A FOCUS Strategy for Estate Agents
I have a coaching client at the moment – a very successful four office owner from Kent – who can’t wait to use the techniques and strategies I’m sharing with him in his business.
There’s just one problem – he wants to do them all. Right now.
As estate agents, we like shiny new things, right? I certainly do. The latest tech, the hot new trend, the newest style website. We want them all, and we want them now.
It’s not our fault; we’re made that way.
We’re salespeople, and that means we love the thrill of the deal, and the roller coaster ride that goes along with it. After all, who in their right mind would run a business where we do all the work months (or longer) before we take a single penny from our clients, and where even then, only around 75% of deals will come off??
So if you want to implement all your new ideas, immediately, you’re not alone. Trouble is, you can’t. Well, not successfully, at least. You’ll get overwhelmed, frustrated and burned out before you’ve managed to implement everything. I know this, because I’ve been there, lots of times. I too felt overwhelm at all the exciting new ideas I wanted to apply to my business, and ended up with a lot of half-baked, half-finished, poorly-executed initiatives, most of which just didn’t work.
Then someone told me about this acronym:
F – follow
O – one
C – course
U – until
S – successful
It made a lot of sense. So I reined in all but one of my ideas, putting all the rest of them on a list called ‘Backburner’. Then, I divided up the campaign or project into several smaller steps, and put them in the best order for implementation. I printed out a calendar and wrote each step on a date that represented a realistic timeframe to get it done, and a final delivery date for the entire project.
Then I worked on it until it was finished. Without looking at any of the other shiny ideas on my Backburner list.
And it worked!
My tactic was to work on each project first thing every morning, for at least an hour or two, before opening any email or switching the phone on. Perhaps you’d prefer saving a couple of hours at the end of each day, or taking a whole day every week to work on your current project, maybe from home, to avoid work distractions. Whatever works for you is fine, just so long as you actually set aside the time to do it. Otherwise, as we both know, it will become sidelined amongst all the detritus of your working day.
Are you going to try it? Let me know in the comments; I’d love to hear from you.
What to read next: Is Your Diary Running Your Business?
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