By Kathleen Black
When growing a real estate team, it’s easy to get caught in the web of additional expenses that easily bring your bottom line down.
By providing your team with the tools, systems, and protocols needed to succeed, you won’t be hurting your business’ bottom line, you’ll be helping it as long as you have a strong economic model to follow and use as a guiding principle.
Strategic Model
If you start out strategically, you will consider future needs for more time, relief, or somebody who can oversee parts of your business as you grow.
A strategic model will give you clarity and strategy. Once you get those two components, you need to be able to take your existing business to create a business structured to grow.
A strong strategic model will allow you to reinvest in the business in the right places in order to offer the top client experience to the public while also reinvesting in your business platform.
Cost Versus Investment
If you’re in a mindset of fear, you will want to cut absolutely every cost out of your budget, and your fear will rationalize every single part of it. Fear will tell you to build a shelter, hide in it, and make sure you stay in there until the sun comes out again.
What you need to do is get to a place where you can look at your finances and clearly see what is a cost in your business and what is an investment.
A cost is something that does not create a return in your business, is a deadweight in your business, doesn’t create any significant value for you or your clients and it is not strategic.
Investments will always be strategic, they are multipliers, they create a return for your business, whether it’s through leads, return or deals. The return could even be an investment of goodwill to support your community. The key to cutting costs and low returning investments is clarity.
Offer Value
The team leader’s purpose is to offer value, not the best split or pay. Value is communicated in terms of systems, support, an abundance of leads, appointments, education and training, and opportunities for growth.
Net value means that your agents buy into the bigger picture of more leads, more deals, more support, and more systems, ultimately leading to much more money and time for all.
Practice Makes Perfect
A lot of Real Estate Teams overlook practicing the key steps in their sales process, like scripting and presentations, which puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to competing with agents or teams who are consistently practicing their materials.
It’s crucial for your team to have a daily or weekly allotted time, where you all come together to ensure the conversations you have with your clients are seamless and professional in every aspect.
A lot of teams look to practice in order to improve and master their sales process and scripting.
Increase Efficiency
“Complexity is exponential to team size”
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is trying to go too big, too fast. You don’t always need to hire more help, sometimes you need to increase your efficiency instead.
If there’s an excess of business that is out of control, instead of hiring, ensure you have created structure for the business first.
To bring on help without any structure, is where you’ll find yourself suffering from the dreaded revolving door syndrome, and you’ll end up more burnt out than before.
Source: Kathleen Black