Most business owners skip the basics that actually move profit: monthly financials, lead-source tracking codes, and cash forecasts. Without them, you can't scale because you're the only one who knows what works.
All right, so what business are you really in? I'm going to really go through this section fast. Mostly just set up as an outline to an exercise that we're going to do here in a second. So the whole point of what we're doing is sustainability. So it's just something that's going to work over and over. It's not a complicated concept. Most businesses are set up this way. It's just in real estate and other industries. I mean, accountants, even like dentists. Some are set up in a way where the guy that owns it or the gal that owns it doesn't have to show up. But everything that we're working on is about sustainability. So if you want to work in it, you can have a position in your business, but the whole thing isn't held together by you. You're not the glue of the business. So financial time, freedom, fulfillment, challenge. Getting caught up in the details and not the outcome. So just getting caught up in the details. And if you spend like year after year just selling houses and not work toward putting together in systems that you can have other people run, you're just going to have the same year, year after year. And your business and your production and your livelihood is going to be dependent on the market and not your ability to make shit happen in your business. So without the systems, you can't scale it. There's only so much you can do, right? But without the systems, you can't truly scale it and have something that's more of an asset, unique, special way. You must make a profit, a huge profit to make it all worth it. Your business owner, start acting that way. Cover the minutia, really, even if it's just you and an admin, you really need to start thinking about your company as a business. There's all these things that have to happen. And just start to have an awareness of how much of your time is spent doing things that aren't maybe the three or four things that really get you paid in this business. So monthly financials, who is producing? So at the end of October, who will have financials back from their bookkeeper within 10 days of the close of the month? Who will have them within 30 days of the close of the month that didn't raise your hand already. Who just doesn't do monthly financials? There's a lot of pans that weren't raised. Does this take some of your bookkeepers more than 30 days to put your financials together? You need a new bookkeeper. Okay, so monthly financials, sourcing. We went to has everyone seen the number system that's in the Google Drive with the lead sourcing? It's something that we just started probably about a year ago, but it really something so simple changed our business. And who was I joking with that? Your wife needs a lead source code. So Daniel's moving into new property like today. Yeah. So he said in order to stay in this neighborhood, which is a really nice neighborhood, she needs to produce six sales and she's not licensed. So through her interminglings with the community, they're moving into a real family oriented community. So I said she has to have a lead code, you know, so she literally, if her lead code doesn't show up six times, then you're moving back to the ghetto. So I think that one document and we just use a number system and it's really cool. It streamlined everything for our business. It's like, is it 101? It doesn't really matter if it's a buyer or seller, but 101 is boomtown. They come through boomtown. We used to track like Boomtown, Craigslist, Boomtown, organic Boomtown. But we don't do that. We just do boomtown. And so is it 101? Is it 102 Commission Zinc? Is it 501 or 502? Is it Larsphere or Larspass? Client versus whatever. It's not optional, it's mandatory. Quick story, I think I tell it later, but the year that we did 1.2 million, top line, I remember it's a pretty picture. I remember I didn't have any of these systems in place and I didn't do a cash flow forecast. But I remember in like October I just went into my Wells Fargo. You know how, who's Wells Fargo? Like totals like your liquid stuff, like what you can like just do whatever you want with. And it was like 305, like 305,000. And then like three or four months later it was 27,000. And so that's one thing like, and I go through it when I talk about growth of a company but not having like this simple tool in place that like I'm always looking at like, what does November look like? Have we filled the bucket up enough where there's going to be like stuff overflowing that I could put in the bank. And then I'm looking at December already. Like so December we're about a 15 grand away gross. So gross commission, gross margin to be able to sort of be profitable in December. And so that it's just an awareness of that. Really, really super important. I can't stress it enough. Even if you don't have the business tracker, there's a simple spreadsheet in Google Drive where you can just run your numbers, just put in your cash, run what you have coming in and what you have going out and just pay attention to it, make an appointment with yourself.
