August 1 is rolling around. This is a pretty significant date for me because this is when I had officially open shop for business. Yes, 3:16 team REALTY is 1 year old. I didn't even realize how fast time flies. As I am reviewing my business plan from 2007-08, I thought I share some of my thoughts from my 1st year of brokerage.

The biggest lesson I can say I have learnt this first year is: FLEXIBILITY. I had learnt this lesson through so many various sources - sometimes far more often than I really want.

Some of you know may that I write my blogs about being a mom/ realtor. Both are in fact a full-time job. Being the over-achiever that I am, the most difficult lesson I have learnt is that I do expect to run my business with 110% energy, yet at the same time, I have this little one to care for. Yes, I am my child's primary care-taker and it will be this way until he is old enough to go to a Mother's Day Out program at 18 months old. Hence, automatically, the biggest lesson here is FLEXIBILITY on my expectations of myself - what I can or cannot do with what limited time I have. It's a very hard lesson to digest and sink in simply because of my personality. Yet, everyday I seize to amaze with myself.

My business is better than last year. Most of it came from the blogs I wrote about my communities and my cities. I believe that my readers do read my blogs about my personal rants, cheers and sadness as well. As I do my annual reviews of my business plan, (honestly) I didn't get most of the stuff I wanted done like I had planned out. The hind sight is that "It's okay" because business is indeed better than the year before. So, I guess I am still on the right track. The biggest flexibility I find that I have to accept is that I'm no longer just me, but because I do have a priority - a little shinning star with me every day, I am not able to commit to my business like I want. I make up for loss time when he is in bed at night. That means just 6 hours of rest time when my head hits the pillow at night.

One of my latest transactions thought me the FLEXIBILITY of my words. I guess I need to look at this in a good way. I was dealing with what I thought was a "MY WORDS ARE WORTH GOLD" type of agent. There was no reason to indicate that she was not. My blog about reading contracts carefully spurred this newly learnt lesson. Apparently, it was not that she did not read the summary correctly, she basically just wanted to buy time to negotiate another offer with a different buyer - with no "courtesy" of letting me know. She took one item on the contract (as per the summary) and with that 1 item, the seller and buyer went back into negotiation for another 12 hours, thus my clients lost the deal. So often people say, Do to others as you want others do unto you. I'd never treat somebody that way, especially in a negotiation that took days to work, what I saw was that a relationship was building. There was no simple courtesy, "Hey, I'm not trying to create pressure, but there is some interest in this property also. I want you to be aware of it".... Nope. No indication whatsoever. The next thing I got was an email saying, We received another offer and we are executing it this afternoon. I am not upset with the outcome. I do not think she did anything wrong. I basically did not see it coming. So, what I learnt here is that until you get an executed contract, everything and anything is still up for negotiation. I was the one who saw that a gentleman's handshake is all it took to do business. You can call me naive. But it would not change the person that I am. It would also not change the perception that I have - to give the benefit of the doubt to the other person.

Broker Bryant taught me another lesson of FLEXIBILITY - in taking listings. I saw it at "Either listing it at this price to sell or just not to take that listing at all". I am very clear about what prices takes to sell a house in my area. I can see it but just me seeing it is not enough. So, I had to learn to be flexible in taking listings - if they are somewhat reasonable and work at it if it really does not get the results I want. A good lesson here.

The fact is that I dont like the word FLEXIBILITY. I see the world as black and white with hardly any grey areas. Flexibility means I need to change and adapt. Not something that I do easily. I guess like everything else, I will have to learn it slowly. I guess next year will be better than this. There's no reason to believe that it's not. As I tweak my business plan this evening, I want to encourage you to tweak yours too. Did you include flexibility in your plan? Your day-to-day activities? And in your life?

PS: I just have to throw this picture in. As I am typing this blog, my little sunshine is popping his head up and down to make sure I am still in the room. I'm just waiting for him to fall asleep... Well, I would say, this FLEXIBILITY lesson is not easy, but I'm pretty sure worth it.