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KPIs and Core Values — Why Both Are Crucial to Use Every Day

January 20, 2021 By Steve Leave a Comment

KPIs — ugh, more numbers to follow and graphs to chart.

Core Values — um, what are those?

If you’re not using these two crucial things on a daily basis, you’re probably losing money or opportunities and may be struggling with some aspect of your business. And yes, they’re that important.

I’m a bit like you probably are. I don’t enjoy looking at the numbers (well, except for that profit number!). I would rather get to work and do something, not read reports or spreadsheets about Real Estate Disruptors. But I make myself look at them and we measure many key points, because we have to if we’re going to continue growing and performing the way we want to.

KPIs Show You What's Going On
KPIs Show You What’s Going On in Your Business

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the important numbers you need to measure to check the health of your business. They’re like the heartbeat and blood pressure of your company. They need to be at healthy levels and within a certain range, or big problems develop. In wholesaling (and fix and flip, etc.), common KPIs are leads generated, contracts entered into, sales closed, profit made, etc.

Core Values are the Foundation of Your Business

Core Values are those ideals or desired behaviors that are important to how you run your company. They can be anything from integrity to honesty to family or anything else you want as part of your culture. The Core Values guide your company’s operations; think of them as the guiding principles of your business.

KPIs Should Be Used Daily

KPIs should be used daily. Why? Because these are the two major indicators for the health of your business. And if you don’t look at them daily, you may not see negative actions happening until it’s too late to stop the adverse results they create. Ignoring your KPIs is like navigating across the country without a map — you may get to your destination, but likely take many wrong turns, go the long way around, or you may end up in the wrong place.

Monitoring your KPIs gives you an instant snapshot into the health of your company’s operations. You don’t have to look at 23 statistics every day (but feel free if you like); just pick a couple that are crucial to your operations. For example, checking leads generated every day will reveal if a change in lead volume develops. It takes time for marketing to generate leads. If you don’t watch your incoming leads daily, you could find yourself with few leads in three weeks. Then it’s too late to adjust marketing or other actions, and you waste even more time getting things going again. Time you’ll never get back and opportunities lost.

Watching your KPIs can also alert you to struggles occurring in any given area, and especially with specific employees. If an acquisitions agent is falling behind on sales targets, what do the KPIs look like? Is he making enough calls? Is he getting enough leads to call on? Is he in the wrong seat? Does he need more or better training? You can identify the issue quickly, address it with the employee, and solve the problem. If you’re not following your KPIs, this employee could spend weeks not producing and hurting both you and the company.

Another huge benefit of watching your KPIs is that you remove managing by feel, which often can lead to wrong decisions. Instead, you’re now managing by statistics (or managing by KPIs). You take actions (or not) based on what the numbers tell you. This removes guesswork and uncertainty because you know what is happening. So if a KPI drops precipitously, you can find out why quickly and correct the situation.

Core Values Set the Tone

Core Values run your business, even if you don’t realize it. These are the things that you hold dear in how your company operates — how you treat your customers, employees, and resolve problems and disputes. Traits like honesty, family, faith, or any other guiding principle you use. 

Think of Core Values as similar to a mission statement of a company. Where mission statements can be full of fluff and buzzwords, Core Values are those things that are important to who you are and how you want your business to behave. They describe the soul of your company.

Core Values are not just something that you write down and file away. They are the foundation blocks of your company. Everything you do is built on your Core Values, and every decision you make must be made with them in mind. Ignore them at your peril, because decisions that go against your Core Values will create chaos within your business.

One of the most important times to use your Core Values is hiring employees. You need to have people who fit your Core Values. If they do not, at some point they will become disillusioned with your company and leave, but not before they crash your KPIs and in general cause chaos. Don’t try to force square pegs into round holes.

Hiring someone who does not share your Core Values is a recipe for low KPIs from that position. The inevitable conflict in how they perceive their job versus how you want them to make decisions and perform only grows over time. Your Core Values absolutely must be woven into your screening and interviewing processes. Don’t justify hiring someone who otherwise seems highly qualified if they do not fit with your Core Values — the end result is that they won’t be around long, and they will probably drive your KPIs down while they are still there.

Always on My Mind…

KPIs and Core Values should always be on your mind. You should make it a daily habit or even part of your daily schedule to review them, both yourself and with your employees. It can be quick, even part of a brief morning muster meeting. 

Focusing on KPIs will force you to make decisions based on the data, not emotion or feelings. Keeping Core Values in the forefront will ensure that your company stays true to the ideals you hold important and you will surround yourself with people who believe as you do. Let either of these principles fall away and watch your company struggle.

The good news is that focusing on these key items will make your business grow. They will also make it a more enjoyable place to work. Once you have them built into your routine, good things happen.

If you need some help in defining your KPIs or Core Values, we can help. Visit http://www.disruptors.com/help

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: core values, kpi, management, real estate disruptors, real estate investing, steve trang

Tiffany and Josh High Share How They Leveraged Their KPIs to Earn $200,000+ per Month

January 14, 2021 By Steve Leave a Comment

Tiffany and Josh High talk about how they quit their jobs in 2017 to start flipping houses. It was a messy start, an engagement ring was taken off, and they lost six figures on just one flip. And now, they earn $200,000+ per month.

Video Replay of Interview with Tiffany and Josh High

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Show Notes:

SHOW NOTES

Tiffany and Josh High Share How They Leveraged Their KPIs to Earn $200,000+ per Month

With Tiffany and Josh High, Heels Homes, LTD

January 13, 2021

About Tiffany and Josh High

Tiffany High is a recovered corporate employee who quit her job cold turkey to start investing in real estate when her brother was ill with cancer. She learned on the fly, taking six months to secure her first deal and was about two weeks away from giving up when she started having success.

Josh High worked in construction for years and quit his job once they had their real estate investment company off the ground. Josh brings his construction background to the company’s fix and flip side of their business.

Tiffany and Josh both wholesale and fix and flip. They unusually started with fix and flips, primarily due to Josh’s construction knowledge but also because they were figuring things out on the fly. As they grew, they sought help learning how to organize and manage their business and now run a lean company with great employee bonus plans to encourage retention.

Connect with Tiffany on Instagram or Facebook. Connect with Josh on Instagram or Facebook. You can connect with Heels Homes on Instagram, Facebook or visit at www.heelshomes.com.

Show Notes

Tiffany and Josh describe to Steve how they use their KPIs to manage their business daily and keep their company lean and growing. They discuss the four fundamentals they use in their business, employee bonus structure for motivation and referrals, and how defined roles put them on the path to success. 

Top 5 Takeaways from Tiffany and Josh:

5.  Define your roles and stay in your lanes. This is especially important for couples. You will find things get done and there will be less quarreling.

4. Spend some time discovering and writing down your core values. Then make them an integral part of your business processes.

3. Never hire someone who doesn’t mesh with your core values, no matter their experiences. If they don’t fit, they don’t get the job. No exceptions. Violating this rule will only result in problems later on. 

2. Don’t chase the shiny objects. Social media is full of lots of noise, of people telling you what you should chase — stay true to yourself and your business goals. You can look to expand into something, but don’t abandon your business to grab the brass ring.  

1. Use your KPIs daily to monitor your company’s performance and catch any negative trends or targets not being reached. This also helps you keep your sales team on track and help them meet their targets.

Bonus Takeaway:  You can maximize your revenue and profits by paying attention to your KPIs daily. Why daily? Because you see negative trends develop before they impact your business. If you only look at the end of the month, you may have four weeks of low sales because someone wasn’t doing their job. If you see a problem in a day or two, you can correct the issue before it wastes your time and impacts your wallet.

About Steve Trang

Steve Trang is the founder of the Real Estate Disruptors movement and host of the Real Estate Disruptors Podcast. He started his podcast in the middle of 2018 to inspire wholesalers and real estate agents to double their incomes by adding a second leg to their business. The podcast has now grown to ten thousand followers with new members of the community sharing their success story every week.

Steve’s goal is to create 100 Millionaires. One of his favorite quotes is from the great Zig Ziglar: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” He heard this quote when he first got into real estate, and it has stuck with him throughout his entire career. In fact, it’s essentially one of the core values Steve lives by.

Connect with Steve at linkedin.com/in/stevetrang, facebook.com/stevetrang, instagram.com/steve.trang, stevetrang.com, or realestatedisruptors.com.

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Filed Under: Blog, Interview, Wholesale Tagged With: blog, kpi, real estate disruptors, real estate investing, real estate podcast, steve trang, wholesaling

Do You Control Your Business, or Does Your Business Control You?

October 19, 2020 By Larry Leave a Comment

October 19, 2020

I meet so many people in real estate who just want to do more deals — get more contracts, close more deals. If only they could do more deals, everything would be fine.

Sounds great in theory. 

Yes, more deals closing is the goal. As long as they’re good deals, because putting in hours and hours of work to make $100 isn’t worth your time. More GOOD deals closing, and that means the total costs involved from finding the deal through closing it. This is where you have to monitor the pulse of your business, know your numbers, budget your expenses — monitor your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Most of us like the end numbers that can come out of real estate transactions. After all, making money is one of the reasons we’re in this industry.

But are you really making money? Or are you just robbing Peter to pay Paul?

As your business grows, it inevitably becomes more complicated. You hire employees, buy software, venture into different areas, add different types of transactions (e.g., wholesaling and flipping and rentals). You have more people wanting your attention, you are now more of a manager than doing the hands-on work, and you are being pulled in 20 directions at once.

This is where the momentum of building a business can overwhelm the solopreneur (the person who started a business). The road to becoming an entrepreneur has many forks in it, and a few roundabouts to get stuck in. This is where businesses grow, only to die on the vine.

You started this business knowing everything that was happening, and you made all the decisions. If something happened, or didn’t happen, all you had to do was look in the mirror to know who was responsible.

Now you may feel like you don’t have a choice in what decisions to make, almost as if someone else has set your company down a path and you’re racing to catch up. Things are happening, but you don’t know why, or you feel like you’re constantly putting out fires and slapping on Band-Aids to keep things moving. Despite your best efforts, despite all the things you try, you feel like this car is driving itself without a destination, as if you just go to work and triage whatever pops up that day.

Your business is running you. 

It’s difficult to admit, but the first step to solving the problem is recognizing and admitting that it exists. The good news is that you can take back control.

The first thing you have to do is know your numbers. Frankly, this can be the least enjoyable part of running a business for many, many solopreneurs and entrepreneurs alike. We like to do deals and get things done, not read reports. Knowing your KPIs is absolutely critical information to both survive and grow. Nothing will improve until you know your numbers.

Why? Can’t you just monitor the bank account? Or number of deals closed?

I wish it were that simple. As a business grows, so too do the opportunities to bleed money. Wasteful spending on employees, rent, marketing, software, supplies, bad deals, etc. can blow a hole in your bottom line. Your closing ratio, profit margins, employee payroll and expenses, all can work against your success if you aren’t setting standards, implementing policy and accountability, and keeping focus on the business’ goals and ideals. ANd it can sneak up on you slowly, silently — a little here, a little there, another cold caller, another database purchase, and suddenly your expenses doubled, which directly affects your bottom line.

This is where training can make a huge difference. There’s an old maxim, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Take it quite literally:  If you don’t know how to manage employees or motivate them to perform to a certain standard, how would you know whether they are? How would they know? Who is taking responsibility and accountability for training them and then tracking it? 

Your KPIs will tell you. You can set standards of performance, goals for each person to achieve which measures their work. The numbers are tracked. For example, you may want your cold caller making 50 calls per day. Your acquisitions person may need to offer 10 contracts a week.

It’s one thing to set targets; quite another to properly train, motivate and encourage your team to achieve them. This is where investing in masterminds, investing in training programs, and becoming educated in specific areas can equip you with the tools and strategies to make your business boom. The right training also incorporates responsibility and accountability, for both you and your team. You don’t want to have to be standing over your employees to make sure they’re doing their jobs. You want them to want to do their jobs, be good at doing their jobs, and enjoy doing their jobs. And it is training that will enable you to solve the chronic issues which cause all the brush fires in your business, will help you close more transactions with less drama, and show you how to hire, train and keep the best employees.

Notice I said “invest” in masterminds and training. Yes, good training costs money. You’re a business owner, you know that valuable things aren’t free, and that quite often free things turn out to not be particularly valuable.

Investing in masterminds and training can enable you to exponentially grow your business far beyond what you paid. Can you figure it out on your own? Sure. All the information is out there. However, masterminds and training will both speed up your ascension to entrepreneurship and will relieve stress and frustration from not having good systems in place.

The real question is where are you going, and how fast do you want to get there? I can ride my bike across the country, but I’ll get there faster in my car, and much faster in an airplane. My bike is free (only I have to put in a lot of effort), the car costs money and it’s still a several day drive, and a jet airplane costs the most but I’m there in time for lunch.

Take back control of your business. Identify your weaknesses (those things you really don’t like to do and are giving you the most trouble), invest in masterminds and training, and apply what you learn. It may be tough at first, because you may need to replace some of your team who simply don’t want to get with the program. You may need to change the way you have always done things, and change can be difficult. You may even change the focus of your business, once you have thoroughly and honestly examined it.

In the end, change is hard, but change is necessary. When you think about it, isn’t growth simply change? A seed grows into a tree by changing, not by fighting to stay a seed. The difference is a seed knows how to become a tree. Your business does not.

Go learn how to grow. Go be a tree.

Filed Under: Blog, Training Tagged With: education, kpi, learning, mastermind, numbers, real estate, real estate disruptors, steve trang, training

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