The green shows how much progress we’ve made toward our goals. The red shows where we haven’t made our goals to date, and the gray is our stretch goal. Red in the bottom half of the chart means we aren’t doing the work to meet our overall goals.

As I said previously, “Setting your goals starts the process.” To ensure you meet your goals, you need a mechanism to track your progress.

My solution is fairly simple. I list each of our prospects in a spreadsheet with dates that record each milestone. Any time I want, I can see how we’re doing. As I’m writing this, we’re starting to slip behind on the number of prospects we need to meet our goal this year, which means we’re also falling behind on all of our other metrics.

Now I could simply say, “January is a slow time of year.” That would be a true statement, but it doesn’t help. I need to understand if the slippage is due to “a slow time of year” or something else. I have to be able to look honestly at our performance, especially my own, and determine if we really are doing everything we could be doing to meet our goals.

You need a growth mindset to succeed in this business, and a growth mindset requires brutally honest self-evaluation. In this case, I determined one reason we’re falling behind is that I’ve let myself become too distracted by unproductive parts of the business. That’s something I need to work on.

But another reason for the shortcoming is where our leads are coming from. Knowing that helps me focus our efforts better.

Good evaluation requires good data and a system for recording and evaluating that data. If you’d like to work with us, sell us a house, or just get a copy of the spreadsheet I use to manage our performance, please email me or leave a comment.

PS from your webmaster: If you want to receive Lee’s informative posts via email as soon as they are published, subscribe below. Be sure to look for our message of confirmation in your spam or junk mail folder!