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Accountability, honesty and determination are essential for any agent who wants to fulfil their career goals and achieve their ambitions in 2025, REIA president and CEO of Laing+Simmons Leanne Pilkington said on a recent episode of REB's Secrets of the Top 100 Agents podcast.
In a recent episode of Secrets of the Top 100 Agents, CEO of Laing+Simmons and president of the Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA), Leanne Pilkington, unpacked her forward-thinking approach on how agents and real estate leaders can set themselves up for success in 2025.
The cornerstone of the approach: goal setting and accountability.
The real estate veteran explained that Laing+Simmons sets annual goals during a pre-Christmas retreat, before using the quiet period to refine them into a strategic roadmap.
Senior leaders then create their own individual roadmaps serving as accountability benchmarks, with specific tasks laid out in 90-day sprints. The 90-day sprint is key to both setting up new projects while maintaining daily operations.
When developing your roadmap, Pilkington advises agents that the “key is to be really clear on what it is you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it”. Understanding this question then unlocks “who you need to help you and what support you need” to hold yourself accountable to your own goals.
When agents truly understand what they want to achieve, they can then work with one another to reverse engineer the path to their desired outcome.
As an example, Pilkington said: “If you want to make $1 million GCI (gross commission income), what’s your average commission? How many sales are you going to have to do to do that? Is that realistic in your area?”
Through this process of reverse engineering, Pilkington said an agent can easily break down their progress towards their goal, and added: “It’s pretty easy to see if you’re doing the numbers or not.”
To further promote a sense of personal accountability among her own staff at Laing+Simmons, Pilkington noted that she also doesn’t tell her corporate team “what they need to achieve throughout the year”.
“They know the financials, they know the growth numbers and all of that sort of stuff that is ideal. But they come up with projects that they want to do and we talk about why, and then we cost them, we break them down, and then they’re giving me permission to actually hold them accountable,” Pilkington said.
The CEO emphasised that this accountability must also be accompanied by an ongoing framework of transparency and support that will help staff to deliver their work projects, which then empowers them to personally strive to achieve their own goals.
Ultimately, Pilkington said that being honest and clear when determining your goals for the year ahead is essential to achieving further success in 2025, stating elsewise: “You’ll just go on the same way that you went on last year.”
“It’s really important to reflect on last year, what went well, what didn’t, what you could do differently, and what you don’t actually need to do,” Pilkington said.
Listen to the full conversation with Leanne Pilkington and Liam Garman here.
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