The ONLY Way to Transform Your JOB Into a BUSINESS is to Work ON Your Business Rather Than IN It

Today's tip is a continuation of Dan Kennedy's (dankennedy.com - co-founder of The Pinnacle Club for Realtors) "8 Universal Business Principles." Today we'll focus on the only real day-in-and-day-out way to improve your real estate business. Enjoy!



Number 6 - The ONLY Way to Transform Your JOB Into a BUSINESS is to Work ON Your Business Rather Than IN It


“If All You Ever Do is “Do, Do, Do”,


You’ll Never Gain the Perspective of How to DO BETTER”


Most agents are so wrapped up in their job of selling real estate that their job and their lives are indistinguishable. It certainly used to be this way for me…

my job consumed me. Even when I took some rare time off, I was thinking about my job and worrying about the things I had to get done or what might be going on that I was missing that could hurt me financially.

Michael Gerber wrote a very important book called The E-Myth (the “E” stands for Entrepreneurial). The book talks about why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it. If you haven’t read this book, put it on your ‘get it done now’ list. The BIG LESSON I got from the book was….

Your Business Is NOT Your Life…Your Business Must Serve Your Life


Your business and your life are completely separate entities. Your business is something apart from you, with its own needs, its own rules, and its own purposes – an organism that will live or die according to how well it performs its sole function: to find and keep customers!

Once you realize and recognize that your life is not your business, but something your business must serve, you can begin to go to work on your business rather than in it. This is where you can put the Franchise Prototype to work for you – where working on your business rather than in your business will become the central theme of your daily activity, the prime catalyst for everything you do from this moment forward.

What do I mean by a Franchise Prototype? Let me explain it this way. Pretend that your real estate business is the prototype for 5,000 more just like it. Perfect replicas. Clones if you will. Said another way, pretend you are going to franchise your business.

Could You Replicate Your Business 5,000 Times?

If you’re like most agents, whatever level of success you’re currently experiencing in your real estate career is heavily dependant on you. If you’re like most agents, you’re “on call” most of the time, slave to your pager, cell phone and email, performing the whole range of tasks and functions right from the CEO to President to marketing to sales to bookkeeper, babysitter and on and on.

If you really did have 5,000 more real estate businesses in other towns, could you operate them with your current system? The answer is, probably not. You couldn’t because you’re right there making most of the decisions as they happen, putting out fires, doing, doing, doing. I bet it’s a rare moment when you can sit down and look at it all objectively.

This is what Michael Gerber means when he points out that your business must serve your life. If your business is not serving your life on some level, you should be taking steps to either change your business or get out of your business – you should be working to live, not living to work.

If you and your business are to grow and thrive, you must begin to work on your business rather in it. In other words, it means stepping outside of the “doer” and taking a good look at the big picture.


If All You Do Day In and Day Out is Churn Out Job After Job, You’ll Never Find a Better Way to do These Jobs, and You’ll Never Attract Significant New Business to Your Doorstep.


Your Partner in Greater Success,


Bill Zimmerman

If you're a Treasure Valley real estate agent and would like to learn more on this and other relevant sales and marketing mastery topics visit www.ForIdahoRealtors.com