How To Plan Your Business in 4 Steps (BONUS Tip Included)

We are in the third quarter, friends, and that means one thing and one thing only. It's time to start looking at our business plan. Hey, my name is Chance Brown. I'm the broker owner of CB&A Realtors, and I make video content because I'm passionate about helping agents build great businesses. I am a huge advocate of business planning because I don't think you are a business if you don't have one. You have to have a plan for your business. You have to know what you're doing. You have to have goals and you need to write those goals down. And ideally, you need to take those goals and share them with people and so they can see that. In a beautiful perfect world, you'd have somebody helping hold you accountable to those goals because that is also very very important. So I have a little bit of a different approach to business planning because I am a super visual person and so I need to see stuff in front of me. Now, I have a full business planning workshop that I do and do a book and we go through all of these things and it is that time of year because the steps that we take in Q3 and Q4 of this year are the things that going to bear fruit in Q1 and Q2 of next year. When we look at business planning, I look at it from a couple of different places. I need to reconnect with the reason that I do this. what that looks like to me.

Whether you use the ninja selling version of creating a life list or the five Fs, which are friends and family, faith, finance, and fun, you've got to lay down the why and start putting yourself first into your business plan because it's your business. And if it doesn't reflect you, it's just not going to work. Like, you've got to want to do the things that you want to do. You got to feel good about it. Let's figure out what that looks like. the things we're trying to achieve, the things we want to do with ourselves, with our families, with our friends, whatever that looks like, and get all that down on paper because that's going to help us establish a goal. And to me, and people differ with me on this, I am a firm believer that that goal should be an income goal. There are a lot of people out there that want to have a a transaction goal, but I think that net commission income is better than gross commission income. And while there is certainly virtue in churning transactions, to me, what do I bring home at the end of the day that lets me do all the things that I just said I wanted to do? That's where I feel like you need to really put a plan in place and have a very good income goal. Now, you can then reverse engineer that income goal into all the transactions and activities and everything else that you need. That's great. The next thing we do in a business plan, and a good business plan, is we go through the action steps that we need to do in order to achieve that goal. And the biggest thing that you can do this, and I've stolen this from somebody else, so this is not original Chance Brown material here. Come up with the reason why you can't do it. Get your excuse out of the way now. And that way you can't use it in the future. And then just go do the things that you need to do to make the money that you want to make. And that's the best part of it, right? Set the goal, set the action step, tell yourself why you're not going to do it, and then kill that excuse, and go actually do it.

That's how we achieve big things. And make your goals big. Why not? The last step that I take in my business plan is I really like to have a visual that's out in front of me. And whether you want to do that as a vision board, I'm not a cut things out of a magazine and paste it to a board kind of guy, but I do have a one sheet that I can hang up in front of my computer. And it's visual to me all the time. It's something that I see and is constantly reminder of this is how much I want to sell or this is how many agents we want to recruit or whatever those goals are. and then the five or 10 things that we're going to do to achieve those goals and it's all in one place so that I'm constantly focused on what I want to achieve. I encourage you not to wait till November or December to put your business plan together. I think that's too late and I think you're setting yourself up then for success in June or July, which sure, but if you have a slow spring, that might be the reason why. So, I would take the month of August to get your CRM correct and I would take the month of September and get your business plan in place. And here's the superpower trick for this video. You ready? Start your next year on December 1st. No month sets itself up better for reaching out to everybody in your database than December. Check in on the holidays. See how things are going. Hope, you know, hope that they have a good new year. And you're already light years ahead of your competition for the people that might be thinking about selling in the spring.