Are you struggling to make money for your real estate brokerage but find yourself focusing your time on non-income-producing activities? In this video, I’m going to break those activities down and help you find the solution to spending less money and time on them. I’ll explain how you can become more profitable by working on your business, not in your business.

How Your Brokerage Spends Its Time

Making money as a real estate brokerage can be pretty tough, especially if you’re focusing a lot of your time on non-income-producing activities. However, there is a solution to eliminate a lot of the friction and consumption of bandwidth—i.e money and time—to help you be more efficient and become more profitable.

We’ve all heard the saying that we have to work on our business, not in our business. But the reality is, it’s really hard to work on your business when you’re so consumed with everything that’s happening in it.

Auditing Agents’ Transactions

One of the things that you’re likely spending a lot of time on is auditing your agents’ transactions. Every transaction is different. There are a ton of different files and a ton of different documents, and every transaction bobs and weaves in its own direction.

Imagine for a moment having a custom-built transaction tree that gives your brokerage the ability to create an interface and transaction management portal. What if it’s completely customized, not just to your brokerage, but also to the specific type of transaction that your agent is doing? What does this do for you? Number one, it makes it easier for agents to stay compliant, get to forms, and stay on top of the transaction.

Number two, it reduces the time it takes for your transaction auditing team to actually audit a file. For example, when we incorporated Sweetassist.com into our brokerage and started using transaction management, we found that we were about able to shave off about 60-70% of the time we were spending per transaction on auditing a file. This is because we now have a completely customized, robust transaction management system that is built for us and how we do our business—combined with the customization of the exact transaction the agent is doing.

So let’s be more efficient in our auditing, which helps us save time, save money, and ultimately help our agents to close transactions and get paid faster.

Bookkeeping And Paying Your Agents

The second thing that takes a lot of time—especially with a lot of volume—is frankly one of the most boring parts of this business: bookkeeping and paying your agents. So how do we fix that? Many of you are probably using something like QuickBooks to do all of your books and journal entries. But what happens when you close a transaction? You have to get the commission approved and paid out, receive your portion of the money, go journal it, and put it into QuickBooks.

Imagine for a moment that there was software—like Sweetassist.com—that had QuickBooks integrated straight into the transaction, the lifeline of the file, and the transaction closing. When you can integrate these different tools that you’re already using and help one system talk to another, you save your bookkeeping and accounting team—along with a lot of time and frustration—when those two systems speak to each other and integrate as if they were one complete, built unit.

Think about how much time we’re spending cutting checks, journal entering into QuickBooks, and going back and forth between those two. When you use something like Sweet Assist that incorporates it all to one, this makes the time that your team spends on accounting and bookkeeping way less and way more effective.

Working In—Not On—The Business

The third thing that I see that really holds a lot of brokers and brokerages back from becoming more profitable is the fact that they’re still working in production. There are a lot of brokers out there—probably like you—that are still out there working with clients, holding open houses, and doing all the things that you were as a productive agent.

Layer on top of that the idea that we need to recruit, we need to run our brokerage, and we need to stay compliant, and all that stuff adds up. Every time we say yes to doing something, we’re saying no to doing something else. So what’s the solution?

What we started to do in our companies is to go very heavy with outsourcing different tasks and activities. These are things that need to happen to either keep us moving forward as a producing broker or keep us moving forward as a brokerage, supporting our agents.

Time=Money

For example, let’s say you want to make a million dollars a year and you’re working 40 hours a week. That means you need to make $526 every single hour of the 40 hours a week that you’re working. So here’s a little activity for you to work on. Consider journaling in one-hour blocks for about a week.

Write down everything that you did in your 40-hour workweek, like what you did from 9:00 am to 10:00 am and so on. Then, go through that list and put a price tag on how much it would cost to outsource that work to someone else.

What you’ll find is that you’re probably spending your time on $10-30 per hour type activities. How can you make a million dollars a year working 40 hours a week when you’re spending hours on these $10-20 activities?

The Importance Of Outsourcing

We have to find a way to remove ourselves from these different things—and this is why outsourcing is so important. Remember that hard work always has to get done and things you don’t like doing always have to get done. However, it doesn’t mean that you have to be the person that does it. In fact, there are people out there that love to do the things that you hate to do. There are people out there that love to do the things that are keeping you from going out and producing more income.

Consider using all of the different outsourcing tools out there to open up your time. Get the things off your desk that aren’t making you as much money as you’d like or that you don’t like doing. You can then reinvest that time in highly income-producing activities. Remember, making money does not create the opportunity. The money that you create and put into action for you is where the opportunity lies.

It’s easy to make a couple of bucks. However, the question is, ‘How can I leverage my money to help me make more money?’ The answer in this scenario is to consider outsourcing. You don’t have to go hire full-time employees. There are a lot of good people that you can hire as a contractor out of your office to do individual tasks and keep your business moving along.

Identify Income Impacting Activities

Let’s assume for a moment that we have done this; we have started outsourcing work, which in turn has given us more time. This means that, both in production and growing your company, you should have more time available as a brokerage. So what are the most income-impacting activities you can engage in, the ones that really move the needle? Recruiting, training, and empowering your agents.

For example, once you take activities off of your plate and have created more time, it becomes imperative that you start to time block those activities into your daily schedule. I’ll tell you something that I believe very strongly in: in all of the companies that we work with, sales fix every problem that they’ve ever had. In other words, creating income makes everything easier.

So ask yourself: what are the activities that you can be working on, such as recruiting, to bring more revenue in the door? What will help you maximize the time you’ve gained by outsourcing activities?

Reaching Your Financial Goals

I hope this helped you understand a few things that are killing brokerages and brokers’ ability to scale and become more profitable, preventing them from ultimately reaching their financial goals. By identifying non-income-producing activities and finding ways to outsource them, you can make time for more profitable things that will help grow your business.

If you want to learn how Sweet Assist can help you with many of these systems, make sure to schedule a demo today to learn more. Reach out if you have any questions, and be sure to subscribe to our channel for more information on how to be successful in your brokerage. See you on the next one!