7 Areas Agents Must Regularly Evaluate Themselves On

Running a business can sometimes feel like a never-ending sprint. You wake up each day, sprint through the day, end it panting and then rinse and repeat the next day. This can lead to gaps in your business that go on widening as time goes by. These gaps can end up becoming insurmountable chasms that can tear your business apart. In this article, we share seven areas you should regularly examine and evaluate yourself on to identify gaps and fill them in before they go too far.

Self-confidence

Your business is only as good as your self-confidence. If you are not feeling confident or your belief system is wanting, then this will negatively affect your business efforts. Think of it as going back to the basics. Are you still happy doing what you are doing? Do you feel you are making progress as a person and as a professional? Does the business still give you the satisfaction it did at the beginning? Through reflection and introspection, try and realign your beliefs and self-confidence with what you are trying to do with your business.

Strategic Plan

A strategic plan involves both a big-picture plan and a day-to-day plan. Do you have a business plan? If so, when was the last time you went through it and updated it? Your business plan should guide not only your long-term goals but your short-term goals and daily activities as well. Where will your business be in the next three years, five years, ten years, twenty years? Does your strategic plan capture this information to help you stay focused on what is important as well as what is urgent daily?

Marketing Plan

Lead generation is the bread and butter of the real estate industry. If you are not generating leads, then you will soon be out of business. As part of your reflection, you need to evaluate your lead generation strategies. How are you doing? Do you have a steady stream of leads or are you ending each day wondering where your next lead will come from? Work at diversifying your lead generating strategy through an effective and evolving marketing strategy, so you know where your leads are coming from.

Conversion Strategy

You have been converting leads for a while now. But, do you know what works and what does not? Are you sure that your phone prospecting is more effective than your cold email prospecting? Also, how well are you doing in your lead conversion efforts? Can you quantify them? Another area to look at is your listing presentation. Have you updated it over the years or are you still using the same old template you started off with? Your closing strategy is essential to your success, so you need to analyze and update it often.

Habits

Habits make a man/woman. If your business and personal habits are not aligned with getting to where you want to go, it will be hard to make progress. Some of the areas you should analyze are your discipline and work ethic. Are these habits empowering you or holding you back? Are they contributing to your success or plotting your downfall? Do you struggle to stay focused or only manage to make progress for the first part of the day? These questions will help you evaluate your habits and see what needs adjusting.

Business Systems

If you were away from the office for a day or a week or a month, would things proceed smoothly, or would everything grind to a screeching halt? Is your team well-trained enough to operate at normal capacity even when you are not there? In short, how systematized your business is will determine whether it survives without you. Systems to look out for include organizational systems, human systems, workflow systems and technology systems.

Team

It’s been a couple of months or years since you hired your team. Yes, you do perform appraisals and performance reviews, but have you taken the time to evaluate whether your team is growing? And not growing regarding numbers but in skill, confidence and performance. Such an evaluation is not so much about the bottom line results each member brings but an overall look at your team and how they are doing.

Conclusion

After completing this evaluation, you may realize you have a long list of things to adjust. This can be overwhelming. The best approach is to break it down into small chunks, starting with those things you feel you can address easily and quickly. These will give you quick wins that give you momentum to tackle the bigger issues. The best way to make sure you keep that list short is to evaluate all seven areas at least twice a year, and then work on implementing progressive and incremental changes.