What You Can Learn From my 2009 Business Plan - Part 1

What's up everyone? Welcome back to another edition of the Business Freedom Podcast. And today I want to dive deep into the thought process and mindset of business planning. And I want to do it in the context of really the first business plan I put together when I got into real estate. If you don't know anything about my journey, I'll tell you a little bit about it. Basically, I left my corporate job. March 5, 2007 was my last day in the corporate world. And unbeknownst to me, our market in Charlotte, North Carolina began to shift in about June 2007. The rest of the country had already sort of experienced some bubble activity and just some weirdness. And then the end of 2008 is when everything hit the fan. Then we went into the Great Recession and it was just, it was really bad. Our roster in Charlotte, North Carolina went from 15,000 to 5,000 and we're up to 17,000 again. As I'm recording this, we are about a month and a half into the COVID crisis and we're not allowed to show homes here in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm preparing you all for what's coming after Covid settles. So we're going to enter likely a multi year recession of some sort. Likely going to be worse than what we saw in the Great recession back in 2008 through 12, pretty much about five years. Some, some markets were 2013 in those years. That's really when I pushed the growth of my real estate business. I went from 4:44 sides as a solo agent, my first full year in the business to 248 sides. The year I did one transaction in January 2012, we went on to go to 310 or 312 or so and then over 400 transactions. Almost 4,000 families served. I've been working one day a week in that business for the last six or seven years or so. So I want to take you through the plan. I put together the elements of the plan as it related to where I was at in my journey. So in 2009, going into 2010, I put together a plan and I already knew. So this was. I did a year of 44 transactions with just an administrator part time went full time in 2008, 2009. I was pretty much solo the whole year. I only hired my first buyer agent probably after I put this plan together. So I had never built a business before. I'd never sold anything before. I got into real estate and I just made a decision based on my experience that it was freaking hard Having any kind of freedom whatsoever financially or time or freedom of stress, being a real estate agent. So I just made a decision that I was going to build this thing differently than I saw everyone else in my market doing it. And just top producers just working seven days a week and conventional success was as it related to the real estate industry was something that I did not care for, I didn't want. I had no intention of being an agent that worked seven days a week for 20 years, 25 years, having nothing to show for it. At the end of all of that, I was focused on building a business, putting systems in place, having people run their systems. And this is the first plan that I put together and so I want to read some elements of it to you. So keep in mind that I had never built a business before, I had never sold anything before. And I just made a decision that I was going to build a real estate team, build an actual business that served buyers and sellers better than I could myself. That was the commitment that I made. I didn't want to just exit working with buyers and sellers. I wanted a business, all of the inner workings of the business work toward giving an experience to buyers and sellers that they couldn't imagine being any better. And so the first thing I did with this plan was I had this sort of just high level, kind of just a preface the plan. This was a 2010 business goal. How me and my team will nail 160 plus sales in 2010 for 960,000 gross commission income at 50% net margin. That was the intention going into this year. And I said first this is a done deal. That said this is going to take laser focus and pig headed discipline. This next year will be the most incredible stretching and growth year of my life. I will exceed my goals and expectations. I will close 100 sides personally and 160 plus sides total with average commission in excess of $6,000. I will accomplish this by focusing on key personal growth areas and business impact zones. And then I had a quote. I will create raving fans out of every person I come into contact with by providing over the top customer service. So that was my intention going into this year. I really had no reason to be this confident going into 2010. This was 2009 was a full year of recession and the market was still going down. Agents were still pouring out of the market and this was going into 2010. I had personal growth areas, four of them, people preparation and plans, potential and practice. And so for people it was to build strategic relationships and, and be A connector. I wasn't naturally a connector. So clients and SOI and building systems around that. I said I have no fear of making calls and asking for business recruiting lunches. Never stop recruiting those sorts of things. Writing personal notes. Those were the sort of personal personal growth areas I knew I needed to focus on because I wasn't naturally outgoing. The second was preparation, prepare and plan every day to realize my goals. I planned every day the evening prior in 30 minute time blocks. And I practiced time blocking in this year and every year since. And I got rid of everything off of my plate that didn't need to actually happen. I used the acronym P L A N Prospect, lead, follow up, appointments and negotiations. Those are the only four things I wanted to have in my calendar. I do not open email or my world to others before 11am I prospect and lead follow up with laser focus Monday through Friday 8:30 to 11:00am this is back in my first year of building a team. And then the next category of personal growth was potential continued growth to reach unlimited maximum potential. I start every day with affirmations and infect people with my positive energy. I know beyond a doubt there are no limits to my growth. I leave it all in the playing field of life and make every day a masterpiece. I look at my business plan every day. This was my business plan. It was double sided. I laminated in different sizes like 10 small versions of it that could fit inside like a small journal. And then 10 were eight and a half by 11 laminated. I I had 20 copies of these all over everywhere. I couldn't avoid them. And I would hold weekly meetings for different areas of my business as well. The third, actually the fourth part is practice. Make perfect practice a part of every day. My team and I are masters at scripts and dialogues. We do training weekly and monthly, attend conferences. During the year I master eat that Frog Mastering Influence and Success principles, Master listing and Buyer Sales systems to drive efficiencies and study and learn my market. I am the expert. So those were the four personal growth areas. And I'm going through this to give you some perspective on what's possible if you just kind of evaluate where you're strong, where you're weak and how to bridge the gap between where you want to go and where you are. And so I didn't come into real estate with any natural sales ability whatsoever. I had never marketed for myself before. I've never built a business before. I barely even managed anybody. I had one person in my corporate job reporting to me and that's about it and it wasn't even. I wasn't even trained as a manager. It was just a junior, a junior level guy. And so then there were business impact zones that I focused on and there were six of them. Lead generation, listings, operations, recruiting, SOI and client database and then affiliates. So lead generation, conversion and tracking and I call that squeeze the lemon. I focused on expireds FSBOs my boomtown and client SOI referrals. That was the whole business for like three or four years. Expired FSBOs your client, SOI referrals, your database. And then just managing you know we did. We had some home search leads back then. We never really got big on home search leads and Zillow and pay per click and all that stuff. Team and outside sales, daily and weekly tracking and reporting. I was always big on tracking with my team and then just response rates for leads and just being super diligent. Eight to 10 contacts in seven to 10 days and having a lead management policy even back then. Listings is the next category. Grow inventory and sell listings fast and for top dollar. And then there's a whole bunch of things that I focus on. Short sales were big back then. Pre list packet, bi weekly client calls, operations systems and finance. That's know your numbers a lot of sort of KPI tracking and accountability. Reviewing my P&L monthly versus budget budget and update in 2010 forecast. As I went through the year I was big on action plans. I used top producer forever and then I was putting a website into place a branded a seller site, a branded site as well and refining the sales system for increased client satisfaction and referrals. So again I was always looking at systems and how to really just sort of make processes run smoother then recruiting, training and retention people leverage is the key. Implement recruiting plan system goal of 44 to 5 OSAs by the end of that first quarter. Develop an OSA outside sales agent training manual with integrated online training. Again I was making time to make these systems and I was still had a plan to of selling 100 sides this year hold sales meeting. We did them bimonthly with outside sales focused on sales and skills and then leverage VAS to cover listing coordinator position and enhance the ISA inside sales effort. The next area was SOI client marketing raving fan club and to have raving fans for life. If you haven't read the book Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard it is worth reading for sure. And SOI client touches. I had a 60 touch soi system back then. We have 57 touches now. It's essentially the same system I've been running for over 10 years. And we'll do a million dollars of GCI from our database this year. Expand SOI by 5 per week using an 8x8. I read Millionaire real estate agent probably a dozen times even though I only got into KW in 2017. And launch our raving fan club. We call it Clients for Life now, host two events in 2010, leverage our affiliates to pay for it and implement new website and all that good stuff and then affiliate relationships, growth through others. There was a short sales person that I used back then. Maintained two lenders in boomtown and a goal. It's a little trickier these days with getting lenders to pay for stuff. Establish relationships with insurance, locksmith, attorney and others. So those were the things I focused on in the business. I'm probably gonna break this up into two. I am gonna break them too. I'm gonna finish off here with the business side of my plan and then I'm gonna focus on the personal stuff in a part two of this podcast. So the last part of my business plan was the production and financial goals for 2010. And we track the same exact things today that I did back in 2009 when I built this plan. And so if you could imagine, basically I put a table together. Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 and full year. So five columns and then different categories, listing appointments, listings taken, listings sold. So that's set or that's met, signed, sold on the list side, same thing on the buyer side. Buyer appointments, buyers taken, buyers sold, then gci, then net income and that was by quarter and then summarized for the year. So before the year even started, I had goals around each quarter for set, met sign, closed listings and buyers, then GCI and net income. So I tracked eight numbers and I tracked it monthly and some of them, well, most of them weekly and then monthly and it rolled into quarterly. And the quote on the, on the bottom of my plan is what the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve. By Napoleon Hill. So that's the business side of my plan. And I've always, and this is sort of front and center in real estate B school and how we teach and what we preach now is a holistic view of a business owner. Like, I don't want any of our members to succeed at business, but fail at life. That's just not what we want. So in part two of this podcast, and I almost think of it as a training I'm going to go through just personally how I looked at the different areas of my life personally and what I was thinking back then, before I really launched into this building a business. You have to keep in mind, all of this was before I did anything as a business owner. I had an assistant. When I wrote this plan. It's all I had was an assistant. And yet in 12, 13 years, almost 4,000 families served and I've been one day a week for the last six or seven years. And so keep that in mind. That that's not an ego statement. That's just for you to remember that anything is possible if you have a lot of intention and you're willing to do the work. The heavy lifting up front to make things easier on the back end. It's the hard easy principle, right? I did a podcast episode, if you consumed it, the Hard Easy Principle. And so stay tuned for part two. If you're at a point in your journey where things just aren't easy, easy and the shift is getting the best of you, I put together a free series of trainings. I'm calling it the Market shift toolkit. It's marketshifttoolkit.com it is a give 100% give. Go to marketshifttoolkit.Com and just grab a copy of it. I organized it in Protect, Pivot and Profit. And it goes four trainings deep in each of those categories and they all relate to exactly what we're going through right now. We've been preparing for this in real estate B school and in my real estate team. I still have a real estate team in Charlotte, North Carolina. We do anywhere between two and a half to three million gci super profitably set up on the right economic model, value based commission splits, systems, processes and all of that good stuff. So, marketshifttoolkit.com these are the 12 trainings you need right now to crush this shift. That's what I want most for you. So go grab that and we'll see on part two.