What gets results? Intention & focus. High Intention & Laser Focus. What do lasers do? Blind people. THAT’S FOCUS.
What causes problem(s)? Counter intention and dissipation
What causes a problem to persist? A lie.
Why do people struggle financially? Lies about money.
What’s the lie? Time is money.
We all have two valuable resources: time and money. How we spend those NOW will determine how much of each we will have in the FUTURE.
Your future is created moment by moment by what you do in the present. Making sound decisions now increases the odds of a brighter future tomorrow.
As business people we MUST be good stewards of our resources, the two most important being time and money. We must spend them both with thoughtfulness and care NOW if we hope to have more of each in the future.
This is what I refer to as the Time/Money Cycle. We all have the same amount of time, so how do some people manage to get a lot done while others seem to accomplish so little? It’s not about how much you have, what matters is how you SPEND IT. The goal is to make better use of time; focus on using time to make more money, use the money to buy your time back; use the extra time to make more money; use that extra money to buy more time back. Soon you will have more time AND more money.
If you find yourself saying “I don’t have time” over and over, then maybe it’s time to take a new look at how you deploy your resource called “time”.
Step one: Assign your time a dollar value. Since you no longer have an employer telling you what you are worth, it is up to you to determine this for yourself. What are you worth? What is your time worth? What is ONE HOUR of your time worth? Write it down. “I am worth $300 per hour.” Assign yourself a value. No one else will. This is something you must do. Now that we have that, watch your watch. Your personal burn rate is $300 per hour.
We can’t manage what we don’t measure. Now that we agree we are worth $300 an hour, we can begin to track and measure the cost and productivity of our time. It now has VALUE.
Step Two: measure your time. Example: Pretend you meet a buyer. How much time do you spend on each of the following activities?
1. Initial meeting and interview? ________ hours
2. Discovery of wants and needs? ________ hours
3. Searching MLS for properties that meet buyers’ criteria? _______ hours
4. Making list of properties to preview and show? _____ hours
5. Previewing these properties to ensure they meet buyers’ criteria? ______ hours
6. Loan app? _____ hours
7. Showing properties? _____ hours
8. Writing an offer? _____ hours
9. Negotiating the offer? _____ hours
10. Finalizing documents? _____ hours
11. Inspection? _____ hours
12. Contract-closing tasks? _____ hours
13. Closing? _____ hours
14. Total hours? _______?
Now add up ALL the hours and multiply by the $300 per hour you are worth. How much money should you have from all these activities?
Now look at your commission check. Which number is greater?
Now we can begin to see the reason why we need to value our time and measure it. When we are working, what activities make us the most money in the least time? Focus on those. These are known as Income Producing Activities.
Step Three: How many buyers can you work with at once? How many sellers can you work with at once? Now that we know the value of time, we now know we are far better of listing properties than putting buyers in our cars. With good systems we can probably work with 30 to 50 listings (Sellers) at one time while we can only work with ONE buyer at a time. NOW WE KNOW WHERE TO FOCUS OUR EFFORTS. Our IPA’s (Income Producing Activities) become LISTING AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.
This shift will allow us to start making more money in less time. We don’t work less, we just make more. We take that extra income and hire an assistant. Now we no longer do administrative tasks like follow up and contract-to-closing paper work. We focus even MORE of our time on IPA’s called Listings, which produces even more money in even less time.
As the cycle continues to repeat itself, we will see that we are generating more income in less time, taking that extra income and buying our time back. Instead of doing the administrative tasks ourselves, we hire an admin person to help us. What does that cost? Less than $300 per hour. Get rid of admin tasks. Focus on IPAs. Unless it makes money, hire someone else to help you. We are now generating two, three, four even five OR MORE times our income in less time!
Step Four: Build the team. Why don’t more people do this? Because they don’t know how to get the right people to do the right thing at the right time. Hire people who are Excellent or Very Good at things that you are Fair or Poor at and stop doing them. Focus your energies on just a few tasks that you are Excellent at or Very Good at.
So, start earning what you are worth today!
Thanks for reading and good luck in your business!