Having a real estate business is great. However, when you’re in an industry that is as competitive as the real estate indsutry is, then having a website with great real estate web design or marketing strategies is not enough to truly move your business forward. In order to truly scale your business, what you need are systems.
What usually ends up happening for most real estate entrepreneurs is that they start running their real estate business but have eventually hit this point where they are just stuck. This can happen to you as well. Imagine the point where you realize that you’re making a certain amount of money but you’re finding it very hard to increase that number by a factor of two or more.
For example, you’re currently making $100,000 and you’ve been trying everything to hit that elusive quarter-million mark. The only problem is you’ve hit your ceiling. What usually ends up happening is you start searching for answers to grow and scale.
This is the point when you’re exposed to different marketing gimmicks or ‘shinny objects’. Whether it’s finding promotions online saying “Lead gen through Facebook ads”, or “We manage your social media”, or “Cold calling call centers for hire that guarantee leads”. There are a lot of these online.Â
Chances are, they’re probably flooding your Facebook feed as well. While some of these strategies do work, there is one underlying thing that you’re potentially overlooking that will help you scale prior to hiring one of these specialists and that one thing is systems.
Let’s say that you’re putting together some furniture that you bought from Ikea for example but it doesn’t come with a manual. Imagine how difficult it would be for you to understand and figure out what goes where in order to assemble this piece of furniture.
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Of course, you can probably go to the original carpenter and ask that person for instructions but that would be extremely time-consuming and inefficient. If every time they sell that piece of furniture, they need to go back to the same carpenter and constantly ask for assembly instructions. This does not make sense.Â
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Well, the same thing applies to you and your business.
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If all the information that you used to operate your business is trapped in your head then how is anyone supposed to understand how your business works? Are you willing to trade your valuable time to explain your procedures to every single person that you bring on to help you scale? Obviously, the answer is no and that’s the importance of systems.
You see, you’ve hit this financial glass ceiling because of one undeniable truth and that is that you are at capacity. You no longer have the time or bandwidth to scale your business because you’re trapped doing the day-to-day operations of your business.
Essentially all your time is focused on working in your business instead of on your business. All of these boils down to a basic understanding of how your time is valued.
As you started your real estate career, you essentially were trading your time for money. However, as you’re probably realizing now, you need more of your time back to focus on growing and you do this by buying your time back.
So what exactly does buying your time back look like?
It essentially comes in the form of bringing on a virtual assistant or executive assistant to handle repetitive tasks. Maybe a buyers agent to drive around potential clients, or maybe a marketing person to help with your lead generation. They come in many forms but the idea behind this is the same.
You see, if your hourly rate is $100 per hour and you’re spending your time on $25 per hour tasks, then you’ll be limited to that $25 per hour rate in the long run. However, if you can delegate that task to someone at $25 per hour, then you’ll be able to increase your output and productivity, by multiple factors thereby allowing you to scale your business.
Now, going back to that furniture assembly analogy, part of the process of creating systems for your business starts with creating processes and procedures or your business’ instruction manual.
You see, working in your business is essentially made up of five different categories. These categories are Lead Generation, Lead Nurture, Sales, Fulfillment, and Retention.
Now, the reason you’re trapped in this position of not being able to scale is that you’re currently working in your business. The goal of scaling is to remove you from working in your business and instead move you to start working on your business, and you do this by buying back your time.
The goal here is that in order to scale, you have to create systems for each one of these categories. For each category, you’re going to want to create a map of your process, or essentially take everything in your head and put it on paper. You can do this by answering the five items below:Â
Now, the plan is to take inventory of everything you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. From there, create a document for each of the tasks you repeat and that can be delegated for less than your hourly rate.
Once this is synthesized, then and only then can you start buying back your time and hire people to help you scale. And of course, once that’s done, then you can start focusing on working on your business instead of in it.
Now, if you need more help on installing systems into your business, it’s actually what we do and we’re experts at. I highly recommend that you schedule a strategy session with either myself or someone from my team and we can talk shop.
However, if you’re not ready yet then I highly recommend that you at least join us in our free Facebook Group where we go deeper into the discussion on real estate systems along with topics like lead generation, digital marketing, and websites for real estate agents.
Emmanuel here and my goal is to empower 1 billion realtors with tools to generate business online. Think you can be one of them?
Emmanuel is the CEO of Square 1 Group, a boutique agency that helps real estate entrepreneurs build a unique brand online. He has been in the real estate digital marketing industry for over a decade and has helped hundreds of real estate entrepreneurs grow their business. He ensure that Square 1 Group is able to design, build, and manage custom-built lead-generating websites.
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