Hello, hello. You’re listening to the women rocking real estate podcast. I’m your host, Jen Percival and I really appreciate you tuning in. All right, quick shout out to you ladies that took the time to write me a five star review on iTunes. It is very much appreciated. It’s always appreciated, but it’s especially appreciated this week, because someone in Canada gave me an anonymous one star rating. So much for Canadians being nice, friendly, supportive people, I guess not. You know, I get that not everyone is going to love this podcast, they might not think it’s a five star podcast, maybe it’s a four or a three. But like, most people would only give a one star rating to a free podcast might I add, if they think it is nothing but a total piece of crap. You know, it takes me a full day to write, record and edit these episodes, and I don’t get anything for it. So it is incredibly demotivating to want to continue producing them when you receive a one star rating. So thank you to whoever gave me that. But I really wish you could have written something to give me some at least constructive feedback around how I could improve the thing.

Anyways, it didn’t get me down for a while, but I do try to practice what I preach. And I know, I know that success in business is rooted in resiliency. So I’m gonna carry on. With that, let’s get to today’s episode, I’ve got a question. How many of you out there suffer from what I call S.O.S – Shiny Object Syndrome. If you’re anything like me, you’ve always kind of got a bunch of ideas of things that you want to do in your business or think you should be doing in your business. And just as you get sort of started executing on one of those ideas, something else comes up and you get distracted and start focusing on it. And before you know it, and before you’ve made any real progress on it, something else captured your attention and you change direction yet again. And before you know it, you’re going in circles and making no real progress on anything and have nothing to show for all your work. Sound familiar? Well, today, I am going to be sharing my secret goal setting system and productivity plan. I will say the one thing that everyone who knows me would agree on even the one star rating person. If they do know me, they would agree that I am a very productive person. The amount of stuff that I’m able to accomplish is kind of mind boggling if I do toot my own horn and say so myself. Even with four kids and running multiple businesses, I am able to get a shit ton done. And I attribute most of that to my goal setting system and my productivity plan. Now I might be a wee little bit of a workaholic as well. But my systems are a big part of my productivity. And that is what I’m going to be sharing with you on today’s episode. So if you want to get your business booty in shape for 2021, and be the most productive you’ve ever been, pull over the car, grab a pen and paper and let’s get you into tip top shape.

Okay for starters, there are hundreds of different goal setting systems out there and I honestly feel like I’ve tried them all. But I always felt like they were all missing a piece of the puzzle. Let’s use the SMART goal system. For example, if you make your goals specific and measurable, and it’s attainable, and it’s realistic, and it’s time bound, that is considered a SMART goal. So if I set a goal of making $100,000 in gross commissions by the end of this calendar year, that would be considered a SMART goal. Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t tell you a damn thing about how to actually make it happen and that is where we all get tripped up. We know what we want to accomplish. We have no problems setting goals, but we don’t know how to make it happen. And that’s where shiny object syndrome comes in. And where we start kind of throwing darts at everything that we think could help us reach that goal. But unless we have a plan of exactly what we need to do to reach that goal, we won’t get traction. We just end up kind of starting a bunch of projects and going in circles accomplishing nothing. And this is where my goal  setting system comes in, it is a proven process for turning a high-level goal into a manageable daily steps.

Now for the purpose of this episode, we are not going to be looking at all of your goals in life, you very likely have got health goals and personal goals and relationship goals. However, we are only going to be focusing on your business goals in this exercise. With that said, you absolutely can use this exact same framework for any goal you have and I do encourage you to do so. Okay, so I Oh, w-wait actually, I kind of forgot, as of this morning, my new planned with purpose real estate planner is available to pre order. It is structured around my entire goal setting system and productivity plan. So if you’re ready to clear your mind set goals and have purpose every single day, my daily planner is going to simplify your schedule and allow you to plan and track the actions that you’re taking so that you can finally start getting the results that you deserve. It is a beautiful hardcover planner that is undated, so that you can start using it anytime you wish and you’re never going to waste pages, that’s been a huge pet peeve of mine with planners, I can’t stand dated planners. It’s also got a whole section dedicated to my secret goal setting system. It’s got monthly spreads so that you can see your entire month at a glance. And it’s also got cute little stickers to mark things like your closings and your content marketing and your vacations. It allows you to track your leads so that you’ll know where they’ve all come from. And it’s got a full page daily spread, with plenty of space for appointments to dues and notes. This is a planner that I created from scratch. And I have tweaked and modified over the years to help me stay organized, focused, super productive and purposeful every single day. 

It was custom designed for real estate using this goal setting system and it also comes with a free online workshop where I basically teach the entire system and how to use the planner to be more productive. So if you’re interested, I am going to be by the way teaching this on this episode. But if you want to get the planner so that you can incorporate it into your day to day, there is a workshop that like specifically teaches you and has all of the worksheets and stuff like that. It Like I said will be available for preorder starting today. And it will be shipped to you in the beginning of December. while supplies last there are limited supplies. Unfortunately, I will be ordering more again, but they will not be new here until the new year. So you can find a link to it in the show notes below this episode. Or you can go to my website and go to the shop tab and order it there. Okay, so the first step in the goal setting system is to determine your annual freedom metric. I’ve talked about this in the podcast before but this is your monthly revenue target that will allow you some breathing room in both your business and your life. So instead of kind of feeling overwhelmed, and financially stressed and busy all the time, you can sit back, take a breather, and sort of enjoy the financial and lifestyle benefits that your business is providing.

For this to work though, we’re not just going to pluck some random number out of the sky and say, yeah, that seems about right. No, we need to base this on your current reality, so that you can have true confidence in your freedom metric, and avoid any nasty surprises in the future. Now, I do not need you to complicate this and complete like a 100 line detailed budget. But we do need to capture an idea of your big expenses. So you’re going to identify one your personal expenses, all this like high level stuff like your mortgage or rent, kids expenses, car loans, groceries, fun things like that. Number two, your business expenses, all of your advertising and fees, and dues and maybe any staffing expenses or computer or program expenses or office expenses. Now those ones are probably pretty obvious to you. But I also want you to factor in savings, you should always have six months of saved income. So once you figure out your monthly expenses, start to put aside money every single month until you’ve accumulated at least six months of income, and then put it aside and don’t touch it. Lastly, this axe man, every country is a little different. Some are greedier than others, but put in whatever percentage you need to set aside for your taxes because nothing is more debilitating than getting a colossal tax bill at the end of the year. You don’t want that to happen, put that money aside, so you don’t have to think about it.

Now again, I don’t want this to turn into a big project. I just want you to put rough numbers in. And like I said, it’s always worthwhile to just round up to the next even number to keep it simple. So once we know what your freedom metric is, we have to take that number and apply it to your business. So if your freedom metric is $100,000 we’re just going to use that for sake of an easy number of years might be last year’s might be more. What does that mean in terms of transactions, how many listings we have to sell and how many buyers or leases will you need to close? These are your numbers that you should always have a really good handle on in your business by the way. So let’s use an example of that hundred thousand dollars. So when you’re looking at your past years in real estate, and if you are new to real estate and you don’t have any, you’re gonna have to estimate this stuff based on average price sales and average commissions and all of that stuff. But if you look at your past business, or you are guesstimating this stuff, what percentage of your business has come from buyers, from listings and from rentals. So when you’re newer in the business, you’re going to have a higher percentage of rentals, and then buyers and then listings. And as you get more and more deals under your belt, let’s call it you will end up doing more listings, less buyers and even less rentals. So if 60% for use of a number comes from your buyers, then you know, if you want to make 100 grand, you’re going to need to earn $60,000 from buyers. If 30% of your business comes from sellers, you’re going to need to make $30,000 from your sellers. And if 10% comes for rentals, you’re going to need to make 10% from or sorry, $10,000 from leases. So if we once we know that we know exactly how many dollars we need to make through buyers, sellers and leases, then we need to look at what your average transaction dollars are. So if your average buyer transaction is $10,000 in commissions, then you’re going to need six buyers to hit your freedom metric. If your average listing, you make about $6,000 in commissions, then you’re going to need five listings to hit your freedom metric. If your average lease is $1,000, then you’re going to need to do 10 leases. Do you see how I’m doing this exercise, it takes a high level goal and turns it into something tangible. Once we know how many buyers listings and leases it’s going to take to reach our freedom metric, we have one other super important number that we need to know and that is your lead conversion rate. 

If you know that you’re going to need to get six buyers, five sellers and 10 leases. Well, how many leads will you have to generate to get that number of clients. Now industry standard is somewhere between 1 to 5%, depending on who you ask and how they’re generating leads. In my opinion, those conversion rates are based on very cold leads. I was personally never a like lead generating machine. But the leads I did generate were really high quality. And my lead conversion was usually between 10 and 20%. So if your business is based solely on referrals, you’re probably going to have a pretty high conversion rate. If your business is just cold referrals, or cold leads, you’re gonna have a lower conversion rate. Either way, it’s really important for you to know what your personal lead conversion is and the more specific you can be the better. For example, you might have the highest lead conversion with leases, and then buyers and then listings. And I do want you to think of those types of clients as completely different types of business, because the activities that you do to generate lease leads will be completely different than the activities that you’re going to do to generate listings. Make sense?

Okay, just to put this in perspective, so that you clearly see the relationship between your freedom metric, and the leads that you’re going to need to generate to get there. So in this scenario, with $100,000 freedom metric, you’re going to need to get 21 clients, this is what the scenario that we just went through. So with an industry standard conversion rate of let’s call it 3%, that would mean you’re going to need to generate 700 leads from a cold source. Now, if you have a warmer audience using a 10% conversion rate, you’d still need to generate 210 leads. And with a super warm audience using a conversion rate of 20%, you’d need just over 100 leads. Now again, this is probably confusing to you trying to follow along in a podcast. But if you do get one of my planners, I go through this exercise in detail with you in the workshop that you get with the planner. So once you know how many leads that you need to generate to hit your freedom metric, well, then you can brainstorm your big 10.

 These are the 10 things that you’ll need to do in your business to generate that number of leads, so that you can reach your freedom metric. 

These are the top 10 things that are going to get to move that needle the most. Everyone’s big 10 is going to be different depending on where you are in your business. If you’re starting your business growing your business or scaling your business, what are your gaps? What have you done well, what are you missing? Have you got a website? Have you got listing presentations? Do you do online advertising? Do you do content marketing, everyone’s kind of starting from a different place and so your big 10 is going to be different than the next person. Now I go through this exercise with each of my one on one coaching clients in like extreme detail but I do encourage you to spend at least 30 minutes brainstorming all of the things that you could implement in your business that fall into one of three categories. The first category is things you can do to increase sales. second category is things you can do to increase your time or productivity. And third category is things you can do to decrease your costs. Now, when you do this exercise, you might come up with more than 10 ideas, that’s awesome. Basically, you need to brainstorm until you’ve got nothing left, the vast majority of your ideas should be in the first two buckets. But I definitely want you to think through at least five ideas for that third bucket. So they were increase sales, increase your time or productivity, or decrease your costs. So once you’ve got your master list, you’re then going to narrow that list down to the 10 most important projects or goals. 

Again, these are the 10 things that are going to move that dial the most towards reaching your freedom metric. Once you’ve got your big 10, then you’re going to prioritize them from one to 10. So put them in order of what you’re going to do first, what you’re going to do second, what you’re going to third, etc. So now that you’ve picked your first goal, it’s time to figure out all of the steps required to complete it, I recommend that you use a post it note strategy for this exercise, you go get a pad of post it notes, and you start brainstorming every single task that you’re going to need to complete that goal. If a task takes more than 30 minutes, or an hour max to complete, you’re going to need to break it up into smaller tasks. The goal here is that anytime you sit down to complete one of the tasks, it’s not going to take you more than half an hour to a max hour to finish. So you put each task on a post it note and you stick them up on a wall. And once you’ve got every single task that you need to complete, the last step is to pull them down and put them in order, starting from first task, working your way all the way through to the last task. And once you’ve got them in order, then you write them all down in your goal sheet in your planner, or just on a piece of paper if you don’t have the planner. So now that you know every single task you need to do to complete that first goal and you know what order you need to do them in, all you need to do now is kind of change gears and chat about how to be more productive. So let’s face it, it can be really hard to be productive in real estate, we don’t have set hours, we don’t have a boss looking over our shoulder keeping tabs on what we’re doing and we don’t really have deadlines. When it comes to our business, we’re not really accountable to anyone, we are accountable to our clients and that’s the main reason most agents don’t actually have a hard time completing tasks needed for buyers and sellers and leases, etc. on time. But when it comes to working on your business, not in your business, but on your business, the vast majority of agents are not very productive. And the biggest reason is that we usually don’t have a plan. We don’t have purpose, every single day when we wake up. We don’t know exactly what we’re supposed to be working on every day. So we kind of start one project. And as soon as we get bored or stuck, we move on to another one. And we simply don’t start anything and end up staying sort of in our pajamas until 11am. So the first step in writing this ship I call it is to start treating your real estate career, like a job like a real j.o.b, you wouldn’t dream of rolling into the office at 11am in your PJs, if you had a corporate job, would you? Of course not. So the easiest way to start being more consistent and productive is with a morning routine. Now I know I’m not sharing some earth shattering new theory here. This is been though proven time and time and time again, to be a super effective way of being more productive. 

So if you actually want to achieve the financial freedom metric that you’ve set, having a morning routine that you stick to is the first step. So what you do in your morning routine is kind of up to you. But whatever it is, do the exact same thing. Every single weekday morning, weekends are your cheat days, but Monday to Friday, same thing. So my morning routine uses the word BEGIN as an acronym so that I can remember so I begin every single morning the exact same way. So the B stands for brain priming. Any of you that are in my coaching program also know that brain priming is the foundational tool I use to turn our success switch on. It is nearly impossible to reach the goals that we set for ourselves without rewiring some of the kind of old neural networks in our brain. Because if we have a subconscious belief that we are not worthy enough or not smart enough or not confident enough or not outgoing enough, if we’re just not enough, then we will inevitably self sabotage our own efforts. 

So if you ever find yourself falling victim to distraction and overwhelm and perfectionism, or lack of focus, or procrastination, those are all signs that your brain is getting in your own way. And if you don’t learn how to unwire it, you’re just going to go in circles indefinitely. Okay, so the B stands for brain priming. Next up is E and it stands for exercise. Now, again, I’m not sharing anything new and exciting here. And I don’t think I need to elaborate too much on the exercise thing, other than to say that if we want to be healthy, physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy, we got to move our bodies at least 30 minutes a day, it makes such a massive difference in our overall well being, and our overall well being. So if you can, can bind also getting exercise with learning even better. And this is another one of my productivity things. I end every one of my podcast episodes with, the more you learn, the more you earn. And I am a huge believer in always learning. So if you’re going to go for a walk or run, listen to a book or a podcast while you’re doing it. If you’re on a treadmill bike or elliptical, watch videos. That way, you’re not just getting in 30 minutes of exercise every day, you’re getting 30 minutes of learning into at the same time, Super productive, right? Okay, next up is the G. So B is brain priming, E is exercise G is gratitude, you know when people are grateful. And again, I’m not sharing anything, I did not create this stuff. When people are grateful, they acknowledge the goodness in their lives. And in the process, they usually recognize that the source of that goodness sometimes lies, at least partially outside themselves. And as a result, gratitude can help us kind of connect to something larger than ourselves. Whether it’s to other people or nature or higher power, it doesn’t matter, it helps us connect. And in psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness in life. It helps people feel kind of more positive emotions and relish good experiences and improve their health and deal with adversity and build strong relationships. So beginning each day with gratitude should become a part of your morning routine. All right, next up is I. And it stands for intention. You’ll hear me talk about this all the time in my programs and in the podcast that you’ve really got to decide to be intentional about things. And it’s also about being intentional around your purpose, every single day. If you know what you want to achieve. How can you be more intentional about your days to make sure that you’re taking the actions you need to take to get the results that you’re looking for. 

All right, lastly, begin each day with nurture, that’s going to mean different things to different people. But what are some ways that you can nurture yourself in your morning routine, it may mean brewing a delicious cup of coffee, I make bulletproof coffee every morning and that’s part of the ways that I nurture myself. And it might be even more nurturing when you take 10 minutes to enjoy it in peace nurturing to you might mean meditating, or it might mean praying, it might mean cooking a nutritious breakfast, it might mean having a steam shower with aroma therapy after your workout. Whatever your morning routine looks like, try to nurture yourself for a more productive day. When you do it, it’ll also make you much more likely to begin the next day the same way because it releases those brain chemicals that make us feel good. So that’s how I recommend you begin each morning. I then recommend that you block off two to three hours in your calendar every single day in the mornings to work on your business. Because here’s the beautiful thing about real estate ladies. It’s not typically a morning business. Buyers and sellers are not usually requesting morning appointments. But even if they wanted to, you need to honor your hours and have some boundaries around your time. This is the biggest pitfall that people fall into in real estate is having no boundaries around their time, no set hours and they end up when they start getting busy. Basically working 24 hours a day, seven days a week and that is just not sustainable. You also become what I call a pop tart agent. And you’ve got just no control over your own life. And like I said, when you get really busy, I can’t tell you how quickly you will resent this business and burnout. Not only that, but your family will really resent you too. And I can say if you asked my children do you want to be a real estate agent when you grow up, all four of them will like scream “Oh my god, no”, they think it’s the worst job ever.

There’s a really easy fix here, block your mornings off and protect that time. I have done this on and off throughout my entire real estate career. And I can’t tell you how much happier I was when I was doing it and how much more miserable I was when I wasn’t. I use a program called acuity schedule to manage my entire calendar with showings and bookings and listing appointments and my personal calendar. And it is a complete lifesaver. I’m also going to link to it in the show notes. But I do have step-by-step training on how to use it included if you do buy my planner. 

Alright, so when you sit down every morning to work on your business, that’s different than in your business, in your business is all of the things that you need to do with buyers and sellers and leases. So it’s staging, it’s paperwork, it’s trade records, it’s all that stuff on your business is how you’re going to grow your business that your systems and your processes at your presentations, it’s your lead generation, it’s your sales, it’s all that stuff. So when you sit down every morning to work on your business, instead of just staring at your plan or not knowing what to work on, you are going to go to your task list for your very first goal. And all you’re going to do is write down the first three tasks into your three must dues in your planner, then that’s all you’re gonna focus on. It’s just those three tasks, nothing else, three tasks is not a lot, you can do three tasks in a day, right? If you finish the three tasks, give yourself those three, lovely checkmarks. And then feel free to if you’re feeling productive, add more tasks from your list or move on to the rest of your day. If you didn’t finish them, move the incomplete task to tomorrow’s must do and then add two more, then you do this every single day until you’ve finished that goal. It’s just three tasks a day. But when you actually commit to doing this, you will be shocked by how much you’re able to accomplish. Because you’ve got a plan. You know what you need to do. And then all you need to do is execute your plan. You don’t need to sit at your computer wondering what should I be focusing on today, every single day, you have a purpose. You just take those three actions every day and you’re going to look back at the end of the month and at the end of the year, and be blown away by how much you’ve accomplished. This is how to take that high-level goal of a freedom metric, and turn it into daily actionable steps.

Once you’ve completed your 10 goals, you move on or sorry, once you’ve completed your first goal, then you move on to your next goal and start brainstorming all of the tasks for it. Press repeat. That is the key though, when you are working on one of your goals, you just focus on it and nothing else. You don’t even start brainstorming the tasks for your other big nines. You just focus on the first goal and what you need to accomplish to get it done. 

Now, if you try this and you find yourself getting distracted by other shiny objects, well that’s an SOS signal that your brain is getting in your way and if it keeps happening and you keep finding yourself in the same pattern, it’s time to get some help sorting that out. Alright ladies, hopefully, that wasn’t too confusing. Like I said sometimes these things are hard to explain in a podcast versus sort of seeing it visually. But if you are interested in ordering one of the planners Like I said, I do have a free workshop that accompanies it, that explains the whole system from start to finish. You can get a copy of it on my website or in the show notes for this episode below.

Remember, the more you learn, the more you earn, until next time.