Episode 15: How Can One Daily Action Grow Your Real Estate Business?

Chris Cook (00:08):

All right, Kory Gorgani, welcome to Mind Your Real Estate Business. So we’ve had a pretty good run of episodes and I really excited, actually you and I’ve been bugging you to get on the podcast here for over a month now. And I’m happy and glad to have you. Welcome.

Kory Gorgani (00:24):

Well thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you. What is it you let me know an hour ago?

Chris Cook (00:31):

I always predict, I always say predictability and planning and don’t make emergencies in your real estate business. And this is the one area that I end up like, ah, we’ve put some people under the gun here. I had a last minute cancellation, so you’re awesome to fill in. I appreciate that.

Kory Gorgani (00:47):

Alrighty then. Alrighty then. That’s

Chris Cook (00:50):

Fine. So yeah, we’ve freed up your schedule for maybe into the holidays here too, to do this and get it out of the way, so to speak. So the timing I think is perfect because of all the different things that you and I have been working on. You’ve recently taken over the education portion for RE/MAX hallmark and specifically what you’ve started to do now and what we’ve been delivering over the last couple of weeks is your power planning. How did that come about? How did you get to a point where throughout traditional business planning and created the power play?

Kory Gorgani (01:30):

In my previous life where I was a coach for a well-known industry coach, doing this business plannings around mid-November to end of November was a mandatory thing. We had to get the agents to write a business plan. It was like a 30 page business plan. It took them a couple of hours and we had to get it completed, otherwise we will not be invited to the next mastermind. So it was like a consequence that, hey, get it done. Here’s the thing. They did this fancy cover business plan and they went into a guessing game of how many leads and deals they’re going to get from a specific pillar and how many percentage they have to increase their GCI and income and volume year over year over year. It’s all a guessing game. By January 31st, that thing would be forgotten.

(02:30):

It would just be in their drawer just collecting dust. So we know that we cannot control the outcome, but you can control your daily activities. So after reading the Atomic Habits by James Clear, I said, okay, so why don’t we create something based on the of progress and also based on Brian Moran’s 12 week year, why don’t I write something? Why don’t I create something that gets people into action right away? They hold themselves capable, not accountable, capable, and they measure their progress every week. And then they also measure their progress based on each cycle that they work in. And the cycle doesn’t have to be, it’s not a quarter because we want to get away from that annualized thinking, we want to be in cycle. Your cycle could start tomorrow at the end of a cycle, could be 10 weeks, could be 12 weeks. You sort of review, reset, lock and load and rinse and repeat. So two levels of measuring your progress, two levels of so-called accountability and a daily plan of action, daily plan of action. Very simple.

Chris Cook (03:56):

I going to say, so first of all, this is something that I really feel like from my type of personality, this is something that I wish I had have seen when I first got, well, I wish I had seen this 20 years ago before I ever even got into real estate. I think it’s applicable to anything. It doesn’t have to necessarily be real estate related, anything that you have a plan, a goal where you want to go. And so one of the things of the biggest aha moments for me when I went through this and why I was so excited to share it with the other real estate agents and create some accountability around it, but also I’m implementing this with my team as well. I really fantastic. I went through it again, I’ve gone through it and I’ve redone the same plan two or three times over the last couple of weeks to refine it and to make sure it’s something that I really understand and that I’m going to do it. But here’s the thing that really excited me about it was actually those daily activities. We’re not talking about a two to three hour block with a huge number of different tasks. It’s like if you do one thing, even if it’s only five minutes,

(05:17):

Pick up the phone call. Even if your plan is, I’m going to call one person from my database every single day that’s 365 people in your database every year, which is probably 364 more phone calls than the average person probably makes, I really got excited about that because I was like, no matter how bad my day is, I can always do one thing to move the needle forward and no matter how busy it is, and we do get caught up with the busy. So personally, I was really excited about this to the point where when you shared this with me, I was like, this is now, this is something that I think broker logic and the brokerage in particular can really get behind to support the agents

Kory Gorgani (06:04):

To

Chris Cook (06:04):

Do it

Kory Gorgani (06:05):

Right.

Chris Cook (06:06):

What’s been your biggest obstacle with this? Because you’ve been doing this with other coaching clients for a while.

Kory Gorgani (06:14):

Yes. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, and I’ve sort of perfected it in time, but it’s not really perfect yet, but I’ve sort of perfected it as I went along. And here’s why. Here’s an obstacle I see as a broker manager, I see, and as a coach, I see agents coming into the office every day and we ask them, Hey, what’s happening today? Okay, well what’s on your agenda today? Or what’s your plan today this week? And the answer is usually, Hey, get a coffee, go and see what’s happening. Make a few calls, answer a few emails reactive to what’s happening. And today’s market, our market has changed this, Chris better than everyone. Our market has changed, right in past two years and this year and last year. So we need to be intentional, and I want agents. I want our agents to be productive.

(07:20):

I want my coaching clients to be productive to have a plan of action. Robin Sharma calls it Blueprint for a beautiful week. So if I may just step back, the way the power plan works, very simple. One page, just one page, right at the top is your goal for the year. And usually that goal is either transaction related or dollar volume, or it could be, Hey, I want to lose 50 pounds. That then we have certain priorities that our business should be built around. Those priorities for majority of agents is finding a new client is turning that client new client into some sort of a contract or transaction and retaining our existing clients and getting referrals from them. Those are the priorities. Majority of agents have maybe some want work-life balance, I don’t know. Then for each priority, we built a number of strategies. What are those strategies?

(08:26):

A group, a cluster of actions that get you to that priority and get you closer to your goal. Very simple. One page, it’s constant. So you need to give this little bit of thought. For example, for lead generation, it could be prospecting, open houses, I don’t know. It could be for retention, it could be single topic email that we both love so much. It could be any of those. So you write ’em down, and now that you have your goals, priorities and strategies, which I call it GPS, now you have your GPS, it goes on your wall, it goes on your desk, and that’s the blueprint for your business. Now, from that, every week we meet with ourselves. I call it a wham, a weekly accountability meeting. And ideally, this is great for teams, okay, get together with a team based on your GPS. Now let’s write a plan of action.

(09:27):

What is a plan of action? You may ask, okay, what is one to two, maybe three, depending on your capability. But let’s start with one. What is one action item? One tactic, a smart tactic, something that’s specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound that you can execute that one day. We are not going to put a time to it. We are not going to say, Hey, 7:00 PM 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM, 8:00 AM to nine, nine to 12. Prospecting, lunch, follow. No, none of that stuff. Okay. What is one tactic that you are going to execute from your strategies that gets you closer to your goal? So one, now I also ask, can you put aside three hours a week that you work on something slightly bigger that moves the needle in your business and income producing activity? It could be, hey, knocking on a hundred doors on a Wednesday afternoon, I don’t know, could be doing some videos.

(10:29):

Whatever it is, promise yourself one action item a day, one tactic a day, and then three hours of combined activities, all of them are non-negotiable, uninterrupted, no admin, no email, no phone call, none of that. And then you measure your progress the next week. So the second week you take a look at the previous week, I wrote down 10 action items, 10 tactics that I must do that week. Did I complete all of them? Yes, that’s a hundred percent. Did I complete on six? Six divided by 10? That’s 60%. That’s no bueno. That’s no good. We need to get to 90%, and since we really can’t get to 90%, we need a hundred percent done. Okay? And for the teams, Chris, this is don’t give them, Hey, this is what you need to be doing. Let them write their GPS and based on their GPS every week they write their own plan of action. The second week you may say, Hey, that was easy. Okay, so let’s do two action items.

(11:40):

The third week you may say, Hey, that was way too much, so let’s dial it down. You either dial it down or you dial it up and you measure your progress. That’s how we take ownership of what we wrote down, that what you’re going to execute and hey, this is what I wrote down and I’m going to do it. And if I didn’t, as a team leader, we asked the right questions, what held you back? What got in the way? What got in the way? What can we do so that next week, on the third week, we can actually get to a hundred percent? And that’s the entire GPS and the weekly plan of action. And the obstacle was to get, agents are not productive, let’s get them productive. And here’s a plan. Very simple one page, something a 2-year-old can do.

Chris Cook (12:35):

I think you really nailed it when you said this is something that would be ideal for teams. And there’s actually, there’s a couple of bigger teams that we’re talking with right now about delivering this for them because the team leader has always struggled with accountability and keeping their agents accountable. And I think that all of these things for the team perspective, the thing that they really like is that it’s engaging the team members as individuals and holding them capable. Love that is what are you capable of doing? I love the one that moment that we had in the last, when we were in Ottawa in the morning, and you were kind of going through the accountability portion and you remember Sean was like, that’s it, because it was such a small amount of actual

Kory Gorgani (13:31):

Work,

Chris Cook (13:31):

And it doesn’t mean that you’re not, you’re still being reactive in ways for your existing clients and doing other things. It’s not like you’re only working one and a half hours per day, but that’s intentional work that you set out at the beginning of the week to do. And his reaction as a team leader, maybe he shouldn’t have been as surprised by that, is like, whoa, maybe I should back off a little bit and only really require a smaller amount that’s for sure going to get done instead of creating a mountain that the moment an obstacle comes into place, the whole thing gets thrown up.

Kory Gorgani (14:09):

Now here’s the thing. I’ve got a team in Florida that does this big team and every Monday morning they get together at 8:30 AM and they track, all they care about is the score. And then their admin takes everybody’s score, write them in a spreadsheet, and as they’re doing deals relates that score to the number of deals that they’re doing so that they know that when they’re at a hundred percent, they dial it up. Yeah. And on average, on average, Chris, we are seeing 39% increase in sales and volume, 39%. That’s a substantial amount.

(14:47):

I mean, I was at a wedding the other day and one of the team leaders, one of our own team leaders came to me and said, Kory, I’m really struggling. And I told her, her, you’ve probably been coaching them. And I said, Hey, this is what we need to do. You can’t hold them accountable because that means consequence. Hold them capable. And she said, how? I said, this is how you do it. And she said, wow, really? I said, yeah, that’s how you do it. So yes, this is really perfect for teams and even single agent. Why not have an accountability meeting with yourself? Who better? Okay, 15 minutes, do a review. What’s your review? You review last week’s work. What do I owe? Do I need to carry anything forward? Do I need to dial it up, dial it down, and then you do a review for next week, you lock and load and you go into action.

Chris Cook (15:43):

That’s it. Because it’s such a lonely business. I think it’s actually, this is a really great time to talk about what has been now created with Path is that you have a place to actually upload it. You have another set of eyeballs. One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed doing is within the platform that we’re using, we require that everybody uploads their power plan. And so I’ve been reviewing power plans and rejecting them. Oh wow. I’ve been rejecting them. And so when they come across and I am like, this is incomplete, actually, this doesn’t put enough into the strategy section. You haven’t really thought out where your real strengths and weaknesses are and how you’re going to go through that first quarter. And this is one of the benefits I, I’m doing this as well. So I’ve gone through this power plan, I’ve rejected my own. Today was actually the last version that I finally uploaded for myself. I went through with David, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to share with you one of my strategies and I’ll get your take on it. So I’ve told you before, I have a background in sports, specifically sailing,

(17:05):

But I haven’t been a member at a yacht club for nearly 14 years. And so when I look at what kind of business I want to run, I want to be involved with, I want to work with people that are like-minded. And so when I think about the sailing community, typically if you have a sailboat, you’re a member of the yacht club, chances are you own a house, you’ve got a little bit of extra,

Kory Gorgani (17:27):

You’ve

Chris Cook (17:28):

Got some. So I’m surrounding myself with the right sort of people that are also like-minded. And so I was like, okay, so I’m going to join a yacht club, and at that yacht club there’s a couple thousand members,

(17:41):

But just doing that action is incomplete. Just being a member of a club, that’s not going to do it for you. So then what I did is I took a look and I was like, how do I want to get involved with the club to meet more people in a meaningful sort of way? And so I put myself, I volunteered for the youth sailing board, so I want to get involved in the junior sailing program, which has members and students. And that’s when I started looking at it. I was like, and I want to actually get on the water coaching at least one day a month coaching youth sailors. And because they do Tuesday and Thursday night racing, I’m also making a commitment to be on the water and race, which once a week, which has, again, all the different members and the different people that are involved in the yacht club. So when I look at this, I look at the opportunities as like, here’s my overall strategy, but there’s all of these ways that I can layer it so that it has more effectiveness over the course of the year. And I have weekly things that I need to do to stay connected with that particular activity.

Kory Gorgani (18:52):

Exactly.

Chris Cook (18:52):

So this is something that I took from the power plan was to really build out. You have that overall sort of goal is to meet more people and then where and how and what are my weekly activities going to be that are connected with that?

Kory Gorgani (19:09):

Good.

Chris Cook (19:09):

And I credit you and the power plan.

Kory Gorgani (19:12):

Thank you. Thank you. Well for

Chris Cook (19:14):

That,

Kory Gorgani (19:14):

Thank you, Chris. This concept is not new. You are an athlete. I hope you still are. You were an, when you coached Olympians, you were in the Olympics yourself. This concept is really called periodization. This concept is called periodization. It’s not new. We just put it a little bit of a twist to it. Now, I actually did this myself last summer when I went to Italy and I came back 15 pounds heavier. So I wrote down, Hey, what’s my goal for the next 12 weeks, 10 weeks, and I want to lose some weight, how I’m going to do these action items. And I held myself accountable. I didn’t need, here’s what people say, I need to go to the gym, but I need a partner. You don’t need a partner. I just wrote down what I’m going to be doing, and I sat with myself every week, Hey, did I go to the gym on that day?

(20:09):

Did I work out? Did I go for a walk after dinner? Did I eat healthy? Did I, all of that stuff. And here’s something else. You do this weekly accountability meeting with yourself or with your team. So that’s first level of accountability, first level of review, first level of reset. And then once the cycle is over, we take a week off. Very important, take a week off. And I don’t mean take a week off work, take a week off this entire plan because you need to sit down and review the past 10 weeks or 12 weeks or 11 weeks. Take a look at each week. Hey, what do we need to adjust? What do I need to do more of? Less of start and stop.

(20:53):

That’s the second level of review or accountability, which a typical business plan doesn’t have. Okay? You write a typical business plan. You say, Hey, I’ll start in March. March comes over, whether it’s getting better, I’ll starting the summer. Summer is barbecue season. No, no. September, I’ll definitely start. September comes around, no, maybe in October. And then before you know it, you have to write next year’s business plan here. Every week you review, you adjust, you move on. Then at the end of each cycle, 10 weeks, 12 weeks, usually anywhere between 10 to 12 weeks, you stop. You take a breather, you review, you measure all your progress. How did you do? Do we need to do more? Did the past 90 days get us closer to that goal or did it get us further away from our goal review, reset, rinse, and repeat

Chris Cook (21:50):

Question for you, because I love tracking this stuff. I like to, if I see something that’s working, can I double down on it? Is that going to improve my results? Can I stop doing other things that maybe are sucking up money and time that aren’t producing a result?

Kory Gorgani (22:05):

Yes.

Chris Cook (22:06):

So you said 39% improvement. You’ve seen an average of 39% improvement. How much of that improvement do you think is a factor of where people stop and review versus the weekly accountability? Do you think one has more benefit than the other, or do they compliment each

Kory Gorgani (22:28):

Other? I say they go hand in hand. I mean, it’s two levels of review. First of all, you don’t want to go into the second week without seeing what worked in the first week. And you don’t want to go into cycle two without knowing that cycle one worked or not. So it goes hand in hand. But Chris, the number one factor in increasing, getting to that 39% is really not the review. It’s the execution of the daily activities. It’s being intentional. And you know what? You don’t really need the power plan. Get a pen on paper, get a pen on paper. This is what I’m going to do. But now you are a systems guy. You love systems. Now you have a simple system. And when you put a system to psychologically, you say, Hey, I have a system that I’m going to execute. Simple, actionable. That’s what it’s all about.

Chris Cook (23:30):

Yeah. I actually had a guy who I don’t know, do you know Pat Giles? Do you know him?

Kory Gorgani (23:35):

Yes. Yes. Pat, yeah.

Chris Cook (23:37):

He was on my podcast. He was one of the first guys I had on, and we talked about planning and same thing, piece of paper, put it down, write your goals. But the thing that he said that ties to this, so anybody that wants to go back and listen to Pat’s podcast, pat is saying the same thing as Kory here is you can write it down, but if you don’t revisit it, if you don’t constantly review and look at it every single, he’s looking at that thing every single week. He’s reviewing his goals, whether or not he’s on track, what he’s doing to promote those goals. These are the things where I’m personally just, I can’t shut up about it. I love what we’ve created here, where we put the power plan together with the path uploading it. And where I really get excited, and I’ve mentioned this before, is review. I’m helping them review right now so that when they go into the new year, they’ve got the strongest plan. That’s possible because it’s evident when I read them. These are people that have not got a lot of experience with writing this stuff out. You can see the intent is there, but they need just a little bit of coaching to get ’em over the hump.

Kory Gorgani (24:52):

And Chris, I mean, we talked about the power plan, but we haven’t talked about one piece that’s really important here, and that’s the system that you created path, the system that gets the power plant on a weekly basis. They upload it, somebody reviews it, somebody gives them feedback. So we have two levels of productivity created for them. Now they have the power plan and the weekly action, which they do. But now we’ve given them a system to upload their power plan. Something that reminds them of, is it every Sunday? They reminds them every Sunday.

Chris Cook (25:30):

It’s on the Sunday. Yeah,

Kory Gorgani (25:31):

It’s on a Sunday. So I think next year for those agents that stick to their power plan, stick to path, it’s going to be a phenomenal year.

Chris Cook (25:41):

I mean, I can’t wait to start reviewing the results because what we can do, this is the part that excites me, is where when I look at somebody’s power plan and then they start uploading their weekly accountability, if you’ve got somebody that’s engaging and uploading, they’re doing the work, but they’re not seeing a result from their work, this is where I get really excited because now I can say, okay, this person has one of two problems. Either they’re lying, they’re saying they’re doing it when they’re not, which I’ve heard of people doing that.

Kory Gorgani (26:25):

Oh yeah.

Chris Cook (26:26):

Or they’re doing the work and they need a little tweak, a little, just if I like to use the open houses as an example. So let’s say, okay, you’ve made a commitment to doing three open houses per month, and so you’ve done six days of open house over the course of the month, but zero prospects that have come from it. Then I would ask the question is, okay, zero prospects, but how many appointments did you have? Also, zero. Hold the phone. How many people came through the open houses? Let’s see your list of people. Well, I can see here that you had 45 people, 45 groups. Have you been asking for an appointment? Have you been going after the appointment while the people are right there in the open house? Let’s hear what you have to say when people come to the open house. So now we can be intentional with our coaching based on the results that we’re getting. If you’re getting poor results, but you’re doing the work, what a great time for me to be a

Kory Gorgani (27:32):

Coach, Chris. If the open house was the power plan, you wouldn’t move to the next open house without doing the review of what worked and what didn’t.

Chris Cook (27:39):

Right? And so this, but I do think that a lot of people keep doing the same thing, hoping for a different result, rather than, okay, here’s an opportunity for me to ask for help. I keep doing this. I keep getting a negative result. Let’s engage a coach here. And where I love is now I can look at this across all the agents that are involved with doing the power plan and doing path,

Kory Gorgani (28:02):

And

Chris Cook (28:02):

I can look for where the anomalies are, and that’s where I can be a coach and connect. So that part’s really exciting that we have something that’s black and white where I can point and say, okay, this fellow or lady needs some help right here. I’m not sure what’s going wrong, but it’s clearly something’s going wrong. Let’s reach out. And we can do that at scale.

Kory Gorgani (28:26):

Absolutely. And you can also go back to the office manager and say, Hey, these are the agents in your office that are doing the path. They wrote their power plan, now they’re doing the path, and this is the result where this is where they need help.

Chris Cook (28:37):

So we have right now, on the last count, 70 agents that have signed up for path, only a handful have uploaded their power plan. And I think that there’s a number of them that are holding off on uploading it because they’ve heard that I’m rejecting.

Kory Gorgani (28:56):

No, actually, I think it could be because during the presentations, we said your first cycle starts January 5th. That’s why I divided the year into 11 weeks for 11 weeks. So four cycles, and the first cycle starts on January, Feb. So it could be that, but I think maybe right after the new year, an email blast from you to them, to the 70 people that say, Hey, you got to start now.

Chris Cook (29:27):

I’ve been emailing already.

Kory Gorgani (29:28):

Whatever you’ve done, you’ve got to start now.

Chris Cook (29:30):

Yeah, I’ve been sending emails to people saying, upload now because I want to review and help tweak and get you. Ideally, I want everybody that’s enrolled with the path to have their power plan uploaded by the 20th so that then they can go through Christmas, do your taxes between Christmas and New Year’s, or do something else. But your plan is already executed. You can manifest and dream about your successful year based on a plan that you’ve already delivered to me

(30:01):

That’s been set for review and accepted. So like I said, I’ve been gushing and I can’t stop because I do love the power plan, what you’ve developed, and I am really excited about having a vehicle to deliver it and keep people accountable. So here’s the way I would like to leave this is because this is going to air in a couple of days from now, which is the perfect timing. If there’s anybody that is listening to this that hasn’t enrolled for power for the Path and the use the Power plan that wants to either learn more or be involved, please do reach out to myself or Kory. It’s chris@RE/MAXhallmark.com or Kory@RE/RE/MAX.com, RE/MAX hallmark.com. And really this is an opportunity for you to start your year and to have, I think that this next year is going to be fantastic because we’re going to start seeing some signs of recovery. I think that the agents that are being proactive are going to start seeing, their years are going to start getting better

(31:10):

Because of the fiscal environment that’s going to continue to improve over the next five to seven years. But if you can get out ahead of that, then this is the tool to help you be intentional about the way you go. And this is a way for you to engage your office manager with the business development portion of what RE/MAX Hallmark really prides itself on and that we’re able to deliver. So thank you, Kory. Not just for being on the podcast, but for the work that you’ve done over since whenever you started this, but you’ve been a coach since 2016, and that’s evident I think, in what you’ve delivered here.

Kory Gorgani (31:58):

Fantastic. Thank you.

Chris Cook (31:59):

Really, really excited about it.

Kory Gorgani (32:01):

Thank you. I appreciate it. And thank you for putting path together. Okay. Because that goes hand in hand with power planning. So yeah. Thank you. Wonderful. Fantastic.

Chris Cook (32:18):

Huge thanks to Kory Ganni for being on today. Here are the top three things that I took from Kory and our podcast. Number one, daily actions beat annual plans. A simple one task per day system creates more consistent results than long, complicated business plans that end up being ignored. Second capability over accountability. Shifting the mindset from holding agents accountable to helping them see what they’re capable of, drives far better engagement and follow through. Number three, review cycles. Create real growth, weekly check-ins and 10 to 12 week cycles. Make it easy to adjust, improve, and avoid wasting time on activities that aren’t producing results. Thanks so much for tuning into this week’s episode of Mind Your Real Estate Business. Please do like and share this episode with somebody that you think would benefit from these episodes. We’ll talk to you next time on Mind Your Real Estate Business.