Where does your business come from?- I recently interviewed for the managing broker position of a nationally known real estate company and one of the things they asked me to provide was a list of all my past business? I figured this would be relatively simple to compile, however our MLS does not keep records beyond 3 years, so I will need to go through boxes of closed files to to account for everyone.
I decided to go with the list of names in my Outlook first where I keep pretty accurate records of clients and transactions etc. unfortunately I did not start using Outlook until the past few years so I still have plenty of work to do. However as I was compiling this list in Excel for the interview process I really started to get a good visual on where my business comes from. 
A whopping 17% of 
my business comes from almost my entire marketing $$$ spent and the rest, a measly 83% comes from people I already know. That means from all of the yellow page ads, magazine ads, newspaper ads, mailings, flyers, brochures, signs in yards etc which accounts for about 98% of my marketing $$$ I am only getting 17% of my business. All of the rest is from people that already know me, like me and trust me, whether they are family, neighbors, referrals or repeat clients, 83% of my business occurs because of who I am and what I do, not how much I spend. WOW what an eye-opener!
At first I felt a little sick to my stomach realizing how many $$$ have been thrown away, and then a warm fuzzy feeling came over me when I realized that the people that already know me trust me enough to refer me or use me in one of their biggest financial decisions of their lives. Here is to the friends I now have and to those friends I have not had the pleasure of meeting yet.
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