Business Planning

5 Steps to Make Your Business Count in 2014
By Patty McNease

Hope is not a strategy. This important phrase is one that was explored by Jackie Leavenworth in the Homes.com webinar, “Plan for 2014: Hope is NOT a Strategy,” which shared numerous ideas about building a real estate business that will support your life in 2014, instead of the other way around. It also provided strategies and systems to create an organized plan to track your success in 2014.

Leavenworth, a 25-year vet of the real estate game, serves as an international speaker and coach for real estate professionals who don’t have a structured business plan. Each year, she meets with thousands of agents across the country and teaches them her 5-step business plan that will help them create an intentional future and run a profitable business.

From the outset of the webinar, Leavenworth conceded that most brokers help their agents, but it’s how they help them plan that makes the difference in success or failure. When she was first starting out in 1984, she believes she was trained “backwards” being told mostly how to market herself.

“It’s a reverse business plan. We market ourselves and hope that marketing (a picture on a shopping cart, back of sports jerseys) attracts buyers and sellers we can work with and then turn into sales and get paid enough to pay our bills and run our business and have money left over to see the profitability in our life,” she says. “Marketing should be the last thing we do, not the first thing we do. I would like for everyone to be very intentional about their life and business, which leads to marketability. It’s going to be easy, just backwards from what we’re used to.”

The 5 Steps to Success

Leavenworth developed a five-step plan that she feels will lead any real estate agent to get to a place that will make them happy and successful.

Step 1: “Plan Your Life.” “It’s hard as adults to dream. We spend more time panning our vacations than we do our life,” she says. “Planning your life takes dreaming and thinking ahead. Real estate is a business that should support our life and not the other way around.”

Step 2: “Determine Cost of L&B.” Examine the cost of life and the cost of business. It’s important not to let one outweigh the other.

Step 3: “Number of Units.” Here, Leavenworth dissects the importance of the number of units that an agent needs to sell each year to make the money that they want.

Step 4: “Identify Sources.” This is the most important step, as this is where an agent can grow their business.

“We throw our money at the wall in marketing hoping that people come to us. What we don’t necessarily intentionally target is where we’d like our business to come from,” she says. “It’s important to figure out where you want your money and business to come from and act on those.”

Step 5: “Market to Sources.” Leavenworth recommends disbanding the shotgun approach to marketing, where you are just throwing money to get your face out there and attracting anyone who will come, and instead knowing where your business will come from, which saves money, energy and is much less confusing in the scheme of things.

Reflecting on a favorite quote to sum up her steps, “Choice, not chance, determines our destiny,” Leavenworth says this is where one should take business to heart.
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Raise Your Net Worth

Can Mindfulness Raise Your Net Worth?



Sitting down with the intention of stilling one’s mind and body is no longer the sole province of hippies and Eastern medicine aficionados, says leadership expert Dr. Stephen Josephs.
Nike, 50 Cent and the Marine Corps all embrace the benefits of mindfulness meditation, he says.
“The benefits of mindfulness meditation do not exist in a vacuum; mindfulness meditation not only lowers your blood pressure, it also offers a host of other positives, including increasing business acumen,” says Josephs, who has coached executives for more than 30 years and recently authored the new book, “Dragons at Work,” (www.DragonsAtWork.com).
“It sharpens your intuitive business sense. By relaxing your body, breathing evenly, and paying attention to the present moment, you notice things you might otherwise miss. Paying exquisite attention is the key to staying real, and daily meditation builds that capacity.”
The benefits of a calm and focused mind are ubiquitous; Josephs offers tips for business leaders.
• If you’re faced with what looks like an enticing opportunity, don’t just do something. Sit there. Breathe quietly and let the fear and greed subside. The easiest way to fool yourself in a deal, negotiation or transaction is to let your thinking stray from what’s happening and get seduced by a dream. It could be the dream your counterpart is spinning for you or simply the dream of results, good or bad. Like most people, you have probably experienced moments when you knew something – a business relationship, an investment – was going south, but you hesitated to act because you didn’t have facts to support your intuition. Sometimes, your intuition knows something that your logical mind does not.
• Pay attention to what your body is telling you; you may be expressing signals that your logical mind is slow to notice. In a psychological study titled, “The Iowa Gambling Task,” researchers gave subjects the task of making the most money possible by choosing cards from four decks. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the decks were stacked. Some were “good decks” (producing winners more of the time) and some were “bad decks,” (producing losers). After about 40 to 50 picks, most subjects caught on to which decks produced winners and losers. Their bodies knew something that their rational minds had missed. After about 10 picks they began to produce physiological symptoms of stress when their hands reached for the bad decks. If you’re not paying attention to those subtle signals, your innate wisdom is inaccessible.
• Meditation develops emotional balance and a better business mind. If you’ve never meditated, try it! Start small by simply sitting still and keeping your eyes closed for five minutes. Feel the weight of your body in its sitting position. Try to simplify your thoughts to basic things, down to the subtle sounds of the room, your breathing. Mindfulness meditation does not require extensive study in ancient traditions. Notice the difference after only five minutes; you will feel more relaxed. Later, try it for 10 minutes, and then longer. Do your due diligence in that state of mind. The equanimity that will sharpen your acumen is also the source of your happiness in life. Don’t trade it for anything.

Reprinted with permission from RISMedia. ©2013. All rights reserved.