Let’s get real. You just aren’t motivated to build a business plan, are you? We know we’re supposed to write business plans. Yet, if you’re like 95% of real estate professionals, doing that seems just like an exercise in futility. Your business plan doesn’t inspire you. In fact, it bores you or fills you with dread even to think about it!
Here’s the magic that’s left out of most plans—and specific guidance for you to put that magic into your plan, so you’re inspired every day—not only to complete the plan, but to use it as a very personalized and specific guide to your success.
Managers: If you’re trying to get your agents to plan, you’ve got to read this article!
Why Are Most Business Plans Useless?
Unfortunately, when most people write business plans, all they do is fill in some blanks with guess numbers. The problem is that numbers in blanks aren’t inspiring. They aren’t motivating. They don’t call out and suggest to you that you should look at those numbers once in awhile.
What Really Motivates Us?
If numbers inspired us, we’d all be gazillionaires selling real estate. After all, we say we want to sell more homes than the average sales associate. We want to make more money than the average sales associate. Yet, if numbers and money were motivators, our results would be different than they are. The fact is that money, in itself, is not a motivator. It’s what we want to do with the money.
And that’s as individual as we are. Martin Luther King didn’t say, “I have a business plan.” He said, “I have a dream.” You must include the ‘dream’ part of your future in your business plans to make that plan useful to you.
Building the ‘Why’ Into your Business Plans
That’s the motivator. In other words, we have to have a big why. Most business plans don’t build in the why. That’s why they fall flat, and leave us cold. That’s why sales associates don’t want to go through the exercise of creating them.
The Tools to Find that Why
Most people think of business plans as projections of numbers. But, that’s not all there is to a real strategic plan. There are three parts of a business plan that provide that inspiration, that motivation, and that why. And, those are the parts of the planning process that are most frequently left out:
- Your vision—why you’re in this business; how you see yourself after you retire
- Your review—what happened in your business that will make an impact on your business in the future
- Your mission—who are you in the business
Start at the End—Your Vision
A few years ago, business professors Jim Collins and Jerry Porras studied very successful companies to find out the differences between stunning (high profits and highly regarded), and other like companies who were almost as profitable, but not so successful. They published the results in the best business book I’ve ever read, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.
What did they find was the common difference between the highly profitable and merely very successful?
A common vision and values shared by every person in the company.
Their conclusion was that the desire for profits isn’t the main driver for profits. The focused and tenacious vision, shared by all in the company, was the biggest determinant for profits.
Components of Vision
Your vision is made up of your core ideology and your envisioned future.
Your core ideology is made up of your core values and core purpose. If you look at your life, you’ll see that the things that inspire and motivate you are the things that adhere to your belief system. That’s what this part of the vision statement says about you.
Your envisioned future is made from a vivid description of this future, and BHAGs—big hairy, audacious goals. Those are goals five years out, that you really don’t think you can attain.
The Power of BHAGs
Surprisingly, as Porras and Collins found, when companies stated these goals, they actually attained them in three years! Inspirational goals that are congruent with your core values and core ideology are powerful motivators!
What Vision Does for Companies
Here’s Porras and Collins’s function of a vision statement:
Provides guidance about what core to preserve and what future to progress toward. Made up of core ideology and envisioned future.
Examples of Some High-Profitable Businesses
As you read the examples below, ask yourself, “Are their core values in alignment with their daily actions?
How to Construct your Vision
How do you want to see yourself in this business? How do you want people to talk about you and your business after you retire? What values are most important to you? What ideology do you follow in your business?
Managers’ exercise. Here’s a great exercise for managers. To figure out what your core values are, imagine that you are opening an office on Mars. You can only take three agents with you on your spaceship. Name those three agents. What are the core values of these agents?
Looking back: Imagine you are at your own memorial, watching from above. What are others saying about you? What’s most memorable about you?
Voicing those BHAGs
What is a great goal you would love to accomplish in your business, but really don’t feel it’s possible for you within five years? Write it right now.
Why We Don’t Reach Those Lofty Goals
Is that goal that’s been eluding you congruent with your core values? What I mean by that is, does that goal feel comfortable to you? For instance, if that goal is that you’ll make two million dollars, and you don’t like the feeling of that much money, because your values are aligned differently, you just aren’t going to reach that goal. That, I believe is the reason many of us don’t reach some of our goals. Those goals aren’t in alignment with our core values.
Here’s what great motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said about goal-value alignment:
Finding your Alive, Powerful Motivation
In my business planning system, I also provide another method to check your motivation.
Click here to get this document.
I’m convinced that we reach or don’t reach our goals based on the intensity of our desire, driven not by cold numbers, but by the warm emotion of aligned values and inspiring goals. Yogi Berra said it well:
Carla Cross, CRB, MA, is an international speaker, writer, and coach, specializing in real estate management. Carla has just created a unique leadership of the month series, featuring one new leadership strategy each month, 365 Leadership. http://www.carlacross.com.
Tracey C. Velt is a writer, blogger and editorial strategist who specializes
in the business of real estate. For the past six years, she's been writing
and editing for REAL Trends. Prior to that, she served as an editor for
Florida Realtor magazine and continues to contribute to multiple real estate
publications, both in print and online.
