A business plan is one of those lofty ideas that everyone in real estate agrees is a best practice, but few actually put into use.
It’s understandable. Agents and teams get disenchanted with goal-setting practices and writing business plans because they feel like those tools never work. But a plan only works if you work on it. And it’s very hard to take time away from your business to work on your business, and even more challenging is to hold yourself accountable.
So quite frankly, many agents are stuck. But they don’t have to be.
Make it big, but make it one page
If you really want to bring about significant growth and increase your production and change your lifestyle, you need to get a plan together and stick to it. The plan should be clear, it should be understandable, and it should be something you can read at a glance. A multi-page document with checklists, budget line items, and pages of tactics will just gather dust on a shelf. But a plan that fits on one page can be hung on your wall and referred to every day, anytime by anyone in your office.
At Icenhower Coaching & Consulting, we call ours a 1-3-5 plan. You start by defining one large goal. Then you identify three focus areas to concentrate on. Then you define five objectives for each focus area. And that’s it. All on one page. Download this template and try it for yourself. We’ve included a page for an agent and a page for a team.
This single page business plan will then encompass all the growth you want to see in your business over the course of the upcoming year. It will represent everything you want to change, to help you focus on growth-minded activities rather than just managing the day to day operations and servicing existing business.
Your overall goal should be something measurable and specific. Perhaps it will be the number of units or homes you want to close, or even total sales or gross commission income. And make it a goal that is ambitious and takes added effort to achieve, so even if you fall short, you will have made significant progress in the right direction.
The single page business plan is a way to map out all the activities you know you should do but never get around to doing when you’re caught up in the day to day activities.
Now take your plan a step further with a coach
In the right setting, your Single Page Business Plan can become more than an outline. It becomes a roadmap for your entire year. And at ICC, it serves as a focal point when our coaches work with our clients — like an agenda for the next year’s coaching.
Because even if you download the template today and fill it out tonight, you’re still on your own when it comes to taking action, checking in on your progress, and seeing it through. And self-accountability is an incredibly hard task for even the most driven real estate professionals.
Without a coach or accountability partner to push you forward, to urge you to do the things you know that you need to do to get the results you want, the implementation just doesn’t happen.
But working with a coach, and developing your one overall goal alongside that coach, this Single Page Business Plan becomes a livable document. And then you have now co-authored your next year’s coaching agenda. Together, you will move forward and knock out the strategies, delivering on your priorities. And at the end of the year, you will hit the big goal that you have at the top of the plan because you did all of the things at the bottom of the plan that you said you were going to do.
Take Eric Craig from Smithville, Missouri. He went from a solo agent to the number one producing team in his region, selling more than four hundred homes a year. His team has a copy of their plan at every meeting.
“We have used ICC’s Single Page Business Plan to set our team’s annual goals every year for the past five years. And it has helped our team consistently grow and increase production by more than 25% year over year.”
When your entire growth plan is mapped out and broken down into actionable steps, you’re on your way to driving significant change. But when you partner with a coach to help you develop, measure and deliver on those steps, you’re that much closer to success. Download your copy of the Single Page Business Plan, then schedule a time to talk to our team. We’d love to help you make 2020 your best year yet.
Learn more about Icenhower Coaching & Consulting.
Brian Icenhower is the founder of Icenhower Coaching & Consulting (ICC), and an owner of many of the largest and highest-producing real estate companies in the United States. Brian has been coaching and training real estate agents for more than 25 years. ICC is one of the largest real estate coaching companies with more than five hundred clients that include 31 of the Real Trends Top 500 list.
