The Annual Plan Organizer - The Step-By-Step Process to Getting It All Done!

Hope is not a strategy this time of year. I love this time of year because I get tactical. I am writing out a blank piece of paper. What will I achieve next year? How does it fit into my three year vision? We don't want to flip a coin and like decide that it could go either way next year. You just gotta do the work. All right, Real Estate Business Builders, this episode is almost a sister training. So a part two to a training I did last week. And it is the time of year where everyone's going to be coming out with annual planning stuff. And, and our process, process is very intentional and deliberate and I do encourage you if you're not in our free Facebook group yet. The only reason I want you guys to get in there is that I'm able to give most of these, not all these episodes, but a lot of these episodes. I have tactical things that I want you to do and they're sort of handouts and like it's a little bit of. It's not a brainless podcast where you can just like mind numbingly listen to this stuff. I'm going to challenge you guys. I'm going to push you guys to actually do the work. So make sure you get in there and take a look at. Real Estate Business Builders is the Facebook group. I do weekly trainings in there. There's a bunch of free tools and systems and I really do want to help you guys. So the training last week was your 2024 growth plan and the training this week is the annual plan organizer, the step by step process to getting it all done. And if you go into the Facebook group and you can either find the post, I think I may have put in the file section in there, but just find that post, comment, annual plan and we'll send a copy. And this is a really valuable resource and I'm going to unpack some of it here today. So make sure you go probably one step back. Even last week I talked about 2024 growth plan, which is. Doesn't matter when you do it, honestly. But we talked about three year vision, one year plan, breaking it down into a quarter at a time, weekly and daily. And that's been the secret of my success. I can't say I've done anything special in my real estate business, but I always consistently thought about my world and like, hey, how do I want my business and life to be three years from now? Then what do I need to do in the first year? First 90 days of the first year, you know, then weekly 13 weeks in a quarter and then, you know, daily seven days in a week. And so what I did in the daily fed into the week, fed into the quarter, fed into the year, fed into it. Me realizing my three year vision. So I know that's a lot real quick, but it really matters ultimately. You know, since I started real estate B school, this is 2013, I had achieved a level of financial freedom, time freedom, and the ability to put the things that mattered most in my life first. And that's what I want most for you. So the underlying or overarching question I have for you guys is, you know, do you have a plan in place to achieve meaningful goals in the areas of life that matter for you? I would say when I first got started, I didn't quite crack the code on it. I figured out how to sell a lot of homes early on, but it was like eight days a week. It was super stressful. I wasn't showing up the way that I wanted to. I was working when I shouldn't. I did buy time with my wife because I told her I did have a plan. It was built to build this amazing business that gave me all this freedom. And all she saw was me working way too many hours. I was up early, I was working at night, I was working past midnight most nights, building the systems to allow the leverage to allow me to scale. And I was motivated because I didn't want to be like my dad was growing up and he was a failed business owner, failed in his marriage, failed as a dad, was an alcoholic, drank until I was 15 years old. And I didn't want to be like that. So you have to ground all of this in your why. And if you listen to last week, I'm repeating it this week. If you're not clear on your why, none of this stuff matters, I promise you.

Okay.

In our business. So when it comes to the conversation today and actually planning next year, like getting down to like, what the year is going to look like, the important things, the non important things. And you know, in, in, well, not in our industry, in any industry. I think those of us that are wired toward building and we're sort of business builders, that's why I'm obsessed with this concept of real estate business builders. We have to acknowledge the fact that generally we're distractible. You know, we're like on Facebook, we see an ad for an AI appointment setter and we're like, oh, that's going to be great, Let me do that. It's only going to cost me, you know, 250 this is like real world. Literally. Somebody sent me this. What do you think about this AI bot person? AI thing that calls people and has a conversation with them and it only costs $250 per month. I'm like, I've never tried it, but I don't think it's going to work. Not because I don't love technology, I love technology, but I would let that thing, you know, marinade for a little bit, you know, let the kinks get worked out of it. You don't need to be the bleeding edge of everything. And generally all of that squirrel chasing, you know, we're just squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. If you're watching the YouTube video, you can see I, my team gave me a squirrel. I was so obsessed with not chasing squirrels that my team knew that I was, I was prone to distractibility and, and they actually got me this cool squirrel. So if you're like me and you're prone to distractibility, you want to buy yourself a squirrel statue like I have, and you want to keep it on your desk or in your line of vision to remind yourself that the thing that you just saw on a webinar or on YouTube or the thing that wasn't in your annual plan is not worth chasing.

Okay.

Generally in this business, when we get to the point where we're doing the right things on generating high quality inbound leads, we're warming them up with our lead nurture sequences, we're saying the right things on the phone to motivate them to meet with us. They're pre sold on working with us. They're signing at a high percentage rate for us to be their agent. And then we're delivering an experience that we thought they thought was unbelievable. You're going to get to the point where things are going to get sideways, you're going to hit a cap and things are going to be out of control. Many of you are hopeful about next year, right? Hope is not a strategy this time of year. I love this time of year because I get tactical. I am writing out a blank piece of paper. What will I achieve next year? How does it fit into my three year vision? We don't want to flip a coin and decide that it could go either way next year. Yeah, we're hopeful, but hope isn't a strategy. And this, like, I hope it goes well next year. Let's just, maybe it could go either way. The goal here is to put you in the driver's seat where you actually construct a year that has you running on all cylinders, firing on all cylinders, and you're achieving at a high level in all the things that matter to you. And I want to allow you to construct your calendar in a way and design your year in a way where there's this clear pathway to profit. That's, that's not necessarily. I have a lot of conversations with a lot of agents, a thousand plus agents have been through real estate B school and I've talked to maybe more than double that in terms of just like strategy sessions with people that are contemplating coming into our world and they have no pathway to profit. And if they do have a pathway to profit, they're failing in other areas of their life. They're not taking care of their relationships, you know, their spouse, their, their kids, their physical body, their, their faith walk right there. They're giving up on areas of their life which arguably are way more important than selling more homes. And my goal is to have you guys just absolutely crush it next year in your real estate business, in your finances, in your, in your marriage with your kids, in your faith walk with your, you know, to get stronger physically, to be a better son or daughter, a great sibling, a great friend, to be able to travel and be present in all of the things that are a whole lot more fun than just grinding out transactions 24, 7. So the question I have for you, and I'm going to go into a little bit of the process here, is why do you want to crush it next year? Why do you have debts to pay off? Do you want to take a vacation, you know, with your family? Do you want to. Maybe you're just living on the edge and you have no buffer. Do you want to build up a 6 to 12 month buffer? We're in a time as I'm recording this, where even NAR National association of Realtors says that 25 to 30% of real estate agents will not be licensed in the next 12 to 24 months. So typical cycle, there's a cleansing. There's not enough income around for all the licenses that are out there. So you have to get clear on your why so you can do the work necessary to succeed. So I talked about this last week that we have to commit to play a different game. And whether you like it or not, you're a business owner. And most agents don't see themselves as business owner. They kind of just like putz around. And if business comes their way, you know, they maybe make a call here and there to their sphere and they maybe post on social media, but there's no intentional processes, there's no legion Levers that are feeding their business where they're able to sit down and have warm leads, to have conversations with and then it's not this, I hope they're going to meet with me.

Right.

They're excited and pre sold on working with you and all of the good stuff that follows from there.

Right.

We want to do this in a way where it's predictable. You know, I went through last week that there's only a handful of things that make you money in real estate. Real estate agents are generally for the most part when you look at a busy real estate agent and you dissect their 10 hour day, they're like 50, 60% of it. @ a minimum, they're running business errands. You know, they're kind of busy, but they're doing things that aren't in the grand scheme of how to run a business. They're, they're not doing things that are like really highly dollar productive. And we want to put you in a position where you're only doing the most dollar productive things and to structure your calendar in a way where, where it reflects that. And I want you to think once about how next year is going to be.

Right.

I don't want you to kind of get three, four months in and wonder like am I really clear on my priorities and am I balancing my income, you know, my business stuff with my personal stuff. I want to put you in a position where you're not having to wonder if you're on track and then to get really clear about what does it take to make money in your business. So what does it take to actually make money? We call this milestone the money making. If you're a note taker, the first part is cash follows calendar. So we want to have you absolutely time block your calendar. The second is to, to think once.

Right.

We're going to construct this annual organizer and I'm going to give you the. You got to jump into the Facebook to get the actual PDF, but I'm going to walk through how it works here in a second. And then number three is milestone the money making.

Right.

There's only a few things you can do to generate massive, massive income in real estate and you want to make sure that you're actually doing those things. And then you want to make sure that you do a stress test that's number four, is that once this plan, this annual plan is running that you're not losing in the areas of life that you would easily say they're more important than real estate. Most traditionally successful agents are running at a level that's not sustainable and they're failing in the areas of life that matter. Once we've got this plan in place, you just literally need to work the plan that's number five. So let me go through high level here. If you jump in the Facebook group real estate business builders get this document. I want to tell the story that will, that will sort of match it here. There's, I think it was, Stephen Covey was the first guy that at least I heard talk about, you know, rocks and sand and pebbles and all of that. And the analogy or the explanation is like, if the rocks are the big important things and the pebbles and the sand and the water are the things that have to get done, but maybe they're not that important if you organize it in the wrong way. Like if you have a jar and you put the water and the sand and the pebbles in first, you won't have room for the rocks. So the rocks are like the big important things that have to happen in the business. The big important things that have to happen personally, the big important things that have to happen in your physical body. These are the non negotiables that oftentimes we don't make these a priority. And we don't construct our annual plan according to the priorities or the rocks.

Right.

We put the rocks in first. We get them scheduled in our calendar, whether it's family vacations or date nights or going to church or giving your spouse a night off. I give my spouse not every Friday, but it's time blocked in the calendar that she has a free Friday every Friday night.

Right.

And once every other month I send her away to three night away at a really nice hotel here locally. Those are things that we just time block and we make happen because it's really important.

Right.

Her taking care of herself is not her go to. So I need to make sure that she is energized and she's taken care of. And that's part of the responsibility I put in my annual plan to make sure she achieves those things. And then you'll have a chance to time block the money making activities. And typically that's, you know, new business development, which is lead generation and lead and lead follow up.

Right.

And then we have appointments that we need to time block in our calendar and then the times that we work and the times that we don't work with and put in our calendar. So if you get into the Facebook group, I did an actual deep dive training and you'll get the handout called the Annual Plan Organizer. There are worksheets that you'll go through. I really want you guys to do this. It's important to me that you actually do the work here. I know this isn't your typical podcast episode in that regard because I'm challenging you and I'm pushing you. For some of you, you know that what I'm laying down, you need to pick up and there could be a next step for you. So if you go to million dollar agent method.com you'll see a seven minute video on that page and you can get really clear if there's a next step. Watch that seven minute video book in a call with me, either me or someone from my team. As I'm recording this, I'm doing these calls personally so you can book in and we can have a conversation about what it would look like to take your business from 100 to 500 to a million and what that journey actually looks like. So go to milliondollaragentmethod.com if you're not in real estate Business Builders Facebook group. We'll see you in there. Much love, much respect. Until next time. Be good.