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You're listening to KW Means Beyond the Sale podcast.

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So here's a suggestion for you. I want you to put more constraints on your real estate practice. Not less constraints, more constraints. Play this out with me, give me a few minutes of your time, and I think you'll see how more constraints in your real estate practice can actually help drive your business forward. Let's start just with a geographic constraint. Where do you do your business? Where do you do your business? If I said, what's the business that you focus on or where your market is? In my experience, most agents don't have a succinct answer. And even if they do have an answer, when you offer them an opportunity that's just outside that answer, they're immediately going to hop on that business. But here's what most of them miss top agents don't act that way. Top agents know their market and then stay in their market and develop incredible agent partnerships where they have an ability to refer business outside their market. And market isn't just a geographic limitation, it can also be a demographic limitation. I only work with my database, I only work with my database and referrals from my database. Or I work with commercial real estate or luxury real estate, or I really special time in specialize in first-time home buyers. What is the demographic constriction you've put on your business so that you stay more focused? What's the geographic constriction? Here's the beautiful benefit of putting those kind of constrictions on your bait on your business. When you look at agents that are really thriving, they almost always own a specific area. You can point to different areas within the state of Maine or even broadly across our country, and you can point at that geographic point and go, that top agent owns that area. More often than not, it's because they choose to focus on that area and refer other business out. So if top agents are doing that, why aren't you doing it? Do you realize the amount of time that is wasted by trying to chase business all over a region or all over a state instead of purposely focusing on where you want to grow your business? If you really want to thrive in real estate, put more constraints on your business, pick your market and focus there. But it doesn't just stop with restricting your business when it comes to the geographic area or the demographic area that you work in. I want you to restrict your business when it comes to your budget too. I want you to be really purposeful. And let's just talk about the marketing dollars that you put back into your business. I really want to put hard constraints on that. And I see the problem with most agents being outside of that in both directions. I meet many an agent whose business is really kind of starving, who really needs to reinvest more of their commission income back into their business to cause future growth. But I also see the other side of that problem, where agents are spending haphazardly and spending way too much money reinvested in their business in a very unfocused and unpurposeful way. They haven't budgeted, they haven't planned, and so that just whatever the next shiny thing is, they're the next person to lay down the credit card and buy it. Your marketing for your business should always fall somewhere between 8 and 10% of the gross commission income you're bringing in. So if you're bringing in $100,000, you should be reinvesting $8,000 to $10,000 per year just for developing future business. So we want to constrain not only our market, our geographic, demographic, but we also want to constrain our reinvestment. Let's be really purposeful with it. Don't spend 2%, don't spend 20%, be in that 8 to 10% sweet spot. I've got one more real constraint I want to challenge you to think about. A lot of agents get into real estate because of the flexibility. I can do it when I want. I've got all I get to determine where and when I run my business. And the byproduct of that, for most agents, means they're on all the time. They're on all the time. Not they've got real time where they're off and real time where they're on, they've got this great counterbalance in their life. Nope. It means they tend to be on all the time. Right? What's the great joke, you know, an entrepreneur is somebody who won't work 40 hours for somebody else, so they work 80 hours for themselves. Don't fall into that trap. I want you to constrain the amount of time you dedicate to your business. Not because I want to limit the growth for your business, because I think you'll find it's one of the best ways to drive the growth of your business. Tell you a quick story. When I was running an office down in Hartford, Connecticut for a bunch of years, I happened to, for the first time in my life, and you know, probably had something to do with getting older, started to have some neck pain. And that neck pain turned into driving pain down my elbow. And eventually I just couldn't ignore it anymore. I'd kind of put it off, put it off, and I lived about 45 minutes from the office. So by my home, there was a great chiropractor my wife had worked with, and I decided to go in to see them. And the good news was they could fix me. The bad news was I would have to come in at least initially three times a week. Now, because they closed at 6 o'clock, I'd have to hit the road by 5 o'clock to get there on time to be able to get kind of that last appointment of the day, get the adjustment, and start the healing process. And because I couldn't put it off anymore, I had to do it. So now all of a sudden, instead of letting my work linger till six, seven, eight o'clock at night, hey, I've already missed, you know, kind of beating the traffic home. I might as well stay for another hour and a half or two hours. Instead, now I'm leaving at 4 45 or 5 o'clock. In the months that followed, I had the most productive months I had had in the role in the first 18 months of being there. Why? Because now I have a limited amount of time. Every moment of the day had to be more purposeful. Have you ever heard the expression, if you really want something done, give it to a busy person. Some of us in real estate are taking a thing that should only take us 10 hours to do, and we're filling our entire week with it. We're doing one piece of business and we're spending two months on it when other agents are doing a piece of business a week. The constraints that we put on our schedule are some of the best things we can do to become more effective and more efficient. And I have to promise you, that's what your clients want. Yes, it's fun to hang out with somebody at their house as we're talking about listing their home and kind of schmooze for a couple of hours. Isn't that great? Nice. But most clients actually want to get in and get out. The home buying process is complicated enough. The home selling process is complicated enough. I want to work with a professional who's gonna, you know, help me to understand exactly what that process looks like, take the right actions, and let's get going. We don't want to necessarily drag this out. So if we show up as a very efficient, very effective agent who listens at a high level, who communicates at a high level, and is very purposeful and effective in the steps that we take from that point on, we will actually be way more efficient than somebody who may be working seven days a week but ineffective. Putting constraints on the hours that you work in real estate, I promise you, can be one of the best things you can do to drive your business forward. I'll leave you with this. Jerry Seinfeld says that when you take a comedy and give it unlimited budget, you almost always ruin whatever that comedy show is. Comedy thrives on constraint, limitations. Great art thrives on constraint and limitations. Architects thrive on constraint and limitations. They have this finite block that they're able to put this development in. They have all these zinny zoning issues and all that kind of stuff, and they work within those constraints and create amazing, amazing buildings. Your business actually can thrive by you making proactive decisions about where you're gonna do your business, how you're gonna invest in your business, and how you're gonna spend time in your business. Constrain it, and it'll grow.

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