How do you help more clients without feeling like the marrow has been sucked from your bones?
Many top producing real estate agents struggle with maintaining a balanced life while hammering out multiple deals. Let’s face it – people want your help. Yet, it could come at the expense of your relationships, health and sanity.
The year I sold 48 homes on my own with a part-time assistant, I felt exhausted and I neglected my family. Five years later, my team sold 207 homes. Yet, I felt rested and spent more time with family than ever before.
How did I help more families, make more money and yet create more time? The short answer: Systems.
A system is a detailed set of processes designed to accomplish a task or solve a problem. As author Chet Holmes wrote in his best-selling book, “The Ultimate Sales Machine,” “Building a sales machine is not going to be about doing 4,000 things; it’s going to be about doing 12 things 4,000 times.”
Below I share the top five areas of your business that systems can help with. They’ll help you be more task-oriented and solve client problems quickly. Systems have improved my business and my work-life balance, and I’m confident that they can help you, too.
Systems provide you more time
Eliminate ordinary and routine activities, and delegate less productive tasks to others. This frees up your time for highly productive tasks and allows you to focus on responsibilities that can make you the most money. Your business will ultimately become more productive and profitable, and you have more time.
Systems create consistency
Provide a consistent customer service experience regardless of your volume and achieve repeatable and predictable business outcomes.
Creating systems with others involved in your business will allow you to deliver a sequential, repeatable experience to clients without you having to be involved every step of the way. Clients will be loyal to the quality, value and world-class experience you provide.
Systems improve productivity
Focus on production, sales and increasing market share. When you’re a solo agent, it can be overwhelming to do everything. By implementing systems, you will be able to connect with more people while investing time and energy into growing your influence and reputation. All of this will enhance your business, relationships and ability to better serve more people.
Systems cultivate more creativity
Try new ideas and identify areas of your business that aren’t as efficient as they should be. After you implement systems and they begin running efficiently, you will have time to step back and look at your entire process.
From this slightly detached perspective, you can experiment with new ideas while the business continues to hum thanks to the systems you have in place.
Systems allow you to scale
Replace yourself completely. Systems will allow you to eliminate bottlenecks, grow your business exponentially, add more clients, increase commissions and free up more time for personal growth.
Eventually, your systems will run the business largely on their own with little oversight required from you.
While systems seem like a cure-all, they do have limits. It takes a lot of hard work. They won’t solve all of your problems, take the place of exceptional customer service, or be easy for everyone to embrace and execute. They also won’t take the place of work that needs to happen or eliminate the drama that often accompanies business relationships.
I know that it isn’t easy to create the systems I’ve described here, but few worthwhile endeavors are easy. Systems have changed my life and they can change yours, too.
Justin Udy is an award-winning agent with Century 21 Everest Realty Group and is a co-author of the upcoming book, “Winning Real Estate.” Learn more about systems by listening to Justin’s podcast and learn more about Century 21 Real Estate by visiting jointherelentless.com.