As real estate agents, we often ask ourselves, what's the bottom line? What will it take to get this house sold or the next client their home? What will it take for the next inspection response to be accepted? As business men and women, we can also get caught up in the bottom line of our business. What's the cost to profit ratio? Can I afford to go to that next big real estate convention? How can we cut out costs while increasing our profit.
But we are more than just business men and women, and more than just real estate agents. We are also humans. Events in the world around us can reveal how quickly our status as real estate agents or business men and women can change. But one thing will never really change; the fact that we are humans.
So, as a human, what's the bottom line? As real estate agents we think of the bottom line as the most important part of running a successful real estate career. As business men and women, we ask ourselves what the most important part is of running a business. But what's one of the most important parts of being human?
This week, The Romanski group had a staff meeting that involved planning a client appreciation party, how to give back to our community, and how to help our buyer's agents succeed in the coming year. It was interesting how easy this meeting was in comparison to others. We were thinking about ways we can serve others, rather than how to "succeed" in other areas of life. We put others before ourselves. I think this is the bottom line for us as human beings.
When we can begin to really put other people before ourselves, this is when I think we really begin to succeed at being humans. When we begin to love our neighbors, I think we begin to see things like peace and joy naturally exude from within us. And that's when people really want to do business with us rather than just choosing to do business with us.
Maybe it would be good to ask ourselves this question before we start the day, "What's the bottom line?" and follow it up with "How am I going to serve others today?" Maybe then we'd see a new-found respect for the real estate profession, a whole lot more joy and peace in our workplace, and perhaps when we finally take off that real estate hat and hang it up for the final time, we can say that we kept our eyes on the bottom line.
