Top Banana Best Practices Challenge
ActiveRain Ambassador Anna "Banana" Kruchten has issued an August challenge for member bloggers to write about some of their best business practices. We have a rainy afternoon in Maryland and I decided to participate in the three parts of this challenge.
The first part of the challenge is to talk about business practices from our first year in the real estate business. For me, that is ancient history. I opened my first real estate office during the summer of 1961 after finishing law school at the University of Virginia. My office was in my home community, in the Cradock section of Portsmouth, Virginia. Cradock is a planned community with a strong navy orientation and I had lived there for all of my life before going away for college and law school. The Norfolk Naval Shipyard was just to the north and the Naval Ammunition Depot was just to the south of our community.
I had needed to develop local relationships and one of the first things that I did was to become active in community and service organizations and this is a practice that worked well for me during my entire career. Another successful practice was to recruit associate agents who shared my business vision. I quickly learned the having outstanding highly motivated agents and a strong support staff were vital elements of business success. A third business practice was diversification. I was building a general insurance business as well as a real estate business.
The second part of this challenge is to write about a powerful mentor. I did not need to hire a mentor. I was raised by my mentor, my father, who had set a good entrepreneurial example for me for my entire lifetime. My parents became landlords the year that I was born and build a successful portfolio of rental properties that became my first account in the real estate business. My parents provided my office location and the funding to get established. The continuing lessons that I had learned were that hard work and great determination were keys for business success. Failure was not an option.
The third element of this challenge is to tell about a business practice that I am currently attempting to put into place but haven't quite achieved. I retired from my real estate activities four years ago and have not implemented a retirement business activity. Dolores and I have enjoyed retirement but I do miss the business challenges and the income that those challenges could generate. Actually, I had planned to continue to flip properties during my retirement but my associate agent did not wish to continue those activities and I never replaced her services. So, I am open for some fresh ideas.
Mallard, National Zoo, Washington, DC
Photograph by Roy Kelley
Roy and Dolores Kelley Photographs
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