How to Actually Double Your Business (Without Doubling Your Time)

Look for things to remove, simplify and streamline.

Get to the point where your business is laser-focused on the exact targets and actions needed to reach the results that you're after. Nothing more.

Which things can you do without and still land clients, close deals and achieve the same level of success that you currently have? What are those activities that drain your time and attention, but don't yield any direct result? Are there things that you’re not good at, or have a low-level of proficiency in? Is there anything that you can pay someone else to do to better leverage your time?

If 80% of your business results come from only 20% of your actions, than the other 80% of your actions aren't necessary and can be delegated to someone else, or axed altogether. And that someone is probably way better at those 80% tasks than you are anyhow!

What is your REAL goal?

You need a clear definition of what you want and where you're going. But first, you need to understand that not every goal is the same, and placing the wrong goal in the wrong sequence will not get you the results you’re after.

In fact, it can seriously derail your overall ambitions.

If your goal is to make a million dollars in real estate sales commissions, it would be very easy to assume that all you need to do is make friends with a few wealthy people who have expensive homes and wait for them to call you once they need to sell. But there is no direct correlation between making a million dollars and having rich friends. It may work for some people, but it certainly won't work for everyone.

Your real goal would be to create a steady inflow of willing and able buyers and sellers that perceive you as their authority on local real estate, and where you can generate a steady stream of appointments, that will translate into business relationships and successful deals. And hopefully they have expensive homes, which would be a bonus!

Your big goal is actually made up of a subset of many clear, tiny goals - baby steps that you take every day to help you accomplish that big goal. Every successful business generates volume (in contacts, leads, calls, sales transactions, etc.), which then enables them to build systems and process to support that business activity.

Define the smaller goals that lead to your big goal. This is your purposefully designed to-do list that you can execute every day.

Enough leads to meet, or exceed, your needs:

To succeed in real estate, you obviously need to have enough leads to meet your goals, but make sure to build a business that generates so many leads that it actually exceeds your needs.

Listings are the best high-leverage area of your business, and they also generate the most leads. Aside from being a great way to get market exposure, listings allow you to multiply your time and effort exponentially. You can only show one buyer a house at any time, but you can have 10 listings running simultaneously with the same amount of effort, as other agents do all the hard work of bringing the buyers and the offers.

When it comes to market exposure, remember that the public really only see's listings - they're oblivious to the buyer agent. Well-presented properties and for sale signs give you the highest degree of social credibility.

Listings also give you better control of your time and helps to market your business to the local area. Establish a minimum number of listings to hit each month. No excuses, no blaming the market, and so on.

If you can’t reach your targets, reverse-engineer your plan to figure out how, and where, you can make those gains.