October 2023 Newsletter

Southeast Region Sponsors

Dawn’s Coffee Talk

Happy October Southeast Region!  Grab your cup of coffee and that favorite flannel blanket to keep you warm and let’s all pause for a moment to just chat!

Coffee talk is one of my favorite things to do with people.  Often in my life, People will ask me, “Can we grab dinner?”  I must confess, I am a Coffee Talk kind of girl over a dinner kind of girl.  It’s so much easier right?  You never have to worry about spinach in your teeth and unless you are going to chew on some chocolate-covered espresso beans…..no grinds ever show up in your grill on a coffee talk.  Unfortunately, the hustle and bustle of life sometimes has us rushing through drive-thru coffee bars to get our morning or late afternoon cup of Joe and we never really get to create community with the Average Joe out there.  Coffee goes with Community.  Do you know what else coffee is good for?  Helping you push through the 4th quarter of your business!  Trust me, it’s science!  I’m sure PubMed has an article somewhere to support this claim!  

The real question we need to ask is, “What is your plan for finishing the 4th quarter strong?”  Before you answer, maybe it is worth going backward and reflecting over the first three quarters of the year.  Do you know what you did well?  Have you identified the areas of improvement that need to be made?  Is what you did from January to September gonna get you to December?  Will you hit those goals you set for 2023?  Many people enter into the 4th quarter of their business with the intention of setting the cruise control button and rolling through the holidays.  Then we wake up on January 2nd with a really bad business hangover.  What would it look like if you did things DIFFERENTLY this year?  Here is a 10-point checklist to make sure you finish the year strong:

1.  Get a good coffee pot.  You will need it.  Save the money you would be spending on your daily Starbucks and put it into your reserve account.
2. Get a Reserve account!  Make sure that for every dollar you earn, you are also putting some in the reserve account to save up for that rainy day.  You should have at least 3 months of expenses saved. 
3. Read Profit First:  Make sure you are paying yourself FIRST!
4. Print out an October, November, and December Monthly calendar and mark all of your vacation days for Q4.  Here is a link to get you started:  https://print-a-calendar.com/printable-calendars/one-page-per-month
5. Set an appointment a day!  This could be a listing, buyer, or profit share appointment.  Any of the three are guaranteed to help you build wealth!
6. For each day you don’t set an appointment, write the word VACAY on your printable calendar.  
7. Post the printable calendar in your office AND on your fridge at home.  Tell your family what you are doing.  (You might have to do some explaining when those additional VACAY days start showing up!)  Did someone mention ACCOUNTABILITY??!! 
8. ATTEND a Business Planning Clinic!  Everything you are doing in the 4th quarter is really setting you up for 2024. You need a PLAN!
9. Write down every morning 3 things you are grateful for and post on Social Media.  You will need a reminder of why you are doing what you are doing!  Gratitude is the highest form of energy after Passion!
10. Set a Coffee Talk date with someone you want to spend time with! Prepare questions ahead of time to ask them and leave the coffee talk time by adding value to the other person.  My only request is….order some good coffee!  Life is way too short for bad coffee!  

My desire is for each of you to finish the year strong!  Winners are made in the 4th quarter and we are a region of WINNERS!  Proud to link arms with each of you as we navigate this season together.  I look forward to reading all of your gratitude posts on Facebook and hearing about YOUR Coffee Talk experiences. Love you guys a latte!

Dawn

From September KWRI Reports:  In an effort to recognize individual teams and groups we are using KWRI reports which reflect GCI.

PATRICK’S TECH TALK

If you work in real estate and pay the least little attention to social media and the news, then you can’t have escaped all the conversations revolving around AI. One side of the conversation has a bunch of excited early adopters looking for any way to exploit its capabilities, while on the other, there are those who are afraid that their industry is about to be displaced. There are ethical concerns to this technology. Economic concerns. Equity opportunities (such as making language translation simple). And of course, privacy rights are front and center. No matter where you fall on the spectrum, though, I think it’s safe to say that AI is here to stay.

So, what is AI? A form for Skynet? No. It’s just a rebrand. We’ve had it for a while.

The concepts behind machine learning and what we call AI have existed for many years. The only thing that has changed in the past year or so has been our general accessibility. To give a bit of clarity around what it is, most of what we refer to as AI in this space is what they call an LLM, or a large language model. The short of it is, you throw bunches of words (or data) in one end, give it a prompt, and it uses algorithms to spit out a word salad on the other end. This word salad tends to feel natural because it was modeled around how we as humans speak. This is what makes it “feel” alive.

In recent days, social media has given rise to several apocryphal quotes over AI in our industry, such as, “There are two kinds of agents, those who use AI, and those who will no longer be in the business.” While I do not believe this to be entirely true, AI can certainly save you time and help you make more money. For many of us, we spend our time on tasks we did not get licensed to do. We work for hours on marketing or drafting emails or generating and nurturing leads. Much of our time is spent on the functionary parts of the job, not the fiduciary role. This is where AI can help.

Need a quick draft of a marketing plan you’ll revise later? Chat GPT does a great job giving you a starting point. Can’t think of the words to thank someone for joining you for an open house? Give it a prompt, see what it writes. Need social media post ideas for the month? Just ask. Give it what you want, your target audience, the tone, and an outline of the format. Write to it like you are speaking to an assistant.

But remember, when you leverage AI the result it gives you is only as good as the data it is given. It makes mistakes. It quotes false information at times. It can be biased. Always review and check any facts that it repeats back. Do not take them for irrefutable truth. Use the tool to save time, but not to replace your sound judgment as a human being.

If you’re like me, you might be asking yourself, did he write this article with AI? I could have (but I didn’t). Or did I? You decide.

– Patrick Mauldin

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