Planning for 2015 might be the last thing you want to do in the throes of summer, but I’ve learned the hard way that the difference between success and failure is planning well in advance. As the saying goes, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
A good example is my first business cutting lawns. There were teenagers who cut my neighbor’s lawn for $10. I figured I could do it cheaper and convinced everyone in my neighborhood to let me cut their lawn for 5 bucks. I was 8 years old and 5 bucks a lawn was a lot, especially if my dad was going to let me use the household lawn mower and pay for the gas. I quickly convinced my friends to do the work for $2.50 a lawn, and we were like a swarm of bees every weekend morning during the summer.
I was raking it in, so much so that my father started talking about overhead and wear and tear on the lawn mower, blah de blah blah. I ignored everything he was saying because I was dreaming about the dirt bike I was going to buy. The crushing blow came at the end of summer, when I failed to account for the weekend baseball and soccer practice schedules and quickly realized that I could only do this volume of business during the summer. As my time — and my labor pool — dried up, so did the revenues.
I learned a few big lessons: Plan for the seasons, check. Plan for staffing turnover, check. Plan for attracting next year’s customers, check. And, most important, figure out how to be memorable and profitable, check.
Those lessons from so many years ago are ingrained in my mind today and inspired me to write this as I plan for the Inman Connect San Francisco and Agent Reboot conference in San Francisco, where I’ll be onstage with some of the best minds in real estate marketing, sharing ideas, tips and strategies for driving business growth in the coming year.
A few weeks ago I tracked down most of the speakers to get their take on what agents should be thinking about for real estate marketing in 2015.
With the help of my team in the Real Estate Marketing Academy at Placester, we collected a bunch of killer tips from these master marketers from offline to online to content marketing to Facebook and put together a slide deck called Agent Intelligence for 2015: Real Estate Marketing Secrets from the Pros. Feel free to download, retweet your favorite quotes and connect with the speakers at the event. Keep dreaming and just remember to plan to make your dreams come true.
Here’s a few of my favorite tips:
Real Estate Marketing Secrets From The Pros from Placester
Seth Price is director of sales and real estate marketing at Placester, a Cambridge, Mass.-based technology company specializing in building online marketing tools for the real estate industry.
