Setting Up Systems For Success In Your Real Estate Business

When I mention the word systems, you know, we all intuitively perk up and we know that we need them. Yet what does it even mean to install systems in your business to get systems to do the heavy lifting in your business? Traditional methods and traditional success in the real estate industry, it will have you working 60, 70, 80 hours a week if you're successful. And it has you doing every job that needs to be done to be successful. So there's 12 minimum jobs that every real estate agent does on a regular basis. And if you fail to put systems in your business, you will fail to scale. You'll fail to live a life by design, a life that you deserve with time and money, freedom and freedom from stress. If you stick around to the end of the video, I want to give you a 15 minute training that's going to go through the, the four key drivers and the 12 accelerators for you to scale your business without scaling your hours. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications. I want to run through the systems that you need to start thinking about. If you're at the point where you're wondering, like, there's no more hours in the week and yet I'm not achieving my growth goals, my sales goals, my income goals, my net worth isn't getting, you know, any better. It might be even getting worse. You may be working more hours every year and making less money. And so I want to just run through the different systems and then share a story with you that will motivate you to take a systems approach as the solution for growth in your business. When I think about systems first and foremost, in my early days, I became a direct response marketer and I built out marketing systems so systems that would generate high quality buyer and seller leads. So I didn't have to put in effort every day to generate leads. I built out systems that could generate those leads. In the early days it was Craigslist. This is before Craigslist got sneaky and, you know, you couldn't have clickable images. And I generated so much business from Craigslist. And then I also ran an ad in a local newspaper that I think in one year it generated like 200,000 of gross commission income. So the system was to figure out like if I could spend a little bit of time coming up with compelling copy to place in Craigslist or in a Google search or in a newspaper or on a yard sign or in a flyer or in a direct mail piece to expires or fizbos. Right. If I could do those things and systemize it, get someone else to run the system, I could scale that part of my business. So that's the first thing you need to consider. You know, your database. Is your database set up as a system where you have to put minimal time and effort into it and get maximum results. I mean, we're at seven figures in our database, and I shoot two videos a month. I have less than a half hour in every month. What is that, six hours a year to generate 1.2, $1.3 million of gross commission income. So marketing systems are where it's at. Then I think about sales systems. You know, do you, when you generate a lead, do you have the lead, follow up the lead, the text sequence, the scripts, the dialogues, the consultation frameworks, the buyer sales system, the listing sales system, all process driven. You know, do you have buyer packets and listing packets? Are all your marketing materials sort of created ahead of time so that when you get to the point where you're sitting down with a buyer or seller, or you're even just following, following up with a lead that you generated, do you know what things will compel them to take action? It's this bridge between marketing, generating that initial interest, and getting someone to commit to doing business with you. So on our team, even now, as I record this video, we're in the midst of a global pandemic. We've installed virtual buyer and virtual seller consultation systems where we could do everything virtually. And we're getting the same, if not better, conversion rates in terms of buyer met to signed or seller met to signed. So how are you thinking about your business in terms of systems where you could sell at the same time to multiple people? You know, I challenge you oftentimes to think about your business in terms of a franchise. A franchise is like, how can I replicate this thing throughout the country? You think about your business that way. Even if you never plan to open up a second location, how could you build systems to allow you to sell to multiple clients at the same time? The next set of systems is client care and technology delivery systems. You know, most of the time we generate a lead, usually by referral to, not systems based. We just generate a referral. We meet with that referral. They know us, you know, they say yes to do business with us. Then we're in service mode and there's not a system around it. It's all of our heavy lifting that has to take that sort of new client. The person that said yes to work with Us, it takes our individual effort to be able to move them into maybe from signed listing paperwork to active listing, to under contract to closing. That whole client care process must be systemized so you can provide a service at a high level without you being the one that's involved in every part of it. And then we talk about technology systems. You know, we have three simple technology tools that run our entire business and we do hundreds of transactions per year, multiple seven figure business consistently, where I'm not tinkering with it every day yet these technology systems and these client care systems and even client care scripts, you know, we have 40% of our clients before they leave the closing table, they've already given us a referral. And it's because we've built out the client care system and the script scripts and the tracking of how many times we asked during that client care process that we're able to get those results. So after client care, I think about planning and a planning system. Do you have a system to achieve your goals? A three year vision, a one year plan, the 90 day world, weekly commitments, your daily top three. What's the planning system that gives you the best chances of getting from where you are today to where you want to be in the future? Then I think about numbers. Becoming the cfo, the chief financial officer of your business. What are the systems you have for tracking the leading indicators in your business and the lagging indicators in your business? You know, are you tracking the number of meaningful contacts that you're having or your team members are having? You know, to get to the number of set appointments to how many of those meet, how many of those sign by lead source, by agent on your team. Right. How many contracts are you putting under every week? That's a lagging indicator for the most part. What are you closing? What does the cash flow look like on a weekly basis? We calculate weekly cash flow in our business. So we know every week if we increased our cash position or decreased our cash position, that's what a good chief financial officer does. And there's systems around it. I built this system and I have someone else on the team running this system and, and our tracking systems. At this point, I'm just a consumer. I know many of you. When I mentioned spreadsheet and numbers, you sort of lose me. So stay tuned here. I'm going to get to the good stuff. The next part is a system around attracting, hiring, onboarding and retaining talent. So we call this grow your team. What's the culture of your team? The cadence? What's the system for protecting the culture. What's the system for? The meeting cadence in your world, your morning huddles, your new business development time, your debrief in the middle of the day with your team. What are the things you can do systematically so that the business and the momentum in the business carries the weight and you don't have to be the one that's carrying the weight in your business. So those are six areas where systems are critically important. If you want to make this shift from agent or even team leader that's in production to business owner or even just to get a little bit of leverage, it doesn't have to be a big business that we're building. All of these concepts of leverage and systems apply to you. I think about a client of ours, Dave Hook, who is in Central PA. His average price point is I think 225 to 250. He came into our world where his wife Jenny was pregnant with her first child. He was working every bit of 70, sometimes 80 plus hours a week. He was doing great production. I think he was doing 80 to 90 transactions when we first met. Problem is the money wasn't worth it. The time away from Jenny with their first child on the way, he just knew things had to change. Fast forward, you know, five years at this point. We've been working together just under five years. They have three kids now. He's working half the hours he used to work. His income has more than quadrupled and he's actually launched to other business as well, that he's fitting into that 35 to 40 hour work week. You know, he has an incredible impact in his community through his Project Lamplight program. He's impacting his kids at a young age. I think they're 1, 3 and 5 at this point, something like that. And I really honor him not only for the work he's done, he's built an extremely profitable business, but he's built that business through systems like he is. Sometimes I joke with Dave and I say like, I know one of these days you're gonna pull off the skin on your face and I'm gonna realize that there's a robot under there. And I say that lovingly because he's so methodical with one system at a time to achieve growth the way I define it, to give me more leverage, to provide more opportunity for my team so I can have a bigger impact in my community. So if you ever get a chance to talk to Dave or check his case study out on our website, please do so. It's an amazing journey of growth not in just business but in the areas of life that matter most. All right, that was a lot that I threw at you. Here's the thing. There's no rush to build out all these systems, right? And don't compare yourself to a Dave Hook or to me in a way that has you feeling like less than or like I couldn't do that. You know, those guys are different than me. Just play the long game in your business and systems are the solution when it comes to long game in your business. If you want to go deeper on the drivers and accelerators and really some of the things I talked about today I put together a 15 minute training. It's predictablerealestatesuccess.com or click on the link below. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn notifications on. We'll see you on the next video.