5 Steps to Finishing Your Year Before It Begins

We are already halfway through the first month of the year. Do you have a strategic plan for the year? Do you know how your business did last year and how you want it to do this year? Renown life coach Jim Rohn always told his audiences to ‘finish the week before it started.’ What he meant was that you need to have a plan for how your day, week, or year will turn out before starting it. If you don’t do this, you fall into the trap of failing to plan, which results in planning to fail. To help you finish this year well before it’s gone far, here are five things you need to do.

1. Analyze Your Market

If you don’t know how the real estate market is performing, you won’t know what kind of goals to set or where to place your expectations. Questions like:

• What were sales like over the previous year? How does this compare to the last 2-5 years?

• How many listings entered the market over the previous year? How does this compare to the last 2-5 years?

• What were the average and median home prices?

Getting details to these and related questions will give perspective on what the new year could look like and how to adequately prepare.

2. Analyze Your Business

The next set of questions you need to ask are to do with your business:

• What did your sales look like over the previous year? How does this compare to the previous 2-5 years?

• What was the average home price? How has this changed over the last 2-5 years?

• What were the primary sources of your listings? How does this compare to the last 2-5 years?

Looking at these stats helps you look deeper into your business to uncover trends, weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities.

3. Create an Activity Plan

What do you plan to do this year to generate extraordinary results? If you have undertaken the two previous steps, you have data on your historical performance. Over those periods, what activities did you undertake that resulted in the greatest return on investment? Did you attend more open houses? Did you do more local marketing? Did you make more sales calls? Whatever it was, plan to do more of those activities in the new year to generate similar results.

4. Work Out Your Budget

What do you anticipate your expenses will be in the new year? Again, historical data can be useful to help you see where your largest expenses come from. When setting your budget, be realistic and plan for some flexibility to cater for emergency expenses. That said, set some strict criteria for what an emergency is so you don’t end up going out for expensive dinners and chalking them down to emergency expenses. If you have a bird’s eye view of your expenses for the year, it will be easier to stick to the plan or at least know when you are straying from it.

5. Wrap It Up with Strong ‘Whys’

Emotion generates motion. Why are you planning all the things you have planned for the year? Is improving your lifestyle a driving factor, or is it clearing debt or growing your business? Understanding and owning your reasons will be the scaffolding that supports the rest of your efforts. Without a clear understanding of why you are doing all you are, you will find yourself grinding along, and we all know grinding leads to resentment and other negative feelings.

Conclusion

Lastly, put all these details in a business plan. I know most people think business plans are only for new businesses, but established business can also benefit from this practice. Create a business plan with all the details you came up with above, and then use this as a roadmap or blueprint for the year ahead. I’m sure you can now see how you can finish the year before it begins.