Now is the Time to Change the Tires on Your Business

 by Susie Adamson, Operations & Systems Coach

Sometimes, the real estate business feels like a high-speed racecourse.

This is not one of those times.

For once, you’re in low gear, or maybe even parked.

That may seem like a bad thing…but it’s actually a HUGE opportunity to level-up your business.

Let me explain.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been obsessed with The Bear, the FX series about a fine dining chef, Carmy, who returns to Chicago to take over his late brother’s sandwich shop.

His brother’s way of doing things was basically just chaos, and as a result, the business was hanging on by a thread.

Carmy wants to do things the fine dining way: mise-en-place.

That’s French for “everything in its place.” It means creating systems and doing advance preparation to ensure that everything goes smoothly when it’s time to execute a task.

In the kitchen, mise-en-place is the difference between a home cook and a professional chef. It’s what allows a top restaurant to deliver a consistently exceptional experience night after night.

But mise-en-place isn’t just for cooking. It can translate to any context, including your real estate business.

As Dan Charmas explains in his book Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind, applying this idea in business involves preparation, process, and presence.

For any task you do repeatedly in your business, you can—and should—create systems and do advance preparation to make the task go as smoothly as possible.

For example, I know that a powerful way to nurture my client relationships is through handwritten notes on special occasions. However, this task used to fall through the cracks because it felt like a hassle…until I applied the idea of mise-en-place to it.

I set up a station at my desk with everything I need: blank note cards, good pens, my return address stamp, envelopes, postage stamps, everything.

Then I set triggers for the task. When I look at my CRM in the morning and see a special occasion coming up for a contact, I immediately reach for one of those blank cards. Later, when it’s time to walk the dog, I take my finished cards with me and drop them in the mailbox.

Thanks to this simple process and advance prep, the cards actually get sent, and my clients feel valued.

Applying this idea of mise-en-place can elevate the quality and consistency of any task: open houses, listing appointments, inspections, closing gifts…anything, really.

On The Bear, Carmy tries to implement this while the business is in full swing.

In other words, he’s changing the tires while the car is moving.

Spoiler alert: it sort of works, but it’s STRESSFUL, to say the least. Ultimately, he parks the car, and starts over.

Fortunately, you don’t have to start over! Thanks to this market, you’re already parked…

Which makes it the perfect time to change the tires.

NOW is your chance to make dramatic improvements in how you run your business, with minimal disruption. You finally have the bandwidth to do it, and if you make the investment now, you'll set yourself up to have greater capacity and do more business than ever when the market picks up again.