🌟How to be in the top 10% of your industry.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Minnesota RealtorsⓇ Unite, the state RealtorsⓇ association’s annual conference. 

In my second breakout session, we got into a super common roadblock you might have experienced:

We were talking about how to figure out where to spend your marketing dollars and walking through the process. At one point I asked the room if they had ever attempted this kind of thing themselves. 

Of about 80 people in the room, roughly 10% said yes. 

For the remaining 90%, some said it had simply never occurred to them…

But most said the process seemed too intense or complicated.

This is such a common roadblock! 

It feels overwhelming (“Where do I even start?”)...

Or like it would take forever…

And in the end you might not like the answer (“What if I find out I’ve been doing everything wrong?”)

This strong resistance to looking backward at your finances comes up all the time with my clients. 

If you can relate, here’s my current opinion on how to get stop resisting and start making progress:

• If we’re talking about your personal spending, start today and track going forward. For the most part, you don’t need to delve into the history if it’s going to cause anxiety and be counterproductive. In my experience, awareness is the key to getting a handle on personal spending and you can do that going forward.

• If we’re talking about business spending in general, you’re going to have to go back and summarize what’s happened at some point (tax time will come around again whether you're ready or not). So it’s truly going to make your life easier to start with accounting software like QuickBooks Online sooner rather than later. Set it up now and you’ll be off to the races in 2025 with a goldmine of information that’s a click or two away. 

• If we’re talking about business spending on marketing activities specifically, I recommend going back at least two years, because it takes time for new activities to start producing. It could not be more critical to go back to at least January of 2023 and add up the different places you spent your marketing dollars in 2023 and 2024. This is step one to figure out how to stop losing money and start making more money! 

And if you find out you’ve been “doing everything wrong”...that’s actually a good thing. 

Because now you know and you can make changes to start getting more bang for your buck (and time and energy). 

Meanwhile, 90% of your competitors will still be confused, anxious or broke.