Mentoring, Coaching, and Goals for The New Year
You may or may not have noticed that I didn’t create any new blog posts in October or November… for those of you who follow me on LinkedIn or social media, you know I lost one of my greatest mentors at the beginning of October. My father.
From an early age, my dad taught me the value of hard work, perseverance, and kindness. He led by example, demonstrating the importance of integrity in everything we do. His unwavering support and encouragement gave me the confidence to pursue my dreams and believe in myself.
I’ll never forget the countless conversations we had about life, goals, and personal growth. His wisdom and guidance were like a compass, guiding me through both smooth waters and stormy seas. Whether it was providing career advice or offering a listening ear, he was always there for me.
As I reflect on his impact, I realize how truly fortunate I am to have had such an incredible mentor in my life. My dad’s legacy lives on through the lessons he taught me and the values he instilled in me. I strive to honor his memory by continuing to grow, learn, and make a positive difference in the world.
While the holidays are always a hard time of year when you’ve lost loved ones, it’s particularly hard because his birthday is always around thanksgiving. And firsts are hard. First holidays, first birthdays, and so on.
It’s not just firsts when it comes to grief that’s hard, it’s firsts when it comes to new things and changes. Like this new market we find ourselves in the housing market. With changes come the need for new ways to look at your business, your growth, or a perceived lack of growth.
Here’s the thing. When you lose someone or something changes, it’s sometimes a celebration to just know you got through the day. You put something together. You made it to the next step. We need to have this mindset in a difficult home building market as well. Sometimes we need to take the wins where we can get them, and the metrics we measure for business success sometimes need to be more esoteric.
Wins We Can Record Beyond Sales
- We valued our employees.
- We created a successful customer engagement.
- We are operating from a place of optimism instead of scarcity.
Don’t Let Fear and Sadness Rule
Something I’ve noticed is there is a sense of fear and sadness, a sense of loss in the new home sales market. Because let’s face it. It’s tougher. People need more trust and more coaching and hand holding to buy a house then they did just a year or so ago.
Focus on the Things You Can Do
This market doesn’t mean people won’t buy a home. It just means what we do and how we treat people is important. It means being empathetic. Understanding a buyer’s pain points, and understanding the things that will give buyers confidence, reassurance, and hope in their dreams of new home ownership.
Don’t Spend Time Wallowing in the Things You Can’t Change
There are things in life you just can’t change. The best thing to do is focus on the areas where you can effect change. That happens on a very local level within your company. I mentor and coach not online OSCs, but also leadership for new home building companies so that they can position themselves to win out over their competition.
You Can Create Change
By re-imagining your online sales process and the way you help your customers, you can win in a changing market. I help builders learn how to create amazing engagement and strong customer journey. Not just set appointments. Our goals for the new year should be to move on and embrace this new sales world we live in. There are a lot of things we have now that we’ve never had during the other real estate slowdowns. We have tools, technology, and a different way of looking at the people in our organizations. Let’s value these things, figure out how to create a wholistic approach to our businesses and we will all create winning change.
We can take some downtime to re-evaluate and review our processes, and better understand how we treat people, both internally to our companies and externally as our buyers. But we can’t wallow in our downtime, we need to then take action. From new processes, new company cultures, new training, and new technology. It’s all available to us.