How to Create a Business Plan for 2019

By Nate Martinez

Nate Martinez is the co-owner of RE/MAX Professionals in the greater Phoenix area, one of Arizona’s top-performing brokerages. With more than 32 years in the business and over 6,000 transactions.

Creating a business plan will ensure you meet your goals. Here’s how.

I’ve talked before about the success cycle, and today we’ll be using an aspect of that cycle in our discussion on business plans: clarity. Clarity helps you know exactly what goals you want to achieve, and creating a business plan is the best way to achieve your goals.

When writing a business plan, there are a few things I recommend you do. First, do a SWOT analysis, which is essentially a self-examination of your own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Jot down these categories on a piece of paper and make a list for each one. You can ask others, such as loved ones or even real estate professionals, to do a SWOT analysis on you as well. This is a good way to find out things from another perspective (things you may not have admitted to yourself). 

After you have a good list from your SWOT analysis, also think about including a marketing plan for the full 12 months of 2019. In my almost 33 years in real estate, I’ve noticed that most real estate agents have no sort of plan whatsoever. However, the successful ones do. Having a plan on how many blogs you’re going to write, how many postcards you’ll send out, or how you’ll attain leads are all ways to ensure a successful plan.

Including a clear vision statement of what you want by the end of 2019 will help set the course you need to follow. Let’s say you want to close 100 transactions next year—how will you achieve this? You’ll break down how many listings you’ll need to take each month, how many buyer presentations you’ll need to go on, etc. I have some powerful tools that can help crunch the numbers on how much business you need to attract to meet your goals.

All agents are different; some like working with expired listings, some use direct mail, some use open houses, and so on. I’d be more than happy to help you create a customized plan that focuses on what you like to do—just reach out to me. Together we can create a path for you to follow in the new year.