The Year, The Week, The Number

Write two numbers, not one. The floor is what has to land for the household to be fine. The target is what you went self-employed to be able to do. They are different numbers and you need both, because an agent with only a target panics in a month that was actually fine, and an agent with only a floor drifts from March onwards.

Build the floor from the bottom up rather than picking a round figure. Mortgage or rent. Bills and council tax. Food and household. Childcare and school. Car, fuel and insurance. Debt. Protection. Savings and pension. A modest amount of life, because a floor with no life in it is one you will break within a quarter. Anything annual, divided by twelve. Add a six-month reserve to the bottom of the page, because self-employed income arrives in lumps and the reserve is what stops a slow April turning into a decision you regret.

What comes off before you

Self-employed income is not commission. Between the two sits a list that is bigger in year one than anyone expects, and every figure on it should come from your own broker and your own accountant rather than something you read.

• The brokerage split, and the cap if there is one.
• Portals and marketing.
• Boards, photography, floorplans, video.
• Your database and subscriptions.
• Phone, mileage, insurance.
• Accountant and professional fees.
• Redress scheme, data protection registration, anti-money-laundering supervision.
• Training and events.
• Tax and National Insurance, and pension.

Three tests before you commit to the number

Is it more than double last year? If it is, it is not a plan, it is a wish, and the year will be spent proving that. Does your patch contain it? Work out what share of the properties that sold in your bracket last year you would need, and if the answer is more than one in ten, change the plan rather than the effort. Can your week hold it? Lesson five is where that gets tested honestly.

Banked is not earned

An instruction won in January is a completion in April and cash in May. Budget the cash where it lands, not where it was earned. Almost every cashflow crisis in a first self-employed year is a good business with the money written down in the wrong month.

Take the figures from your own people

Every line on the costs list should be confirmed with your broker or your accountant and dated, because these numbers move and a plan built on last year’s subscription prices is wrong before you finish writing it.

Mark each one fixed or per deal while you are there. That single column tells you what a quiet quarter actually costs you, which is the figure the reserve at the bottom of the page has to cover, and it is usually smaller and more survivable than it feels at two in the morning.

Start at the money and keep going back until you reach something you can do before ten in the morning. By the time you get to the bottom of the chain, the frightening annual number has turned into a handful of daily activities you fully control, and that change is the whole value of the exercise.

Ten steps, in order. Target income, from lesson one. Gross commission needed, adding back your costs and your split. Average fee banked per completion, from your own last twelve months if you have them. Completions needed. Instructions needed, because not everything completes, so add the shortfall back on. Valuations needed, which is instructions divided by your conversion rate. Appointments to book, because some cancel. Conversations needed. Contact attempts needed. Then divide by working weeks, and use forty-four rather than fifty-two, because holidays, Christmas and the fortnight you will lose to something exist whether or not the plan admits them.

What comes out of the bottom is three small numbers: valuations a week, conversations a week, attempts a day. Those are the numbers you actually run the business on.

Work it in pencil

Almost everything above the line is an assumption at this stage, and at least three of them are wrong. That is expected. Lesson four replaces them with counted figures, and until then the chain is a working draft rather than a verdict.

Run it again, twice

Rerun the whole chain at the first quarterly reset with your own ratios, and again at the half year. Keep all three runs side by side, because the gap between the columns is the most useful thing in the plan: it tells you whether the plan is getting truer or whether you are getting better, and those need different responses.

Write down which assumption was most wrong, which ratio is worth improving first, and what that does to your weekly floor. Three sentences, and they set the next quarter.

The chain is not there to make the year sound easy. It is there so that on a bad Tuesday you know what to do, which is the six calls, rather than worrying about the sixty thousand.

Use your own conversion rate, or say that you are guessing

Three lines in the chain need a ratio: instructions to valuations, appointments to valuations, and conversations to appointments. If you have twelve weeks of your own figures, use them. If you do not, write the assumption in the margin and mark it, so that when the chain produces a frightening number you know which line to distrust.

An unmarked assumption becomes a fact within about a fortnight, and then it is the thing nobody thinks to check when the year is not working.

Split every number you might track into two piles. Leading numbers are things you do today that cause results later, and you control them entirely. Lagging numbers are what those activities produce, and they arrive weeks or months after the work.

Watch the wrong pile and you are steering by the rear window. Fees invoiced is a real number and a useless steering wheel, because by the time it moves, the work that moved it is a quarter old and you cannot do anything about it.

The two piles, written out

Leading, with a weekly floor on each: contact attempts, real conversations, new database records, appointments booked, valuations attended, introducer conversations, content published.

Lagging, with a monthly floor: instructions won, sales agreed, exchanges, completions, gross fees invoiced, reviews received.

Both get counted. Only the leading pile gets steered by, and only the leading pile is fair to judge yourself on, because it is the only one that was inside your control this week.

The pipeline snapshot

Three numbers sit between the piles and tell you what the next quarter already looks like, largely regardless of what you do now: live instructions, agreed but not exchanged, and valuations awaiting a decision. Take that snapshot every Friday. It is the earliest honest warning you get, usually about eight weeks before the bank balance says the same thing.

Your keystone number

Pick the one leading number you refuse to drop on a bad week. For almost every UK sales agent it is valuations attended, because everything upstream exists to produce it and everything downstream depends on it.

Having one named keystone is what makes a chaotic week survivable. When four things go wrong on a Wednesday, you are not choosing between seven priorities. You are protecting one, and letting the rest take the hit.

One row a week

Attempts, conversations, appointments, valuations, instructions, agreed, exchanged, fees invoiced. Thirteen weeks on one page, filled in every Friday before you form any opinion about the week. Count first, then judge, because the opinion contaminates the counting and a bad mood on a Friday afternoon has rewritten a great many perfectly good weeks.

Give every leading number a floor, not a target

A floor is what you hit on a bad week. Set one for each of the seven leading numbers and set it low enough that you can hold it through a fortnight when three chains are wobbling, because the point of a floor is that it survives.

Then count the weeks you hit it. Over thirteen weeks that count tells you more about next quarter than the totals do, because the totals can be carried by one heroic week and the floor count cannot.

Four percentages decide how hard your year is, and they are yours, not the ones off a stage at a conference. Attempts to conversations. Conversations to appointments. Appointments to valuations attended. Valuations to instructions.

Twelve weeks of counting, and there is no shortcut. Any figure you produce from memory will be flattering by about a third, and a plan built on a flattering conversion rate is a plan that quietly requires a third more work than you have hours for. Do not calculate anything until week twelve, and read four weeks at a time, never one.

A working rule to sanity-check what comes out: roughly ten leads produce one appointment, and a healthy sales business earns most of its money from instructions rather than buyer-side work. That one comes from Gary Keller’s economic model, and it is useful as a check on your arithmetic rather than as a target to adopt.

What a low one actually means

Each ratio points at a different fix, which is exactly why you keep them separate rather than tracking one blurred conversion figure.

• Attempts to conversations. Wrong hours, or a stale list. Change when you call before you change how much you call.
• Conversations to appointments. The conversation is about you, not about their move.
• Appointments to valuations. They cancelled. Confirm in writing, ring the day before.
• Valuations to instructions. Instructed elsewhere on the day means the appointment. Went quiet and instructed a week later means the follow-up. Two different problems wearing the same number.

Fix valuation to instruction first

Every time. It sits highest in the chain and everything below it multiplies. Moving from one in three to one in two removes a third of the valuations you need for the same income, which is roughly a day a week handed back to you.

This is also the only part of the plan where an hour of practice is worth ten hours of dialling. More attempts is the answer agents reach for because it requires no skill and no discomfort, and it is nearly always the more expensive way to close the same gap.

Pick one ratio for the quarter and write down the specific method you will practise, not the intention. “Rehearse the fee conversation out loud on the drive to every valuation” is a method. “Get better at closing” is not.

Count for twelve weeks before you decide anything

Do not recalculate the chain, change your fee, or conclude anything about your ability until you have twelve weeks of counted figures. Four weeks is a mood. Eight is a hint. Twelve is a ratio.

Write the four ratios in one line at the end of the twelve weeks, then again at the end of the next twelve. The movement between those two lines is the only real measure of whether you got better this quarter, and it is a much fairer one than the income, which is still reporting on the spring.

An ideal week is not a timetable you will keep perfectly. It is a default, so that “what should I be doing right now” is already answered, and so that a request for Tuesday at ten meets a week that already has a shape rather than a blank grid.

Build it in order, and the order matters. Life first. Then the money hours. Then appointment windows. Then admin in blocks rather than scattered. Then content. Then the Friday review. Then leave two hours a day genuinely unbooked, because the week that has no slack in it fails on the first Tuesday something goes wrong.

Six principles behind the grid

• Mornings outbound, afternoons and evenings for appointments.
• The same kind of work batched together.
• Appointments grouped geographically.
• Each day has a named job.
• Two hours a day genuinely unbooked.
• One full day off, properly off.

Why mornings

People answer phones before ten, and they are home after six. Build the week around when other people are available rather than around when you feel like working. Most agents build it the other way round and then conclude that nobody answers the phone any more.

Why a day off

Seven-day agents do not last three years, and the industry is full of people proving it. The only asset this business has is you, and the day off is the maintenance schedule for it. It is not a reward for a good week and it does not get traded away for a busy one.

Seventy per cent is a good week

Nobody hits an ideal week. The check that matters is not whether the grid survived, it is whether the money hours survived, and everything else in the week can move without the plan being in trouble.

Tick the principles your week actually follows, and write what you are changing where it does not. One change at a time, as ever, or you will not know which one worked.

Draw it, do not describe it

Put it on a grid, six in the morning to nine at night, seven columns, and shade the money hours. A week you can see is a week you can defend; a week you have described to yourself in a paragraph is one you will renegotiate every Monday.

Then look at what the grid says about the life around it. If there is no full day off on the page and no unbooked time on any of the others, the week is not ambitious, it is fragile, and the first genuinely bad fortnight will take the whole thing apart.

Within a fortnight, something will try to take the block, and it will feel more urgent than a list of calls. It usually is more urgent. It is almost never more important, and the difference between those two words is most of what this lesson is about.

Name the thieves in advance and write the exact defence for each one, because a vague defence does not hold at nine on a Tuesday when the phone is going.

There is no such thing as time management, only choice management.

Tom Panos

The four thieves, and what actually stops them

A genuine emergency. Book the block as an appointment with a name a client reading over your shoulder would accept, and it stops being the first thing offered up when somebody needs a slot.

Other people’s urgency. Phone on do not disturb with family on the exception list, and email shut rather than minimised. A minimised inbox is an open inbox with a delay on it.

Comfortable work. Have the list ready the night before. Deciding who to call is not the block, and it is the most respectable-looking way there is to spend forty minutes not calling anybody.

Yourself. Keep a visible tally on paper in front of you, so that stopping early is a decision you can watch yourself make rather than something that just happens at twenty past ten.

Never miss twice

One missed morning is a Tuesday. Two is a habit forming, and the second one is the only one worth being strict about. Agents who try to be perfect about this quit it in a fortnight. Agents who allow themselves one miss and never two are still doing it in year three.

No punishment schedules

Do not make a missed morning up with three hours the next day. That is a punishment schedule, and it turns the block into something you dread, which guarantees the next miss. Tick the block, write one word on what got in the way if anything did, and start again tomorrow at the normal time.

Four working weeks of ticks tells you more about next quarter than any forecast you could build. Count the blocks out of twenty, the longest unbroken run, and the number of times you missed twice.

Twenty days, ticked

Four working weeks on one page. Tick the block, and one word on what got in the way if anything did. One word is enough: school, chain, tired, portal.

The word is what makes the page worth keeping, because after twenty days the same word appears three or four times and you are no longer arguing with yourself about discipline in the abstract. You are looking at a specific, fixable thing that happens on a specific kind of morning.

Results that depend on mood are not results, they are weather. A process is how you stop the tired version of you doing a worse job than the good version, and the way you write one is to record what you actually do on a good day rather than what you think you ought to do.

Start with the process whose failure costs you most, and write what it costs when it fails at the top of the page. That figure is what gets you to finish writing it.

Verb, owner, timing

Every step gets all three. What happens exactly, by when, and who does it. A step that says “chase the solicitor” is a note. A step that says “ring the vendor’s solicitor every Tuesday by eleven and email the vendor the same day with what was said” is a process, because somebody else could do it and you could tell whether it had happened.

The seven worth writing

Not everything needs one. Write a process for anything you do more than once a month where doing it badly costs money, then rank them by what a failure costs and work down the list one at a time.

• New enquiry to booked appointment.
• Booked to attended valuation.
• Valuation to instruction.
• Instruction to launch.
• Launch to offer.
• Offer to exchange.
• Completion to review and referral.

Where it lives

In your database as a dated task sequence, not in a folder. A process that requires you to remember to open a document is not a process, it is a document, and it will be opened twice.

Improve it at the review, never in the moment

When something goes wrong you are annoyed, and annoyed people overcorrect. Note it, follow the existing process for the rest of the week, and change it on Friday with a clear head. One change at a time, or you never learn which one worked.

You do not rise to your ambition on a bad day. You fall to whatever you have written down.

Write it the way you do it on a good day

You are recording your own best performance so that the tired version of you can borrow it. That means writing what actually happens when it goes well, not what you think a process should look like, and it means writing it soon after a good one rather than at the end of a bad week.

Eleven steps is usually plenty for any of the seven. If it runs past fifteen you are writing a manual rather than a process, and nobody, including you, will follow it.

Thirty minutes, the same time every Friday, in the diary as a real appointment. Not at home on Sunday night, where it becomes either a guilt session or nothing at all. A reviewed week is a finished week, and an unreviewed one just runs into the next.

Count first, then form an opinion. Always that order. The opinion contaminates the counting, and a Friday afternoon mood will rewrite a perfectly decent week into a bad one before you have written a single figure down.

Plan against actual, seven lines

Contact attempts. Real conversations. Appointments booked. Valuations attended. New database records. Introducer conversations. Instructions won. Plan, actual, and a colour: green, amber or red.

The colours matter more than the numbers on any single week, because what you are reading is the pattern. One red line is a week. The same red line four weeks running is a problem with a name, and it is nearly always a specific hour on a specific day rather than a character flaw.

The worst line, and why. Once.

Pick the worst number and write why that specific number was what it was. Not why the week was bad in general, which produces “too busy” every time and teaches you nothing. Why that line, that week.

One change for next week

One. Specific, small, and inside your control. “Move the block to eight thirty” beats “prospect more”, because you can tell on Friday whether it happened.

A change you cannot check by next Friday is not a change, it is a resolution, and resolutions are what you are replacing with this half hour.

Then write the wins

One line each, as they happened. In a difficult month this is the only evidence you have that the work is real, and your memory will not supply it. Memory is very good at the lost valuation and remarkably poor at the four good conversations on the same afternoon.

Same slot, every Friday, in the diary

Booked as a real appointment with a real name, in the same way as the money hours, because a review that floats to whenever there is a gap is a review that happens for three weeks and then does not.

Thirty minutes is enough and it should not run to an hour. If it is running long you are problem-solving rather than reviewing, and the problem-solving belongs in the one change for next week, where it gets tested rather than discussed.

Half a day, out of the office, phone off, four times a year. The Friday review checks the work. It cannot check the plan, because from inside a week every plan looks about right, and a plan that is quietly ten per cent wrong will never be caught by the person living in it.

Diarise all four dates now, today, before you do anything else with this lesson. The one you leave undated never happens, and the quarter it was meant to catch goes by unexamined.

What you look at

• Income and completions against plan.
• Instructions and valuations.
• Your four ratios, recalculated on the real figures.
• Source mix this quarter, against the audit you started from.
• Whether the ideal week survived.
• The pipeline for next quarter.
• Energy, health, and life outside work.

Nobody puts that last line on a business plan, and it decides more outcomes than any of the numbers above it. An agent running on empty in October produces a bad January regardless of what the pipeline says in the autumn.

Three decisions, forced

A reset that produces no decisions was a reading exercise. Force three, write them down, and put the first action for each in next week’s diary before you leave the room.

One thing to stop: an activity that produced nothing for a whole quarter. Stopping is harder than starting and it is where the time for anything new comes from. One thing to start: one, not four. A new introducer category, a patch, a price bracket, a skill to practise. One thing to improve: a single ratio, with a specific method attached rather than a wish.

When the plan needs changing rather than the effort

If you have hit your leading numbers for a full quarter and are still well behind the income plan, the plan is wrong, not you. Change the assumption, rerun the chain from lesson two, and reset the weekly floor.

That is not failure and it is not permission to lower your sights. A plan that never gets corrected was never being tested in the first place.

Out of the office, phone off

Both of those are the lesson, not the setting. A reset done at your own desk with the phone face up becomes a slightly longer Friday review, and the whole point is to look at the plan from outside the week rather than from inside it.

Half a day, four times a year, is two days out of a working year. Set against the cost of running a quietly wrong plan for twelve months, it is the cheapest thing in this course.

At some point you will be meaningfully behind. Everybody is, and the agents it damages are not the ones who fell behind, they are the ones who responded by working harder at all six possible causes at once and therefore fixed none of them properly.

Work these six questions in order and you will land on one.

The six, in order

• Is the income behind, or is it timing? Check agreed but not exchanged first. Half of all bad quarters end here, and it is a progression problem rather than a prospecting one.
• Are instructions behind? If valuations were on plan, it is conversion. A skill fix, not more calls.
• Are valuations behind? If appointments were booked, they cancelled. Confirmation and preparation.
• Are appointments behind? If the conversations happened, the conversation is not working.
• Are conversations behind? Wrong hours, or a stale list.
• Are attempts behind? The block went. You already knew.

The four honest causes

Underneath those six sit four causes: the work stopped, a ratio slipped, the plan was optimistic, or something outside the business. The first is the most common by a distance, and it is usually caused by a fortnight of good work rather than a bad one. Three instructions came in, the block went, and eight weeks later the pipeline was empty.

Knowing that is worth a great deal, because it means the fix after a good fortnight is the same as the fix after a bad one, and it is the block.

Build one week, not a heroic month

When you have found the cause, do not plan a spectacular month. Plan one ordinary week: the block protected all five mornings, every floor number hit including the small ones, one process followed properly start to finish, the Friday review completed with the numbers written before the opinion, and one conversation with somebody in the club who has been exactly here.

Then another week like it. Momentum in this job is not built from big weeks. It is built from ordinary weeks that did not get skipped.

Tell somebody

Write down who you are telling about it, this week. Self-employment removes the person who would have noticed, and the agents who recover quickly are almost always the ones who said it out loud to somebody within a fortnight.

Behind plan is information, not a verdict. The only real failure available is not finding out which of the six it was.

Where this goes next

Where the Next Instruction Comes From is the activity that fills the top of this chain, and the business plan and momentum workbook is the printed version of every page in this course.

Fix one thing, not six

Once you have found which of the six it was, fix that one and leave the other five alone until the next review. Fixing all six at once means fixing none of them properly, and it also means that when things improve you will not know what did it, so you will not be able to do it again in the autumn.

Write down how you will know by Friday that it worked. If you cannot answer that in one sentence, the fix is not specific enough yet.