The Business Plan is Not Just a Money Plan, It is a ROAD MAP

I spent some time the last couple months of 2013 putting our business plan together for 2014.  As a team we decided that we wanted to increase our overall transaction volume by just over 40% in 2014, which was a fairly aggressive, yet doable, goal.

After long thinking and planning, if you merely write down how many homes you need to sell, need to list, leases you need to take and sell, as well as a smattering of commercial transactions in there (as our team also has a commercial component to it) it really becomes quite clear what the road needs to look like.

When you know what the road needs to look like to achieve the overall goal it is much easier to make adjustments in the event certain parts of the road have a "tree" in the way. You will know when and how to swerve out of the way and get back on the road to the goal.

In the past we have not had such a detailed business plan. We reached or came close to our goals every year but it was a shooting from the hip and guns blazing type of approach. Because we could not see in what catagory we have failed (i.e. see the downed tree blocking the road) we were not able to quickly and efficiently get out of the way and back on the road to goal success. It took a lot of pain and time to get back to where we needed to be.

For example, if you need to list 10 homes next year as a component to reach you goals and by October you have only listed 5 going into the slower winter months, you need to lift the other catagories of transactions to get to the goal in another way. You need to market more for more leases or year end commercial transactions. If you did not have catagories of where the transaction volume is coming from you would just run out in the street with a sign around your body saying, "Does anyone need a real estate agent?"

The Business Plan is Not Just a Money Plan, It is a ROAD MAP