You work hard every day.

You make your calls.

You sell houses.

You take care of your clients.

You seem to do it all.

Yet, after all is said and done, you’re just not getting the results you want -- and deserve -- in your real estate business.

You know there has to be a better way, but you just can’t put your finger on it.

Here’s the good news: by looking at where the “holes” are in your business, you can make the changes you need to get your business humming along to get consistently better results.

Let’s take a look at where the biggest gaps are that are keeping you from enjoying legitimate growth (and profits) in your real estate enterprise.

Here’s Why Your Real Estate Business is Underperforming

There’s likely a number of reasons...some bigger, some smaller as to why you’re not where you want to be.

Here are 5 of the more significant reasons your performance is lagging.

1. You don’t have a strategic plan.
2. You don’t know where you’re spending your money.

Like most agents, you likely have goals for your business and yourself. While this is a good thing, you may not have a strategic plan in place to determine how you’re going to make your goals a reality.

A strategic plan takes into consideration what you need to work ON in your business to ensure that you get great results when you work IN your business.

It’s important at this point that you know what the difference between strategy - working on your business - and tactics - working in your business.

A strategy is a bigger, comprehensive plan that can constitute several tactics, which are smaller, more concentrated plans that of major importance to the overall plan. The terms strategy and tactic are derived from the military, but they are now utilized regularly for planning efforts throughout the business world.

By creating a solid strategic plan, you’re able to take stock of where you are with respect to money, people and time to see what’s working and what’s not working.

Once you know where you stand in these areas, you can figure out what you need to do on a day-over-day basis to make the necessary changes to achieve the outcomes you seek in improving your business.

From there, you can put your long-term plan together to reverse engineer your plan to current-day activities so that you’re working on the things that will get you to your goals in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of money spent in doing so.

Without a strategic plan in place, your business becomes more of a “ready, fire, aim” approach.

While doing this can net you some “bullseye’s”, it’s not going to help you hit the target with any sort of consistency.

Benjamin Franklin said it best: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”

It’s one thing to spend money to grow your business. It’s an entirely different thing to know where you’re spending it and what your return on investment (ROI) you’re getting.

I’ve spoken with tens of thousands of agents who’ve spent money on different lead generation strategies, technology platforms, marketing ideas, and even people on their team without realizing whether or not they were getting a good ROI on those expenditures.

Then, only after I asked them to look at it -- and they did -- were they horrified that they had spend thousands of dollars on things that brought them no profitability.

I’ve also worked with agents who spent money on these same items and, even after they determined there was no ROI, continued to spend money “hoping” that things would turn around...only to have them not.

Unfortunately, when it comes to improving your business and putting your money to work, hope is not a strategy.

In order to have your business perform optimally, you must know where your money is going and what you’re getting in exchange for it.

Sadly, many agents don’t.

As a result, it either leads to them having to exit the business earlier than they had planned or work way, way harder than they need to in order to get results.

Simply employing a budget and then tracking what results come from those expenses would keep everyone from either overspending or spending foolishly (which, as I write this, I realize is just another form of overspending). 😀

Make the commitment to create a budget, stick to it and stop spending money on things that just don’t pay dividends in your business.

Your bank account will thank you.

3) You don’t know where you’re spending your time.

This one is a tough one for virtually every person who becomes a real estate agent.

Real Estate is one of the few industries where you nether have a product to sell nor prospects to sell to when you get started.

What’s even tougher is that once you sell a home, you’re often in the same boat.

You’re only true commodity is time and it’s what you do with it that counts.

Unfortunately, most agents aren’t trained properly on the right things to do, the right order in which to do them and how much time should be spent on doing them.

As a result, they have trouble getting their business to sustain consistent results in production and profitability.

Unfortunately, a lot of time is lost in poor prospecting efforts and strategy, poor training, poor lead management and not knowing how or where to improve any of these.

Time is also lost in working with the wrong prospects and focusing too much time on the wrong activities and/or letting people at your company and in your life vampire your time.

Ultimately, you must own your time at the highest level.

You need to look at it not only as time management, but also as priority management.

More specifically, you need to make time for the things that are the biggest priority:

• Prospecting: new leads as well as past clients and sphere
• Working on your business: implementing a strategy for success
• Training: sharpening your skills regularly to improve conversion
• Tracking: making sure your time, energy and money are being used wisely
• Personal development: bringing an even better version of you to work every day

Take the time to prioritize and manage your time. It’s worth the time you take to do it.

4) You’re not tracking your results.

I’m a huge Peter Drucker fan.

Drucker was a management consultant and author, whose contributed greatly to the philosophical and practical infrastructure of today’s business corporation.

He was literally a business optimization genius.

In his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices he wrote: “Work implies not only that somebody is supposed to do the job, but also accountability, a deadline and, finally, the measurement of results —that is, feedback from results on the work and on the planning process itself”.

What he’s saying here is that you just can’t go out everyday and sell, sell, sell.

You need to go sell, sell, sell and then track, measure and improve.

Tracking, measuring and improving what you do on a regular basis is the only way you’ll be able to truly get your business to perform well on consistent basis.

In order to be effective, you need to track metrics like:

• Dials, Contacts, Appointments Set, Appointments Met to see if your lead conversion approach is working
• Dollars Spent, Ads Run, Leads Generated, Leads Converted, Homes Sold to see if marketing is getting you the “raw material” you need to build your business
• Leads Assigned, Leads Contacted, Leads Converted, Homes sold to see if your agents are trained well and doing their jobs
• Appointments Met, Listings/Buyers Taken, Homes Sold to determine how your conversions are working face to face

There are a number of other metrics that you should be tracking on a regular basis to ensure that your resources of time, energy and money are getting a proper return.

It’s also important to track not only to figure out what to start doing, but also to determine what you should stop doing.

Sometimes, just by not saying something you already say or engaging in an activity that you don’t need to engage in can have a huge impact on your results.

Whatever you do, just don’t continue to do what you’re doing without stopping to take a look around to see how things are turning out.

Track like your business depends on it...because it does.

5) You’re not investing in enough time in improving yourself and your business.

New York Yankees slugger, Reggie Jackson, in referring to his importance on the team, was quoted as saying: "This team, it all flows from me. I'm the straw that stirs the drink.”

Now, that may have been up for debate if you were Thurman Munson, Billy Martin or any other member of the Yankees organization, but that’s how Jackson felt.

In your business, however, you ARE the straw that stirs the drink because virtually everything in your business - whether you work alone or have a team - flows from you.

Knowing this, you must take the time and put in the effort to learn better ways to improve sales, marketing, profits, competitive performance and even yourself.

To do this, you must learn like you’re going to live forever.

Learn from the business masters out there today: Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, Brendon Burchard and Frank Kern.

Read books from a variety of arenas: business, leadership, improving interpersonal skills, how to love more...don’t just stick to real estate.

Spend time with people inside and outside of real estate that you can learn from and take what you’ve learned to improve yourself and your business.

The more committed you are to doing this, the faster you will grow.

And the faster you grow, the faster your business grows.

Look, I haven’t shared anything groundbreaking here. It’s all good, sound advice that you’ve likely heard at one time or another.

The only difference is this: if you’re business is underperforming, it’s because you’re not doing what you at least need to in the areas I covered here in this post.

The important thing now is that you must take action and do what you’re not doing and fix what is not working in order to get better results.

Even small steps will make a difference.

Want to see how your business stacks up?