Planning is Everything in Business

It’s that time of year again (yep, it’s annual planning season)! Time to bring your financial statements out of hiding, crunch some numbers and get pumped for another year of doing what you love. We paint a pretty picture, but for those of you who are less fond of accounting, reporting, and analysis, annual planning isn’t always so exciting.

Knowing where to focus your efforts can take that stress level down and get you on the road to setting attainable goals for growth and profitability. Start by taking a look at your Annual Income statement. This is a fantastic way to understand the overall financial health of your business and will inform the decisions you make throughout the planning process.

Once you understand where you’re at today, you’ll then want to decide where you want to go. That is to say, where do you want your business to be, next year, when everything is said and done? Possible goals: grow your agent base; improve productivity; be more profitable.

Identifying a primary objective can help you keep the planning process on track, and also lets you know which data points you need to look at along the way. For example, if you’re looking to improve productivity, you’ll want to focus on agent production and sales trends. Conversely, when considering a strategy to increase profitability, you’ll want to examine performance metrics like commission cutting and sales activity.

Lone Wolf’s back office system, brokerWOLF, provides all the tools you need to account for, track, and report on the activity of your real estate brokerage. Our extensive inventory of on-demand reports simplifies annual planning and helps you keep your finger on the pulse of your business all year long. Get a complete set of brokerWOLF sample reports.