Have a Revenue-Producing Day

Of the nine mistakes I see from new short sale investors, this is the one that is completely within their power to change right now. It’s a small thing to do, but the reason so many people make the mistake is because it’s also pretty difficult.

Before you overcome seller objections, you have to overcome yours. It’s a huge mistake to avoid focusing on revenue-producing activities, and correcting that mistake just involves a little time management and changing how you spend your day.

You might think you already have this conquered, but think for a minute about this. What percentage of your day do you spend on revenue-producing activities? Do you know what percentage of your day that you actually spend on anything?

Some of you know what it’s like to be on a diet, counting carbs and calories and portions. Before that diet can really succeed, you have to understand what it is you are eating. A way to do this is to record what you eat during the week. I know that when I did this, I assumed I was keeping my caloric intake down by going easy on breakfast and lunch. I never suspected how I was blasting my caloric intake out to space by the types of food I’d eat for dinner!

You can follow a similar process in examining how efficiently you work in your business. Think about your day as being made up of non-productive time vs. productive time. As owners of a real estate investing company, we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that we need to do or oversee EVERYTHING. So much of our business appears to be outside of our control, that it is only natural that we want direct involvement in all aspects of the business. But such micromanaging is ultimately wasteful and non-productive.

After I graduated from college, I began working for a prominent financial services company. As part of my training that first year, we talked a lot about how much of the day was focused on revenue-producing activities. Our trainer asked us to keep a daily journal broken down into 15-minute increments. It was our goal for three days to keep track of everything we did during the workday, and I mean everything: stops at the snack machine, bathroom breaks, calls from home, etc.

Did it drive all of us a little crazy? You bet. But when we got back together the following week, it was surprising how much time we spent each day not doing the things we needed to do to make money. Most of us were taking our vacations 10 minutes at a time and then complaining about our lack of time off!

Try this yourself for a couple of days. Get a small pad of paper that you can keep with you and record each 20-minute segment throughout the workday. I think that you’ll be surprised and alarmed by what you find.

As you learn to identify those tasks that are not revenue-producing, you’ll begin to understand those parts of your day that are. This is where you need to begin rethinking your business design and creating the system you need to earn your ideal amount of revenue.

The short sale business is divided into three main areas:

    •    Acquisition
    •    Negotiation
    •    Disposition

Each of those areas includes some revenue-producing activities. You have control over how much time you spend on each one. Revenue-producing activities do not include such tasks as organizing your files, cleaning the office, or playing solitaire. Outsource your administrative responsibilities or hire an office manager.

Focus on tasks that will create short sale opportunities such as finding or selling houses in your sweet spot, improving the effectiveness of your marketing, improving the efficiency and response of the marketing programs, managing money-making projects like marketing and BPOs, setting up referral systems and apprentice groups to bring in leads (typically for free), and creating scalability in your business.

You also need to clearly understand how to evaluate whether a particular activity is cost-effective. If a certain business activity generates more money than it costs, that’s a cost-effective way to spend your time. Likewise, you need to find a way to make your money producing activities more profitable without adding significant expenses.

It’s not just delegating, or automating that leads to leveraging your business to produce and grow. It’s being able to see what areas of your business are non-productive as well as productive. You need to address these areas by developing a framework to serve your needs, making it complete by adding the tools and people needed to run the system. Remember the fulcrum? Time management is a huge part of making that work for you. The self-discipline may be a little challenging if you really love that solitaire game, but it’s definitely worth your time.