What's in Your Playbook?

In the very memorable Capital One credit card commercials, Samuel L. Jackson cleverly asks, “What’s in your wallet?”

My question for you is, “What’s in your playbook?”

From individual agents to mega teams, I think every real estate business owner needs a playbook. While a football team’s playbook contains strategies and plays, your business playbook should contain the same elements, which will take the form of a written outline of any process your business completes three or more times.

Below are a few questions to help you get started thinking about what should be included in your playbook, which you might prefer to call an operations manual.

1. What’s the process you follow when representing buyers? What do you do when you first meet? How do you educate them on the market? How do you help buyers avoid being surprised by the competitiveness of a low-inventory market?

2. How do you collect all the important information you’ll need from buyers and sellers? Do you have a form? Do you have any tricks or special ways of asking questions that elicit the most accurate answers? What do you do with the information once you collect it? Do you put it in a specific database?

3. When do you update your contact database? How do you categorize prospects, current clients and past clients? What’s your action plan for maintaining good communication before, during and after the sale? How do you make sure you don’t drop the ball with buyers and sellers who want to work with you in the future, but not today?

4. What tools do you use to measure the performance of your marketing and sales activities? How many postcards do you have to mail to find a motivated seller? How many calls, emails and text messages sent will produce a ready, willing and able buyer? How much money are you making on the dollars invested in marketing?

Wouldn’t it be nice to know the answers to these questions? More importantly—once you create a system that produces consistent results—wouldn’t you love to be able to duplicate it over and over again and produce more and more of the same result?

My team utilizes the Workman Success Systems Training Center for all of our systems and processes. This online video resource provides everything we need to know and do to build a business that produces a reliable stream of sales and income. We don’t use everything in the Training Center because there’s so much included that it’s really not possible to use it all, but it’s amazing how having this resource has helped fuel the growth of our business for the last four years.

You don’t need to personally have access to the Workman Systems to be able to grow a successful business yourself, but you’ll definitely need something similar. If you’d like some help getting started, connect with me at Cleve@GoGaddis.com and I’ll share the table of contents and an outline of the WSS Operations Manual, which should give you a huge head start in creating your own.

In closing, if you found yourself thinking that you don’t have a big enough business to need a playbook as you read this article, you better get really comfortable with the size of your business today. As an alternative, I suggest you begin running your business as if you know it will be really big and profitable someday, as this is the only way it ever will be.

Cleve Gaddis is a master coach with Workman Success Systems and team leader with Gaddis Partners, RE/MAX Center in Atlanta. He learned sales the hard way, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and now puts those skills to use in helping his team close $60 million annually. He loves to share his systems and strategies to help others succeed. He hosts the Call Cleve Atlanta Real Estate Show heard weekly on NewsTalk 1160 WCFO. Contact him at Cleve@GoGaddis.com. For more information, please visit www.workmansuccesssystems.com.