In a poor environment, why do some thrive while others languish? I’ve experienced several market changes, but none more memorable than the Global Financial Crisis. At the time, others insisted that we wouldn’t maintain our high profits in a market where approximately 30% of offices were ready to close.
The media was heavily publicising economic problems, and it would have been easy to blame the market, accept that we could not maintain our results and begin a period of poor outcomes and income.
We made the decision not to blame the market. The Australia-wide real estate results in our group proved that winning offices were not affected in this poor market. Those in the top 100 in the boom were still in the top 100 in the tough market — we couldn’t use the market as an excuse.
We quickly made a decision not to settle. We adopted the mantra, “We are market proof — results not excuses.” We couldn’t change the market, but as a team we made three decisions to limit our exposure to the negative market hype:
1. We stopped reading the paper and watching the news — choosing only to hear radio news headlines. We had to keep the negativity out.
2. We decided to eradicate market excuses from our vocabulary. The market was never blamed for a poor result.
3. We were careful who we listened to — limiting our exposure to non-believers, who said that good outcomes weren’t possible during the GFC.
It worked! We continued to thrive during the GFC and afterwards. We were a highly profitable office gaining market share and a reputation as an optimistic agent with a refreshing attitude amid a very negative real estate environment. We actually won business because we were a refreshing change amongst the doom and gloom.
You can’t always change your external environment, but you can control your exposure to it. The path to greatness appears when you choose to see things differently.
You can thrive in any market and in any environment!
Every Minute Counts and You Can Have It All!
