because nothing happens for your business until you book appointments.

If you have a clear vision of what success looks like for you and how you know when you achieve it, then you know how many active listings and open for inspections you need to see on your schedule. You have to meet people to generate listings, make sales and produce income. That all begins with making calls and booking appointments.

To make sure you will have great call sessions, start by scheduling when your first call will go out each day, and commit to making it. Expect to make 16 to 24 calls a day and have a list of names and numbers ready to go. Also consider that calling from your mobile phone rather than your office phone makes for a more personalized experience for your customers.

Next, realize that around half of your calls will require that you leave a voice message rather than speak to a person, and be ready to leave a message the customer is most likely to call back for. This is simple, really: Leave your name and mobile number only. Customers are more likely to call back if they think the call is from a friend. As soon as they call back you have the opportunity to make a conversion and book an appointment.

It is important that you consider the best times to make appointments. You don’t want to make appointments during the mornings when you need to be on the phone. And you don’t want to book appointments at times when you know your energy will be low. So decide when your best time of day is for meeting people and schedule your appointments accordingly. Within that time frame you can then offer your customer a couple of alternative times that might be more convenient for them.

You are probably more focused in the morning than at any other time of the day, so you want to capitalise on that energy and channel it into your most important work. Making calls in the mornings also allows your customers more time to return your calls the same day.

Think of it this way: Everybody wants to have a friend in the business. The time you spend making calls to people will be more enjoyable if you think of yourself as a friend calling a friend to be helpful. After all, you are not just selling property; you are building relationships and helping people make good decisions that will enhance their lives. Keep that in mind every day as you make those calls and book those appointments.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Sesame Street Simple

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The best agents know that there are a few basic questions that determine the course you need to take with your clients when conducting listing presentations. The key is Sesame Street simple: what they think they want and what they actually need are not the same. Your task as their agent is to determine their needs and their desires, help them reconcile the differences between the two, and move forward.

What you want is for your client to talk to you. There is a basic four-question formula you can engage them with:

1) What would you like to see happen here?
2) How would you like to see things proceed?
3) What would you like for me to do?
4) How can we best work together?

If you think about it, these questions structure your entire listing presentation by defining your client’s perceptions, needs and desires. What you learn here informs your thinking on the solutions you will provide to your clients going forward.

There is a danger of making listing presentations unnecessarily complex. Your goal is to make the process as simple as possible for your clients. You want them to feel empowered, confident, and motivated. You want them to have a positive sense of urgency toward choosing you and your agency to represent them in the sale of their home.

There is a real satisfaction here in truly connecting with your clients, determining their needs and preferences, and helping them move forward with their sale.

Some of the most relevant questions you can ask in order to facilitate this process are:
– Have you sold a home before?
– Do you have a preference between auction and for sale?
– Is there a particular price that you need to get in order to be able to move?

Your clients rely on and will respond to your expertise in pricing and market response. This is where you establish yourself as a trusted advisor.

Be mindful of how you want to represent yourself, in an organic interactive way, not by rote. Show them an open for inspection brochure from one of your earlier successful sales. Offer evidence of your credibility with examples of your prior sales.

Your auction bidding record is another viable determiner of your ability to deliver buyers from a variety of networks who are willing to pay a premium price for attractive properties.

You want your clients to know that you are proven to be current and connected, and thus you can be their trusted advisor. Remember, if they can’t see the difference, they won’t pay the difference. It’s up to you to represent yourself well to the consumer.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you next week.

Chase the new or work with the old?

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Like most agents, you are probably focused on prospecting for new customers and it never occurs to you to work with your past clients. But that’s exactly what you should be doing. Building relationships with your clients does not end with making the sale—maintaining those relationships is how you generate future business, with them and the people they refer to you.

Handing over the keys to a property should be a beginning, not an ending. You want to remain relevant to every client you have worked with. To do that you need a system that is scalable and teachable so that it grows with your business and becomes part of the regular work your team does.

First, as you study your market for new listings make sure you contact past clients in your database with listings in their area. Call them up and let them know when a property near theirs goes on sale and then what it sells for. This is not primarily about getting appointments, but staying current and establishing yourself as their trusted advisor. You want to be their “friend in the business.”

When you call your client back with the final sale price of that property, then you can ask if they would like to make an appointment to assess the current value of their own home based on current sale prices.

One simple system to follow is the one day, one week, one month and one year strategy that begins the day after selling your client a home. Simply call them the day after they move in and ask if they have any questions so far about the property that you can answer, or that you can ask the former residents.

A week later, call them again with an item of interest in their new neighborhood. One great gesture is to tell them about a local restaurant and arrange for them to have a round of free drinks there on your tab by mentioning your name to the owner.

In a month call them to let them know you will continue to be available if they need to contact you, that you will call them occasionally with news about properties in the area, and you will be happy to answer any questions they may have by then. This is a way to step back without stepping away, and maintaining that connection with them for the future.

The one-year call is to reinforce the continuing relationship with the client and to make an appointment to assess their home again if they are interested in knowing its current value.

Following this system is not just a good idea for keeping your past clients active with your company, but it also puts you ahead of your competition. Most agents only see 10% of their past clients again after the sale. That means their past clients can easily become your current or future clients if you build and maintain the client relationships that your competition fails to follow through with.

There is a lot to be said in favour of working with people you already know and have established rapport with. You still want to always be prospecting for new clients, but you don’t have to generate as many new contacts to be highly successful if you can maintain all of your past client relationships as well.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Burnout Recovery, Renewal and Working More Powerfully

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It happens to all of us: Burnout. How you handle it will determine what you can achieve during the busiest months of the year.

The months of August through December are big months in real estate. A lot will be happening with all the holidays, and Daylight Savings Time means more evening appointments. All of this creates additional demands on your time and energy, so having a few recovery routines in place will make a big difference in your ability to make the most of these opportunities. Especially if you are already feeling tired and irritable, you need to change the way you are working.

First and probably most important is your diet. What you eat and when you eat directly affects your energy, ability to focus, and health in general. Food is fuel, and you must refuel at regular intervals or you will stall out. Skipping breakfast and having late lunches, and later evening meals, are hard on your body. Bad eating patterns alone will wear you out. You want to eat every 4 to 6 hours, or even have 5 smaller meals a day, to keep your energy high. Drinking plenty of water is also necessary to keep you feeling fresh and clear, and presenting yourself to clients at your best.

Exercise is also a vital part of your defence against burnout as it is the very best stress relief, and stress is a major contributor to burnout. If you aren’t already training then a personal trainer could be very helpful to get you going and keep you committed. Whether you go to the gym, or go running, cycling or swimming, keep active on a regular weekly schedule.

You must get enough sleep every night, too. Commit to an appropriate bedtime, get plenty of sleep for renewal, and you will be far more productive and powerful during the day.

All of these physical maintenance elements will give you greatly improved mental focus. Keeping a daily task list will direct that focus into efficient productivity. It will also help your assistants manage workflow, stay on track, and properly execute whatever tasks you delegate to them.

Working in 45-minute segments is another way to stay sharp and focused while you are working. You will get more done in less time by taking a break every 45 minutes. Use a timer if you need to, but give your mind a rest and maintain clarity.

Good emotional energy is another factor you cannot overlook. This is generated by keeping great people with positive energy around you. Maintain healthy supportive relationships and avoid negative distractions. Listening to carefully chosen music can be highly motivational or deeply relaxing, depending on what you need it to do for you.

Finally, always keeping your goals and achievements fresh in your mind offers a tremendous boost to your energy and vitality. One of the easiest and best ways to do this is to keep notes in your mobile phone. Maintain a list of goals and a list of achievements, update them regularly and look at them daily. These notes are a ready source of inspiration whenever you need a boost for your confidence or sense of purpose. Setting a short-term goal every few months and achieving it is a great way to boost your sense of personal accomplishment, too.

If you want to stay consistent and avoid burnout during these high-productivity months ahead, then make sure you have all of these areas covered. Diet, hydration, exercise, sleep, mental focus and emotional energy, and keeping your goals and achievements always fresh and current—all these factors work together to keep your energy high. It’s your energy, after all, that really sells.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

When do you change gear?

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Being a real estate principal is about being a leader and growing your business. Before you can do that, you have to decide what kind of principal you are and who you want to be.

There are basically two kinds of principals:
• The principal who is an active listing selling agent
• The principal who is a coach, leader and mentor

You might be thinking, in terms of revenue, if you are acting as an agent you can make 60%, 70%, or even 100% of your business revenue, but to do that you must sacrifice your role in coaching, leading, and mentoring your people because you simply have to spend too much time with the tools. And though it is true that you can make a $10,000, $15,000 or $20,000 fee whenever you list a property yourself, when you list a great salesperson they can generate $100,000 to $150,000 in fees every year they work inside your organization.

It is necessary for you to decide what you really want to be best at, and what you want to do with your business in the next five years. Of course you love listing and selling, but you can achieve more by being a leader—and the people who work for you are counting on you to do that and to learn from you.

Consider that the agents who work for you are actually your internal customers. They believe you have a plan they can learn from to help them achieve more in their own careers, and in essence they are paying you up to half of their income to learn from you while they work inside your organization. They aren’t there just to list and sell property; they are there to benefit from your management, coaching and leadership. You should ask yourself if they are reaping those benefits–if they are increasing or declining in their income production.

As a principal, you must first be clear about what you ultimately want to accomplish in your business, and then you must share that vision with your people. Be a good mentor and help them to realize their potential whilst working within your organization. Be available to talk with them and answer their questions. Have coffee or lunch with them. Find out what their dreams and goals are. Find out what their expectations are of you, learn what they have to offer your organization, follow through on your promises, and help them to help your business grow and prosper.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Growth, Leadership and Management Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next month.

Getting clear on what you want

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Making significant changes in your business often begins with improving your life in general. Most important is having the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what you want out of life. Once you can define that for yourself, everything else—including your business–can fall into place for you.

There are three simple steps you can take to start making those progressive changes in your work and your life:

1. Keep an Achievements List
2. Keep a Lessons Learned List
3. Have a Statement of Purpose

In our business we are exceptionally busy and we often don’t recognize all of our achievements because we are always focused on the next step forward. So the first step you should take is to create an Achievements List as a note in your mobile phone.

Every time you do something important in your life, put it in your Achievements List. This includes things like making time for your family, having a great day at the gym, or participating in a charity event. Then, if you are having a disappointing day or questioning your abilities, pull up your achievements and remind yourself that you are making progress and accomplishing important things.

Next, you need a list for Lessons Learned. This is where you document things that go wrong and mistakes you make. But this is not a list of failures; this is a list of solutions. After you get through a crisis, write down briefly how you resolved it, what you learned and how to keep it from happening again. Not only is this a reminder for you, but it is also wisdom you can share with assistants and colleagues when they find themselves in similar situations.

Your next note to yourself is a Statement of Purpose based on the often-quoted phrase that the tragedy is not that we will die; the tragedy is that we will live, but allow something important to die within us. Spend some time discovering what is most important to you in your life and write it down so you can see it whenever you need a reminder. This is your purpose. Without it you have very little motivation to accomplish anything.

People feel energized by others who are positive, active and motivated. For your life and your business, you want to have that attractive, vibrant life energy about you. Whatever your age, you have a lot of potentially productive years ahead of you. What do you want to do with the rest of your life?

The book Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly is about fulfilling one’s life dreams. There are exercises you can do from this book that examine your areas of interest, including travel, adventure, creativity, character, legacy, financials, professionals, relationships, spirituality and more, to determine what is most important to you. Once you choose the areas of life that are most meaningful to you, then you can focus your energy on those areas.

This basic life choice was summed up in the movie The Matrix when Neo has to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. Most likely, if you would choose the blue pill you would not be in this business today. The blue pill offers a normal, mundane life. The red pill offers a real chance to live life to the fullest.

Do you want a bigger house than you have now? Do you want to travel the world? Do you want to have a family? Do you want a passive income of 100,000 or more per year?

Don’t be afraid of making money. Money gives you opportunities that you do not have without it. Money allows you to have a positive impact on the world and to support the values you believe in. Money allows you to live a life of significance.

Know what you want out of life. Learn from your experiences. And never forget what you contribute to the world every day. All of this will make a difference in your business and in your life.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Past Clients – Out Of This World Customer Service

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You may be missing an entire market segment that is sitting in your database right now. It’s a source of uncontested business that no one else is working—but you are about to do just that. What are you missing? It’s your list of past clients.

You actually have two sets of past clients to work with: the people who have sold property with you, and those who have bought. In order to work with this market you need to do two things that you should already be doing:

1. Build and maintain client relationships
2. Stay actively relevant

Most agents probably do not follow up with past clients more than once or maybe twice after a sale is completed. Years will go by and no contact is made. There’s no relationship and no relevance in that. You can do better than this. Rather than being done as soon as the sale is completed, your next level of prospecting is just beginning.

The customer service you perform after a property changes hands is where your future business and customer loyalty will be set. It starts with the experience you provide as soon as the client picks up their keys from you. Instead of having them come to your office to get the keys, why not meet them at the property and escort them in? How about a small housewarming gift waiting in the kitchen as well?

After the new homeowners have had a day or two to settle in, you can give them a call and ask if they have any questions or concerns, or anything you might need to ask the previous owners about for them. In about a week, call them again to make sure everything is still going well. Then in about a month, check in with them one more time.

From this point onward make sure they get quarterly newsletters and alert them to related sales in the area. Then make a yearly appointment to see them and the home so you can keep them apprised of its value in the marketplace. Keep yourself current with them and maintain that relationship.

Most agents only check back with fewer than 5% of their past clients after a property is sold. That represents 95% of a market segment that is essentially untapped and uncontested. That can be your market segment, with better fees and more recommendations through the relationships you build and stay active with. You can base your entire agency on this philosophy and train all your incoming agents to follow up this way. You can be the best at what you do and stay ahead of your competition by simply delivering a higher level of service than anyone else.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

The List – Ultimate Productivity

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There are some surprisingly simple systems you can use to get yourself back on track and working at your ultimate level of productivity.

First, increasing your daily bookings is as basic as starting each call session with a list of your top 5 potential sellers. It’s those face-to-face appointments with clients that get listings and, ultimately, sales. Just think about what happens if you start every business day calling five potential clients first thing, before you even check your email. You can’t take them to market if they don’t know you, so make those calls and see those people.

Out of the hundreds–or thousands–of prospects in your database, you need a reliable method for choosing which ones are potential sellers. One of the simplest ways to do this is to create a special Seller Hit List category in your database for potential sellers. These are people who own property in a marketplace where they are likely to sell in a given number of years. For some markets that may be five years, for others it could be twenty years.

Your goal in locating and contacting potential sellers is to progress them into a market appraisal. This is where you can talk with them directly about what it will take for them to make a decision to sell. Pricing context is a key component to this discussion as you must find out if there is a price range they would not consider at all for their property, a price range that might interest them, or a price range they would definitely sell for if they could get it.

Once you are clear on a client’s pricing expectations you can then advise them on whether selling in the current market is a good move, or if they might want to wait for market conditions to improve for their property. Delivering a sound professional recommendation to a client is the best way to become their trusted advisor and gaining their loyalty for future real estate transactions.

The people who come through the market appraisal looking like potential sellers are the ones you categorize in your Seller Hit List. These are the people you will call regularly in order to bring them to market as soon as they are ready.

Keeping your systems simple is key to remaining flexible, responsive and current. Unfortunately many agents suffer from “task load” which means they encumber their databases with too many tasks and activities and eventually burn out trying to keep up. Consequently the few truly important tasks get buried and lost. You can avoid this pitfall by being clear about your process, and selective in your tasking and scheduling. One way to do this is to simply wrap up your phone calls by asking when you can next speak with that client, and scheduling that next contact point before ending the phone call.

Ultimate productivity is based on working a category, not individual clients. Each client fits inside a category, so if you address communications to the category—emails, market news, videos, etc.–then each individual will get the specific message that is relevant to their situation.

Still, it is your daily 45-minute phone sessions that drive your business. If you’re not making calls then you will have no appointments, no listings and no sales. Therefore the best time to make phone calls is the minute your day begins. Very simply, if you want more business more often, then you’ve got to be on the phones more often. So your most important task every day is to have your list of people to call, and get on the phones first thing. This is what it takes to be a great agent. It’s up to you to get serious about your business and make it happen.

I hope you have enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip. If you have a topic you would like to see discussed here, simply reply to this email. We’d love to assist you at the Josh Phegan Company, and we look forward to seeing you here again next week.