Happy Sunday Everyone:
Q1 is over. How did you do compared to last year? do you know? I’m down 1 loan from last year at this time, up 1.2 mill in volume, and up 6% in income. I didn’t look until putting this together and honestly was pleasantly surprised, it felt much worse than that. Why did it feel worse? Lots of drama out there right now. Inventory is low, rates are going up, massive pressure on buyers, on Realtors, on lenders. I can feel myself taking my eye off the ball and letting other people affect me, which can’t happen, I can’t allow that, nor can you. There are real pressures out there but I think we need to evaluate what we can control and what we can’t, where we need to make changes, and where we need to keep our head down and drive forward. When markets get like they’re getting, we need to get better, we need to make our tweaks and rise to the occasion. I’m trying to find the balance of evaluating my business, where I need to make changes, and where I simply need to get the massive noise around me out of my head, and push forward.
More than ever, we need to understand our value right now. If you can’t articulate your value, you have a problem. You can’t understand your value without asking the people around you how you’re doing for them. Your own perception of your value, without confirming it with the people that work with you, is dangerous. The other side is true, if you confirm your value with the people you work with, it’s much easier to help others you don’t work with understand your value. This is true for everyone. If you own the company, you need to understand why people are there, and you need to understand why they would leave. If you have a team, why would your team stay, and why would they go? I have my quarterly meeting next week with my team, I will ask them this exact question.
I’m sure like many of you, I seem to have more on my plate than I’ve ever had. I believe for most of us, certainly me, multitasking is a farce. What’s not a farce is compartmentalizing our time, which in the simplest form, is called “time blocking”. With the start of Q2 my primary focus will be reevaluating my current time blocking and questioning the allocation of time to the areas that are most important to me. For most of us it’s ass backwards, we spend most of our time doing what doesn’t make us successful….which is crazy. I think we ‘d all be a lot better if we took a ½ day to determine what we need to accomplish in quarter 2, review your value, consider what changes you need to make, how you’re going to measure yourself, and those around you, and then don’t look up for 90 days. My team and I will doing exactly that this Friday.
Have a great week ahead.