Businesses go through four major stages throughout their life cycle: Start-Up, Growth, Maturity, and Succession (Exit). Each stage dictates the decisions you should be making around your budget, marketing efforts, and staff; of course, this means if you don’t know what stage your business is in, you’ll inevitably end up wasting time, money, and resources focusing on the wrong priorities. Let’s take a closer look at the four stages of the business life cycle and what that means for the growth of your business.
1. Start-Up: The beginner stage of business should be all about increasing your cash flow. You can’t reinvest money in your company until you have money to save, so your main priority should be revenue-generating activities. For real estate agents, this means you should be time blocking as much time as possible to prospect and follow-up with leads!
2. Growth: You have enough money and are doing well, so now it's time to analyze the results of your week. Keep track of where you’re putting your money and why, and document your daily, weekly, and monthly metrics. Remember to ALWAYS make decisions off of data, NOT emotions!
3. Maturity: At this point, you probably have staff – a few agents and administrators whose job it is to ease your personal workload and handle the menial tasks. The issue Mature businesses face is the delegation of vital tasks too soon; until you have a reliable team of 5-7 consistently performing agents that you can trust, all of the production tasks should be handled by you, and you alone.
4. Succession: The goal of every business owner is to create a company that can run itself. If you’ve gotten to this stage, you have a large, top-performing team of experts that know exactly what they should be doing without you needing to guide or micromanage them. Once you’ve reached the Succession stage, you can start spending more of your time on other business ventures, such as investing or working toward becoming a broker.
Real estate is an incredibly lucrative industry, but only if you’re taking the right steps for your business at the right time. When you understand what stage of the life cycle your business is in, you’ll be able to make educated, informed decisions about how best to proceed and expand. Before you know it, you’ll have a team that can run itself and you’ll be able to move onto bigger and better things while living the life you’ve always dreamed of!
