It’s all about running your business like a business. Now you know that you should bump up your ad- vertising in September and you will get a much better return on your investment than you do with the same amount of dollars spent in March. You are now in a position to start making really smart busi- ness decisions instead of just guessing. This is where agents start making massive gains. When you know how your business is working and thinking like a business person, you will quickly start to hit goals you thought you would never get to – or that you thought would take you years to achieve. You are not hitting them in a few quarters.
Since you brought it up, when you say “running your business like a business”, what do you mean by that?
Every mega-agent has to, at some point, make the jump from thinking like a salesperson to thinking like a businessperson. The biggest thing is that you create financial statements on a monthly basis so that you know exactly where you stand at any given time.
You have a solid business plan. You are holding team meetings and tracking your numbers. You are implementing a marketing plan to accurately track and see where you are spending your money and where you are getting the highest returns and spend your money accordingly.
A lot of top producers are making a ton of money, but because they haven’t made the critical shift to thinking like a business person after the smoke clears, there isn’t a lot of profit left. A businessperson always focuses on profit first and builds the business around the numbers. I have people in my group that are grossing multimillions of dollars and keeping 60-70% of it in pure profits.
The big thing that happens is that you start to become accountable for your whole business. Where- as, before, you were only accountable for your sales and a few people. I have repeatedly seen that where most top agents falter is that they continue to be sales people only and not business people. And so their team falls apart, and they don’t make any profits. They aren’t making the kind of money they want because, although you need to concentrate on sales 80% of the time, you still have the responsibility of being a professional and running your business like a business.
