It might not come with fireworks, parties and rousing renditions of Auld Lang Syne, but just like New Year’s, the end of financial year offers the opportunity to review, reset and relaunch.
It’s the chance to check in on your goals, and make some resolutions for the year to come, while also tending to money matters and gauging your past performance against the cold, hard metrics of your actual financial performance over the past 12 months.
Money matters
When it comes to assessing this year’s performance, nothing beats the black and white evidence of your group certificate, profit and loss or business balance sheet.
These are numbers that cannot lie and tell you a whole lot about the year that’s been, including whether you achieved your goals.
As you review your financial performance, ask yourself these questions:
What did you intend to achieve this financial year? When you set that objective, did you set it in concrete? That is, did you actually mean it?
The power of intention
When you plan and set goals with intention, you don’t get the chance to “editorialise”.
With a clear intention, you remove the luxury or opportunity to adjust.
You eliminate the possibility of letting yourself off the hook or making yourself feel better by justifying that you didn’t intend to do it in the first place.
Sure, plans might change along the way, but you should always refer back to what you set out to do.
When you analyse your performance against what you intended to do at the outset, you give yourself the opportunity to honestly gauge what happened.
If all’s gone to plan, you have the chance to congratulate yourself for achieving or surpassing the original target.
If you have fallen short, it is the opportunity to learn, grow and reset for the next 12 months.
Planning breeds action
But the end of financial year isn’t just about looking to the past. It’s also about setting goals for the year ahead and creating the plans that allow you to achieve them.
There’s immense power in planning. Write down your goal, then work backwards, reverse engineering exactly how that goal will be achieved.
For example, set a GCI target, then consider:
- How many properties would you need to sell in a year, based on your average commission?
- How many listing presentations would you need to make to sell that many properties?
- How many appraisals would you need to conduct?
- Now break it down, how many is that a week?
- What do you need to do to secure that many appraisals in a week?
That’s your plan. That’s what you need to do.
Small actions, massive results
The smallest of actions are often the catalyst for massive results.
Remind yourself of the power of compounding.
For example, would you work for me if I was to employ you for 30 days, and offer you 1¢ for the first day, and thereafter double it each day for the balance of the month?
So you’d receive 2¢ on day two, 4¢ on day three, 8¢ on day four and so on.
After seven days I would owe you $1.27 with 23 days left. Would you still turn up for the balance of the month?
You should, because had you accepted my job offer I would have paid you $5,368,709.11 over the course of 30 days.
Will you thank yourself next year?
There’s power in intention, planning and small actions. There’s power in knowing where you are now compared to where you’d hoped to be.
So as the clock ticks down to 30 June and we turn the calendar page on a new financial year, take the time to review, reset and relaunch. Your future self will thank you this time next year.
Manos Findikakis is the CEO of Agents’Agency.