Almost every successful business owes that success to careful planning and budgeting. Knowing your personal and business expenses, as well as planning your marketing activities to produce your desired income is an extremely important budgeting activity. Revisit your plan regularly and make changes if necessary, then follow it.
Difficulty: Average
Time Required: Two hours
Here's How:
- As a self-empolyed independent contractor, you first need to know your personal expenses to maintain your lifestyle. By spreadsheeting these expenses and even seasonalizing them if necessary, you will be able to better determine what you need to do in your business to generate the necessary income.
Here's information and a spreadsheet for personal expense calculations.
- Once we know what we need for income personally, then a budget for our real estate business can be calculated. This takes into account expenditures for marketing and the expected results from it, as well as a seasonal breakdown. Here we need to be realistic with our expectations for income that will be generated by our various marketing activities. One approach is the sales funnel, so named because we're estimating income out the bottom of a funnel for prospects coming in by type of marketing.
- For those who would like a more structured and supervised approach, you could check out the CreateAPlan® Agent Business Planning System, or the corresponding system for brokers.
Tips:
- Be conservative in your income expectations and careful to not leave out any expenses.
What You Need:
- Microsoft Excel to use the spreadsheets.
