Business Planning: Broccoli or a Banana Split?

By Jeff Szolomayer

For many agents, business planning is a lot like eating broccoli. It's one of those things that we all know we should be doing, but somehow it remains on our plate without ever actually making it into our body. And yet, who can argue with a healthy discipline that ensures the future financial welfare of our business?

There's only one problem: for the average agent, it's not the most exhilarating experience known to man. But it can be. Your business plan is the best crystal ball you have. How exactly is that, you might ask?

The end must be at both the heart and the beginning of every business plan. A useful plan fosters a certain degree of prescient thinking, and that's where the challenge - and the fun - arises. We interrogate our own preconceptions about the future by asking the question, "How do I want this story to end?" Then we slowly travel backwards to the present, turning hindsight into foresight, pausing to consider various causes and effects, and ultimately arriving at a clear set of activities that we are confident will aim our business precisely in the direction we've envisioned.

One agent, armed with a solid plan, can generate millions of dollars in revenue every year, but what about 100 agents? 500 agents? Any broker who has ever attempted to manage the progress, productivity and profitability of multiple agents knows what a formidable ordeal it can be. The sheer time commitment involved in performing the administrative and managerial tasks required to keep your agents on track can rapidly consume the entire business day. Sounds like we're back to the broccoli again.

What if brokers, however, could keep a pulse on their brokerage unprecedented in scope, efficiency and speed? What if they could create, control, manipulate and project an infinite array of possible scenarios in real-time for all of the agents that compose their team?

Track all agent production, in aggregate, in seconds. Identify key performance trends across the organization. Postulate and model revenue sources, then apply different commission, fee, income and expense structures to each one.

Now that's a broker's banana split.

CreateAPlan has just released its new broker-centric business planning tool. Four years of development has taken the platform well beyond its initial primary focus on agents to shape a robust online business planning system totally devoted to brokerage management.

CreateAPlan's Vice President, Allen Wright, stated, "For years we have focused on the agent side of business planning. Now we are able to offer brokers the opportunity to make better business decisions by mapping out the productivity of their entire sales team, managing their business plan through one convenient online portal."

Imagine a poorly managed, complex and convoluted organizational system. Factor in the daily rigors of real estate sales, and the result typifies how real estate offices generally operate: things tend to get messy, fast.

"CreateAPlan calculates and consolidates dozens of factors and summarizes them for the broker," explained Wright. "It not only offers built-in accountability to ensure that agents meet their goals, but amasses and consolidates all marketing activities into one routine checklist," he concluded.