Real Estate Calendar: How to Plan Your Year for Maximum Profit

Alright, so if you're a real estate agent and you struggle to get traction in the business, meaning, you know, maybe you get a client and then you service that client, you get them to closing, but in the meantime you forgot to do all the stuff that got you busy in the first place. Today's video, I'm going to dive in and literally show you the exact calendar that I would use. And I've used it a little different back in my day, but I'm going to go through everything we've learned over a decade coaching agents. 2000 agents have been through our world and this is the, the calendar I would use to get to four to five transactions per month. And if you don't know who I am, my name is Lars Hedenberg, the founder of Real Estate B School, the creator of the Million Dollar Agent method. And I help agents scale their businesses without the grind, without losing their life in the process. So let me share my screen here and if you missed, I did a recent video, I think it's the one right before this on the Agent Performance Dashboard. That video, along with what I'm about to unpack for you here, exactly how to set up your calendar so you can get all the businesses business in and all your personal stuff in. These two go really well together, so make sure you check that one out. And if you know, after kind of just being in my world for a little while that you need help with some of this stuff, all I can offer you is a conversation about your business. So go to milliondollaragentmethod.com and book in a strategy session there. So the intention, you know, and when I look back on my journey, I figured out a way to generate. I'm a systems guy. So when I think about business and this goes back to me just getting into real estate, I was like, okay, so how can I set up a lead gen lever, I call it Lead gen Levers now how can I have leads coming in and the systems I can put in place to be able to convert them into first of all just conversations, but then also nurture and you know, know 90% of folks that come into my world as a lead aren't ready to transact in the next 30 days. So you have to have all these nurture sequence in place and then all the sales and consultation frameworks and then leverage around client care and all of that. So I didn't know it at the time, but the Million Dollar Agent method was born out of me, you know, grinding through this stuff and all the trial and error. And the one thing I did really well was that I guarded my time even when I was in the grind. So my first 10 months in the business started, sold 27 homes, 40 for my first full year. I did bring on a part time administrator that year who turned full time and that third or second full year I did 58 transactions. So I know that this is going to work if you put this into your calendar and you actually do what your calendar tells you to do. So let's unpack this here. And there's some things, you know, I think I have one, one workout in, in this, in this whole calendar which is not, is not gonna work if you wanna take care of body. But the point is you have to use a calendar, electronic calendar I think is a better way to go about it than, than just kind of winging it. And this is Google Calendar. So the first thing that I want you to do when you start this exercise is decide when you're not going to work. It's critically important. Real estate will always be there. If you let real estate take up 80, 90 hours a week, it will take up every waking hour. So you have to claim some boundaries early on. I don't care where you are in your journey, if you're doing 100 transactions or you're doing 10 transactions, you're just getting into the business. Decide now what your business hours are. So in this example here, I would model something very, very close to this. In this example it's 8:30 to roughly 5:30, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday on Wednesday and Thursday a little longer day. So 8:30 to 7:30 and Saturdays 9 to 1 by appointment only. Those are my business hours. So when I'm working in my new business development time blocks, which is an important business activity, I'm filling appointments that are already premeditated in my calendar. If someone says, you know, hey I can get together Friday at 5:30, it's like ah, crap it. I have an appointment Friday evening, I can't make it. But since you are pre approved, you know, and you're ready to go, I have an opening, you know, Saturday at 9am for 90 minutes. We could probably take a look at those three houses and write an offer on one of them if it's the perfect house for you. Right? So you're, you're navigating these different time blocks, but this is how your business should operate. I'm getting ahead of myself. First things first, all the red, red in business implicates a loss if you're looking at a profit. And Loss statement. Generally red is not a good thing in the context here it means love. Either self care or you know, doing the stuff that's important. You know, your relationships, your family, you're dating, your spouse and all of that stuff. So I do think some kind of quiet time every day. Maybe not for an hour. Ours is currently. It's not quite 6am anymore, but it's like 6:30 to 7:30. We do a devotion and then we read the Bible, then we do a meditation and then we pray. So that's me, that's my faith. Even if you don't share any kind of religion or faith, you should have time where you're just sitting still. Maybe you're journaling or. I do have a five minute journal, a gratitude app. You could just review your goals. I review my goals every day. I have an app called Tick Tick which I'm obsessed with is T I C K T I C K and I can, I'll show you one of the coolest parts. It has a little Eisenhower matrix in there which is the urgent and the important. And I track all of my stuff. All my goals are in here. You can see my personal habits and goals are listed there. Read those every day. My financial goals, my. I've got two businesses so my goals in the different businesses so highly recommend organizing yourself in some sort of. And that includes project and task management and also habits. So I've got my. I think what I have 1, 2, 3. So six daily non negotiables which are tracked as habits in this app. So starting your day in some kind of solitude or just thinking, even if you could only manage, you know, 10 or 15 minutes, even just a straight up meditation, you know, calm C A L M is a good one. There's also another one. What's the name of it? I forget the name of it. It's more of an instructional how to teach you how to meditate, something like that. Okay, so that should start the day then if you're, you know, if you do have a family, you know, guarding some time where you know, you know, my kids are getting up around 7am Still. This is similar to mine. I block out about. I don't start my business days until 11am anymore but my mornings are pretty similar to this where I know that I need about 60 to 75 minutes to get my kids situated and to be present with them and to play with the dogs with them and to get them lunch and breakfast and all of that stuff. So block that time out. The non negotiable Here is if you want to make a ridiculous amount of money, I wish there was a different way to do it. I wish there was. There's nothing. So acknowledging that your ability to have to make an unbelievable amount of money or an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time is directly correlated to your ability to guard your time blocks in the morning around new business development. I don't like the word prospecting. I just don't, I don't love it when you hear the word new business development. How can you be in sales and not commit to daily new business development? Like if you worked for a sales organization and you had a manager that was looking at your activities, you know what you were actually doing, would you even keep your job? Think of that for a second. If you had a sales job, are you actually doing the activity of a salesperson over the course of a week? You know how many dedicated hours? And I would say new business development or lead follow up. This schedule here is four hours a day, five days a week, 20 hours, probably a 50 hour. You know, we coach and train. Even if you're at 100k, you want to go to 250 to 500 to a million. We coach around a 50 hour work week. You could do it in less, especially as you get leverage. But, but we don't work more hours as the business grows, we just make more money per hour. I did another really good YouTube video on that topic. How to go from a hundred k to a million. How to scale your real estate business from a hundred k to a million. Where I literally went through all the different stages. Make sure you check it out if you want to navigate that growth because it's not necessarily easy. It's littered with pitfalls. New business development. If you struggle to sit down or who would I call or I don't have leads coming in, that's a separate issue that we can help you solve. Million dollaragentmethod.com just booking a strategy session. You have to be able to generate new business on the daily and do whatever you can do to have as many meaningful conversations, which is a two way conversation with a decision making adult about real estate agents that fail to scale not only their bank account or the number of transactions, but fail to scale their lifestyle. Not just like buying a nice car. I know plenty of agents that have like nice cars but they're working eight days a week, right? So when I say scale, I mean scale everything. Scale your lifestyle, scale your freedom, scale your business. The big difference here is that you're doing the things required to, to bring in more business than you could possibly handle. And that just makes allows you to make different choices about how to buy back your time. Whether it's delegation or automation or you know, a technology bit that might make the business run smoother. So new business development that's non negotiable. Typically it's a three hour time block. It's 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off, 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off. So your hard core reaching out to people and having conversations for five, zero minutes and you're taking a 10 minute break. 50, 10, 50, 10. You take a little break. Don't let your whole day squirrel away from you. When it's, when you take this office break here, just make sure there's nothing like really, really blowing up and then get back into lead follow up. The 90% of folks that aren't ready to transact now. New business development, you need leads. We've got four pillars of million dollar agent method and I'm only telling you about the four pillars because all of this fits right into it. The first pillar is what we call leverage lead generation. It's your database, your social media. 10 other lead gen levers, you have to have lead gen levers installed in the business to have leads coming in so you have something to do during new business development. Lead follow up is all the nurture sequence, all the lead management protocol, how to follow up, what questions to ask the lead nurture sequences which is the emails and texts and the value that you're providing over time. So they're pre sold on working with you when they're ready and, and then you're filling appointments in the morning, you're filling these appointment slots in the afternoon and that's where the sales and consultation frameworks come in. That's our third pillar. So lead gen levers is number one, the appointment setting process which not only the scripts but also the lead conversion sequences and systems. And then your consultation frameworks is the third pillar. If you could stick to that on the daily, you will be able. You'll put yourself in a position to be able to at a minimum outsource your listing coordination, your closing coordination, your marketing coordination and all the courier activities that you do. Right. A busy agent. If I were to follow them around for a week and look at where they spent their time and I could smack them over the head with a two by four every time they did something that was less than $20 per hour they would have a bloody skull. It would be awful. And that's like A highly productive agent. Let's say an agent selling 25 homes for 250k GCI that's typically like there's a couple ceilings, there's the 100k ceiling and then the 250k ceiling. If you don't have these systems installed that help you run the business at a higher level so you can scale it, you will hit an absolute wall, absolute ceiling. And so in that analogy, I'd just be hitting them over the head all day long. Because we think the job of a real estate agent is to go out, you know, let's just start the day and see what happens. And you know, I'm now running an errand over here to maybe show a home. But then I'm meeting an inspector, I'm dropping off a lockbox, I'm picking up a check at the attorney's office, I'm stopping by the office, I'm talking, you know, it's all these activities that are not highly not dollar productive essentially. So different conversation, but it fits into this overall context here. The reason why most agents don't have more business than they can handle is because they're not focused on the less than handful of things that make agents a lot of money. There's only a few things here and it's literally, I mean there's an acronym. P, L, A, N S. So five things. P is for prospecting, which I like. New business development. L is for lead follow up, which is on the calendar. And A is for appointments, which is on the calendar. N is negotiating deals. First time negotiation, not appraisal or inspection. You do that in between the appointments. And then S is systems work. And so I've only got one, one time slot in here for work on the business. But your systems work. Pick a different color. Get a couple of these in your calendar where you're going to actually work on building, building a better and bigger business through building out systems. Now again, if you don't know what systems you could possibly install and you're hustling and you're at the six, the, the six figure mark, maybe you hit more than that. You definitely need to go to milliondollaragentmethod.com get three to four workouts in there. This is a bad example because I only have one workout in there. Put the family time in the calendar, get your family fun nights in there. Or Fridays where family fun nights, you know, get your date nights in there, guys, date your wives, super important, non negotiable. And then your work on business time blocks. I Like early in the morning on Saturday. And then last thing here that I would definitely make sure you don't miss out on is, and this is critical, it's a weekly planning session. And so every week you're going to have an appointment with yourself where you're looking at your calendar, you're looking at how your week went. Did you honor your time blocks? Did you, you know, what should you start doing or stop doing? Don't be like overly critical of yourself. No shame, no blame. Just look at how the week went and then what would you do differently going forward? And then look at your following week and see how you can move around your time blocks. One other tip, make sure you negotiate all of this with your spouse. So commit to the date night, commit to the family night, commit if you need a couple late nights, commit to when those are and don't move them. And then get your workouts in. And so for probably two years, when I had exited the buyer side of my business and I was only doing listings, I would have two or three listing appointments every Saturday. Could I have pushed harder to get them done during the week? I could have, but for me, I could list two or three homes every Saturday and I would list during the week as well, but I could list two or three homes on a Saturday. And to me it was totally fine. It was my position on the team at the time the team was scaling, I was bringing in other agents and eventually had a couple really good agents that came in as more junior agents that were able to elevate into full listing agent roles. And so that's it, my friends, you know, if you're not using a calendar at a very high level, you are missing the opportunity to make that unreasonable amount of money and reasonable amount of time. And like I said, if you know, you need help even with installing a time system for one of the first things we focus on when we start working with people and every time we get on a call, the million dollar agent method, it's only a 13 week implementation. So we work together for 13 weeks and we install all of the lead gen levers, all of the lead conversion systems, and all of the sales frameworks and anything on the leverage clients care side that you need as well. But we work on productivity. Time management is forever and always an issue for everyone, myself included, right. I get busy and I tend to drop a workout or I'll work late one night. And I told, you know, my spouse I wasn't going to. And you know, none of this is easy, but you have to constantly be willing to look at the calendar, do those weekly planning sessions so you can move things forward. So if you know we need to have a conversation, go to milliondollaragentmethod.com Much love, much respect. And we'll see you on the next video.