Video Transcript

Prefer to read along? Here’s the full transcript from this training video.

Brian Icenhower: Let me show you how we should be coaching business planning, because business planning is a big problem. A lot of people hate business plans because they build them and they never use them. So how we implement them is the key. The business plan is very rarely the problem. The problem is people don’t know how to stay with it and work it over the course of a year.

And that is really only going to happen with a coach or a leader holding someone accountable. If someone thinks they’re going to do that on their own, they are kidding themselves. Here’s why. A business plan is a whole bunch of extra work that you want to get done next year, work you’ve been unable to get done so far. And usually it’s so much work that it takes an entire year to get it all done.

We in the real estate industry don’t realize this, and if we don’t realize it, we’ve got a big problem. Our natural default position is to wake up every morning and get done with work that day as soon as possible. That is our natural default. It’s why agents don’t want to spend extra time in the CRM. That’s extra work, and it keeps them at work longer. They don’t want to watch training videos. That’s extra work. They want to work from 10 to 3 and pick the kids up at 3, and if they can get done by 1, that’s even better.

So they’re jamming to get all the work on their pending transactions and pending clients done as quickly as possible. That’s all the business they’ve already got, though. That’s rear view mirror stuff. They’re not doing anything to get new business, grow their business, or enhance their career. The natural default is just to be done as fast as possible every single day.

That’s why people always ask, “Why can’t I get my agents to use the CRM?” Because they don’t want to do it. They want to get done earlier each day, and the CRM is extra work. They look at work as handling their current clients’ needs. They never put time into getting new clients, or into training, or into working the CRM. That’s why they all hate CRMs, despite the fact that every CRM is a hundred times easier to learn than an MLS software program. The MLS is clunkier, harder, and less intuitive, but every agent knows how to work it. Why? Because that’s what their existing clients need. They need you to input a listing and search for property. But when it comes to a CRM, it’s “Oh no, it’s too hard.” That has nothing to do with the software. It has everything to do with the fact that it’s extra work, and I’m looking for an excuse not to do it.

So the quicker we can be self-aware that we’re just trying to work less, the better off we are, because then we can do something about it. And business planning is exactly the same thing. On a business plan you typically have a large group of things you need to do next year to get where you want to go. That is all extra work. So the idea of doing that extra work without accountability is crazy.

It’s one out of a thousand agents who can make themselves do extra work for an extended, continuous period of time. There are a lot of people who can do it for short periods. “I’m motivated today, I’m going to get it done.” Or “I’m out of money, I need to get money.” There are tons of people who will work when they have no money, but once they get some money, they drop it all and ride that roller coaster of up, down, up, down. Volatility is the enemy of success in all business. It is the steady person who can hold it.

That’s what accountability does. Putting accountability in place is what creates that steadiness. The person who always goes to the gym, always eats healthy, always lead generates. Those are the tortoises that win the race over all the rabbits that are up and down. You’ve worked with someone who’s volatile before. I’ve been volatile before. It’s not pleasant. So learn to get self-aware and understand that it’s really just laziness. “I don’t want to work. I don’t have time.” Be aware of that. We’re naturally lazy people by nature, so being self-aware that we need to put things in place to make us do extra work is absolutely crucial.

A business plan is just that. It’s extra work. So we have to, A, be aware of that, and B, put some accountability behind getting it done.

I’ll give you an example. A business plan format we like to use, because it is very simple and it does get it all done, is the 1-3-5 business plan. Yes, we copied it from lots of people. I didn’t make this up. It’s well accepted out there in the industry. Here’s one for a broker owner. This brokerage’s leadership team has a goal of doing $15 million in total GCI. That’s their one big goal. Then they have three focus areas: recruiting, retention, and operating systems. They want to increase recruiting, increase retention, and implement a bunch of new operating systems. So your one is at the top and your three are below it. Then we have five objectives for each of those three focus areas.

In this case there are different objectives for recruiting. We’re going to start tracking things, set goals for appointments, attend some Realtor events, do some social media marketing. Here’s retention: different things we could do to increase productivity in the office, train more, create a productivity coaching program, and so on. Operating systems: they want to start using an onboarding calendar for their agents, implement engagement pipelines for the agents who aren’t showing up a lot, and hold a couple of biannual staff and training retreats. Things you’d expect to see. So there’s your one, your three, and your five.

We have different examples of that for real estate teams and for individual agents. I just showed you a brokerage owner’s because we have a lot of brokerage owner clients. Here’s the key, though. Once you get a 1-3-5 business plan done, and typically when we’re working with our clients we have them do a rough draft and then we, the coach, edit that rough draft with them and help them finish it. Then we take it to a leadership team, if our client has one, and let them make some edits. Then we possibly roll it out to the entire office. If it’s 500 agents I may not roll it out to everybody, but I’ll show everybody: here’s what we’re working on this year. That way they see that you’re working and growing too, and we encourage the agents to do the same thing for their own businesses. We lead by example.

I can tell you right now, our company has a 1-3-5. We meet on it every single year, and we don’t do things impulsively. We get ideas about good things all the time. In fact, one of our coaches gave us an idea for a new class just today, and I’d love to jump on it right away, and we are going to do it. But it’s going to go on the 1-3-5 business plan, if everybody agrees it’s a priority for next year. Because we get something like 50 different ideas every year.

We can’t just drop everything we’re doing right now and be impulsive like a real estate agent and say, “Oh yeah, let’s do it, I’m fired up on this.” I’ve been in organizations like that. They’re usually run by volatile people, up and down. Nothing ever gets done. We scrap things all the time and never see them through. It needs to be a systemized, process-based stability. So we put the idea on the 1-3-5 and weigh it against all our other plans and ideas to see which ones are the real priority. What can we get to first? There’s always a big list every single year in a business.

What happens is we never see a plan through, because, number one, we aren’t constantly looking at it and working on it, and we’re going to talk about how to do that. And number two, we abandon half of those items because we squirrel after new things that come up and excite us throughout the year. We always justify them by necessity. “This new company opened up and they have a new commission structure, so we’ve got to change ours.”

We get very reactive because we’re volatile creatures. In real estate, salespeople are just volatile. They operate off full emotion without any type of constraint. So we jump after impulsive things. We buy something because we don’t have any business. “I need some leads, I’m going to pay for this marketing.” And the vast majority of the time, we don’t end up using it. We don’t act like we’re running a business. We act like salespeople.

So what we say is, no, we’re going to get through our plan for this year. We’ll put that idea on our list for next year’s 1-3-5. At the end of the year, if we’re still excited about it, we’ll see if it earns a spot in our top 15 objectives. Remember, there’s one, three, and five, and those five are different objectives for each of the three focus areas. So there are actually three times five, 15 things we’re going to work on over the course of a year. If the idea is still in the top 15 by priority, we get to it. Not a rush.

I know that’s hard for a lot of real estate agents, because they love to be impulsive and don’t want to wait for stuff. They don’t like the bureaucracy of big companies that move too slow. Those big companies are really big and their owners are rich for a reason. So get over yourself. Stop acting like the low guy on the totem pole in the org chart and needing everything yesterday. You’ve got to be self-aware enough to know that impulse is crazy just as often as it’s smart, and you’ll justify anything to yourself if you get excited about it. The key is to put some accountability in place so you don’t do that.

So we move slow and go after our priorities every single year. Otherwise you’re just going to create a to-do list every year, and you’re never going to have time to do anything on it, like most people never do with to-do lists. We put things on a to-do list and feel good, even though we’re totally aware we’re never going to do anything on that list, because we always want to get done early every day. It’s madness we put ourselves through.

So here is the way a 1-3-5 should operate, and it’s really simple. Once the 1-3-5 has been vetted by everybody in the organization and rolled out, if you’re a broker owner, I would certainly hope you have at least a staff or leadership meeting every single week. If you’re a brokerage owner, you probably have either a combined staff and leadership meeting or separate ones, depending on how big you are. If you’ve got 500 agents, you might have a lot of staff, and not every one of them needs to be in the leadership meeting. But most aren’t that big. If you’re not that big and you’ve just got the people on staff, that is your office leadership, and we’re going to meet.

In a portion of that weekly meeting, let’s say it’s an hour long, I would dedicate 15 to 20 minutes every single week to at least one to three of the 1-3-5 items. When I talk about the items, we’ve categorized 15 objectives at the bottom, based on the three focus areas, which are directly aligned to meeting the one numeric big goal at the top. Now, you could have a 1-3-6, or a 1-4-5. I’m fine with stretching it a little bit, but we don’t want too many or it just gets burdensome. Let’s say we’re using the standard 1-3-5.

The first thing I’m going to do once I’ve got my 1-3-5 together is prioritize. I want to list the objectives one to 15 in order of importance. That’s the first thing. One to 15. Then I’m going to select two or three of them to start working on right away. And we’re going to push the ball forward in baby steps every single week.

It’s really simple how you do it. Whether we pick two or three depends on how many people are in this meeting who can get the work done. If I’ve got six people in there, and I can assign one task to one person who doesn’t need much from anybody else, that person can pretty much drive the project through. Then the next person takes another. Maybe I can pull three down at once. I’m not usually pulling four down at once, two or three. I push a few at a time because some things get stuck, we wait on things, and I want to be able to push something else through, because this is the 20 minutes a week I’ve got dedicated to growth as a group. That’s it. 20 minutes a week, and I’m going to protect that 20.

So the rule is, if you are the project leader driving one of those three projects, whether you’re a member of this leadership team, this real estate team, or a large team’s leadership group, you’re going to drive it forward. Your goal in that 20 minutes is: what’s the first thing we need to do to get this started? It might be to call another team, or talk to your coach, or talk to somebody who can tell us where to start. If we’re going to start lead generating, it might be “we need to find out what the best lead generation sources are. Who are we going to call?” It might be someone saying, “I’m going to ask ChatGPT what all the different lead generation activities for real estate agents are.” Great. Can you report back your results by next Tuesday’s meeting?

We have to pick a task for them, one they’re accountable to the group to complete, that is so microscopically small it can certainly be done by next week. We go forward in baby steps, because growth comes slowly, then suddenly. If we start making little baby steps, you’ll see it moves very fast as you get closer to the completion of each objective. So we always go slowly, then suddenly. We just have to start. You know how that works. Once you get something started, it starts to go, but we wait forever to get it started. So the key is just to get started. You start going slow, and then it moves very quickly.

Usually at the beginning we’re finding a who to tell us how to do this. That’s when it moves slow. We’re trying to learn which way to go forward. A lot of it is just reaching out to this person or that person. We come back: “I asked ChatGPT and what it gave us was no good.” Then we come back next week. At least you tried. You did something. Now the whole group can say, “Why don’t you try this? Why don’t you call this person? Why don’t you ask your coach this week?” You do that, and all three of you report back next week. With those three activities, I bet we have an answer. We’re just trying, and we’re going to keep trying. We’re not going to quit until we can check this off our box.

Let’s say we get all the way to the point where we’re going to start geographic farming neighborhoods, and we’re going to have each agent pick a farm. Then it’s “What’s the first step?” Let’s all start taking the ICT geographic farming course as a team so we learn how to do it. Maybe that’s it. Then once that’s done, we push it forward each week. When we start selecting farms and picking our contact plans for how we’re going to stay in front of the farm, we’re done. That objective is now complete. One of our 15 is done. I go back to the 1-3-5 and put an X through it. 14 to go.

Mind you, we pulled two or three down at once, so we’re also pushing those in the meeting. That 20 minutes is compact, because we’re trying to figure out the next baby step for two or three things in 20 minutes. That’s all we’re doing. What’s the next step? What’s the next step? Then we write down what the next step is and who’s going to do it. When next week comes, our agenda is already set for that 20 minutes. Did you do it? Great. Now we’ve got a whole team pushing to get a business plan done.

Does that make sense? And it’s only 20 minutes of your team meeting. You can still go through your dashboards. You can still go through your inventory pipelines. You can still do a training in there. We’re just taking a small sliver and dedicating it to our business plan each week. That’s it. All we’re doing is pushing it forward.

Now, if you’re a solo agent with a 1-3-5 trying to do this on your own, it’s extremely hard. I can tell you, very few get it done. I’d say one out of a hundred, one out of a thousand, actually pulls that plan out every week and keeps pushing forward in baby steps. That’s why you get a coach. You get a coach to push you forward. In fact, any good coach should have a business plan, and basically what they’re coaching you on every single week, by way of content, is your own business plan. That had better be the case, because you both agreed to put this plan together.

If the coach is talking about new stuff, that shouldn’t be happening. That’s squirreling. A good coach should hold you to what you both agreed to on your business plan, and every week we should be pushing you forward on the next baby step for one, two, or three items. If you come to that coach with a bunch of fires to put out and problems to deal with, and we get off your business plan and don’t keep pushing it forward, that’s a bad coach. The coach is going to keep you focused on growth. I’m not worried about you putting out fires. Real estate agents do that all year long by themselves without any accountability. What they abandon is the growth. Why? Because it’s extra work and they want to go home early.

So the coach should never have to worry about what to talk about. The coach is not there to entertain you and give you new, exciting things that motivate you. The coach is there to make you do the work you already agreed to do. And yes, it’s not fun. The coach is not there to be your friend or a shoulder to cry on in lieu of this. They can do those things, and I’m okay with it, but I’m not excited about it. What I’m really excited about is whether we can get you to stick with the plans you both agreed to, despite the fact they may be boring every single day. You don’t have to like the activities. You just need to want the results.

Staying the path, keeping the focus without jumping around to different things, moving companies, changing lead generation methods, changing coaches, changing leaders, changing everything. That’s the volatility that leads to failure. It’s the people who can stay the path who win. Especially in slow markets, especially in seasonality and winter, everybody just can’t stand the pain and has to make a flip flop. A good coach keeps you on the path so we stay in growth, and that’s really what you should be working on.

A good coach should have you through a 1-3-5 probably by June or July, halfway through the year. We’ve had to do that many times, where we actually create a second-half 1-3-5 because we’re chugging forward so well. It’s baby steps every single week until it gets done. If you get to the end of the year and it’s not all done, we combine what’s left with the list of ideas we held back on and didn’t react to, the ones we were going to wait and see about. Do we still want to do those, or are these 15 things better? That’s why in October, November, and December, coaches should be talking with their clients all about business planning for next year. It’s that important. We architect the path forward together, and then the coach has to keep you on it when you get distracted by all the other things that want to take you off it.

Our coaching company does the exact same thing. We get lots of neat ideas, and some people in our organization don’t like that it takes forever to act on them. It’s because we get so many of them, and we’re really committed to this year’s plan. So we put the idea on the list for next year and see if it makes the top 15. You should do the same with your business. When we’re really excited about something, we certainly want to do it right now. Give it a couple of weeks and see if you’re still excited about it. Weigh it against all the other bright, shiny ideas you came up with, and you’ll start to realize, “Wow, I do a lot of this kind of stuff.”

That’s what coaching is. Little baby steps and little chunks. Once we mark that X off, we pull the next one down. What’s priority number four? We start pushing the ball forward on it. Then we mark another one off and pull number five down. We’re always pushing two or three forward at a time in baby steps. What is so small that I can get it done by next week’s meeting? That’s the test. What is so small that I can get it done by next week’s meeting?

You usually have one leader pushing a project, but not always. Sometimes the project moves into a different area. Now we’re implementing with the team, so it moves to the person whose job that is. Just make sure someone is pushing it forward, and hold that person accountable to the baby step each week. You’ll watch how fast it starts to get done after a while. That’s how we get a business plan done. It’s through accountability. It’s through teamwork. It’s through a coach. It’s not the plan, it’s the implementation. Thanks, guys.