Ready....or Not
The holidays are a time of preparation, and this year is no different. And, most of us see the end
of one calendar year and the beginning of another as a time to take stock, make resolutions, look to the
future, and hopefully do better next year. An incident on Thanksgiving got me thinking about
preparation. Success is described as the intersection of luck and preparation, so here's my tale about
Thanksgiving-which I promise I will relate to real estate.
My mother was Greek, so holidays are about FOOD at my house. It is my unabashed goal to put
those at my table on Thanksgiving into a turkey coma just in time for kickoff of their favorite games.
Preparations begin the week before, with ordering the fresh turkey from my local butcher, Erv, getting in
the yeast to bake Greek bread, buying cranberries and vegetables, figuring out what kind of pies and
salads, etc. On Monday, I picked up the turkey; on Tuesday I made pie crust (from scratch, of course-do
I want to hear my mother spinning in her grave?); on Wednesday I baked the bread and pies, cooked the
cranberries, made a frozen salad, made the stuffing; on Thursday I stuffed the turkey and put it in the
oven and started in on peeling potatoes and the vegetable casseroles. I needed milk for the baked corn,
so my always helpful daughter ran out to the supermarket to get it. Here's what she encountered at our
local store: a woman wandering the aisles, with a cart which had: a large frozen turkey, fresh cranberries,
pie crust mix, pumpkin in a can, and various other items. The woman was in search of the evaporated
milk (for the pumpkin pie, for my novice cooks). Lauren gave her directions, and the woman asked: "Do
you by any chance know how long it takes to cook a turkey?" Lauren replied: "Well, it's 20 to 25 minutes
per pound, more if you stuff it....but your turkey is frozen." Woman: "I can't cook it frozen?" Lauren:
"Um, well, no." Note to novice cooks: there are lots of reasons you can't do this, not the least of which is
that certain innards of the turkey are inside the turkey, in clever little paper sacks, waiting for you to pull
them out. Defrosting a turkey takes at least one full day using the cold water in the kitchen sink method;
3-4 days using the refrigerator method. And that's just the turkey-pies cook at 425; turkeys at 325, so
they can't inhabit the same oven at the same time. Lauren asked: "So, when are you planning to have
dinner?" Woman: "I told people to come at 1:00." Folks, it was 10:00 a.m! I'm betting they ate pizza,
or ending up going out.
Well, what does this have to do with real estate? Being prepared! Agents constantly get
themselves into bad situations which get worse quickly because they are not prepared. They don't have
the correct paperwork; they don't have marketing materials; they didn't remember to do something, etc.
Now part of preparation is planning. Thanksgiving comes every year. Ditto for Christmas and New Year's-
and Halloween and St. Patrick's Day, for that matter. It doesn't matter-it's a sure thing. And every year, I
think, we want to do better as agents. We want to close more sales, make more money, take more
vacations, etc. But we don't get there, because we're not prepared. We're down to the waning weeks of
2008. Take a break from what you are doing (and most of you have mentally stepped away from real
estate to immerse yourselves in holidays, or worse yet, self-pity over the market), and figure out what
you are going to do in 2009. Be prepared for next year-remember we set our own tables-is yours going to
have the full turkey dinner, ready on time-or are you going out for pizza?
To read some of Melanie McLane's specific ideas about being prepared, visit www.OnlineAgentResource.com;, where she is a constant contributor. This members-only web site is full of everything you need to succeed in real estate. If you like it, and want to subscribe, use the code Melanie to get substantial reductions.
Comments(2)