Lack Of Organization Can Ruin A Business
By Paul Esajian on November 6, 2013
As a real estate investor, you are the CEO of your own business. Accordingly, you are the ultimate decision maker and the person responsible for the success and failure of your business. As such, it is in your best interest to know what is going on with all aspects of your business at all times. Can you ever imagine the CEO of Apple or Coke not knowing what is going on with their companies? The most successful investors can quickly cite where they are in the process with each of their prospective purchases, which properties are generating the most income and which are the best long term holds. It is this knowledge and organization that makes them so successful.
Everyone has a method to their madness. You don’t have to replicate exactly how the person next to you runs their business, but you need to have a system in place. You should never lose a deal because you didn’t fax over a necessary document or put a bad tenant in place because you were lazy with the application process. Everything that you do from buying to rehabbing should have a system in place for you to follow. As soon as you get lazy with your systems or content with how things are going, you open yourself up to trouble.
Some of the most successful people follow one of the most basic tasks in business, making lists. You should make a list every morning for what you want to do and how you are going to do it. Taking this one step further, you should have a spreadsheet or even a generic notebook with everything you have going on at the moment. Every offer you make or estimate you received should be noted somehow and someway. There are many good programs and spreadsheets currently available that will make organizing your business that much easier. If you are not taking advantage of these, you are not maximizing your time and will eventually miss out on an opportunity.
If you have not reached the point where you need an assistant, it is even more important that you have systems in place to stay organized. The real estate business is often has you taking on a series of overlapping projects and putting equal priorities on all of them. Closing a deal is great, but if you want to keep things going in the right direction, you need a new deal or deals to back them up. If you are too focused on the present, you will lose track of the future and any deals you may be working on.
Once you have a system, run with it until it is time to change again. Everything you do should be constantly reviewed and updated every few months. Systems can get stale or outdated if they are not in line with current technologies and marketplaces. You can either make the necessary changes or find yourself losing business. A good system can get or secure a handful of deals every year while a lack of any system will cause you to lose the same amount. It is up to you.