Happy New Year!
The changing of a calendar is an excellent opportunity to evaluate where you are, where you’re going, and where you ultimately want to end up. For some, it’s good to take a step back from the day-to-day details of the business to dream big, and for others it’s an opportunity to learn how turn your dreams into realistic possibilities with careful planning.
Whether or not you’ve already made your business plan for 2014, you’ll want to start the new year off with this video from real estate coach Dan Smith, about how to organize your goals in a way which maximizes your chances of success.
Also, here’s the link to the pyramid handout Dan discusses so you can print it out NOW and get started on keeping your resolutions for 2014.
This week, we’re going to talk about business planning for 2014. And when you do business planning, there’s a million and one different ways to do it. But what I’ve always used, and what the people who I work with and coach now use, is we use something that I call “The Pyramid.” All right? Now if you want your own copy of this, it’s very easy by the way, just get a marker and you draw a triangle on a piece of paper, but if you want your own really nice copy that’s laid out like this, you can go to my website, VersatilityInSales.com, click on it, and print it up that way. All right.
So The Pyramid, it’s proven over the last decade or so to be a very, very powerful goal planning tool. How many of us have made goals before, and then not reached them? Everybody put their hands up. All right. How many of us have made goals before, and then halfway through the year, the end of the way through the year, we not only did we not make them, we don’t even remember what the goals were, and we can’t find where we wrote down what our goals were. Most of us, right, put our hands up.
The Pyramid will help prevent that, because it’s very easy, it’s on one piece of paper, and it lays out perfectly for what you’re looking to accomplish. Ok. So there’re seven levels to this pyramid.
Number 1, the top level, all right, the capstone here. We call that “The Dream.” And up here, this is your dream, this is your 15, 20 year plan. For some of you, it’ll be 5, 7, 10, for some of you there’ll also be 25, or 30. But this is your long-term plan, what you want your life to look like. Now, you probably can’t get it all in this little, this little tiny triangle. I get that. But that’s what arrows and lines are for, kind of pointing in to it. All right.
The second level is for goals. Now these are the goals that you will achieve along the way to finally achieve your dream. You don’t just achieve your dream overnight, right? This is going to be a process over the course of a decade or two. The goals along the way. So maybe you have 1 year goals for 2014, 3 year, 5 year, 7 year, 10 year, 15 year, 20 year goals. Along the way, what you’re going to achieve.
The third level down, that’s when we get into the nitty-gritty of 2014. That is your plan. What is your plan to achieve the goals? You want to make X amount of dollars? You want to sell X amount of houses? What is your plan to do that? Ok?
Now the next level down, all right, after we have plan, is activities. What kind of things are you going to have to do, how are you going to spend your days? The plan will lay that out for you. The plan tells you how much you want to do, and so you’ve got to figure out now what’s it going to take to actually make it happen? What activities do I need to do, day in and day out, to make this a reality? All right?
Now the next level down, we have schedule. Because we all know, if it’s not on your schedule, it doesn’t exist. So if we have all these plans, all these activities that are in our plan, all these activities, these things to do to make it happen, we have to have them on our schedule so they actually get done. Are you with me? Nod your head yes. Ok. If you’re lost, just rewind it, you can go watch it again. All right.
The next level down is tracking. All right. Tracking. It’s fantastic that we have the activities, it’s fantastic that we have a schedule to follow them; how often have we written a schedule, though, and not followed it? Pretty often, for most of us. So the tracking is how we actually keep track, did we do what we were supposed to do when we were supposed to do it? And the schedule’s very important, I mean, the schedule’s important, right, but the TRACKING of the schedule is very important. That’s like on a report card, ok, that’s your daily, your weekly report card for telling you how you spent your week.
And at the bottom level here, the foundation, right. All great plans, all great buildings, have a strong and solid foundation. And the bottom of this foundation here is accountability. You can have all of this in place, and some of you, I know, are great at making these plans, but not so good at executing these plans. We need to put an accountability into place so that you do what you’re supposed to do. There’s that old saying, I really like it, “doing what you’re supposed to do, especially on the days that you don’t want to do them, that will separate you from everybody else.” Ok? The accountability is that part. It will help you, it will help you do the things that you don’t really want to do that you have a tough time doing, but you still, because you have these accountabilities in place, they get done. Ok? Now remember, you can always go to ReboReports.com to get more information, to get more great information like this. And if you have anything particular that you would like these Real Life Real Estate episodes to be about, that you would like for me to talk about, go ahead and send me an email, dan@versatilityinsales.com. Thanks for tuning in this week, and remember, to get what you’ve never had, you must do what you’ve never done. I’ll see you next week.
