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Dear Friend,

This week we’re going to continue talking about the concepts that we talked about last week in the book The Four Hour Work Week. Now last week if you were listening in we had a wonderful interview with my friend Tim Ferriss and if you want to check that out you can look in the last week’s section of Marketing Monday.com up in the upper right hand corner there and what I wanted to do this week, hopefully you’ve had a chance to get the book, you’ve had a chance to look at it and you’ve probably got some ideas going around, you’ve probably got some questions so I’m going to hopefully this week give you some things to think about as you’re working through the book so I’ve got four questions for you as you kind of go through to help you really make an impact on your life and your business because when you start thinking about this concept of a four hour work week in a lot of ways that’s kind of metaphorical, meaning you might not get to four hours but boy wouldn’t it be great if you could do it in less time and the same thinking that goes into getting you four hours is what’s going to make a big difference in your every day experience in real estate.

So question number one that I always ask when I’m thinking about this is how will you know when you get there and that’s a big question for most people. So often we got caught up in doing, doing, doing, we’re constantly busy, we’re striving, we’re always looking and aspiring to do more but do we often ask the question what does success look like, how will you know when you get there? You know in a lot of ways do you have a crystal clear income goal? A lot of times your lifestyle is going to be driven by your income or your aspirations are going to be driven by your income. What would it take, how much income would it take to live the ideal life that you really want to live and that number is going to be very different for different people but do you have a crystal clear income goal for yourself? If you don’t know how much it would cost to live the ideal life that you want then you’re really kind of just spinning, going, going, going, continuing to do more and more and more when you might if you really think about it be able to define a finish line for yourself so maybe take some time and think about what would your crystal clear income goal be?

Another thing to think about and consider when you’re deciding how you’ll know when you get there is how much time off is the right amount for you, what would you do if you did have the time? So often because real estate and mortgage business does not have any real definitions or any real boundaries so often we get caught up working, working, working and when you’re just defining time off as just that, as time off, that’s not really that inspiring but what would you do if you did have the time? It’s very funny because sometimes scheduling crystal clear time goals is just the thing you need to actually get that time off that you want. If you’re interested in playing tennis or playing golf what a dramatic difference it would have on your time, on your life, if you were to schedule those things, to know ahead of time what it is that you would actually like to do. Where would you go on vacation if you were going to schedule a one week or a two week vacation? What would you do if you were going to do what Tim Farris talks about and take a mini retirement, what if you were going to go away for two months? Now that might not even be fathomable in your current situation, that might not even be across your reality, you might not even have that thought of what you could do with two months but it’s very interesting. I’ve got friends that are real estate agents that spend an entire month or two months over the summer up at their cottage or spend the whole month of December away in the south in the Caribbean scuba diving, snorkelling, whatever it is it’s first got to start as an idea, it’s got to start there where what would you do if you did have the time.

What about mobility, is mobility something that’s important to you, would you be willing to work while you’re away, would you be willing to just relocate and kind of manage things in your business if you could have more mobility? So often we think of real estate as a local business but what would you do if you could manage large portions of your business from a remote location? International telephone calling now is so affordable and so crystal clear quality that a lot of times people don’t even need to know that you’re away, you could be on the other side of the pond as they say, you could be in Europe and nobody would even know that you’re gone. It would be interesting to think how could you manage some of that if you were a little bit more mobile.

Another question that you might want to ask is how much of what you do really matters? Now when you look at it what would an 80/20 analysis reveal about your time? When you look at all of the time that you spend, because we all know that time tasks expand to fill the time available for them, but how much of your time do you actually spend getting the results that lead to you making money? How much of your time is really spent in getting leads, in getting appointments, in showing homes or negotiating contracts or removing conditions and closing escrows, how much of that is real honest to goodness things that matter? I think if you took a look at your week and you were really honest about how much stuff you really do and how much of it really matters I think you’d be surprised. How much of your emailing or how much of your time surfing the internet or going to different websites or looking at your numbers or checking your email repeatedly, continuously, how much of that really matters? It would be interesting for you to take a look and just kind of give yourself an honest evaluation on what you actually do do with your time. If you were to keep a log this week I bet it would make a big difference for you in the coming weeks just to know what you actually do.

In the book The Four Hour Work Week Tim talks about 80/20 being a way to identify what are the 20% of the things that you actually do that yield 80% of the results. What kinds of things could you eliminate completely from the time that you spent? Another thing you might want to ask is what could someone else do and when you make list of what really matters how much of it can you or could you delegate? As a realtor the core services you provide are finding homes for buyers and finding buyers for yourselves, that’s the absolute core of what you do so how much of that process could be completely automated or delegated?

I remember several years ago reading a book by Tom Peters called The Pursuit of Wow and he made an interesting provocation in the book. He said make a list from beginning to end of everything that you do to create a result and for us that would mean finding a lead which can be automated, it can be getting an appointment, all the things that go into preparing for that appointment, if you’re going on a listing appointment you have to prepare a CMA, do you have to prepare the CMA though? It would be an interesting thing to look at. What would your process be for defining what the market value of a house would be, how do you go through that process? A lot of times we get so caught up in things thinking well I’m the only one that can do that but you know it’s very interesting, when I read that book one of the things that I started doing was paying an appraiser who had an office right below ours to do a CMA for me and it was much better than the one I would do but it was done for me. I really took this very seriously where I was trying to think what part of this can I eliminate and it was very interesting and if you do the same thing, you start looking at all of the processes, how can you find someone else or some way of getting those processes done without you being involved in them? It’s a very interesting exercise even if you’re not going to remove yourself from it initially but when you look at it somewhere right now, somebody actually who’s listening to Marketing Monday right now, has one element that you do yourself completely handled for them, somebody, every single element.

Some people that I know really like to show homes, that’s all they like to do, so they have people who do everything else up to the point somebody’s ready to look at a house. Now I also know other people who don’t like to show houses, they like to do all the other stuff up to the point where the people are ready to start looking at homes so they do the lead generation, they talk to the people on the phone and then they hand them off to somebody else to show them the houses. So it’s very funny that at some level somebody right now is doing or delegated the exact process that you’re actually doing so what could you do to eliminate a lot of the things that you actually do?

It’s a very interesting concept and I hope that you get a chance to read the book, I hope you get a chance to look at your processes, define what does it look like in the end for you, where’s your finish line, define what it is that you do that gets you 80% of the value and then get a chance to look and see how can I eliminate myself from that equation.

So there we go for this week. I hope you’ve had a great experience reading this book. Again it’s The Four Hour Work Week and if you’d like to check out more information on Tim’s blog you can go to fourhourworkweek.com. So tune in next time and we’ll have even more ideas for finding buyers, getting listings and converting leads.