News cycles are often easy to predict.
There will always be fireworks on New Year’s Eve, mothers having lunch on Mother’s Day, children having their photograph with Santa at Christmas, the Boxing Day test match and the grand finals to provide foreseeable news cycles.
As the decade rolls over and we head into 2020, it’s easy for the next news cycle to be people making predictions on the next decade.
There are two types of market predictors; those that don’t know, and those that don’t know they don’t know.
Often, the industry looks for the shiny new object.
Whether it be some type of script or dialogue or a new technology platform that is going to provide the key to success for the next decade.
The great man himself, Warren Buffet, once said: “Beware the investment activity that produces applause, the great moves are usually greeted by yawns”.
Many agents continue to look for a strategy that will generate applause or instant success.
Nothing builds greater success in our industry than the building of a reputation and the development of relationships.
I can’t help but think they go hand-in-hand.
My thoughts for the next decade are simple:
- Be a servant to your community as they are the source of all our earnings.
- Default to the side of reputation rather than that of return.
- Rome wasn’t built in a day and nor are great relationships.
- Build and understand metrics that allow insights into your business so that you may pivot and improve.
- Capacity can be the first stage of growth or the first stage of failure. I am amazed how often it can be a difficult choice at that crossroad.
- As my good friend Gavin Rubinstein once said to me, “become the highest-paid telemarketer in Australia as the phone is designed to make calls, not receive them”.
- Technology should serve one purpose, and that is to put us closer to our customers more often, at more relevant stages. It’s not necessarily to make things easier, however the right tech should.
- As the tide went out in the period leading up to the election, many were exposed. History will always repeat itself, how have you prepared?
- Every industry in the world has a core product. Champagne is celebration, McDonald’s is time – how quickly do you need a burger at 3am? Ours is trust. Do all your structures and systems support and enhance your core product?
Continued from my fascination with Warren Buffet quotes, the next one I want to lean on is, “there seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult”.
Our industry is straightforward, but unfortunately there seems to be a lot of people trying to make a lot of money out of making it more difficult than it really is.
Stock in, stock out.
Trust is the core product, so build reputation and relationships.
It doesn’t matter what the next decade throws at us, these are the underlying structures that will guarantee success.
