5 Steps to Reach New Heights in 2014!

Have you created a business strategy for 2014? If not, then you need to pay attention. Hoping for success isn't going to produce the results you're looking for, but planning for it will. During the Homes.com webinar, Plan for 2014: Hope is NOT a Strategy, Jackie Leavenworth highlights different strategies that real estate professionals can use to help track their success and reach their goals in 2014.

Leavenworth has been in real estate for 25 years, so she's no stranger to the obstacles that everyone inevitably faces during their career. During this time, she has become an international speaker and coach for real estate professionals who don't exactly have a well thought out or effective business plan. Jackie travels around the country every year to share her five step business plan with real estate professionals, providing a foundation for creating an intentional future and a profitable business.

Jackie explains that it's not a question of "if" brokers are helping their agents, because most of them do. Rather it's "how" they are helping that determines whether the agent will find success or failure. Leavenworth explains that when she was first starting her career in 1984, she was trained "backwards" because she was only provided with ways to market herself.

"It's a reverse business plan. We market ourselves and hope that marketing (a picture on a shopping cart, back of sports jerseys) attracts buyers and sellers we can work with and then turn into sales and get paid enough to pay our bills and run our business and have money left over to see the profitability in our life," she says. "Marketing should be the last thing we do, not the first thing we do. I would like for everyone to be very intentional about their life and business, which leads to marketability. It's going to be easy, just backwards from what we're used to."