Business planning is seldom one of the most exciting subjects a broker or team leader can provide agents — but it’s an important one.
We’ve been doing it for years in one form or another, but I think this year, we finally cracked the code. We put together a comprehensive look into how agents can measure their goals and what they need to do to achieve them.
One very important change we implemented this year was meeting with the agents individually instead of in a group setting. This allows us to dig in and help them fill out any missing pieces.
It takes a lot more time going through all 40, but our agents really appreciate it. Also, it gives us more facetime, and we can then use their objectives to coach them throughout the year.
1. ‘What could you do with extra income’?
We start by asking the question: what could you do with extra income? Taking a note from Jon Cheplak, we skipped the cheesy and overplayed, “What’s your why?” and just asked, “What do you want from this?” Here’s an example:
2. Measure your ‘Bossy Score’
From there, we move into determining your “Bossy Score,” which measures your skills at being a good boss on a scale of 1-10. This will give you an outlook on the things you need to improve to become a better self-starter.
What’s more, it will help you identify some of the high-level objectives that you will focus on to help you reach your production goals. As an FYI, the average score for all our agents was 6.5 out of 10. Here’s an example of this.
3. Consider volume goals
Next, we get to the actual volume goal for each agent. Below is a photo of the spreadsheet. We look at last year’s numbers and put in what they are shooting for in 2021.
Then, we break it down into the percentage of buyer and seller appointments that lead to a client as well as the percentage of clients that lead to a deal. Factoring this in with the average price point will let the agent know how many appointments each month they need to go on in order to achieve their goals.
4. Look at high-level objectives
And finally, we look at the high-level objectives they want to work on in order to achieve their goals. This was probably the most interesting part of the process for us.
We asked them to pick three, but of all the agents we met with, there were no more than eight of these to choose from. Examples included farming an area, having a better social media presence and becoming better at follow-up. Because each agent had the same objective, we began to have canned responses to help them with these goals.
We ask the following questions for each objective:
- What will you need to do to meet this objective?
- What can others do to help you meet this objective?
- How can you measure progress, and when do you measure it?
- What does your business look like once you’ve measured it?
In the first one, we dive deep into what steps they need to take to achieve it. In the second, we tell them what systems we have in place that they need to plug into.
We’ve also been able to think of speakers, training and workshops that we plan on providing for our agents. As an example, we’re putting together a social media workshop for them. We have a time management speaker coming in, and we also have a tax consultant who will speak at our next meeting.
The result of these individual meetings have brought us closer to each agent and provided insight to what each one needs and wants from their career. We will use these high-level objectives in our accountability groups as well as our quarterly individual meetings that we typically have with the agents. In short, it’s been a smashing success.
Ryan Rodenbeck is the broker-owner of Spyglass Realty and Investments in Austin. Connect with him on Instagram.
