First off, the leaders of these successful offices understand the three basic steps to operating a business. In any business you have to have ideas, then you make plans around those ideas, and finally, you have to execute those plans. Doing this properly means you have a business. Many companies are great at having ideas and many are great at making plans. It is the execution though, where most companies falter. Why? Because this is where the heavy lifting is done! To execute means to perform labour. It means to work. Ideas and plans are talking the talk, but executing is walking the walk. To have ideas is great and to make plans is also good but without working those plans and ideas, nothing will happen. And realize that just as you operate your business this way, your agents are watching with you as their role model. When they see you execute, they are much more likely to begin working the plan themselves.

Next, successful companies are always re-inventing themselves. Nothing stays the same forever and neither will your company. Successful leaders are vigilant in watching for certain phrases in their company that signify a resistance to the vision of moving the company forward. First is the classic line, "we are too busy". Second is the line "we've always done it that way". These two usually go hand in hand. We are too busy because we've always done it that way. The people saying these things are the ones who have continued to do what they have always done. These are the people who are holding your company back. And doing things the way that you have always done them means you are not open to opportunities that present themselves.

Let me provide an example from my own business. At Lone Wolf, we've preached for years that having accounting as the integral part of the RMS system was the only way to go. We did not sell our program to people who wanted to use a generic accounting system, like QuickBooks^TM. There were lots of sales to be had with people who wanted the advantage of having the management tools that our integrated system could bring to the table. And we did this for years. Then we took over a competitor's product and were converting people from it to Lone Wolf. But the competitor had been using Quickbooks^TM for the accounting. So we brought out a version called Lone Wolf Quick and made that available to clients. Some of my staff members were appalled that we’d do that. They said "that's not the way we've always done it". But in order for us to move forward and attract a new type of client, we had to take this step. We didn't leave behind our existing clients and we grew the business by looking at things in a new way, the best of both worlds!

The last point I wanted to make was a version of the ideas-plans-business commentary and this is vision-goals-tasks. Visions, like ideas, are what set your business off on a path and tasks are the jobs that you are doing to achieve that vision. What really successful companies do though, is put the goals in the middle and end up monitoring the heck out of them. It's great to have lots of vision and it's great to be working like crazy on a bunch of tasks but unless you put those goals in place in the middle of it all, you just won't know where you are!

To wrap up, I thought I would make a quick list of some traits that the truly successful brokers have in common. See how many you can check off!

* Has a clear vision of where their company is going
* Communicates regularly with staff and agents
* Creates an annual budget and monitors financial activity
* Has goals that are monitored
* Owns their own real estate office space
* Focuses on retention as much as recruiting
* Realizes that recruiting is a job, not something that just happens

Until next month,
Lorne C. Wallace, C.A.
President & Founder of Lone Wolf