ICYMI: Last week, I talked about why it’s so important to identify a clear purpose for being in real estate and building a team—you must define your “big why” if you want to develop a successful business. Without a focused purpose, it doesn’t matter much what you do to advance the business because you have nowhere particular you want to go.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?” It’s easy to feel busy working in real estate, but not every task is productive. To be a successful team, each team member must focus on activities that directly lead to contracts and closings. Otherwise, they are wasting their time.
Does your team know how to define productivity? Many agents are busy, spending the entire day away from home, “at work.” But they aren’t really doing what it takes to be productive, because at the end of the day, they haven’t completed any dollar-generating activities.
Too often we get sidetracked by “fake work” and miss the real opportunities to be truly productive. Think about the difference between a productive day and an unproductive day. How much of your time is spent making money: that is, setting showing appointments, prospecting, running an open house or closing a deal? How much of it is spent on filler: running errands, doing admin work, having unproductive lunches and coffee meets?
When you leave your home every day to go out and earn money for your family, you have an obligation to actually do that. A business needs to make a profit, not cost, and in real estate, you need a strategy to make sure that your time spent equals money made. If you aren’t spending time producing income, you are not being honest with yourself or your family, and your real estate business will struggle to get off the ground.
Does that sound a little harsh? Well, it’s true. It’s the days you slack on money-making activities that cause the peaks and valleys in your business.
I’ll lay this out with two examples:
Example 1: You decide you want to start your own team together with a long-time colleague. You quickly realize that there is room on your team to add other new agents. Business seems good; you are always busy. But you are often sacrificing time on the weekends to make a deal work. Time seems to be getting away from you. You realize it’s now been a few weeks since you’ve shown a house because your time is occupied at the office dealing with other matters. You have so much to do between working in the business and working on the business, which causes you to question why you ever wanted to lead a team in the first place.
Example 2: You decide you want to start your own team together with a long-time colleague. You quickly realize that there is room on your team to add other new agents, but your partner insists on bringing on support staff as well. At first, this doesn’t seem necessary given your current production volume, but as the months pass, you see your sales increasing while at the same time having more free time than you’ve had your entire career. By not needing to complete administrative tasks, you have been able to build the business and support the team so they can provide an excellent client experience.
Do you see the difference in productivity here? In the first scenario, the team leader was bogged down by their level of production, not doing the tasks that would bring in the most revenue according to their role on the team. The second team leader found more success, profitability and free time because their time was better spent on business development than on tasks that can be delegated to other team members. That makes everyone’s time and effort more dollar-productive, every day, and that’s what makes a top-producing real estate team.
Verl Workman is the founder and CEO of Workman Success Systems, a real estate consulting company that specializes in performance coaching and building highly effective teams. Contact wss@workmansuccess.com for more information and free downloadable resources.
