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2. Is It Time for You to Begin Working With a Partner?

With the New Year now being here, this is a natural time for agents to formulate what their income goals are for the year. During the past week in doing one-on-one coaching with my clients, I had a few situations where my agents were setting some very ambitious goals for themselves, but I also recognized that their approaches might lead them to experience some future disappointment, too.

I think the best way for me to illustrate this is in mentioning what happened during my most recent coaching session with my client Bill. Bill and I began working together in July of 2003, and at that time he was making about $12,000.00 a month in commissions in his real estate business. Now, six months later, he's earning commissions at the rate of approximately $35,000.00 a month, and he has $300,000.00 in commissions set to close in the first quarter of this year.

When I asked Bill what his income goal was for 2004, he told me he had set his goal at $720,000.00 for the year. While I was excited to hear his enthusiasm and confidence in what he could accomplish through our continued work together in 2004, I also suggested to Bill that he consider writing his income goals for the year in a slightly different manner than he had been accustomed to.

Bill's income in 2003 was $220,000.00, which represented close to a 50% increase in his income over 2002, when he earned approximately $150,000.00. The reason I asked Bill to revise his income goal was because of the following:

Even if he doubles his income this year to $440,000.00, he could still feel disappointed that he missed his goal of $720,000.00 by such a substantial amount of money. And any time an agent doubles his or her income in one calendar year, disappointment is a feeling that they shouldn't experience.

So this is what I recommended to Bill:

1) Set an income goal that you feel through giving your best is the highest amount of income that you could earn for the year.

2) Set another income goal, not as high as the first one, that would still have you feel that you had a very successful year if you achieved it.

3) Set a third income goal, and this is the minimum amount of money you must earn for the year in order to feel that you still had a successful year in your real estate business.

This approach is similar to what top athletes experience when competing in the Olympic Games. They would all love to win the gold medal, but winning a silver or bronze medal is still an accomplishment that most top athletes would still be proud of.

As a real estate agent, make sure you're allowing yourself to win in your career the way you'd like to. Any year when you've made more money than the year before is definitely an improvement for you in your business. Just keep it all in perspective and allow yourself to feel you're successfully moving your business forward and in the right direction.

2. Is It Time for You to Begin Working With a Partner?

Most agents in our industry work without partners. But there may come a time when you find yourself thinking, "Could I produce better results if I worked along with a partner instead of continuing to work alone?" Well, it all depends on you, how you work best, and the person or people you may decide to partner-up with.

If you're considering working with a partner, you may want to listen to what top commercial agent Paul Earnhart recently said to me. Paul and his team of experts have closed more than $2 billion in real estate transactions over the past 21 years. That's an average of $95 million a year in closed transactions over those 21 years. And in 2001, Paul was given an award by the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR) for the largest volume of commercial cooperative transactions closed in the United States.

In my recent audio interview with Paul, he talked about the important considerations in choosing the partner who's best for you:

"You don't want to work with a partner who duplicates what you're already good at yourself," he said. "You want to find someone whose skills complement, not duplicate, your own."

With this recommendation from Paul in mind, if you're someone whose number one skill is developing new business, you probably don't want to partner-up with an agent whose best skill is developing new business also. If you do, you may soon find yourself in a partnership as two people developing new opportunities, with a great need for someone to assist in following-up on the opportunities. Similarly, if you're someone who is great at follow-up but lacking in business development skills, you may find yourself continually in need of more new business if you you pair-up with someone just like yourself.

As Paul said during my interview with him, "There are a lot of people who can do a great job in real estate while working on their own, but they can't cover the market with the same effectiveness that a great team can through working together."

If you're thinking of working with a partner I have one more recommendation of my own for you. I recommend that you sign an agreement with your partners before you begin your partnership together. Write down all the important details of how you're going to work together, what each person's job responsibilities will be, and how the commissions will be divided among yourselves. And since you can't be 100% certain of how well the partnership is going to work for you, you may want to have a termination date for the partnership agreement itself. You may, for example, have the partnership run for a trial period of three months, six months, or a year. When the original term of the partnership agreement expires, you can extend the agreement it as it is written for a longer period of time, modify some provisions of the agreement before extending it, or not extend the agreement at all and go back to working on your own. This allows the partners to find out in reality if the partnership is a good idea for everyone, while allowing the agents the flexibility to get out at a later date if it isn't.

Whether or not forming a partnership with one or more agents is clearly the best choice for you, when you choose partners whose skills complement your own, have everyone sign a written agreement, and provide for a termination date in the agreement, you both maximize your flexibility and help to ensure that your new partnership will become everything you want it to be.

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