Everyone in real estate, particularly brokers and team leaders, face significant challenges as they try to run a profitable business in 2022. Historically low inventory, buyers flooding houses with offers, turbulent recruiting and retention conditions—we’ve heard it all.
We talk a lot about the importance of planning for times such as this, and for good reason. Creating and following a business plan can give you needed stability and focus as things in the market “go crazy.” Your business plan is the representation of your vision, and the roadmap to achieving that vision.
The types of challenges brokers and team leaders are seeing today can make a business plan feel irrelevant. Agents can feel powerless and lost if their clients continue to be outbid and the pool of available listings dries up. They may feel like a business plan won’t even touch these issues. I’ve talked to team leaders and brokers who have all but abandoned their business plans as they’ve tried to find the right response to these ongoing changes in the market.
It all begs the question: What do you do when things don’t go according to plan?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about a lesson I learned back in my early scouting days: If you ever become lost, all you need to regain your bearings is a fixed point you can see, like a mountain peak or building. Using that fixed point, you can orient yourself and get back to safety.
Allow me to suggest that if it feels like your team or brokerage is getting lost in the challenges we’ve been facing over the last few months, your business plan might be that fixed point you need to guide yourself to the right place.
Simply because you’re facing challenges your business plan doesn’t account for does not mean the plan has no value. Your business plan is a defined vision that you ought to let guide you through challenges. Like the distant mountain peak a hiker uses to reorient himself, your plan (and the vision it represents) can provide both perspective and direction as conditions change around you.
By abandoning your business plan, you’re guaranteeing that the vision and goals it contains will never be accomplished. By redoubling your efforts to focus on your plan and charting a new course to fulfill it, nothing in the market—low inventory, high prices, fluctuating retention—will keep you from your goals.
Verl Workman is the founder and CEO of Workman Success Systems, a real estate consulting company that specializes in performance coaching and building highly effective teams. Contact wssm@workmansuccess.com for more information and free downloadable resources.
