The single most important formula for success in your career and life can be found in the term “ISIT”.

1. Identify
2. Strategize
3. Implement
4. Track

 

This formula can be applied to all of the following

–          Your goals

–          Overcoming obstacles

–          Changing bad habits

–          Your buyers

–          Your sellers or listings

–          Negotiating a contract to close

 

Let’s use your 2012 income as an example.  If you have decided you want to make $100,000 in real estate during 2012, you must:

1. Identify in writing that this is your goal. (Remember, if it isn’t in writing it doesn’t exist.)
2. Develop a strategy by writing down where your income is going to come from, and how you expect to get the closing you need to make this amount. (Once again, if it isn’t in writing, it doesn’t exist.)
3. Implement your strategy, or as the Nike commercial put it: “Just Do It!”
4. Track your results– If you think a strategy will work, implement it and you win. Even if your strategy isn’t successful, you win. By knowing what doesn’t work, you can modify your strategy. This gets you even closer to what will work in the future. Tracking also must be in writing, or it doesn’t exist. We all know people that continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. This is because they can rationalize their failure when they haven’t documented it. Don’t fall into this trap.

 

The ISIT formula is also critical for use with your listings.  As a Trusted Real Estate Advisor, you have an obligation to use ISIT with your Listings. Your Seller is paying your company 6% of their gross sales proceeds (even though this amount is being split with your broker and another agent’s company) because they believe in your ability to get the job done. If you aren’t using ISIT to strategically plan for success in selling their home, and it doesn’t sell, you have done your seller a disservice.

 

Many agents argue that the fault isn’t theirs. That it’s the seller who refused to take the agents advice by, say for example, reducing the price to make it competitive. But, this is just a poor excuse. The solution to getting a price reduction and selling the listings lies in using ISIT to get the price reduction as part of the plan to sell the home.

 

The ISIT formula is also great for personal goals such as losing weight. A good strategy may be to use a diet to help achieve the weight loss, but if the amount of calories being eaten is greater than the amount of calories being burned each day, the goal will never be met. By document the caloric intake in writing each day, the goal is much easier to meet because you don’t rationalize what is being eaten.

 

One final note, if you were to use ISIT with every goal you wanted to achieve, every obstacle you wanted to overcome, and every bad habit you wanted to change, you would be spending all day each day just writing things down. It’s best to use ISIT only with the 20% activities that are going to make the biggest difference in your life.  Remember, it’s all about TRACKING AND PLANNING!