Quarter 4 Business Planning | LeadingLane Podcast | Episode 43

Welcome to the Leading Lane podcast for Real Estate Pros by Real Estate Pros, with your hosts, Ashley Frederick and Stephen Burch. If you're looking for an honest, authentic, and raw perspective, you found it.

Okay, so now that we're into the fourth quarter, Steven, how do you get people to one, think about finishing the year strong? But I'll be honest, fourth quarter, I'm also starting to think about Q1, so kind of tell me what your thoughts are to finish the year strong.

So I think what we do is making sure that I want to do business planning in December or January or February, because business planning for the next year, like, already too late. We're behind the eight ball, right? So Q4, the very beginning of Q4 is typically when we start the business planning of it. And what I tell all of the people that I work with is typically, Q4 for me is the most productive and most profitable quarter that we ever have. And I think the reason being is because we're lighting the file to get going for the next year. But I always get the pushback of, well, you know, December and November, the holidays, it's always so slow, like, blah, blah, blah. Nobody wants to, you know, the best time to put your house on the market is in spring. Well, I want to turn that around real quick because if that's what every other agent is out there telling the sellers, then that's what's going to happen. Right? But if you get in front of them, in front of that seller and saying, well, if everybody is putting the house on the market in spring, wouldn't you want to be putting your house up when there's less competition and so that you get the best number for your. Your property? And, like, the light bulbs just typically just go off like, oh, my God. Never thought of it that way. So I think it's just changing mindset. First of understanding that, okay, yes, we're looking at the next year, but let's not forget where we are currently. And if everybody else is slowing down because it's the slow time, this is time for you to be able to put your foot on. I was about to say the brake. Not the brake, the accelerator, right? And go like you're going balls to the wall and let's go. And then you get that momentum going. And then because you already doing your plan now in October, starting in January, you have the momentum moving forward and you don't have to stop and then refocus on. Okay, now what do I do?

I don't know.

Does that answer your question?

All in. No, all in my head that I can hear is from the windows to the walls. Think about. Anyway, so, yes, you know, it's funny that you talk about business planning in November because at my old brokerage, we would have our meeting in March. We're almost through the first quarter, right?

You're the way through the year already.

Yes. So I think, you know, one way I like to view like quarter four is most of has. Most of us have goals. And I do like to just be like, I mean, all right, there is like three solid months left. Like, what could I do to finish out any of our goals that we haven't done, you know, anything about, like, transactions that you have, like, what's currently on docket to close, but also, you know, any offers that you write between, I mean, now and technically. I mean, you could be listing all the way through December 1st. You can get maybe some of those 30 days closed in there. I mean, like, that's a lot of business to be had yet between October and November. Like, those are a lot of listings that could still close. So if you're, you know, maybe five units or five families away from where you want to be, super doable if you put your head down. But I think you make a good point. Especially in, like the Midwest, people like to say nobody sells their properties in the winter. I think one January had like 17 closings. And I was like, believe that that is not true because everyone has life changes and it doesn't necessarily go around with the seasons. So it could be, you know, relocations, could be deaths, it could be family sizes. And that doesn't matter if it's spring. I like to tell people, let's beat the spring market if you can. You know, one thing that's important right now is that rates have crept down a little bit. So anybody that was on the fence, like, now's a great time. So I think that, you know, looking at quarter four is just. Are there anything that you want to just get pushed out by the end of the year? Was there something that you had planned to do between January and now that you didn't do? You know, like, for me, I was going to take a course, and I think I got halfway through the course and I'm not done yet. But in the same sense, right, we talk about that these can be slower months. So what a great opportunity if there are any stragglers out there to finish them up. So if you were going to take a ABR course or re. Any course, like, are there any things that you could just button up so that they're done for 2024 and now you have new sites for 2025.

Well, and maybe this is just a me thing, but I work really well under pressure. And so I know those things pushed off. Like, I don't want to bring them over into the next year because also, I mean, we've talked about it before in a podcast about the accountability in our business planning retreat that we do with our entire company. Like, I don't want to come to the table and say, all right, guys, this is now your number three that I'm pulling this over that I haven't done yet. Like, no. So I think it helps me get my shit together and let's hurry up and push through. And then typically when I get into that momentum again, all it's doing is it's accelerating me for to run into the new year. But I also think in Q4, it's super important to plan or reflect on what is it that you continuously bring over. What is that thing that you are are constantly pushing? And we've talked about eating frog before and making sure that when you do your business planning for this next year, that frog goes first. Right? We want to put that frog, we want the ugly stuff on first so you can get it done out of the when. So then the rest of the year, the rest of the quarter, rest of the month, whatever you're planning is going to be able to be knocked out and look at those strengths, look at the things that are getting your return of investment. What are, what are the items that you wouldn't be able to do that brought you, you know, happiness and joy and the transaction and do more of that. Stop doing the stupid shit that you don't like doing. You know, like, it doesn't make sense that, you know, I don't like cold calling. I'm very. I've never cold called entire career to be able to say, hey, you want to buy yourself real estate? Or hey, you want to come work with me to, you know, consult and do better. But that's not how it works. So I'm not going to put that as something that I'm going to accomplish. But I would rather do. How many more webinars can I do? How many more events can I host and have different people come? You know, so I want to do the things that are fun and enjoyable and then bring me business. And it's a win win at the end of the day, like, stop trying to recreate the will and just push forward with what your Successes are. And your strengths.

I do appreciate the trying to find joy because I do think that. I don't know, I mean, the world we live in is a little negative.

Just a tad bit.

Just a tad. And I think it's overwhelming, you know, I'll be honest. Just been like, watching the tiktoks of the devastation. I, like, I had to turn it off because I couldn't take, like, literally watching people's homes washed away or like dogs and cats waiting for their owners on rooftops or people just missing. And I think it's just a. You know, Ben and I talked about it. A stark reality of. I know we know I talk about it, but I mean, like, literally seconds, like, some of these things happened in seconds. They were unexpected. We've had a boatload of car accidents here in the last two weeks. It's been crazy. And like, we all know somebody like one of my girlfriend's moms that passed away last week. And I think it's just a reality of, like, why are we spending so much time doing something that we hate? And I think that comes back to our wheel of like, 1, 2, 3, 4, like, if it's something that needs to be done for your business, but you hate it, someone else to do it, it will still get done. You know, spend your time the time that makes you happy. I think the other thing for quarter four is profit and loss statements.

And what is a profit and loss statement?

Just going to say, I know that so many people hate that word or don't know exactly what that entails. And I'll be honest, for the longest time, like, we had someone that was kind of preparing ours for us, and I looked at the bottom line, but that looks good, you know, and then it was through working with you that we kind of tore apart our profit and loss statement and found some areas for some growth and found some areas for some cuts. So I was actually. We have a meeting today. So I was looking at them and I was like, oh, spent a little bit more there than I thought we were going to. But being aware of those. And then if we can make. Which another thing people really hate. But I like to try to have a little bit of a budget. So, like, what did we spend last year in marketing? Do we need to spend that much in marketing? Can we allocate that somewhere else? So I think quarter four is a really good opportunity to look at what you've done this year. What worked well, what didn't work well, what can you implement for 2024.

You know, profit and loss is something that I remember going to a training one time and it was asked, how often do you look at your profit and loss? And I was like, never. I mean I was very early on in, just in the supervising broker role in Emory Plotti. He was like, well, how the hell are you running a distance if you don't know where your money is at? I was like, noted. Well, he may have been a little tad bit aggressive with me on the entire training and asking me like all these different numbers. I can just kind of drill in probably deer in front of Holy shit. Like I have no idea. And I made it a point like I'm not going to allow. I think we should come in this ship to be able to call me out in the training.

We're talking about it.

Yeah, we should call me out in the training and asking these questions. But I'm so thankful that he did because I already was a numbers person. Like I'm already going to do it, you know, spreadsheets and everything. But I just wasn't focused on the right number. So I wasn't focused in because I didn't know either. Because there's so many different opportunities that you can look at this of this, you know, profit and loss and. But my favorite is your fallout rate. What is your fallout rate and what is the contracts you actually wrote, like truly wrote and then what added those numbers what actually closed and then the difference in the percentage, that's your flaw rate. So imagine if you were able to save 10% or 15% or whatever your number is and what that would do right there without having to increase your production. That's just saving your production and educating yourself on there. But going back to like the profit and loss like, you know, you can only cut so many expenses to run a business and you can only focus on cutting for so long. There has to be a time that you take your, your vision and your, your focus and just cut, cut, cut into okay, it's not going to grow, grow, grow. And it's. There's so much more opportunity when you change and start not being so I still think you need a budget, don't get me wrong. But I don't think you need to be so hyper conscious of how I can cut and be so much more open to. There's all this unlimited potential and opportunity of income if I were to expand my horizon of view. And I think that was a game changer for me as well. I saw, obviously I didn't know where I was at develop that budget, but Then started then analyzing return of the investment of when spending X amount of dollars on marketing, how much for that align specifically together. But how much did that align of expense return? And once you can start analyzing that and you can see your huge like what is providing you the roi and then you're able to then pair that with those things of joy and the happiness of the events or whatever it's going to be right there. You start multiplying and you can see that's the number you need to focus on. And maybe it's not cutting expenses out of that line, maybe it's spending more because you already have the formula of growth of what it's going to anticipate for forecast that you're going to be able to pull back in for additional income.

Well, I think too like, does that number make sense somewhere else? Right? So like if you're spending like $20,000 on marketing, like would it make sense to spend $5,000 instead of that on client appreciation? Right, because there's a good portion of repeat clients and referral business, right. So it's a matter of just having an idea, I think, of what you're spending. I think, you know, I remember that we met with a couple and literally just asked to look at their profit and losses. And just by looking at their profit and losses, we had suggestions for them. So I think that that's a great opportunity. But I also think you have to which you were very, you know, upfront with us is, you know, how long could you run your business on this, right? So like, let's say you had a really crappy market tanks, right? Like how long, like what do you need in your reserves? I think that that was a really big eye opener for us to know exactly, like this is what we should have in there at all times. And it made it a lot easier for us to make decisions moving forward. Can I buy a building and I do this fundraiser that might cost X amount of money. Like if I didn't really know what I was operating at or what I needed for three months to, you know, pay all the bills, I don't think that you can make the same decisions without having that information. But even before we had that information too, we had to make the decision of hiring Steven and money was tight, like should we, shouldn't we? But right at the end of the day, like, we knew we had to make a change. And sometimes you have to spend money to make money. And it was the best investment we had made to get us to where we are today, right?

And that's, let me tell you, it's tough, like, to show somebody your profit and loss. Completely not HR appropriate. It's like you're literally exposing yourself for the first time to this person. You're looking up the skirt, whatever you want to call it, and you have to be able to be open to have that conversation. I've went into conversations with clients that have spent a lot of money with me, and I said, okay, cool. Now we're just profit and loss. And they're like, oh, no, no, no. But we're gonna have to. We don't want to do that. Well, because they have to be vulnerable. These are real hard facts. And I think that's the eye opener of, you know, numbers don't lie. And those numbers are going to be traceable and they're going to go back and you can identify. And typically, people know that they're the reason why they're in this position, whatever it is. Right, good. And so I think that it's making sure that you're working, if you're going to go that direction, making sure that you are going to work with somebody that is coming into this place of want to help and you are not shoulding all over them. Should. Right. Like, you're not telling them, you should have done this, you should have done that. Right. Instead of giving them a different perspective, being able to say, hey, have you thought about this? Like, let's, let's talk this through. Maybe I'm not understanding. And I think typically in those open, vulnerable conversations, as hard as they are, there's a lot of light bulbs that go off instantly, and you can see a lot of areas of opportunity very quickly that you can change. And these changes do not have to be drastic. I do not like working with clients and saying, all right, we're going to go and we're going to recruit 150 new agents and we're going to go and we're going to do this. Like all these big buzzwords. No, let's first look at the foundation that you're working with. And if we were to add two or three, you know, different variables to this formula and just increasing. What if we were just to increase your agent's productivity by two units per year, what would that look like? And then if we were to be able to increase by 10% year over year for the next five years, where would we be at by just highly focusing on training? It's small things. It's the compound effect. It's small and it's consistent. But then it's coming up with a plan to implement and make sure that everybody's on the same page.

Sure. So as far as like those are all great things for quarter four. So for Q1 you do some business planning with your agents in November, correct? Like where you do like a couple days. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So really it's going through and having them do an analysis on where are they at, where did they get their numbers, where did they get their current transactions, what are going well, what is not going well for them. And I really used to hyper focus on just numbers and I didn't really provide a true implementation plan. I kind of said okay, you know this and go. I think that that kind of leaves people at this like stagnant of oh, I just had this nice little chin check and I'm not loving where I'm at, but I don't, I don't know how to get there. And so now what we do is we come up with like a true, true plan of the next 12 months. We understand life is going to happen forever changing, so we know it's not going to be 100% to the point. But if I were to do all of these different items and you know, if I were to implement following up with my clients and doing two customer appreciation events instead of just one, to do this, like when are you going to do that and get down to the very specific and being able to visualize your entire year when you are doing all of these different events. And then now let's map it out. How do we make that work so that it's bite sized pieces that we're not saying, oh shit, next week is a client appreciation event and you're hurrying up and running and spending all this money and then you're forgetting everything else. Like you, you actually have a plan that if I start three months in advance and I work up to how I'm actually going to implement this and I put it into a system of technology of reminding me or telling me, hey, I need to start this and leaning into the plan, you're able to make it to where it's not overwhelming. It's not something that you have to, you know, again, change entire focus. It's, you're mastering it and then you're moving on to the next. You're mastering it and moving on to the next constantly. But now you have a written out plan and when you have that in black and white, you can identify where did I do? Where did I mess up a Little bit or how can I improve this next time versus continuing in this vicious cycle again going back to that self reflection. So maybe next time you start two weeks before than you know what you initially thought you needed to or whatever it's going to be.

Do you also do any like self reflection as far as the company as a whole from the agents?

Yeah. So we typically do a one on one. We do one on one and that's more like a grade of broker. Like agents think it's all about them, but really we want to see where we're at. But there's different activities that we do like a SWOT analysis as a group. We want, we want feedback from people. And you know, it's funny to do sales meeting yesterday and then we made it, you know, a joke like do we need emotion as a group? Well, no, at the day it's still my choice. Like I get, well, Ryan's choice. Right. But we, I think it's so important to have that open communication and being vulnerable and allowing them to provide us feedback of what they need help with or what we can do or what we need to stop doing so that we then based off of their plans, our plans as a company, we're all aligning. And I think the other thing that I mean that we do is we take their goals and so we don't dictate, like you have to meet that you have to sell 50 units. Like this is your, this is your quota for the year, right. We say what is your, what do you want to be able to make? Like how can we help support that? And then whatever that number is, we pull it on top and like collect everything together and then number collectively based off of everybody else's annual business planning is now our company goal so that we can all work together. So it's a funnel and planning versus a funnel down and dictating and directing people their, their quotas.

You know, we actually do that on a monthly basis. So we have a yearly goal chart that we work with too, but we actually do monthly goals.

So that's a great idea.

We go around every Tuesday like before the new month and you'll just go like, all right, how many listings and how many offers? So it's company goal for the month of, you know, 20 offers and 20 listings. And maybe, you know, Noah said it was going to be like, you know, one and one and Celeste thought two and two. Well, maybe at the end of the day like one does two and one does three and right now. But we still got at the End. So then once we. Typically when we meet goals, then we'll have like a, you know, a pizza day or whatnot. Because it was a group effort. It wasn't just one agent that was.

Doing something that's awesome. And something else that I love in your office is you have that big acrylic board to be able to fill out, you know, just color in the different houses as you go through.

Awesome acrylic board that has houses on it. And then every Tuesday, if you closed a property the week before, you get to color in the house. So I think it's just, you know, it creates some excitement. It also creates, like, I think agents, like, want to get up there and they fill them in differently. So I think there are creative ways to help people feel involved and get.

A little bit more baited. And those are specifically sold correct on that acrylic board. I wonder. I think, like, listings are huge for. For me, you know, like, if that were something to be able to break out, like, because to me, I think if you. If you get the listing, if you win the listings, you control the market. So the more that you can be the listing dominant in your marketplace. I like that. As I'm taking notes, these are things I'm sending over to Ryan and Kim to be able to start implementing. I think that'd be great for our new year because we don't have a visual board anymore.

I mean, I walk by. Everyone walks by it every single day. And even I think it's cool when you have clients that come in and then they'll be like, ooh, what is this all about? Or they'll be like, oh, my gosh, you've sold this many houses, you know, or whatnot. So it's a good conversation piece, too.

Yeah. And it's celebrating success, right? Like, and it's a group effort. And I think that's more importantly, it's like, we're here again, lifting everybody up. Like, we. To cheer everybody on. There's room for everyone to make a lot to be able to make. It's just being able to make sure that they're utilizing the support and everything that is involved from the brokerage level to push each other out there. So I love that. Cool. Thank you for listening in today, guys. As always. If you have any other suggestions, if you're looking to be a guest on our podcast, please reach out to us and, like, share and subscribe. And we'll listen. We'll listen to you next time. We'll talk to you next time.

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