Here’s a friendly reminder to go visit your goals, my friends. Not just to make sure you’re on target this year, but also to make sure you placed the right bets from the start.
Most of our goals in business (and in our personal lives) involve quantitative metrics to get us to where we want to go. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that they fail to visit their goals on a regular basis… not just to remind them about their priorities, but also to give themselves opportunities to course-correct throughout their time allotment in order to stay on track.
Let’s unpack this a bit…
A common fallacy in goal setting for real estate professionals is the ‘one for one’. For instance, some agents assume that if they need to sell ten homes to hit their income goal, all they need to do is get ten folks to hire them. Simple, right? But what about the buyer who changes jobs? Or the seller who loves your staging recommendations so much they decide they don’t want to leave their home after all? (True story for another time). What about the money you need to spend on marketing, desk fees, commission splits, signage, gas, cookies, etc? What about the fallout? What about the cost?
Paul McCartney talked about the early days of The Beatles and how getting hits meant real money. He and John Lennon used to joke about writing a song that would literally pay for a swimming pool, because that’s the sort of thing they dreamed of being able to afford when they were working-class kids with no jobs.
“Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.’ That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now let’s write a swimming pool.’” — Paul McCartney, 8 February 1990 Rolling Stone.
Most of the people I coach are real estate agents or brokers, and they all have unique and specific production goals. Before the year began, they decided what they were going to shoot for in terms of profit, and from there we factored in their estimated cost of business, expenses, and fallout based on past performance so we could essentially, write their own swimming pool. But putting pen to paper and drawing the map doesn’t get them to their destination. They have to make sure they’re still on the right track, often, to make absolutely certain they don’t miss their mark.
Goal Coaching 101: Evaluate Often
Know what your monthly metrics are and hit them. Visit those metrics every week and then review at the end of the month to ensure you’re on track. If not, you learn quickly if you need to change your approach, your momentum, or you might consider moving the goalpost. This early in the year I don’t recommend changing the goal, but refining tactics is an excellent place to start.
Advanced Goal Coaching: Evaluate Conversions
When we initially set these goals, we factored in a bit of fallout based on past experiences in business, however our businesses evolve as will our conversion metrics. For instance, relationship focused agents who source a lot of their closings from their sphere will have a higher conversion rate than agents whose primary source of leads comes through direct mail or social media marketing. It’s math! But if that relational agent has their eye set on growth and they adopt an additional spoke in their business wheel, their conversion rate might swing lower if their first appointments are now more with folks they don’t know. If we planned their entire year around selling homes for people that already knew and trusted them, and part-way through the year their business morphed into a marketing machine to strangers, we’d be crazy if we didn’t re-evaluate their activities/conversions.
In Sum…
This is the time of year to not only make sure you’re on target, but also to make sure you placed your bets correctly. You wrote your swimming pool, now let’s make sure you get there.
Don’t roll through your business blind. I’m always happy to roll through the math with anyone who wants to talk about it. Drop a line and we’ll set up a call. I love the numbers part of goal setting, so borrow my brain! It’s yours.
Yours in Success,
Coach Lins
