After people, systems and tools make up the remainder of leverage. Before you hire your first staff member, you should think about what systems and tools you will need in place. Systems are about documenting your methods. You want your people to document your methods and then be able to duplicate your excellent results. Creating systems can be challenging. Your first hire, your administrative help, will help you to create initial systems for them and any future hires in your sales staff. Tools are everything from computers, equipment, and phone systems to something as simple and as vital as a job description. Actually, the job description is an extremely important tool for establishing your standards for performance and behavior on the front end. They should be detailed and thorough. If it is helpful to do so, try thinking of them as the syllabus college professors hand out on the first day of class. A typical syllabus will not only provide a description of the material to be explored, but it also sets standards for passing and failing. Your staff needs to understand how they can succeed with you and how they might fail with you. The management of almost all your other tools can be delegated to your staff.
The systems/tools goal category manifests itself as the following questions:
■ What new systems or tools do we need to add?
■ What current systems or tools do we need to improve or upgrade? Because system/tool leverage can take time to research, create, and deploy, they should always be present in your goals and tracking. You’ll want to predict these needs well in advance so you can give them the attention over time they may require.
If there is one thing that our experience has shown over the years, it is that Millionaire Real Estate Agents are always focused on personal development. For themselves, they attend seminars, seek out consulting relationships, and require their staff to do the same. They are always looking for ways to improve how they and their staff operate professionally and personally. Your personal education goal category will show up in your thinking as:
1. What knowledge do I need to learn? What skills do I need to acquire?
2. What knowledge do the individuals on my staff need to learn? What skills do they need to acquire? There is always an ongoing need to improve your understanding of the key areas of your business. On the road to becoming your best, school is never out.
Keeping goal categories is one of the areas that changed my life as a businessperson. Back in 1979, I attended a Lewis R. Timberlake seminar on goal setting. Timberlake advocated using goal categories, and before long I was scratching out notes on what should be the core goal categories for a highly successful real estate agent. These categories were originally tried and tested by none other than myself. Now, over the course of my career, they have withstood my personal scrutiny as well as the original doubts and skepticism of thousands of real estate agents who have consulted with me. While goal categories are magical and can bring amazing focus to your business life, they shouldn’t be compartmentalized to just your business life. I encourage you to explore taking advantage of the power of goal categories in your personal life as well.