Have you ever found yourself wishing you were more successful?
I wish I had as many listings as Jan. I wish I had a huge team like John. I wish I had a nice car like Jamie…
In business, wishes don’t come true. Well-executed plans do. You CAN get better if you’re deliberate about it. Develop a process for your real estate business, put it into workflows, and execute the same steps over and over again. This slow, repetitive approach—in which you make incremental progress toward your goals—is the true key to success.
In this video, learn how workflows rewire your brain and force you to reconsider the path to success.
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Video Transcription
Today, I wanna talk about how your brain works differently when you operate your business using workflows. If you run your real estate business using workflows, magical things happen. Before I get into that though, I wanna tell a quick story to illustrate a point.
This weekend, I spent some time with family. And a lot of people in my family are very musical people. They play instruments, they sing. And so, as often happens, after dinner, we were sitting around and somebody sat down at the piano and started playing. And one of my relatives leaned over to me and said, “Man, I wish I could play the piano like him.” And I happen to know that she plays the piano. Maybe she doesn’t play as well as he does, but she plays pretty well. And if I asked all of you, “How could she go from playing pretty well to playing even better?” All of us know exactly how to do that. So why do we all know, inherently, that she just needs to practice more? She just needs to be deliberate about getting there? How do we all know that, and yet we still find ourselves wishing that we were in somebody else’s place? With somebody else’s skills? With somebody else’s success?
And I happen to know that she’s not been practicing the piano lately. It’s been years and years since she has been really busy with other things and just made a decision that she’s gonna spend less time on hobbies. And that’s totally fine. But she needs to be honest with herself. If she really wants to better at the piano, then she needs to put in the practice and put in the effort. And if she just doesn’t care, she’s on cruise control, that’s totally fine. But that’s an honest look at what it takes to get better at something. Because there’s a formula for getting better. Saying that, “I wish I were better,” implies that there’s some fixed state of being, that somebody else is better than you and you’ll never get there. Saying, “I wanna do better and so I’m going to practice,” implies that you actually can get better, which is the truth. We can all get better if we’re deliberate about it.
It’s the same thing in our real estate business. Do we find ourselves looking at other people’s success and saying, “Man, the inventory is super low right now in my market. I wish I had as many listings as Sally.” Or, “Man, I wish I had earned as much money as John. I love his car. I wish I had that.” Or, “You know what? I wish I could do what that real estate agent did on the webinar that I watched the other day.” Because that doesn’t amount to anything. Wishing means nothing. Wishes don’t come true in business. Well executed plans come true in our business. And there’s a reason why everybody talks about setting goals and making deadlines and working on process. Because that’s the only way we’re gonna get better.
Maybe, over time, through our experience, we’ll get incrementally better at our business. Just by nature of us being around and getting kind of an intuition about things. But if we wanna really accelerate the rate at which we’re getting better, if we really want to attain more success, or if we wanna spend less time on the business while maintaining the same level of business, then we need to dedicate ourselves to getting there. And there’s three things we need to do to get there. And it actually changes the way our brain thinks about our tasks every day.
The first thing we need to do is stop saying, “I wish.” The first thing we need to do is create a strong desire to achieve whatever it is we’re setting out to achieve. So we need to know what that tangible thing is, and we have to have a strong desire to do that. So you need to create a desire in yourself, however you do that, to actually achieve the goals that you have.
Number two, you need a process. Winging it doesn’t actually make us incrementally better. Winging it doesn’t get us closer to our goals, long term. But working really hard on a process, iterating on that process over and over again, will get us better. We love to trick ourselves into thinking that there is some sort of magical event, some spontaneous explosion of success that happens in life. But the reality is that rarely happens. It’s like winning the lottery. Not very many people see this transformative, overnight change that leads them to some sort of a success. Most of us rely on incremental improvements to get better slowly over time. But we can accelerate how quickly we’re getting better by using this process and not interrupting the chain of events that leads to success.
And then the last thing we need to do is measure. We have to measure our results. We need to both measure our daily activities. Those are the predictive indicators that will lead to success if we continue to do them on a consistent basis. We also need to measure the lagging indicators or the trailing indicators. The things that prove that what we worked on in the past, actually, equal success. Those are the two ways that I love to measure as many things in my business as I possibly can.
So lead generation activities are the leading indicators or the predictive indicators. And the money that comes out the funnel at the other end, or the transaction sides, or the volume, or however you wanna measure it, that’s the trailing indicator that reports the success of my previous activities.
And when we do things this way, our brain actually shifts how it looks at achieving our goals. It shifts how it looks at that incremental progress. No longer will we say, “I wish I had as many listings as that person.” We’ll start looking at, “What is that person doing differently than I’m doing that’s actually meaningful, that’s actually contributing to the number of listings that they have?” Look, it could be personality traits that you see in that person that you think is leading to the success. But those things can be nurtured and developed as well. Double down on the things that you’re strong at and figure out ways to enhance yourself in the areas that you’re weak.
I know that all of us can get better than we are today. There’s no such thing as a fixed state of being in life. Everybody can improve themselves. There are very, very few examples that I can think of that will actually hold you back from being twice as successful as you are, three times as successful as you are. There’s always somebody else that’s done it, and almost always, you can trace it back to some sort of a process that they used to get there. It’s not always evident on the surface to us, but I guarantee you, when you pull back the covers, that process is there.
So if you already have Realvolve, I want you to evaluate the workflows that you’re using today and make, basically, a judgement call and score how effectively you’re using those workflows. So do you have really strong workflows in place for converting new leads into clients? Do you have really strong workflows in place for managing your buyers, for managing your listings? And most importantly, do you have really strong workflows in place to make sure that you stay in touch with your past clients? That’s one of the hardest things for us, as salespeople, to do because it doesn’t feel like an immediate return on our time investment. But it’s so crucial over time to have workflows in place to make sure that we’re consistently following up with our past clients.
So give yourself a score on a scale of 1 to 10 in all those areas and figure out where you can really get better at that process side. And figure out what you need to measure better to get closer to the goals that you really want.
And if you don’t have Realvolve, if you’ve never used Realvolve before, I wanna challenge you to start a 14-day free trial of Realvolve by clicking the button down below. It’ll start a 14-day free trial of our system. No credit card required. And what will happen when you start that trial is we’ll reach out to you with a series of emails requesting that you get some time on our calendar. Because what we do with workflows is so far beyond what other people in the industry are doing.
These workflows can feel like another person that you’re working alongside. It shortcuts a lot of the tasks that you’re doing, makes you so much more efficient, and holds you accountable to this process that you’ve decided you wanna follow through on. And it creates a whole different culture in your own brain of this incremental progress towards your goals. And we’ll walk you through how other agents are using workflows, and we’ll help you diagnose which areas of your business need the most improvement in the short term, and we’ll fill those weaknesses in with some workflows.
I hope you really enjoyed the training today. Give me some feedback in the comments below. Let me know what else you want me talk about on the next one. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye for now.
