One of the biggest struggles real estate agents face is managing their businesses. While many agents create daily to-do lists, they often get so wrapped up in the emergencies that arise that they never get around to what’s most important. As a result, their productivity and profitability suffer, and they end up burned out. They may know they need to incorporate structure in their days, but aren’t sure where to start.
Like many in the real estate business, when Barbara Betts, a real estate professional in Long Beach, Calif., became an agent, she struggled to create structure in her day.
“I started my career thinking I would just help people buy and sell homes. I didn’t think there was a business behind it,” she says. Without any real, focused, results-producing activities, she ended up working all the time. Although she’d get home from work at six or seven in the evening, she was often up until two or three in the morning answering internet leads. “At one point, I had worked for 27 days straight,” she says.
Unfortunately, working all the time didn’t translate into more income or success, and the long hours prevented her from spending time with her two children. As a result, she felt guilty all the time—guilty when she was with her kids because she felt like she needed to work and guilty when she was working because she was missing out on her kids’ activities. She knew she had to make a change.
How did Betts transition from just being busy to becoming productive? She got a coach who worked with her to help her understand the difference between the two.
One of the first things Barbara worked on with her coach was discovering and leveraging her strengths and applying them to her business. Next, they developed goals based on her top priority: her children. Together, along with Betts’s husband, Harold, they were able to create a plan that took into account family events, children’s activities, and vacations first, before planning the rest of their daily, weekly, monthly and yearly activities. By prioritizing the things that mattered to her most, and building intentional rest periods into her schedule, she was able to create both a highly profitable business and a thriving family life.
Since the Betts committed to a system and stuck with their plan, their business grew. In one year, they closed 47 transactions and touted more than $21 million in sales volume. They were able to travel to watch their daughter dance and their son (who was offered an athletic scholarship to the University of Tennessee and then drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays) play baseball.
“The biggest impact coaching has had on my life is it helped me realize we could have a top-producing business and still be at all the events or things that were important to our children,” she says.
If you want to achieve your goals and enjoy the results of your hard work, create structure in your day. While a system can help you get started, click here to learn how a coach can work one-on-one with you to help you break through the barriers preventing you from being as successful—in business, or life—as you want to be.
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