The Four Functions of a Healthy Business

Transcript:

My challenge is to think about it this way earlier. We had a conversation with Smitty and Dave, and they are like “Ah, we don’t have leads” and I’m like “Are there any hours being spent in marketing?” They don’t have a marketing person, which is understandable. Most of us aren’t going to have a full-time true marketing person. Someone who actually has marketing experience.

There are people in this world who can come into our real estate teams and create a whole another level than the stuff we know or we learned. It’s a huge awareness. There’s not a lot of leads coming in, right? And I know your market is a hot market, so is this market, but it’s because no one is spending any hours in the marketing position.

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Jeff is good at marketing and he needs to get his hands out of sales. Let Dave live or die or sink or swim in sales and just spend some time in marketing. If you’re doing all four of these, it’s very tricky. This is when I was up at 2 a.m. and I was figuring out expired letters and mailing and post stamping and all that stuff. Someone’s got to spend time in all of these and you’ve got to have distinct roles and responsibilities for all these functions.

Then someone’s gotta count the money. You shouldn't be doing your own books at any point. Even if you’re not selling the amount of homes you want to sell, someone else should be doing your books. It’s just not worth it for you to do those. I’ve had some of you be like “It’s totally cool, I do it once a week on a Saturday.” I’m like, “You really think you’re serving your family by spending two hours every Saturday doing in Quickbooks when you can hire someone at $30 an hour to do it?”

Imagine if you’re sitting in this room and you have nobody on your team, it doesn’t necessarily., so someone is going to serve as the team leader right? That’s either a COO or General Manager or CEO, that person has responsibility for running the ship. You may or may not be a visionary. Don’t get caught up so much in the top position, but you have to be spending time in marketing. Your name may be in every bucket, but to just to look at this like do you have a true sales lead? If not, if you’re spending time there and Andrew who is your listing agent is covering some of the buyer agents but it’s just dysfunctional. It’s not going to work. It’s not scalable.

A good example is say you have buyer agents on your team and you’re the listing agent. You can be the listing agent and still be the sales lead, but then you have buyer agents and listing agents under you. Your first admin is probably going to be the marketing lead and the operations lead, and maybe the finance/ HR lead. You’ve got to just deal with the fact that there are multiple things that have to happen in a healthy business. Even if you're small, even if you’re not selling 500 homes. The takeaway here is that you’ve just got to think about the four functions and you’ve got to check in with this. Once you can fill the seats, you’re building this function out. This is how a healthy business functions, even if you don’t have the people for it.