Building A Next-Level Real Estate Business
We are joined by Middleton Elite Coaching real estate + business coach, Lisa Quin. Lisa is sharing with us some of the ways she is helping her clients in Building a Next-Level Real Estate Business.
Lisa’s focus with her clients is working through how to take their business to the next level in multiple different facets. She says that helping clients push past their perceived limits is one of the many things that Middleton Elite Coaching does really well. It is what attracted Lisa to working with MEC as her real estate coach, and to later become a coach herself.
Middleton Elite Coaching has worked with thousands of real estate agents, team leaders, and brokerages looking to discover the next level for their businesses. Whether that next level looks like adding leverage for yourself, increasing production, setting new financial goals and metrics for your business, or developing an exit strategy, we help our clients define their next levels of success.
The key steps to building a next-level real estate business are:
Identify Your Starting Point
Reaching the next level in your real estate business requires knowing where you’re starting from.
During an exploratory call with potential clients, as well as during the launch meeting we look for a plan that this person has had in their business. Do they have any historical data, action plans, or targets with identifiable metrics? Many do, and many don’t.
Lisa recognizes that sometimes we can get so busy working in our businesses, that we don’t look at the big picture. Working with our clients to identify gaps in their business as well as what their goals are, gives us a great starting point.
At Middleton Elite Coaching, we understand the importance of coaching the person as a whole. We do so using our model of The 4P’s: Productivity, Projects, People, and Personal.
Leverage For Your Business
One of the key elements of building a next-level real estate business is leverage. For many business owners, adding leverage may seem scary. For others, leverage is asking what comes next so that they can go and advance the business.
Whether you are new to real estate or have been in the business for a while, there are likely times you are working at a pace that feels a lot like running on a hamster wheel. We can sometimes forget that our business is supposed to fund our life, not vice versa. Adding balance to your life is one way we coach our clients to the next level.
Leverage shows up in many different ways.
For some, leverage can be admin support or sales staff. Depending on where you’re at in your structure and production, leverage could be adding a CEO level. Leverage can also be as simple as having somebody take care of the laundry and other household tasks so that you’re able to stay focused on work while at work.
There are many people who resist adding leverage. There are three reasons people don’t delegate or leverage.
- Control – you know exactly how you’d like it done and by when.
- Lack of Confidence – you lack confidence in the ability or skill set of the person to whom you would delegate (leverage) the task.
- Guilt – You feel guilty asking someone to take on this responsibility.
It IS possible to train the right person to do many of the things you currently do so that you are free to do the things that have a greater impact on the growth of the business. And that’s something we work with our clients on as well as finding that right person.
Control, lack of confidence, and guilt can begin to compound on each other.
Lisa started as an independent agent and later hired a transaction coordinator, a marketing assistant, an executive assistant, and then later, a buyer’s agent. Though she admits that it did initially take some of the commission dollars out of her pocket, it allowed her to reach the next level in her real estate business. Lisa was able to generate leads and focus on the things that would grow her business while her buyer’s agent multiplied the business.
Setting Financial Goals
Another key part of building a next-level real estate business is setting financial goals. Lisa says that means making sure you are making a profit, not simply looking at what you are doing in GCI. It’s about what you’re putting in your bank.
The financial metrics we measure are returns on investment; whether that ROI is the staff that we have and the lead generation sources that we have, or in the sales team and the production levels that we have.
That’s our barometer. That’s what tells us whether or not our current plan is working.
Part of your value proposition for growing your business or as you start moving toward an exit strategy is the ability to show the profitability of your business.
We can make a bazillion dollars. And if we spend a bazillion in one, we didn’t make any money.
Lisa works with her clients to be really open to working through this process and not just looking at how many transactions they are doing this year and what income comes next, but also what they will do with it in order to reach maximum profitability.
Creating a Business Plan And Metrics
Another step in building a next-level real estate business is creating your business plan and setting the metrics that will allow you to get there. Creating a business plan is about putting the foundational pieces in place to keep your business moving into new phases of growth.
Have you been building a business or have you been working at a job?
If you turn the light switch off and things stop, you have a job. If you have a business, things will still happen if you the light switch off. If you stepped out of your business today, would it succeed or fail? If you are the person doing everything, quite frankly, you have a job.
A business is an entity and an entity is something that you can walk away from and it will keep running. The question for many real estate business owners is:
“How do I get there?”
One of the ways Lisa coaches her clients in creating their next-level business plan is to ask them what it takes to make their business run and who’s doing it. And to also ask, if that person disappeared, who comes in behind. This part of the business plan evolves and there are different levels to building it.
A fundamental part of the evolution of a real estate business plan is to continually look at everything that it takes to make your business run and then identify who could be doing it. We would then set metrics for reaching the level that would allow you to put that person into place and work to create customized benchmarks to reach a point where you could, at some point, feel comfortable walking away from the business.
This could be identifying how much business you need to have on the books consistently over a 6, 12, 18 month period in order to be able to pull back. It also involves figuring out how many dollars in revenue your business needs to be generating over a certain period of time so that if you stepped away, your revenue would not be impacted.
Exit Strategy
In the same way that everyone defines success differently, we are firm believers that everyone defines the exit strategy differently. This is the strategy that, depending on where your goals are, will allow you to walk away or step back, and have your business keep moving.
The exit strategy for many agents may be selling fewer homes and not fully leaving the business of selling. For some, it might be working in one specific area of the business. And the others, the exit strategy may be to transition completely out of the business and consider this a passive income revenue stream.
This may require creating a partnership or building a team that is self-run and self-managed; accomplished by hiring leverage and leadership.
We work with our coaching clients to really dive into their definition of success and future exit strategy. This allows us to create a win for our clients through a customized coaching plan.
The CEO Model
An exit strategy for the CEO model is building your business and production to the point where you can hire someone to take on your role and manage your team. These key hires would be a CEO, a sales team, and admin support. The critical element to this strategy know what kind of production we need to have in place to drive profitability and the income needed for these hires to make sense.
The Sale Of The Business
Another strategy is the sale of the business. If this is your goal, there are some foundational steps required to build a business structure that is marketable to sell to another agent. There are identifiable metrics to building this and making your business a commodity.
The Partnership
Another type of exit strategy is a partnership. If you aren’t looking to stop, only to pull back a bit so that you aren’t having to work as hard, a partnership might be a great option. It will require creating a partnership with another agent of like mind and like production. There are some really clear steps to identifying that person and putting that partnership together in a way that can work. We help our clients identify these steps.
The Referral Business
An exit strategy that works for many is a referral business. This strategy is ideal for anyone who wants to fully transition out of the business and continue referring the business out as it comes in. As simple as that sounds, there are some necessary steps required to run that strategy at a high level. It is establishing and building strategic relationships to make a referral business work well for you.
Final Thought
I think the most important thing to consider is that sometimes it takes an outside perspective to push us past our perceived limits. Working with a real estate coach can help guide you through your blind spots and push you through to the next level of your real estate business.
Lisa is an amazing coach and an incredible person. She has a wealth of information about the real estate industry and brings that to the table every day for her clients. If you’re interested in real estate coaching or working with Lisa, connect with us.
Be Elite!
Bill, Debbie, & The MEC Team
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