“Welcome to the team!! Here are your responsibilities!”
“Thanks! ….uh…how do I know what I need to do to make sure this all happens.”
“Oh…ah…just shadow me for a few days, ask questions, take notes…you’ll figure it out.”
Setting Our Team Up For Failure
When we brought on our first hires, this is typically how the “training” process went.
This led to a lot of stress and uncertainty. This also led to too much reliance on me for what to do in all kinds of different situations. The calls never stopped coming.
The problem: All of our systems and processes were in a secure computer…my head.
I just figured I was too busy…and really just didn’t know how…to properly document everything. With enough “shadowing”, our new employees would just magically learn everything I had learned in the span of 5 to 10 years within a couple afternoons.
Ha!!
Balls Get Dropped and High Turnover
When our systems and processes are in our heads, we don’t have a good way of transferring them to other people.
Do you remember when you first started in this business? Do you remember your first calls and your first appointments. Yeah, I’d like to forget those too. 😩
When we run our company like this it’s basically operating as a hobby. We need to transition into running our company as a business.
A proper business is one that works more for YOU so that you don’t have to work so much for IT.
If you want to constantly field calls from your help and want to stress over the fact that you are no longer turning as many leads into deals, continue operating this way.
I did for too long and I cringe at how much stress I created and how much it stunted our company growth… not to mention how much time I was away from my family while trying to do it all.
Don’t let this be you.
Get That Knowledge Out of Your Head
It’s time to start documenting your processes. I love Tettra for this. You can get a free account to manage everything.
You can organize each of your processes by potential position in your company. This way everything is easy to find for each position you eventually hire for.
I love their search feature. If I don’t want to hunt through the processes, I can simply search and usually find what I’m looking for immediately.
Should you record videos or write up step by step docs?
I prefer written processes for the simple fact they are easier to update.
We all know that our processes should be constantly improved. Something new we learn that we want to start doing needs to be added in the middle. You don’t want to have to recreate entire videos to make these changes.
Making it easy to modify your processes also empowers your team to update the processes and improve them. If you’re concerned about letting your team make these updates, Tettra has a button on each document to ‘Request an update’.
If you’re still not convinced, or at least motivated enough, to document everything you do, make sure to read this book:
This book really opened my eyes to the power and and benefit of documenting everything…as well as how to properly do it.
How Will Your Team Know Which Process To Do When?
Once you have your processes documented, you’ve got to have a way for your team to know which process to use and when.
How do we do this?
Leverage technology.
Forefront CRM makes it easy to create your workflow for leads and deals as a “Pipeline”.
For each status of your pipelines, you can set up automations to create tasks and even automate assigning the tasks to members on your team.
Now, when a lead gets dragged into the Appointment Set (or whatever you customize it to be) status, Forefront will automatically create tasks for Johnny to ensure all property and leads details are entered, run comps, determine an ARV, etc.
Sometimes a process is mandatory sometimes it’s not.
When you have processes that must be done, you can set the corresponding task in Forefront to be required to change status. This way your team cannot move a lead out of a status in the pipeline until that task is completed.
This is powerful!!!
No more getting ready to leave to an appointment only to discover comps haven’t even been run.
Locked and loaded, baby!
Create Tasks To Follow Up
Want to easily turn more of your leads into deals? Follow up!!!
In Forefront, it’s super easy to make sure you and your team follow up with sellers. Simply create follow up sequences that include tasks and assign them to yourself or your team.
Not remembering to follow up is why investors are not consistent with follow up. Forefront makes the process dead simple. Set it and forget it…until you get a task to follow up of course. In which case you can get notifications about the task, or simple check the Up Next page…which I’ll cover next!
What Do I Need To Do Now
We created the Up Next page to have a quick way to know what tasks each team member has due today, tomorrow, etc.
This way your team doesn’t have to ask anybody what to do next. The system tells them! No excuses!
You can also go in and monitor whether tasks are being done or not.
It’s nice to have the peace of mind the ball isn’t being dropped!
Go From Hobby To Proper Business
It’s time to start documenting everything, I mean everything, in your business. Each time you do something each day, check to see if you’ve documented it. If not, do it!
I know you’re going to procrastinate with this. It’s only natural as a human. You are busy and don’t see the immediate benefit. If you want to get out of being overly busy, I insist you do this.
You got this!
It’s time to take your business from hobby to a true business that is working more for you than you for it.
Would you like to try Forefront CRM free? >>> Click here to sign up and try it free for 14 days!
Leave a Reply