Apr. 2, 2008
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Is Your 2008 Strategy On Target?
The first quarter of the year is gone! That makes it a good time to do a reality check with your business plan. Are you on target? Are you ahead? Are you behind? With the current financial situations, many people have become more cautious. Many who don’t need to move are holding off. If your business plan for 2008 didn’t take into consideration this changed climate, do some research and, if necessary, some re-strategizing.
One of the reasons the great hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, had an edge over his competition, was because he looked to the future: "Some people skate to the puck. I skate to where the puck is going to be." Where is your market going? What changes are needed for you to be positioned to hit your target this year?
Block a couple of hours on your calendar to work on your business in the coming days. If you do this every quarter of the year, you will find you can make course corrections and be more powerful in achieving your goals.
Here are three steps to take:
Review the first quarter numbers
If you’ll take the time to do an in depth view of this, you’ll discover information to make and keep you profitable.
Numbers to track:
- Your Gross Production
- Your Net Proceeds
- The Number of Listings Taken
- The Number of Buyers Sold
- Average List Price/Average Sales Price
- Where each transaction came from
- Where your advertising dollars were spent
- Absorption Rates for your selling area
Compare To Your Plan
If you are right on target, congratulations! Keep up the momentum and take a look to see if there is any fine-tuning that can leverage where this year’s business is being generated from to enable you to maximize what is already working.
If you are behind: What is the gap? What will it take to get on target by the end of the 2nd quarter? What actions need to be increased? Take a look at where you have gotten business this year. Is your marketing plan aligned with the results you are getting? In other words, is where you are spending your money where you are getting business from? If the Internet is generating 20% of your income and print ads are generating 5%, is your marketing reflective of this? Where can you tweak your actions and dollars to be more effective?
If you are ahead, great job! I like to see my coaching clients have their financial objectives met by the end of October so they can relax towards the end of the year, if they want to (or just get real picky about working with the perfect clients, instead of the high maintenance whiners). What IS working? Can you go deeper with your impact in these areas to take advantage of the trend?
Strategizing For the Future
- Regardless of which category your numbers fell into, perhaps the most important action you can take from this business planning session is to look for the trends.
- Are the niches you are focusing on the ones where the activity is occurring? Look at the MLS data to see what trends emerge. If you do geographical farming, review last year’s numbers vs. this year’s.
- What new areas are emerging? A young new home subdivision (3-5 years old) is a great place to establish a foothold as a guru before anyone else does.
- What changes in consumer buying trends should you be taking into consideration? A need for homes with offices could be an opportunity, if you target that market. With consumers hungry for information and learning they educate themselves before they call you, would call for using good content on your website like informative reports or using a hotline such as Automatic Response Technologies. You will get a special if you use my code 5250.
- It is possible to have real estate in an IRA and this could be a great opportunity to generate sales that weren’t going to happen anyway by contacting your clients to share this opportunity with them. There is some great information on Self-Directed IRAs at Pensco Trust
- The sub-prime issues have caused problems in many areas, and repossessions and short sales are a substantial part of today’s inventory. Building alliances with lenders and banks now could yield new business.
Wayne Gretsky also said, "You'll always miss 100 percent of the shots you do not take." And "The fundamentals of the game are never going to change, but the things you're going to do, that changes." Every marketplace offers individual and unique opportunities. The agents that are aware and awake to shifting BEFORE others see the trends will have an edge! Will you be there?
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