How Do You Eat a Real Estate Elephant?

Originally posted on Short Sale Daily News

One bite at a time…..

Building a real estate business in today’s market can seem like a daunting task.  Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed?  The different hats and directions each of us need to tackle on a daily basis for consistent growth can give even the best in the biz an “I’m sinking in quick-sand” feeling.

So, what do you do to keep your head and move forward? First, and most essential for business sanity, is to break your business into departments.  Even if you are the lone player on your team, you still need to respect and separate the shoes you fill.

Most real estate businesses have at a minimum the following:  Marketing, Administration, Acquisition, Liquidation.  You can be even more detailed to include roles such as rehab management, recruiting, personnel, settlement, etc.. Once you have titled the departments that match your business, describe in detail the goals and responsibilities of each.  By doing this, you are by inference defining and clarifying your tasks or the expectations of your team members when working in each department.   As you grow, the department descriptions can be used as job descriptions when recruiting, hiring, and training a team.

Having clearly defined tasks helps clear the ADD cobb-webs.  Focused effort leads to result-oriented action.

The next essential step to sanity is to time-block.  Whether you are a one-man team or an entire brokerage, you need to block time to work on each of your departments.  Time-blocking is scheduling committed times to work on each department without interruption.  During those scheduled times you work only projects related to each department, auditing the results of that department, project planning, etc…

Step three for eating the elephant is to manage projects broken down by departments.  Take each project and create a punch-list (yes, just like a rehab project) each individual task.  Assign to each department those tasks for project completion.  During your blocked time for that department you can block smaller chunks of time to accomplish department specific tasks related to each project.

Hold yourself accountable to finish the elephant!  Yes, you need to complete the elephant (fat, trimmings, and all).  To accomplish that feat, you have to hold yourself and your team accountable.  This means that you have to take the steps to define roles, responsibilities, your expectations, tasks, and time-line.  Then, you have to make it clearly understood so that everyone knows.  Calendar deadlines for yourself and your team.  Do not allow anything to interrupt time dedicated to task completion.  Set auto-reminders for yourself. If you have a conflict arise with a time-block, discipline yourself to re-schedule just like you would with a client.

2011 is on our heels and is poised to be a great year as long as you learn to eat the elephant!