By Kathleen Black
Many clients come to coaching when they are capped out at what they can accomplish. They only know so many people and they can only do so much with their own personal time. It is great to get to this point in your business, but what happens is we hit a glass ceiling and you can only get so far before you have stagnated the growth of your business all together.
When you see your business not as a separate entity of its own, but you as the business, or believing that you are the business, you can achieve moderate success. This is the age old trade time for money that boils down to an hourly wage once you have filled all your available working hours. It is great to certain point, usually around the $125,000 to $200,000 mark, when it starts to affect your family, how much you see your friends. This sets you up to see you as the business.
What is healthy is to see your business on its own and capable of operating without you. I am not saying it is going to operate without you, or that is a goal in anyway. I am suggesting that seeing your business from a “bird’s eye view” or from a dimension outside of yourself is where you need to be to see the potential of the business for growth.
The real problem is not capping out at 100-150,000 or even 250,000, it is seeing yourself as the business that causes stagnation. Your business is a separate entity. When you have a goal or a mission your business is the source to achieve those goals and create your impact and legacy. Your business is a vehicle used to help you achieve your personal goals as an individual, but in the long run the business is capable of more than satisfying your personal goals. When you view the business as a separate entity you can see it through the other dimensions of leverage of other people’s time, knowledge, marketing, and technology. Versus when the business is you, that is the only dimension of leverage visible to you…your time.
The answer is simple; we all understand the concept of leverage…at the very least, in its simplest form. We have all; to some degree leveraged our own time very well and others have learned to master it. Anything we have ever done successfully as a coaching company, partnership, or working with a team, in real estate has come from a firm grasp of the concepts of leverage.
This simply put is how we accomplish much more than our physical limits will allow.
Leverage is the use of the tools and resources to do more
with less effort, time and money
without sacrificing any standards of service.
We can all be capable of doing more than we could ever imagine. Doing more using this concept of leverage does not mean working harder. It means using tools we never realized we had and using these tools in a way that will allow us to make more money with less effort while increasing the amount of time we spend one on one with our clients. This will ultimately mean leaving more time to spend with our families and friends.
We know what it is like to do a very large amount of business on your own, to be run off your feet, feeling like everyone wants you at the same time. What we know today that is very different is that you can do ten times the business with much less effort, if you have a system you can leverage.
The dimension of leverage where marketing meets time is the point where realtors feel maxed out. This is the problem: traditional marketing methods like cold calling, open-houses, and door knocking are great but require all your time and you cannot be doing anything else during that time.
When we leverage ourselves using marketing we can get the leads to call us. This way we can be doing other things with our time. When we are cold calling, door knocking, or even holding an open house, your time is required to convert people from a prospect to a lead. By leveraging advanced marketing systems the prospect is converted to a lead by the marketing system and then calls you. Not that open houses are a bad thing, but your time and effort are required to move prospect to lead, opposed to allowing marketing to do that for you.
The difference between a prospect and a lead is that a prospect is someone who has expressed a need for the service you offer (but not necessarily wanting that service from you), whereas, a lead is someone interested in your business providing them with the service they seek. A good example of the difference between a lead and a prospect is a for-sale-by-owner or FSBO prospect. Most agents try to convert the FSBO right to an appointment, but the FSBO is only a prospect, and it is our job to warm them up to a lead prior to trying to secure an appointment.
When we talk about advanced marketing systems and their ability to bring a lead to you, we are talking about leveraging these systems to do the work of converting prospect to lead for you. Take an open house for example, we want to give you a better option to allow you to spend less time on your weekend and create qualified leads.
I think we can all agree, open houses bring out the noisy neighbours, tire kickers, and home design enthusiasts looking for ideas, and yes it may be a good way of attracting prospects, but we could be using our time to convert qualified leads to clients. You could be spending the energy, effort, money to hope to attract a few prospects to the open house, and 3 hours of time or more on your weekend to attract higher qualified prospects using marketing. We can spend a few minutes placing the ad, as much or less money on the ad, and create many more opportunities.
Obviously if you are new in the business you may have an abundance of time to invest. In this case door knocking, open houses, just listed, and just sold calls, and even cold calls may be the best route if you are starting in the business and working on your own. However, these techniques are not going to grow your business to the level it is capable of in the long run, and eventually you will hit a cap, or ceiling in your growth, and be ready to invest in a marketing budget, and implement advanced marketing concepts to leverage time, marketing, and technology to create a better service for a higher volume of clients.
If open houses are working for you great, but the goal in the future must be to have the leads come to you. If we are disturbing you by presenting ideas that seem the opposite of what you are using now, then we are doing our job. If you want growth in your business, these are the changes you need. If you are looking for explosive growth in your business, where you can leverage yourself and spend less time, this is what it looks like in your business.
Kathleen’s extensive knowledge of team building and systems has enabled her to successfully coach hundreds of top producers to higher production. Many of her clients have now built mega-teams that are leading their markets in production. As a highly demanded coach Kathleen has enjoyed a high retention rate, uncommon in the coaching industry, with loyal clients and a long waiting list for her services.
You can contact Kathleen at info@kathleenspeaks.com
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