What makes a successful real estate business? What is the difference between the agents who fail and agents who thrive? Perhaps the difference is a matter less visible and less physical than the high-tech CRMs, trackers, and spreadsheets that drive our real estate businesses. Perhaps there is a real and powerful function in having a high level of focus on the fundamental principles that inspire our businesses as well.
This is why the three Ps are useful. Standing for purpose, productivity, and prosperity, each of the three principles promotes essential focus on key aspects of any real estate business. The three Ps are a standard – a code of ethics or a set of values – where your business can take root. Using these three principles, any agent can set themselves and their team (if they have one) up for success with a strong foundation.
In Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the young heroine arrives at a crossroads where she meets the Cheshire Cat. Feeling lost, she asks him which way she ought to go. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” he replies. When Alice says she doesn’t know where she is going, the Cheshire Cat tells her, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
If you do not have a clear purpose, then your business activities will not make much difference – meaning that they will not lead you anywhere in particular without proper intention behind them.
In order to build a successful business, you must do so with a laser focus on purpose. Why are you doing what you are doing? If you can’t come up with a specific, motivating “why” for your business, then you might be in the wrong line of work. Finding your “big why” can be a hard process, but without it your business won’t go anywhere.
Time management is a huge concern for agents as they are technically their own boss and need to prioritize a mountain of tasks every day. It’s probably safe to say that none of us struggle to fill the day with things to do, but how many of those activities are meaningful and dollar-productive?
Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?” When it comes to your real estate business, a key element of success is filling your days with money-making tasks that will also help you fulfill your purpose.
A simple way to draw a line between “busy” and “productive” is to determine whether a given activity directly contributes to making money. After all, one of the primary mandates of a business is to make money for the people involved with it. This is why Workman Success Systems developed the Daily Success Habits Tracker. This powerful tool makes it easy to see where you are engaging in money-making activities and where you are wasting time on “fake work” that isn’t contributing to income. Using this tool, you’ll quickly be able to see if you are spending your time productively, or if you are just being an industrious ant.
As stated above, the reason you are in business is to make profit. You are not in business to lose money or to break even. A successful business offers prosperity, for the team leader, agents, and admin alike.
Gaining and maintaining real profitability means divorcing profitability from the team leader’s individual efforts. In fact, there shouldn’t be any one person on a team who is the only reason a business stays in the black. Anyone on the team ought to be able to take a vacation and not have to worry that production will collapse while they are away.
Many Workman Success private coaching clients begin coaching with a strain on their profitability. Many team leaders struggle because their team’s profitability depends heavily on their own production, reporting that they are responsible for anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of their team’s production. A financial model like this can leave you feeling like you are as busy as you have ever been, yet your team’s overall profitability doesn’t reflect your efforts.
Having a top-producing team with balanced production is the way to have prospering real estate business. But just because things are out of balance on your team now doesn’t mean it’s a lost cause. By implementing the right systems into their daily operations, any team can achieve consistent income and long-term growth in profitability.
