3 MIND–BENDING

3 Mind-Bending Philosophies to Expand Your Professional Perspective

Beyond the day-to-day duties that make your business tick, so much of success is derived from the principles you put in place to guide your business. The foundational tenets you subscribe to can make or break your business for the long-term; they not only influence how you complete routine tasks, but also impact your growth, your ability to manage a team, and what the future might hold. With all that in mind, here are three philosophies to remember as you strategize your professional life—whether you’re mapping your monthly goals or creating an overarching plan for growth.

1Treat Your Business Like a Business

One of the perks of working in real estate is that you’re often able to create and manage your own schedule and volume, but that doesn’t mean you can skimp on the technical details of being your own boss. No real estate professional worth his or her salt would forgo empowering tools like a business and marketing plan, or spreadsheets to track cash flow and expenses, or regular profit-and-loss statements, or fiscal year budgets and projections. Taking these measures may appear daunting at first— and completing them will certainly require discipline and a learning curve—but harnessing valuable data and information can intelligently inform your professional decisions, strategies, and long-term growth.

2Achieve a Holistic Understanding

When schedules are busy, it sometimes feels like enough to reach the end of the week’s to-do list. But, if you’re planning on a lasting career built on year-to-year growth, it’s not enough to account for the short-term. By creating daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and five-year goals, you’re outlining and quantifying your progress. While your quarterly and yearly goals may be clear in your mind, what about five years from now? Perhaps you’d like to add to your designations, or incorporate a new team member, or add an additional branch. No matter how you envision your professional future, the first order of business is to create a timeline. Once you have a clear deadline in mind, it’s far easier to build out the steps and calendar necessary to achieve your goals.

3Specificity is Empowering

While you may have a general sense of where you’d like to see your business go in the next few months or years, it’s hard to work toward or attain a goal that’s abstract. To make the most of your time and efforts, you must identify and understand precisely what you’re aiming toward. For instance, instead of planning to add volume to your enterprise, outline a specific, attainable number to work toward. Or, if you’d like to add an administrative staff in the years to come, consider the details of this decision—the money it would take, the type of people you’d want to hire, how many hours per week they’d work, what tasks they would complete, etc. Adding hard details to your goals not only makes them more realistic, but progress is more easily made when you have specific items you can cross off your to-do list along the way.

While there are no 100% fool-proof or guaranteed routes to success, shifting your mindset from the present and the abstract, to the specific and the long-term can have a major impact on your chances of success. Instead of dreaming of being more productive or successful, do yourself a favor and craft a gameplan you can bank on.

JERMAINE FOX

JERMAINE FOX

Jermaine Fox began his real estate career in new home sales. “Right away, I loved the freedom,” Jermaine recalls. He built a strong referral base working with a builder, and got his license in 2011. “I haven’t looked back since,” Jermaine says. His clients value his experience, personal attention, and hard work on their behalf.

This past year, Jermaine moved to eXp Realty, where he heads a team that includes 9 other Realtors® and counting. Jermaine serves the Columbus, Ohio area, and an impressive 95% of his business comes from repeat and referral clients. “I love people, and my clients know I care about them,” Jermaine says. Whether through client parties, calls, notes, or visits, “I give back a lot to my people. I’m a giver. I learned early in the game that if I gave back to my clients instead of trying to chase internet leads and people who don’t know me, I would do well. I realized I was better off building a real business and putting clients first.”

One of the advantages clients find in working with Jermaine is that he can show them how to build personal wealth. And he leads by example: a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” Jermaine also owns an insurance company that was #1 in growth this year in the state of Ohio, in addition to flipping properties and investing in rental properties. “That’s what sets me apart,” Jermaine says. “I can help you build wealth through real

estate, but on top of that I can show you how to get passive income.”

When it comes to marketing listings, Jermaine’s extensive network—which he has built up through his other business ventures as well as through real estate—proves invaluable. In addition to sharing his listings on his own social media, he says, “I also send it to my team members and they share it, and I send it to my other contacts too, like wholesalers and contractors. Everybody sends it out.” Along with other techniques like broker open houses, this approach results in maximum exposure. “I did a flip recently and shared the open house with all the people in our network,” Jermaine says. “About 50 people showed up to the open house before we even listed it, and it was in contract within a few days.”

Jermaine’s future plans include growing the size of his team, and increasing their total volume to $50 million a year within the next two years. He currently does about $10 million himself, and his team finished this year at about $25 million.

When he is not working, Jermaine loves spending time with his son, coaching his sports teams, and going on trips together.

Above all, Jermaine says, “The most important thing for me is to give back. I love to mentor people. That gives me the most satisfaction in the world.” He emphasizes the importance of going the extra mile for his clients. “I love helping people, I know how money works. I love being able to help people make money from the equity in their home. That can shift somebody’s life in a big way, and I know how important it is. So whatever it takes for me to help get someone a house, I will do it. I figured out I can have everything in the life I want, if I just help enough people get what they want.”

To find out more about Jermaine Fox, you can contact him by phone at 304-617-5780, or by email at jermainefox05@gmail.com. You can also find him online at http://jermaine.columbusfoxgroup.com