Section 1: Building Your Mission, Vision, and Goals
When I first started my wholesaling business, I had no vision, no purpose and no WHY. I didn’t have a deep purpose of why I was doing business. I was solely focused on numbers and making money for security, notoriety and recognition.
I stopped focusing on impact, and I was ultimately chasing money with no end goal in mind.
Mission and vision statements are critical to strategic planning when you’re first starting your business because it helps create your company’s identity and will serve as a guide when making company decisions.
In this Simple Guide, I want to spend some time talking about the importance of having a clearly defined mission, vision and goals to positively affect the success of your team, your team members and the people you service.
Defining Your Mission and Core Values
To start this thing off, I want to be completely transparent with you guys. For eight years, I conducted business without a clearly defined mission and core values.
I want to encourage you guys to sit down and really think about the reason why you started your wholesaling business and think about the impact you want to have on others.
Core Values
Let’s first discuss core values and their importance.
Core values are the fundamental beliefs of an individual or organization that helps drive your mission, vision and goals.
It wasn’t until roughly two years ago, I decided I needed to make a change in my wholesaling business. So that’s when Simple Wholesaling was born and I hired a business coach to help me define my company’s vision, core values and goals.
Here at Simple Wholesaling we have five core values:
Simple and Smart Systems
Leaving a Lasting Impression
Mission Minded
Faithful Servanthood to People
Enjoy the Ride
Now that we have defined our core values, we ensure that everything we do as a company and every person that we hire aligns with our core values and if I have to let someone go, it is typically because they didn’t follow our company’s core values.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to have a lot of them, so I would recommend having between 3 to 7 core values.
Here at Simple Wholesaling we always want to be mission minded. It’s no longer all about money and how many deals we close. It’s really about our mission which is to spread the Kingdom of God through empowering our investors.
Once you have your mission, vision and core values in place, the next thing you’ll need to do is set company wide goals.
Setting Goals
When I hired my business coach, he took me through a book called Scaling Up.
This book studies the Rockefeller family’s business habits and how they used those habits to scale their businesses and become the most powerful family in the United States.
The book includes a One-Page Strategic Plan which walks you through various aspects of your business from defining your company values, purpose, strengths, weaknesses and goals, and there is a section called the BHAG which stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
A BHAG is a clear and compelling goal of where you want your company to be in 10-to-30 years.
Now keep in mind that your BHAG may be so huge that you might not be able to see how you’re going to obtain at that very moment but this will become your company’s focal point to ensure your team remains focused on the end goal.
Once you have your BHAG defined, you’ll want to work yourself backwards and clearly define your 5-year goal, your 3-year goal, 1-year goal and then your 90-day goal which the book refers to as ROCKS.
Breaking down your BHAG into small steps will help you not only define your goals but this allow you and your team to know and understand the role they play into achieving the company’s goals.
Now let’s dive into a few strategize we use to keep our team focused on the end goal.
Measuring Your Goals
Have you ever played a pickup game of basketball? Did you keep score?
You probably did because someone has to win right? Well the same concept goes for business.
If you are setting goals but you aren’t keeping score, how do you know if you’re winning the game?
Setting Metrics
This business is all a numbers game so it’s important that you have keep metrics in place to help you reach your goals.
Let’s use this scenario as an example…
Your goal is to make $25,000 a month. Here’s an example of things you might want to keep track of:
How much money you’ve made each week in wholesale deals
What’s the average amount you make on each deal
So you’ve figured out that you make an average of $5,000 on each deal so you will need to close 5 deals in order to make $25,000
How many calls and people talk to close 5 deals
Just continue to break down each metric and then once you have the math figured out, you can communicate these metrics to your team so that each person knows which metrics they have to hit order to reach $25,000 a month.
Company Scorecard
Here at Simple Wholesaling we review our monthly scorecard and metrics to help us evaluate our goals and staffing neads.
Having a scorecard is a great opportunity to hold your team accountable because it gives everyone specific metrics they have to try to hit each week.
If we are trying to increase our leads by ramping up our direct mail campaign, we know only one person can handle mailing our 5,000 letters a month, if we want to double the amount and send out $10,000 a month, then we know we’ll need to hire another person.
Team Meetings
Have you ever played football or watched a football game?
Have you ever observed how the team gathers into their little huddle before the play and the quarterback tells the team the next play. Now everyone on the field knows what they’re supposed to do on the next play.
We do something similar here at Simple Wholesaling called the daily huddle where we quickly gather on a 15-minute phone call every morning and each individual shares what they are going to do to move the needle.
We also have a weekly meeting where we discuss various things going on within our company and we also talk about our scorecards during this time as well.
During our team meetings, at least once a month, I mention the core values in our meeting just to remind our team of our team values.
We also take the time to congratulate team member living out our core values during our team meetings as well.
Conclusion
My goal with this month’s Simple Guide is to help you paint the vision of what you want your wholesaling business to be, to help you set goals and break down those big goals into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals.
Next week I’m going to share tools I use to help create systems and track productivity. Read in next week!