When I became the owner of a real estate office, I achieved a huge goal. Part of me felt like I had succeeded and thought it would be plain sailing from there. What I didn’t realise was that rather than sitting on top of the mountain, I was at the bottom of the climb.
After all what did I know about running an office? What did I know about management? Nothing! I’d gone from being a salesperson looking after myself and one PA to looking after nearly 20 staff members and trying to keep a business afloat. I was overwhelmed to say the least, but figured if I could just lead by example and keep making sales, that would do the trick. It didn’t – my sales certainly contributed and kept some money coming in the door, but it took me away from my people and when you are not visible you send the message that you don’t care. And when your staff think you don’t care then they don’t care.
It took staff leaving and clients getting very upset due to the lack of service for me to realise a real estate office does not run itself. I shifted my focus to office management, but then my personal sales started to suffer. Does this sound familiar? I’m going to use a few clichés here, but it becomes a bit of a vicious circle, you leap from one thing to the other, trying to keep both afloat, while constantly putting out fires.
The reality is running a real estate office and selling real estate are two completely different jobs. It is incredibly hard to do both successfully at the same time. If you have built some structure in your business and have key people running the various departments, and you are meeting with them regularly and getting regular reports on how the business is running and reacting quickly when something needs attention, then certainly you can go ahead and sell if that’s what you want to do. If that’s not happening, then you can either say goodbye to your sales position or say good bye to your business. At this stage you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
If you choose sales, I wish you luck and every success, but if, like me, you choose your business, what’s the next step?
If your goals and ambitions are to have a successful real estate office you just need to learn how to become a good manager. And it’s not really that hard, you do it the same way you become a good salesperson by:
- training
- creating a vision
- creating a business plan
- spending time with your people and listening to what they want and need.
Then slowly but surely you create systems and procedures where there are none and improve the ones that you do have. The reality is you can have it all, just not all at once. And you don’t have to do all this yourself. To use another cliché, why reinvent the wheel? At Real Estate Brilliance we have developed a set of systems, processes and procedures to help business owners manage their office from hiring staff to running meetings and managing and motivating their teams.
Some of the real estate businesses that I work with make huge profits and have amazing cultures. Some of the owners of these businesses work a few days per month, they have their businesses on autopilot run by key people, some who have a small share, others that are very well trained, managed and remunerated. You too can become like them and have your cake and eat it too. Register now for my upcoming FREE half-day Real Estate Brilliance webinar by clicking the button below.
