2019 Business Planning: Five for Five
We are entering a tricky time of year. Not because the holidays will soon be upon us with their myriad distractions. It’s tricky because CRE practitioners are busy trying to end the year strongly while simultaneously laying the right ground work for 2019 success. The business planning season is in full swing! On January 2 of this year, I posted an article Make Your 2018 Business Plan Stick. I stand by those five, time-tested suggestions, and this year want to add some additional food for thought.
Each stage of a CRE Broker’s career presents a different opportunity. Here are five business planning tips for five CRE roles…
Rookie
Challenge: Rookies are full of enthusiasm, but most have not yet learned how to aim for the right targets. The typical scenario involves significant overestimation of earnings or underestimating the effort and activity it takes to launch.
Pro Tip: Follow a prescribed plan of your manager, mentor, coach, or senior team leader. Someday you may invent a better mousetrap, but today is not that day. Follow the path that has lead countless others to the success you desire.
Mid-Level Broker
Challenge: Many mid-level brokers know intuitively that they are capable of more. They know they can grow. The common challenge I see is lack of specificity. It’s common to hear, “I want to take my business to the next level.” The follow-on question to that statement is, “what does the next level look like?” It is not enough to say you made $150,000 last year and you want to make $300,000 this year. That is only a first step.
Pro Tip: Mid-Level Broker business plans should almost always be reversed engineered. Start with a next level goal and then methodically back into the activities and resources that will make it possible.
Senior Team Leader
Challenge: Being a good broker is not directly correlated to being a good team leader. Senior Team Leader business plans too often ignore the skills and activities around running a high-performing business.
Pro Tip: Like the Rookie who didn’t know what it meant to be a good broker; you should not assume you know what it is to be a good manager and business leader. Your business plan needs heavy weight in the skill acquisition and activities of a manager. You already know how to handle the brokerage.
Player/Coach
Challenge: Different than the Senior Team Leader, the Player/Coach is building a brokerage operation. In addition to the STL’s challenge, the Player/Coach often encounters the ongoing struggle between personal production and office building.
Pro Tip: Advanced, disciplined time management, vital to everyone, is a make-or-break proposition for the Player/Coach. This is a deep topic. One of my all-time favorite tips for Player/Coaches is Office Hours. Scheduled time each day to field the questions and concerns of your broker associates. It can be very hard at first, almost appearing impossible, but over time your team learns to respect the boundaries between your personal production and the needs of the team.
Non-Competing Manager
Challenge: You are no longer in direct control the revenue stream. You aren’t making all the calls and going on all the meetings. Your business plan, and corresponding success, is the aggregate of individual commitments.
Pro Tip: You must make your own grounded assessment of your team’s individual contributions. Simply adding up everyone’s commit number, assuming you don’t have a bunch of sandbaggers, will set you up for disappointment. It helps to think like an insurance company. Do you have a sense of your “actuarial table”?
In my 2018 Business Planning article, I encouraged individuals to make their plans short. The one-page plan that you regularly reference represents a distillation of a lot of thought and perhaps pages of notes. These five common issues are the tip of the iceberg. So much more to discuss! But I better let you go, so you can start your plan. And stay away from the holiday treats in the break room.