The Month In Review - January 2015

One of my favorite quotes is, "You can not live in the past, only learn from it." This is such a powerful quote to me because it forces the reader to stop regretting the past and focus on the lessons one can gain from their experiences. So in the spirit of reflection, here's my short review of January 2015!

What Was Good

This past month I focused on creating systems within my business. This primarily meant more automation and delegation of tasks. Creating this automation and delegating tasks took a lot of time and work to accomplish. I spent close to two weeks fully documenting and automating substantial parts of my business. In regards to delegating tasks, I also brought on and trained three people to help me grow my business. The three items I am proudest of in the past month are:

• Implementing an automated follow-up system for seller leads
• Training a virtual assistant to handle the bulk of my email
• Systematizing the offer delivery process

What Wasn't So Great

There were several things I failed at this past month. I hope to correct these errors in order to improve the business moving forward. One of the errors is that I allowed a few deals to fall through the cracks because I spent a substantial amount of time on automation. Moving forward this shouldn't be an issue but it it still something I can not allow to happen moving forward. Another failing this month was the number of closed deals. While I hit my regular watermark, I did not reach my goal of closing three to four deals this past month.  The biggest missteps this past month were:

• Not hitting my weekly goals for number of offers delivered
• Spending too much time focusing on selling hard to move properties
• Not delegating more of my routine "low value" activities to someone else 

What Will I Focus On Next Month?

I must be a better manager of my time. In order to do this, I must become more ruthless in what I choose to spend my time on. I actually value my time at $750-$1000 an hour depending on the activity I am doing. The things I will focus on in February to eliminate distractions and make sure the business is moving forward are:

• Offer Delivery: ensure our team is hitting our offer delivery numbers every day and week
• Delegate More Tasks: I must delegate more of the low value, routine tasks I currently do in order to free up more of my time to focus on higher value activities
• Polish The Automation: my automation systems are not perfect and probably never will be. I want to spend some time evaluating them in order to simplify these processes as much as possible

How Will I Accomplish These Goals?

I find it's not enough to know what I want to focus on. I need to know how I plan to achieve my specific goals. Here's my action plan for my areas of focus:

• Offer Delivery: unfortunately my reporting systems got screwed up with a recent software update. I will update these systems in order to make sure our reporting is clean. To make myself more personally accountable, I will post a daily summary of the number of offers I have delivered every day on this blog starting Wednesday, February 4, 2015.
• Delegate More Tasks: First, I must document the tasks the assistants will take on. Second, I will hire additional assistants who will be able to specialize on the execution of these tasks. I will hire someone to handle my biggest time drain (i.e. talking with buyers) within the next two (2) weeks.
• Polish Automation: this will require me sitting down for several hours one day and auditing each of my process flows. I will probably save this for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon later this month. Once finished, I will post a blog post about what I did and why I did it.

Tell Me In The Comments Below...

How do you keep yourself accountable?