Real Estate Business Plan That Withstood a Recession

How can you predict the future in your real estate business? I talk about my first business plan quite often. In 2009, I wrote a business plan that had a three year vision. I looked out five years, I looked out ten years. I broke it down into an annual plan, broke it down by quarters. And the priorities, the things I need to work on in my business, I also focused on personally, you know, what are the things I need to do on a personal basis? My habits, my routines. It was an awesome time because it was just in my mind at that time. I hadn't hired an agent. I was like deep in production that year. I sold 58 homes and I was losing my mind, I was losing my life. I was not showing up as a great husband, as a great dad. And so stick around. This video is going to be awesome. I'm going to break it down. How that plan and the methodologies and the ways I went about it, how it sticks still applies today, even in the midst of a global pandemic. And whenever you're watching this video, video, there's always going to be a shift. There's always going to be something changing. The earth, the world, our environment, the economy, the real estate market is always and forever will be changing. If you want access to a report I created, it's a roadmap. It's a blueprint of the six stages of growth. Make sure you stick around to the end of the video. I'll show you how to get access to that. Make sure you give me the thumbs up. If you appreciate these videos, subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you're the first to know about new videos when they hit. There's a saying that goes like this. If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. And it holds true in real estate where we know that, that traditional success. If you're a top agent, you know, selling 20, 30, 40 homes a year, or you're running a team and you're still in production, or maybe you have a big team and it's not set up the right way. You know that if you're not planning in your business properly and you're not executing your plans in the right way, your business is probably getting the best of you. You're probably working, you know, more hours than you need to. And if we could just sort of back this thing up a little bit and set up plans, you know, a three year vision, a one year plan, break it down into 90 days at a time, weekly commitments and our daily cadence. There is a better way to do real estate. So today I want to go through some of the things I've learned about this planning process and this is 11 years at this point that I've been planning in my business and how all of those iterations and some of the things I did back then that are still working today with our members that are going from, you know, 50, 60 transactions to, you know, three, 400 transactions, going from 70 hours a week, 80 hours a week to, you know, 40, 50 hours a week, quadrupling 10x ing their income in the process and going from no vacation to 10, 12 weeks vacation. Right. A lot of that sounds out there. And I want you to know that it starts with your plan as you consider, you know, personally and professionally, going from where you are today to where you want to be in the future. There are a few things about any kind of planning process and especially when it comes to real estate that I really need you to sort of focus on and consider implementing in your business. Real estate will consume your life. If you're a top agent, you're a team leader, you already know that to be true. A lot of times though, we rationalize that. I do have freedom. I could take off an hour from 2 to 3 on Friday. Yeah, but you worked four weekend nights and you're going to work Saturday and Sunday that weekend. There really is no freedom in traditional success in real estate. And I only say that because I've been there and I've felt that pain. And I built it out in a different way through a plan to be able to do it differently. It starts with this concept of motivation and emotional leverage. You know, in those early days when I was doing the heavy lifting and building my business and going from transaction treadmill, just grinding it out and dying every day in my business to more leverage, more systems, empowering people, you know, giving people the opportunity to achieve their goals within my business. I was very clear on, you know, why I was doing this, you know, how I was using the gifts that God gave me. And I had a wake up thought every morning, you know, I'm going to make the best of today. I'm going to build something for me and my family that they couldn't imagine being possible. I'm going to, you know, achieve time, money, freedom. I'm going to limit the stress. Like I had all these things I would tell myself, like God gave me these set of abilities, like he gave me a passion for business. You know, even when times are tough, I'm going to think about this, I'm going to Think about that. Like all of these things. And even at the time, my guiding quote was by Napoleon Hill, it went like this. What man can conceive, believe he can achieve. You know, conceive, believe, achieve. So a plan is. It's just you're conceiving something. Then the next point I have is that once you've written this plan out, you know, how do you actually believe it to be true? For me, it was double sided plan. I printed it out and I laminated it 20 times. I had 20 copies laminated of that 2009 plan that told me clearly where I was going to be in 2012 and 2014 and 2020. And it was everywhere. It was in my car, it was in the shower, it was where I got changed, it was where I did work. I had several copies in my briefcase at the time. I mean, I couldn't go anywhere without seeing this plan every day. The conceived part was done, this thing was baked. I had conceived the plan, it was laminated, right? The believe part came by me just reading it over and like, okay, I said I was going to focus on this area this year. You know, how can I get better at scripts or how can I get better at my sales process? How can I turn my sales process into a system so I didn't need to be the one doing it right? How did I go from 58 sides in 2009 to 118 sides in 2010 to 178 in 2011 where I stepped out of buyers, stepped out of listings, and in 2012 we did 248 sides and I only did one transaction. All of that in the Great Recession years where the market was tanking year after year and barely was lifting itself out of the bottom by 2012, 13 and 14, we went on to do 312 sides and over 400 transactions, where I was down to one day a week at that point in 2014. So how does that happen? It happened because I pre baked this thing. I conceived it in 2009 and I went through a process of just believing it could happen, then achieve, right? You got to conceive it, believe it, achieve it. So that's my next word of advice, is that you need to do the work, think about, you know, the areas of your life that matter, you know, both personally and professionally. Put it on paper, you know, believe it, go through a practice of reading it regularly and then achieve it, time block and actually do the work. Planning does not need to be difficult. You know, a lot of real estate agents and team leaders and you know, I happen to have a background in planning before I came into real estate. A lot of us though, we don't have that background. And I want to give you this encouragement that don't overthink this process. You know, all you really need to do to be able to plan is to sit down for 90 minutes or a couple hours in silence with no technology and just write, just write the word business and describe what you want your business to look like three years from now. Write marriage or your spouse's name and describe what you want your marriage to look like. Write out children and what you describe. You know, how you want to influence them and sort of build them up. Right. Your physical body, your spiritual journey, your emotional well being, relationships with your parents or relationships with siblings or friends or the impact you're having for your community. Your finances, you know, just write it out. Three years from now, my finances, I'm not going to have any junky consumer debt. My cars are going to be paid off and you know, I would have purchased my second investment property or my net worth, my liquid net worth is X dollars. Right. Just envision what you want it to look like in the future. I think of a member of ours who's been in our world for a little over four years now. Cody Riddle. She was, when I met her, she was 18 years into the business and this was 2000, I mean early on in real estate, B school, 2013 or 14. She had just been through the wringer in the Great Recession and so she was doing about 250k GCI, which is top agent status. She was 18 years in the business at that point and she had completely fallen out of love with real estate. She describes it to me where she was ready to get out of the business. She had her mom at the time, they were in a brokerage together. It was an independent brokerage that they owned and her mom was that traditional agent that just kind of was a real estate agent for 40 years and, and didn't pass on from this earth with anything more than the transactions that she had recently worked like, worked as a real estate agent with no real plan for freedom. When Cody tells that story, it's inspiring. On the one hand, because Cody was convinced and convicted to do business a different way. So I just said, Cody, what do you want your life to look like? What do you want your business to look like three years from now? She's like, I want to fall back in love with real estate. Because for many of those 18 years she was in love with real Estate. It was that great recession that crushed her. I want to fall back in love with real estate. I want to make a lot of money. I don't want to put in seven days a week. I'm just done with it. And so we just kind of sketched out and we made some financial moves. They owned a cabin that wasn't serving them, that was really expensive and it was a drain on them financially and just really worked with them to develop a plan plan where they could achieve what they wanted to achieve. She went from 250,000 GCI to last year she did 1.2 million only working mainly listings, working five days a week, not many evenings or weekends. This year, I think it was eight months in, she reported, she messaged me they already had closed a million dollars worth of gci. So do the math on that. Eight months in is two thirds of the year in. And so they'll do 1.5 million in GCI. And she has a small team, handful of agents, really good administrator. Her husband Bill is her business partner. So she's husband, wife, team, business partners, a solid administrator and a handful of agents. They're doing $1.5 million worth of gross commission income. And she is on fire for real estate again. She's back in love with the business. So when you think of planning, it's not like this corporate strategic planning process that I used to do in a corporate job, which that plan would sit on the shelf and it wouldn't inspire anybody. And nobody actually executed that plan in real estate, specifically making the shift from agent to owner. It's a different process and don't complicate it. Okay, so just get at it. Take some time to think about where you want to be in the future. I put together a blueprint, a roadmap to take you through the six stages of growth. And no matter where you are in the journey, every stage has a different growth question you should be asking yourself a set of tools and systems. You should be focusing on the amount of money you can make per hour at each different stage, the team and what it looks like, the team structure. To grab a free copy, go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com it's our real estate business growth navigator. Or click on the link below. Give me the thumbs up. If you like the video, subscribe to the channel and turn notifications on so you're the first to know when a new video drops. We'll see you on the next video. Sam.