The Critical Importance of Your Business Cadence

Hey there. Lars Hedenborg Founder of Real Estate B School Co founder of High Performance Real Estate Advisors Today I'm going to talk about the critical importance of your business cadence. And here's what I mean by business cadence and why the subtitle for this podcast and why I think this is everything. So I think business cadence is everything, everything when it comes to growing and scaling and building a leveraged business, especially in real estate, you know, folks are attracted to our industry that aren't interested in, you know, being consistent and doing the same things every day and all of that. So the business has to claim responsibility for a consistent cadence. So if you're new to the podcast, you may not have heard me talk about our 3190. It's our strategic game plan. It's a three year vision, a one year plan, 90 Day World. I just did a three part series. I think it was on kind of breaking down how do you actually achieve at a high level? And I broke down our 90 day cadence or 90 day world and the questions to ask yourself every quarter, every week, every day and how to keep your spirits up when business is hard and all of that. So I'm not going to repeat any of that. You know, in real estate we tend to, especially if you're building a real estate, a real real estate business, meaning you don't want to be the person, you know, forever working with buyers and sellers. And you see this opportunity like I did back in 2008 when I hired my first administrator. 2009 I hired my first buyer agent. That year 2010 we did 118 transactions. Then I hired one more administrator, buyer agent or two more. I got out of buy sides, just focus on listings. We went to 178 that next year and then we went to 248, 310 and over 400. And then I went from throughout that I went from seven to five to three to two to one day a week. I've been working one day a week in that business for the last six. Well how long now? I guess over since 2013 is likely, maybe even 2012 I got down to two days. 2013 I got down to one day. So. So the whole point of me telling you that is that if I didn't have a business cadence, if the business didn't have this living, breathing way of showing up in the world and everybody sort of knows that the business has this way it operates, it'd be impossible for me to take a step back from the business. And so even if you don't have a vision of building a multimillion dollar real estate business. You still have to have a plan to build some sort of cadence leverage through sustainable systems and leverage through empowering people. Even if it's just one administrator and a couple of showing agents or a couple buyer agents that act as your showing agents. You know, our team last year did 2.8, 2.9 million and I think we were like 12 people, pretty well split sales and administrators. And so it doesn't have to be this big business, right? If you set it up the right way, it can have a life of its own. So when I say business cadence, here's what I mean. I mean that we're operating against a three year vision. We have a very clear one year plan. And that one year plan has goals set for each of the major functions in the business. The four major functions are recruiting activated listings, our client service, which we measure referrals before our clients leave the closing table, and then what's the other one? And then percent of business or actually dollars, GCI from our database. Those are our four core goals that we're looking at this year. And then we break that down into a 90 day world. In the 90 day world, we are tracking specific projects which we call rocks that we are implementing in order to achieve the one year or crush the one year plan and ultimately achieve our three year vision. The cadence beyond that though is really what's important. There is this monthly, weekly, daily and hourly cadence and it has to exist for everyone on your team. If you want to compete in this business at the highest level, if you want to go against the status quo that's that's set up in our industry. There isn't a high performing business that doesn't get into the calendars of the people on their team. And it's going to be hard to build anything worth anything if you're not willing to get into that conversation with your people in terms of, hey, here's the one year, here's our three year vision, here's the one year plan. You know, this quarter we committed to do this as a business. And here's where I need your help. I need to do your regular job and I also need your help on these three projects, or rocks as we call them. And then every week you're helping this person time block into their calendar, their normal day, their ideal week, and also put in time blocks to work on projects or rocks together. Then in every day you're probably doing a huddle with everyone and your sales Team and your administrators. I do huddles in both businesses in real estate, B school and at high performance, Real estate critical. Like if you view business as you're going onto the field every day into like a sports setting or the sports analogy 100%, you're going to do a huddle before you go on the field. Then you're also going to do a huddle and you're going to get together after the fact to see if you won the game, if you lost the game. You know, the game's never really over in business. The whole point of the game is to stay in the game. If you haven't read Infinite, what is it called? Infinite Game by what's his name. Well, you can look it up. Crap it. I've like read all Simon Sinek, Infinite Game. So the whole point of business is to stay in business. You know, it's especially in a crisis like we're experiencing now. The whole point is to stay in business, to serve your clients at a time of need, not to, you know, freak out. And you know, assuming you didn't position yourself properly for a shift, you may be experiencing some pain right now. So a cadence. So ask yourself. I'm just going to guide you through questions to see where you are in your journey. Do you have a written three year vision for your business and all the areas of your life that matter? That's number one. Have you broken down that three year vision into one year personal plan and a one year business plan? Are you operating in a 90 day world personally and professionally? So you're taking those annual, you know, that annual plan, those big goals for the year and you're chunking them down the quarterly and then are you breaking that down monthly, weekly, and then are you daily focusing on your time and time blocking in your calendar and are you planning your weeks and then beyond just you in the business, this cadence has to translate to your team. So your weekly cadence with your team has to include a front stage meeting and a backstage meeting. So front stage is sales. You have to have a sales meeting which is focusing on numbers and where are you struggling when it comes to sales? Where can we do better? How can we have better handoffs between inside and outside and then administratively, how can we have a better client experience? Where are we tripping on these files? What's going on? That's once a week, a deep dive, 60 to 90 minute meeting in the functional areas of your business. Just two big functions. That's it. Even if it's just unit, administrator and two buyer Agents, you still have these two meetings once a week. You all come together and just celebrate your wins. High level feel good type meeting where you're just celebrating your wins and you're sharing positive focus, you're praying together your, you know, your prayer requests. Whatever you do in that meeting, it's a high level meeting. And then you're doing personal development once a week, twice a month. You have to have a one on one with everyone, everyone on your team. Either you or if you have a main operator or if you have a sales manager. Somebody has to have a one on one with every single person in the, in the business twice a month. And these meetings do not get moved no matter what. What else from a cadence perspective. So I actually wrote down, we usually say 3 190. I wrote here preparing for this. 319-0137 24. So three year vision one year plan 90 Day World. 13 weeks. Well, there's actually four weeks in a quarter. 13 weeks, you know, four. Well, sorry. Three months in a quarter, four weeks in a month, seven days in a week, 24 hours in a day. So a lot of us that have gotten to the point in our real estate business where we could actually scale the business and we got big enough to bring people into our world, we don't have the discipline to really think in this way. So to be able to think in and capture our thoughts about the future and then, and then chunk it down into what am I going to do today to get where I want to go in the future in business and personally. So ask yourself those questions. Three year vision one year plan 90 day world. Your monthly, your weekly, your daily. Are you time blocking? Are you helping your team time block? Are you working on projects together outside of the scope of their regular work? Are your agents, are you challenging your agents to think about their business as a business where they should be? Tackling rocks, living in a 90 day world. What are you going to do to improve your business in the next 90 days? Work on your database? Are you going to work on your scripts? Are you going to master this presentation or that presentation? Or start a different lead gen lever, right? Master open houses or master working with home search leads or whatever it might be. Anyway, I hope this served you. If you're at the point in your journey where you know you need help with this stuff, all I have to offer you. I've got a couple things to offer you. If you're running a bigger business, you're a top agent or team leader, I can offer you a free coaching session. So our higher level programs are intended to get you results, get you time and money freedom as quickly as possible and to bring your stress levels down. That's the big promise in our graduate program. In our boardroom program. We have just launched our Business Foundations program. You can go to getbusinessfoundations.com to get more information on that program that is available for folks that haven't quite picked up the critical mass to be in a position to fit into one of our higher level programs. So getbusinessfoundations.com or just go over to realestatebschool.com and and free resources over there. You can book in for a business growth strategy session and we will take excellent care of you. So think business cadence. Business cadence is the solution when it comes to running a business that doesn't depend on you. This business has a cadence of its own. It is marching to the beat of a drum that you're not hitting necessarily. All right, so we'll talk soon.