Thread: Business Plan???

Hi Lisa,
My best suggestion is to think up ways to find business. To many agents site back and wait for business to come in. Come up with 10 different marketing strategies and impliment them. Marketing is expensive, but worth its weight in gold.

I spend well over 3k a month in marketing but make well over 6 figures a year. Flyers, website, postcards, benches. Get your name out there and make sure people are finding you!

Lisa:

With the majority of new agents leaving the business in their first two years, your early focus on planning is appropriate. Not only do you want to plan and budget marketing, but also budget for personal and other business expenses.

Then you need to do your best to project income. There is an approach called the "income funnel" that will help you to do that. Unless you can get at least a minimal idea of income over the next year or so, it's quite difficult to develop a sound business plan, particularly the marketing budget piece.

There is a service out there that pulls it all together for you, but the links above are to articles with downloadable spreadsheets that can help you to get the planning process going without spending money.

Thanks Jim!

It looks like some good stuff. I've actually ran across your articles online before. Very informative.

I'll check out the service too ... I want to put my best foot forward and it only makes sense to get yourself organzied and focused on what needs to happen and what you need to do in order to get there.

I'm convinced that's why many people don't last in this business or any business for that matter.

Thanks again!
Lisa

Hi Lisa,

I would highly recommend continuing your education in real estate. You can start out with taking some of the REALTOR designation courses. If you take the CRS route ( www.crs.com ), they even offer a whole module geared towards business planning and marketing. I wish I would have started with that class years ago. I highly recommend it.

That being said, don’t forget, this is a people and contact business. The more people who think of you first when they think of real estate, the better off you are. It’s kind of tough to do that in a classroom or some think-tank somewhere.

Best of luck

Yes,I was looking at that designation also and figured that would be the first one I'd like to attain. They have some really interesting courses.

I will defiantely look up that class. I think education along with the work is best combination. I don't look at how am I going to get through my ConEd. I want to get as much info as I can an apply it!

Does anyone have a plan they'd like to share with me? It would be great if I had one as an example.

Thanks for all the replies! Much appreciated!
Lisa
Real Estate One - South Lyon, MI