Last week I went off on a wild raving rant about Mega-Agents. I needed to vent a little pent-up steam, don’t you know? 🤯
(I will reveal the reason I tend to go off on tangents within this article.)
The week before last, I talked about The Three Pillars of Success in Real Estate (real estate skills, people skills, and business skills). Let’s continue that discussion with the most important of the three pillars—business skills.
Did you just cringe and want to stop reading? Yeah, you’re a hot mess, aren’t you, first name?
Haha! J.K. Actually, you’re perfectly normal. For a REALTOR®, I mean…
Systems and Procedures
Here’s the #1 most important business lesson I ever learned:
You cannot be successful in business without clear-cut systems and procedures that you follow daily.
I learned about the importance of systems and procedures in the motorcycle parts business long before becoming a REALTOR®. But business is business, and you can’t grow any business without simple, repeatable systems and procedures.
I learned this by trial and error through the school of hard knocks and, more importantly, following the advice of successful people I looked up to.
Many people think I’m naturally super-organized! Haha! Fooled you all!
In my natural state, I’ve got severe A.D.D. However, I’ve taken steps to overcome this by implementing simple systems and procedures into my business and personal life, one simple step at a time.
These tools keep me focused, calm, and organized, despite my natural messy inclination. 🙂
Other people say they’ve got A.D.D., and that’s their excuse for being a hot mess, like there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it. That’s a total cop-out. Sorry. Not sorry.
If I can do it, so can you. Besides, I think having a little A.D.D. is actually an advantage in real estate if you know how to control it.
My First Day
When I first became a REALTOR®, I had zero clients and zero prospects, but I was still as busy as a beaver building a new dam. 🦫
With zero clients to distract me, I directed my energy towards gnawing wood and assembling the chunks into something useful that I knew I would need later. After doing all that work, when I finally landed my first client, my business took off like a rocket.
Hey, check out the rocket on my home page! Seriously, click on the link. Isn’t it cool?
(Oops, there’s my A.D.D. kicking in. This happens to me all the time. Now, what the heck was I talking about?)
Oh, right, getting organized…
Months before I had my first client, I was implementing systems and procedures every day, building a website, building a listing presentation, and lots of other important biz stuff.
Did I have perfect systems and procedures and an awesome website and listing presentation from day one?
No, they were all garbage. 🗑️
After all, I had no idea what I was doing. But you learn by doing, first name.
What I did have was a foundation to build upon, which I did by continually tweaking all my business systems and procedures every day for the rest of my career.
For a guy with A.D.D. and poor people skills (at first), I did pretty well by most standards. Even though it took me months to get my first client, I still earned $186,000 in commissions in my first year. After that, I earned between $590,000-$865,000 for 12 consecutive years, all as an individual agent.
I did that without once chasing after a crappy Internet lead, by the way. In fact, I attribute almost all of that success to implementing simple business systems and procedures.
There’s no reason whatsoever that you can’t do the same thing if you choose to. In fact, you’ve got a massive advantage over me because you don’t need to learn all this stuff from scratch as I did.
If you’re in business (you are) and your business skills suck (they probably do), you should quit making excuses and do something about it.
If you want to achieve massive success in real estate, stop accepting that good enough is good enough. It’s not.
Learn more about the Agent Skills Master’s Program here.
“The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself… The more you learn, the more you’ll earn.” — Warren Buffett
Ted Greenhough
I teach GOOD REALTORS® how to become GREAT REALTORS® with a simple, logical, easy-to-follow, easy-to-implement, inspirational step-by-step program.
Knowledge + Action = Skill
