Andy Griesinger // (443) 299-8946 // andy@andyre.com

Is setting goals not your forte? Do you get down on yourself because you’re constantly scrolling social media seeing everyone post their success stories and boasting about growth in their business? That stops today.

Every online guru likes to talk about strategies for setting goals — all the right ways and all the wrong ways to set goals. I am no guru, but today I want to go through how I personally like to set goals and how that’s developed a mindset that helps me grow my Charlotte real estate business every single year, as it has for the last seven years.

Today we’re going to go through the two different things that I think about when I go to set goals:

1. Setting quarterly goals that are measurable.
2. Setting annual goals.

The combination of the two and the way I do it helps create a mindset that keeps me fueled throughout the entire year. Whether I have a good day or a bad day, I know that if I can review those goals, I’m going to be able to stay on track.

If I’m exceeding the goals — great let’s adjust them.

If I’m not hitting the goals — that’s okay, we can adjust them too.

Ultimately the way you set goals develops and derives this mindset that keeps you going every single day, which is critical to succeed because as entrepreneurs we fail every day. The most successful people are the ones who fail the most and who just keep getting back up and keep going. The reason they’re able to do that is because they understand the mindset of what it takes to get where they want to go.

Setting Quarterly Goals

The biggest thing with quarterly goals is you want to set just a few of them — maybe three or four so you’re not overwhelming yourself. Two is fine as well if you can’t think of three or four. However definitely more than one.

The biggest thing when it comes to quarterly goals is making sure they are achievable, trackable, and measurable.

Your goals also need to have a number associated with them so that you know if you hit them or not.

Setting quarterly goals allows you to take a step back and reassess your situation professionally and personally every three months. You can use this opportunity to reassess and increase your goals — whether it’s selling a number of homes, traveling a certain amount of time, saving an amount of money, losing weight, or going to the gym.

Whatever your goal is, it helps to put on paper exactly what you’re doing and what you’re not doing to stay accountable.

Now one trick, if you really want to stay accountable is to start posting on social media what your goal is and how you’re progressing.

Let’s say your goal is to go to the gym or work out 80 days in that quarter, and you start posting on day one, day two, day three, and so on. What starts to happen is that people who follow you begin to expect to see when you hit day four, day five, and day six, as well as what kind of workouts you’re doing. When your friends and family start expecting to see your progress, that’s going to hold you even more accountable than tracking your progress privately.

Setting Annual Goals

When I set annual goals, I like to break them down into three different categories:

1. Floor Goal – you should be able to hit this if you just wake up and go through the motions without really having your foot on the gas the whole year. Even with minimum effort, you should hit your floor goal.
2. Target Goal – this one should be a little bit higher, typically something that’s going to stretch you. You should be able to hit this goal if you are working hard and moving along throughout the year. Typically the target goal is going to be a higher number than whatever you sold or earned the year before.
3. Game Goal – this is the big one. Your game goal happens when you are firing on all cylinders and everything’s going right. Hitting your game goal as a Realtor means you’re getting calls for big listings and you’re increasing your average pricepoint.

Setting Goals As A Realtor

It’s very natural that your quarterly goals will correlate with your annual goals. Let’s say professionally, you set a goal of selling 40 houses in 2024 — which would be around 10 houses per quarter.

If in Q1 you sell 8 houses, now you know in Q2 you need to sell 12 houses in order to catch back up.

Or on the flip side, if you sell 15 houses in Q1 instead of the 10, maybe you need to look at your annual goal and increase it slightly because typically Q2 and Q3 are very busy quarters for us as real estate agents.

Through this example, you can see how your quarterly and annual goals can mesh together in a very nice way depending on how you set them.

Structuring goals this way allows you to stay on pace throughout the year and it creates motivation to keep growing. For example, if you can hit your floor goal by June or July, it motivates you to work harder in order to hit the target goal even earlier so that you’re on track for the game goal.

Structuring goals this way also helps prevent you from getting down on yourself if you’re not hitting your highest goals or getting close.

A lot of real estate agents will sell 20 houses in one year and then turn around the next year and say, “Okay I did 20 last year so my goal this year is 40.”

But then what happens is if they get halfway through the year and have only sold 15 houses, they realize that they’re probably not going to hit their goal of 40 and start getting a little less motivated to go out and work harder each day.

What I would do if I sold 20 houses last year is set my floor goal at 20 houses for the next year. My target would be 30 because that’s going to stretch me a little bit more, and my game goal would be 40 houses.

Following this goal setting structure will help you build a mindset that will allow you to continue to grow.

The Most Important Part of Goal Setting

The final piece of advice when it comes to setting goals is that you need to make sure you are surrounding yourself with other people who are growth-minded like you are. This is how I was actually able to sell more houses in 2023 than I did in 2022 even though there was a huge drop in transaction volume that year across the market.

I was able to sell more because I had the right goals set, the right mindset behind those goals, and surrounded myself and my team with the right people.

I was master minding with people who were way above and beyond where my goals were, learning from them, and going to conferences to be face to face with some of these agents who were doing way more business than me.

Every little bit that I learned from them, I implemented in my business. And while I don’t necessarily need to be selling a billion dollars in real estate every year, I can promise you that there are things that I can learn from agents who are selling a billion or half a billion or a hundred million dollars in real estate every year.

Surrounding yourself with more successful people, growth-minded individuals, and entrepreneurial people who are trying to obliterate their own goals is one of the biggest keys to being able to succeed even in a down market.

If you want to learn more about the people that I surround myself with or maybe you’re interested in working with us and figuring out what it looks like to set goals, I’d be more than happy to talk with you. All you need to do is shoot me a DM on Instagram or e-mail me. I’m more than happy to help you with your goals as are all of my peers, mentors, and coaches that I’m aligned with.

Starting today, make sure that you’re aligning yourself with the right people to help you set your goals because it’s never too late to set goals for 2024.