Why Your Clients Call At Night, And 4 Simple Ways To Prevent It
Have you been called late at night by clients? These 4 simply time management tips will help you prevent clients from slowly taking over your schedule.
Have you ever felt like this?
If you’ve been in real estate for any amount of time, you’ve probably felt like this.
A client emails you at 8 p.m. and expects a response within minutes…
Or a client calls you at 11 p.m. and expects you to answer…
You only get paid when they finish the deal. And so it’s hard to not take every notification you get as a life-threatening event!
This can create a self-feeding cycle where you as an agent slowly let real estate consume you. And can also lead to burnout.
But let’s peek behind the curtain and figure out “Why do your clients call at night?”
Most of these problems are solvable with preventative action.
The four steps below will help you build systems that create that preventative action.
But why does this matter?
Because being in real estate is kind of like this:
You simply can’t build a stable business without every one of those steps.
And you can’t expect the number of phone calls you get late at night to decrease until you successfully implement a system that replaces you answering those late-night phone calls.
Here are the four steps you need to take to prevent those late-night calls:
The first step towards not answering the phone at night is generating leads.
Real estate is the business of lead generation.
It’s that simple. If you don’t have leads, you don’t have a business.
And if you don’t have a business, you are so dependent on every freaking deal that you have to answer the phone at midnight.
Why?
Because you don’t have enough cash flow coming through your real estate business to hire assistants without leads.
Here are several ways to generate enough leads to start working on systems to prevent late-night calls:
Honestly, the tactics here are endless. The key is picking 2-3 that you can commit to doing every day for the next year.
Generating leads (using any method) is similar to investing in a 401k.
You’ll see little immediate returns. But over the course of a year, the returns start to get compounding effects.
Look at this:
Over a 1 year period, you are putting in the effort of the blue line. And you get the reward of the red line.
Let’s take blogging as an example…
If you write 1 blog post per week, you’ll have 50 at the end of one year.
Given the law of compounding returns, you’ll actually reap rewards like you wrote 150 blog posts.
The cool thing is that these results (and the leads that come with it) help you generate enough business to hire people.
And then these people you hire can prevent you from having to work 24/7. Building incoming funnels of leads is the first step towards freedom of time.
After you’ve generated enough leads and business, the next step is systemizing your business.
For example, what emails get sent to what clients? When do they get sent? What needs to happen before the closing date? And when does that need to happen?
You will personally handle all these details for the first few clients. But, as leads grow, this work slowly overwhelms you.
The key here is this:
You must document every part of your business.
Here are two ideas for building great systems:
Try Nekst:
Try documenting everything in SkimWiki:
SlimWiki is this awesome service you can use to flesh out your internal guides.
I used it at Easy Agent Pro to create standard procedures for nearly everything. You can easily edit pages. And add team members.
The next step in outsourcing yourself from late-night client phone calls is to find a real estate partner.
The key here is to find someone who is the opposite of you.
Why?
Because you need two types of thinking in a real estate team…
You need the typical salesperson and the business developer.
The salesperson is always hunting for more leads and working on the sales process. This includes things like blogging, marketing, a follow-up process, and more.
And the business developer is always working on the internal client process. They need to build systems so that the paperwork is always completed 100% properly. And sellers are staying up to date on the progress of their listing being sold.
These two activities are very different. And require different types of thinking.
You’ll never fully be able to separate yourself from clients calling you unless you perfect both systems.
Finally, the goal of everything you do in a given day should be to:
Your goal as a business owner is simply to put something in place that makes your assistants, sales representatives, other agents, and clients’ lives better tomorrow. Here are what 8 agents do on a daily basis to build their businesses.
The ultimate version of this is building something that makes itself better.
For example, if your assistant discovers something wrong with the way you’re filing paperwork for certain mortgages…
Do they fix the system?
Do they alert you to fix the system?
This final step is how you create a business that can fully operate without you. And prevent the situation where clients call at night.
Quick note:
If you’re interested in checking out Nekst, here is a 20% off promo code for you.
Promo code: easyapro20
It will give any new user 20% off any Pro Plan for 6 months.
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