It's Time For Your Mid-Year Review

It’s the time of year when real estate agents look back on the first six months of the year. How well have you performed relative to your in-going business objectives? Have you stuck to your prospecting program? Are you on-track to meet your transaction goal? Have you maximized the power of your Espresso Agent CRM platform?These are all excellent self-assessment questions for any mid-year review. However, this is no typical mid-year review because of COVID-19.You may have been cruising through the first two months of the year, your prospects for a successful 2020 looking great. Then, around mid-March, America went into hibernation in an attempt to stifle the spread of the coronavirus. All of a sudden, America’s once-humming economy was falling off the rails. Unemployment spiked to near Depression-era levels. Nearly every business sector was impacted on one level or another.Of course, if you habitually scan the various real estate blogs and websites, you would have been fed an unprecedented level of doom and gloom about our “unprecedented” economic collapse. For some, this could have created paralyzing fear, especially if you were in a particularly hard-hit hot spot. But for many, the arrival of COVID-19 was a blip on the screen that didn’t stop them from staying with their program.If you’re plan is off-track, what adjustments can you make mid-stream to get back in the game. If things are humming along, congratulate yourself. Then get back in the game.No matter how busy you may think you are, set aside time to review your performance and take the necessary steps to improve your chances of meeting, or exceeding, your annual financial goals.Let’s take a look at a few basic tips.

• Focus on your purpose. Before beginning your self-assessment, know what you are trying to achieve. You may want to evaluate your own performance, resulting in a need to reallocate resources to better meet goals. Maybe you’ve realized you need to up your game and provide stronger leadership in your office or to your team.
• Motivate your team. Make sure you’ve prepared and shared your agenda with your team. Be thorough and be clear about what you want to achieve. Review first-half successes and accomplishments to set the state. Then, move on to talk about necessary improvements.
• Assess your performance gap. At the mid-way point, you should have a clear idea of whether you’ve set realistic goals. If you are on-target, keep doing what you’ve been doing! If not, now’s the time for a brutally-honest assessment of your process: daily schedule, work patterns, ability to avoid distractions and what’s keeping you from reaching your target. COVID-19 aside, determine if there’s a legitimate reason for falling short.
• Revisit your marketing plan. Take a fresh look at the marketing plan with which you started the year. Are meeting your prospecting goals? Is your website converting? Is your social media engaging new prospects? Have you done a good job connecting with your sphere? Are you getting the most out of Espresso Agent?
• Develop a SWOT analysis. This classic business tool allows you to assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. But again, you and your team need to be brutally honest to get the most out of the SWOT exercise. The key to SWOT is to leverage your strengths, while also shoring up your weaknesses.

Now is the time to get started on your mid-year review. It’s easy to let it slide, to make it a low priority. But you owe it to yourself, and to your team, to spend time evaluating and, if necessary, tweaking your on-going business strategy.One final thought on the reality of COVID-19: It's not going away. We can all expect to live through an extended period of uncertainty, especially with the prospect of the virus returning in the fall. Herein lies a tremendous opportunity to turn this uncertainty into your ally! Be "that agent" who uses your tools (especially Espresso Agent) to establish your position as the go-to real estate expert in your MLS.Good luck in the second half of the year