Get your business off the hamster wheel of looking for new business

As a small business owner, there always seems to be that point that continually creeps up on you where you begin to wonder where the next bit of new business is coming from and what you can do in order to generate it.

Sometimes it can be a draining thought that makes you wonder why things don’t ever seem to get significantly easier for you? How come new entrants to your market seem to move forward at a better speed than you and why is the gap between you and others not bigger?

Actually, the answers to these questions are answers we all know for our personal lives but for some reason fail to apply the same advice to our business lives.

For instance, if a young person were to come to you and ask, how do I become a bit more financially stable or have a little more financial freedom in my life? Most of us would give the same advice. To save and invest more for the future, as that future comes around all too fast.

But as a business, strangely, very few of us apply this same advice. Instead we are only focused on the here and now. How often have you or one of your colleagues called someone a time waster after they got you out to value their property but then told you they are not thinking of selling for 6 to 12 months? But how about if we flipped this idea and looked at those people as our ‘savings’? This way, we could feel more comfortable that each month we require some food and drink money (valuations) AND we also require some savings or investment money (valuations).

If we then make sure that our systems are continually nurturing those ‘savings’ valuations, we can start to build up a very big pot of them over time. We have no idea when they will come to fruition, but it stands to reason that the more savings we have in that pot the more likelihood there will be that one of them will mature into a here and now deal.

Unfortunately for agents their systems are not set up to work this way and as such an agent that has been a market leader for the past 5 years may well have all of their old valuations in their crm but the crm is not keeping in touch with those contacts and alerting the agent whenever they are back on their website or reading their content on social media etc. Because of this when a new competitor opens up, they are pretty much on the same footing as you immediately. In fact if they are using a more advanced system that will stay in contact with everyone in your database, providing them all with personalised and useful content and letting them know who the right people to call for viewings, valuations and instructions are, then it is quite likely that they will catch you up, speed past you and eventually leave you in the dust.

So whilst making the most of every opportunity today is imperative, if you are able to change your systems and your thinking to embrace ALL of your opportunities no matter if they are short, medium or long term, then you will not only make your life easier and easier as the years go by but you will also make it more difficult for anyone to compete with you and finally find a way off the hamster wheel of new business.