4 Must-Haves for Your 2026 Business Plan

Over the course of the last couple months at my brokerage, we have been doing business planning. I kind of want to talk a little bit today about what that ought to look like and maybe a couple things that it doesn't need to have. My name is Chance Brown, the broker owner of CB&A Realtors and I make video content for real estate agents because I'm passionate about helping them build great businesses. And having a great business plan is part of that. I think a lot of times we go through the motions with a business plan and we do it because the brokerage is holding an event we feel like we need to do it or our coach told us to and over the course of the past decade at our brokerage we've done multiple variations of business planning from really simple workbook style things to paid business planning sessions with outside sources.

This year we're kind of getting back to some of the basics that help us connect with people. There are things that you need in a business plan. I think there are things that you don't need a business plan at the end of the day. However, if you're not going to follow it, don't bother doing it. It's just a waste of your time. So, if you're serious about business planning, here's what I'd love to see. First things first is why. And this is a deeper connection than a dollar amount. It's a deeper connection than I like to help people or I like to be around people when they're making this decision and guide them through it or whatever it is. It really needs to be very deeply personal. Like I will share with you that I have a goal of a certain dollar amount of income, but my baseline reason for that goal is that I never want to have to tell my children no because I can't. Now, I tell them no all the time, don't get me wrong, but I don't want them to ever miss out an opportunity because I can't afford to do it with them or send them on it or whatever that is. So, it needs to be your deeply personal why that drives your business plan because the next thing I think you need to have is a dollar goal because that why needs to be funded. And there was a time when I did my business plan and I said, "Hey, I want to help 50 people or 100 people or whatever it was." That was it. But here's the problem with that. What if all of those people buy really cheap houses and you don't have enough money?

Then great, you made your goal, but you can't fund your why. We had a misconnection there, right? So, I think that what you need to do is have a dollar volume goal after taxes of what your income is going to look like and then let's reverse engineer that to get to number of transactions to get to number of contracts to get to number of appointments to get to number of contacts and so on and so forth until we get down to here are the daily activities that I need to do every day to reach my goal. Simple as that. And it's not that hard, but it needs to start with a dollar, not with a number of transactions. And then the last but not least piece of the puzzle is the accountability piece that I think you have to have there. Whether that's through a coach, whether it's through an accountability partner, whether it's through a tracking vehicle, it doesn't really matter, but you need to have somebody holding your feet to the fire on doing those activities that get you to the place that you need to be. Last thing on my business planning dos is I think you need to have something visual.