Title: Optimize Your Remote Environment Now, Come Out Ahead Later
The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has thrown a wrench into our schedules and plans, amongst other things. In the wake of the outbreak, employees who are accustomed to spending their days in the office have now found themselves having to adapt, and quickly to working from their home. The goal of every Ultimate Mastermind session, is to explore tools to remain proactive, strategic, caring, and focused as leaders. I invited serial entrepreneur Nick Sonnenberg, the co-founder of Leverage, founder and CEO of Efficient Frontier Solutions, Inc. contributor and the co-author of the book Idea to Execution, to elaborate on how we can make working from home, actually work. Leverage was created with the intention of staying focused on your unique abilities and outsourcing the rest. In their first year, Leverage had an employee base of 100 plus, and made 7 figures. In their five years, they have been fully remote, and have never had an office. That’s why I knew Nick Sonnenberg was perfect to Mastermind for how to optimize remotely. “When working with businesses to optimize themselves, I found a cycle. Every company, no matter size or industry, needs three operational efficiency components,” Sonnenberg said. He calls it ‘C.P.R.’, and it’s crucial for any business, especially right now. The pattern stands for Communicate, Plan and Resource, it’s the business model he runs Leverage off of and consults people on. For top real estate teams it is vital to learn project management for NON-transactional projects/tasks, emailing for client communication and internal team communication platforms. Communicate: Communication is like the oxygen of your real estate team, if you can’t communicate efficiently, everything else suffers. Nick breaks down communication into three separate buckets, text for personal, email for external communication, and a program like Slack for your internal communication. “The problem that we face is that when we use the same tool for all communication, we create a scavenger hunt for ourselves to find information,” Sonnenberg said. External - To optimize your emails with clients, Sonneberg recommends to get your inbox to zero, not your unread emails to zero. There are three main things you can do with emails, reply, archive and defer. The main reason you would defer an email, or snooze it is if you have themed days in your schedule. If you focus on administrative work on Monday’s and you receive a non urgent admin related email Tuesday through Sunday, you can snooze it in your inbox to reappear on Monday when you can deal with it. “This is a really great way to get to inbox zero, and knock un-urgent things out of your line of sight,” Sonnenberg said. Internal - There’s a tool called slack that is very robust for your team’s internal communications. “The process of separating internal and external communications is huge, you’re not looking in multiple places to find information, you know where your internal communication goes,” Sonnenberg said. Another way this benefits your internal team, is that you can prioritize your communications, if someone on your team needs you first thing in the morning, you can get to slack zero, before you get to inbox zero. You can even have separate channels on slack for different departments like, marketing, sales and even payroll! This makes it easy for you to go back into conversations and find what you’re looking for, much faster. Plan: To run your real estate team, you need a map. Your map is the project management software that your company runs off of. There are plenty of project management tools you can use, any tool works the same and will give you the same functionality you need to run your real estate team. No matter which tool you choose, it will give you everything you need to stay in sync with your team, hit deadlines, and reach your goals. Another crucial step in the planning section are your team meetings. Nick Sonnenberg says Leverage’s motto is “No agenda? No meeting.” Nick believes every meeting should have cadence, agenda and structure. Cadence - Even weeks after the pandemic hit us, you may still be finding it difficult to work remotely and reach your team, you might want to opt in for 15 minute daily check-in meetings. The agenda and structure for this meeting is simple, you’ll want to ask them what they did yesterday, what they did today and what they’re focusing on. Agenda - Every meeting needs an agenda. The agenda should be collaborative in the cloud or attached to every calendar event. Consistent meetings also mean that instead of sending constant messages, if non-urgent, you can add to the meeting instead. Structure - Use the first five minutes of the meeting for personal catch-up. Ensure that you’re considerate of everyone’s time, if certain people are only relevant to a few of the matters on the agenda, go over those first and allow them to leave. And don’t forget to go through the most important items first. Resource: The transition to remote is new and scary. These tools are resources that you need now, in order to continuously pivot your business. It’s important to digitize your knowledge, you don’t want one person on your team to hold everything in their head and get sick or quit. You want your whole team to be in the know so that they’re able to optimize themselves and the business. You need a process document in order to ensure your team can fully function without a team member. A process documentation is a detailed description of how to execute a process. The process document outlines the exact steps needed to complete a task or process from start to finish. It describes how team members perform the process, not what the process is. The benefits of having a process document are the de-risking of your team, and ensuring everyone can be on the same page, all the time. You will also have breakthroughs by constantly having new eyes on the same process, and it will also save time because you can automate your processes. The biggest take-away from this Mastermind was that we can all pivot our teams now, by working together, planning and building our structures with resources. The tools we use will change but the concepts we’ve learned from this Mastermind will not. Stacey Green Director of Operations Kathleen Black Coaching & Consulting Inc. The Most Efficient, Productive, & Profitable Sales Team Model & Network in the World Toll Free 1-844-866-5222 Home of Ultimate Team Summit & Ultimate Mastermind Events www.ItTakesA.Team Here is How We Can You Grow Your Business 1. Do You Need Help to Become More Efficient, Productive, & Profitable in Your Business Now? Schedule a FREE Strategy Call 2. Wondering if You are on Track for Your Business Growth (or Not) ? Take our Leverage & Scale Business Evaluation to Discover Blind-spots Holding You Back! (P.S. It's FREE & You Don't Have to Wait for a Report!) 3. Do You Want to Learn What the Most Efficient, Productive, & Profitable Top 1% Teams Are Doing Differently to Thrive? Request a FREE Future of Real Estate Report 4. Not Quite Ready for Coaching? Willing to Take Longer to Figure Things Out Solo? Grab Kathleen's Best Seller , "The Top 1% Life" here, & let us walk you through the "Ultimate Expansion Strategy ™" that has paved the way for thousands to expand their business to the top.