This month's ActiveRain Challenge is called "How Have You Changed?" The challenge is to share how our professional or personal life has changed from when we started our real estate career to now.
I started my real estate career in late 2010, and wasn't truly active until late 2012, so the question is how has my life changed in the last 13 years? Most of the big things, like going from a shy person who didn't want to speak in front of people, to someone who can talk in any situation, had already happened by 2012. So the question is, what (if anything) has changed in that relatively short period as a result of being in real estate. And I finally came up with an answer! What changed is:
I learned how to run a business.
Before I started in real estate, I had always worked as an employee in some else's business. So I received a regular paycheck and in other businesses obtained a lot of experience in roles such as a cashier, office clerk, secretary, manager and director. I learned about retail stores first, then about the furniture industry. I then learned all about the telecommunications industry in terms of distribution service, Internet networks, financial planning and budgeting, marketing, business planning, technology and more.
But all that knowledge included just bits and pieces of how things worked in a huge organization, and all that knowledge and the actions taken with that knowledge helped a corporation. It only helped me in so far as they handed me my paycheck, but otherwise, there was no real ownership of the business by me.
And then I decided to become a real estate agent, not realizing when I started that I wasn't becoming just an agent, I was becoming a business owner. How well I did, and how much I made, and how many people I helped, were all on my shoulders. I found out if I sat around waiting for the phone to ring, it didn't. And I found out if I want people to know about me, I need to figure out how to market myself and my business. And I needed to determine what would make me successful in this business that I now owned.
So what's the big deal? What do you need to do as a business owner?
- Create plans and set goals and measurement systems. You need to know how you are doing, what you are doing, how often you are doing it, and then you need to know what is working and what isn't.
- Business owners need to be decisive. Procrastinating helps no business succeed. So if things aren't going well, we have to decide what to do about the situation. We have to investigate options and then just pick one and move forward.
- We have to manage the systems and processes that help us. We need to track leads and have a system in place to contact them. We need to manage the dates for our deals; what is due when and how will we make sure things are done on time.
- We need to stay current. For real estate business owners that means paying attention to changes in rules and forms. It means knowing when training is necessary and scheduling ourselves to take it.
- We need to have excellent customer service skills. When the phone rings, answer it with a smile. When we get an email or a text or some other communication, respond quickly and clearly.
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