The 5 Steps of change for Self-Employed Agents
With any big change in your life, you go through five distinct steps along the journey. Taking the step of moving into self-employed agency and away from your employed role is a very nervous time. This process is no different and there are five steps to tackle as you work through this process.
I feel it is important to highlight this process as it helps you understand the roadmap you are on and helps justify some of the feelings you might be having as you move along in your journey.
1. Dream
It all starts with a vision of what the future could look like for you. As you sit in your latest long management meeting, or on a long commute late at night after a hard day’s work you may think to yourself that there is a better way of doing this business. You dream of a better work/life balance, dream of more money and more autonomy in all areas of your life.
2. Leap
This is the moment you step off the edge and past the point of no return into your new role as a self-employed associate agent. It is now on you to create leads and interest in the properties that you are trusted with.
3. Action
This can sometimes be called the messy middle; it is where you are deep in the work and you are grinding away to get results and to remain consistent. You are knocking on doors, dropping leaflets, going to networking events, remaining prolific on social media, working within the network, and generally prospecting like mad to create opportunities for your business. You can spend some time in the ‘messy middle’ before you move to step 4. This is where our partnership is so important, we will assist you in this time with marketing support, ideas sessions and accountability to make it successfully through this stage.
4. Climb
This is the moment the snowball starts to roll for you, you have a good pipeline, great experience now as a self-employed agent and fully understand the processes involved and how you move your business from A to B — this is the exciting part of the journey. As the growth really starts to come, new business seems to come towards you — this is not by luck, this is by the hard work involved in step three.
5. Arrive
This is a big moment; this is the moment you reach an initial goal that you set for yourself when you were dreaming about what the future could look like for you. This might be that you have Saturday mornings back to take your daughter to football. For the autonomy that you now have and the ability to deliver the service level you want, to go the extra mile for your clients and creating raving fans that get behind you every step of the way. This may be a financial goal that you have set yourself to match or exceed what you had been earning in your employed role, whilst having the benefits mentioned above and no management meetings, KPI’s or pulling together figures!
This is the five-step journey of change as a self-employed agent. The beauty of mapping this out is to help people understand where they are along the journey, and to help identify the pain points along the way. Once you move through these five steps you often start dreaming again — that dream may be to now expand your business further, to take on an assistant or to earn £100,000 in personal income in your second year of business.
Whatever your next dream may be once you have arrived, you will be keen to start working through the next five steps of your latest dream. If you would like to hear more stories of how our self-employed agents have gone through their first year of business and what their dreams are now as they move into the second year of business and beyond, let me know. I would love to put you in touch with them to hear firsthand how they have worked their way along this journey as an associate agent with the support of David Lee.
Lee O’Brien
07771635853
