“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” ~ Stephen Covey
Have you ever worked backward from Friday? At the end of the week, imagine you are sitting down and looking back…what would make this week great?
We can’t control the market this week, yet we can control the daily activities that lead to our expected outcomes.
I’m sure you would agree – without a doubt – we are in uncertain times. The paradox is this: we need both uncertainty and certainty in our business. Yet, from the conversations I’ve had this week, we have more uncertainty than certainty. How can we create more certainty?
If you show up for the day with no structure in your calendar and decide to do “urgent” tasks like returning calls and texts and checking Facebook, those activities will expand and eat up all the time you hoped to devote to more “important” activities. You will end the day unfulfilled and have more uncertainty. Get clear on what you want, make it part of your everyday routine, and have a plan for when you feel stuck or lost. That is a winning formula.
The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule but to schedule your priorities.
The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
Ten excuses the top 1% all made, yet figured out a way to bust through:
1. I don’t have time
2. I don’t have the money
3. I will try it next year
4. I don’t have enough data
5. I am too tired, skeptical, or biased
6. No one ever did it before
7. It’s too much work
8. I could fail
9. I will wait until I retire
10. It’s too risky
You can bust through too. One of my associates told me all of these “excuses” are rooted in some sort of fear, so really the top 1% are masters of fear.
Near-death by a car accident, boot camp, Kilimanjaro Summit day, Hellmecula, Snowmageddon, Spartan Beast, crazy markets, and so much more.
Some things are just hard, and you want to quit.
I’ve made it through some tough situations with this one strategy: looking only a few steps, tasks or minutes ahead.
“Doing the next right thing.”
At certain times tunnel vision is a good thing.
Consider this – the next time getting through a challenge that seems like it might be too much for you. Lower your gaze to whatever the next minute, step, or task is right in front of you. Then take it.
There are times when big-picture thinking is needed. Yet the moments when you doubt you have the strength or the desire to put one foot in front of the other isn’t among them.
Focused Time. The top 1% know that less is more! Say what?
Who would you imagine to be more productive—someone who works 55 hours a week or someone who works 70?
If you guessed the latter, you’d be incorrect. Research done by Stanford showed that productivity diminishes after 40 hours and falls off a cliff after 55 hours. In essence, less is more.
Resource? Life on The Wire by Todd Duncan – in his book Todd challenges the status quo in search of a better, smarter way to work and live.
It cripples our society in destructive ways: racism is rooted in ignorance, bigotry is rooted in ignorance, sexism is rooted in ignorance, tolerating violence is rooted in ignorance, oppressing the poor is rooted in ignorance.
Ignorance causes misery.
Transformation requires suspending our ego along with an open heart and mind. I’m at war, I’d like us all to be at war against ignorance.
When you are inconsistent, nothing works at the optimal level.
Here’s what I know: recruiters, talent attraction coordinators, team leaders, managers, and real estate sales professionals who consistently set and attend appointments are producing more results, period. These leaders are consistent and disciplined in their daily prospecting and marketing routines.
Consistency… social media does not work if you are not consistent; geographic farming does not work if you are not consistent; repeat and referral does not work if you are not consistent; open houses will not work if you are inconsistent; online leads – a waste – if you are not consistent; recruiting and talent attraction is a roller coaster without consistency.
Show me something in your business that works when you are inconsistent.
Anything you are going to do, the more consistent you are with your mindset, attitude, approach, expectation, strategy, and tactics, the more predictable the result.
Bottom line: when you are consistent, everything works… when you are inconsistent, nothing works.
So my question is, what have you been inconsistent with?
What has that inconsistency cost you financially, emotionally, or physically?
I’d submit that the action we can all take is to be more consistent in creating, setting, and attending more new appointments.
We cannot control the market.
We can control ourselves, our thoughts, and our actions.
Next Steps:
Make an appointment-setting goal for the next 2 weeks and share it with an accountability partner.
Gather your past client list, all of your past leads, open house registers, and people you know, and start making appointments today.
Be CONSISTENT… list the 1, 2, or 3 things you must do consistently to propel your business forward.
Mark’s Note: Originally published February 2023. This version adds the Recruiting 8 D’s, a section on market intelligence, and a clearer split between the two audiences this post serves. If you read the original, there’s enough new here to make it worth another pass.
Pull up your calendar from last week. Now pull up your new appointment count for the same week.
Do the two tell the same story?
The calendar shows how you spent the week. The appointment count shows what it bought you. When those two numbers stop matching, you don’t have a business problem — you have a confusion problem. You’ve started mistaking activity for productivity.
Here’s the line I’d draw: an hour that ends with a scheduled next step is progress. An hour that ends with a good feeling is motion. Most weeks are full of motion.
Appointments are the lifeblood of this business. Not leads. Not listings. Appointments. Nothing happens until you’re sitting across from someone who needs to buy, sell, or make a career decision. Your marketing, your branding, your social media — all of it is noise until it produces that moment.
And appointments are the one thing you actually control. Not the market. Not rates. Not your competition. But you can pick up the phone. You can knock on the door. You can show up. That’s where your power lives.
Two Audiences, One Discipline
This post is written for two people, and I’m going to speak to each of you directly rather than making you translate.
If you’re an agent, this is about setting more appointments with buyers, sellers, and the people in your sphere who need to hear from you today.
If you’re a recruiting professional, this is about getting in front of agents who haven’t yet realized their next move starts with a conversation with you.
Same discipline. Same math. Same payoff. Where the tactics diverge, I’ll say so.
Stop Defining “Appointment” So Narrowly
Most people in both roles wait for the perfect appointment — the signed listing agreement, the committed candidate. That mindset starves your pipeline.
An appointment is any meaningful interaction that moves a relationship forward and ends with a next step.
For agents:
A listing presentation with a motivated seller
A buyer consultation to understand goals and timeline
A property preview with someone thinking about a move
Coffee with a past client or referral source
A conversation with an investor, an HR director, or a relocation specialist
For recruiters:
A first phone conversation with an agent who actually picked up
Coffee with someone who’s been on your radar for six months
A follow-up call where an agent finally opens up about their frustrations
A brokerage tour with someone seriously considering a move
Any conversation where an agent asks a real question about what you offer
Every one of those counts. Start tracking them that way and your numbers — and your confidence — change in a week.
The 8 D’s: What Moves a Homeowner
Nobody wakes up and decides to move for no reason. Life events drive transactions. Learn to recognize them and you’ll never run out of people worth calling.
My good friend David Knox identified the eight that consistently drive real estate decisions:
Death — when a homeowner passes, the property often has to be sold to settle the estate.
Divorce — separating couples almost always need to sell the shared home.
Diamonds — engagements and marriages send couples looking for their first place together.
Downsizing — empty nesters want less space, less maintenance, more freedom.
Diapers — growing families need more room, and they needed it yesterday.
Deployment — military families face timelines and constraints that often force a sale.
Default — financial hardship leads to foreclosure, and those homeowners need guidance, not judgment.
Displacement — job changes, company relocations, graduations. Life transitions move people.
Once you’re looking for the D, you stop cold-calling strangers and start talking to people in the middle of real change. Completely different conversation.
The Recruiting 8 D’s: What Moves an Agent
Inspired by David’s framework, we built the parallel set for recruiting — the forces that make an agent open to a conversation about their career.
Read these in two groups, because they don’t do the same job.
Seven of them are what you offer:
De-Risking — agents want protection. They need to know their broker has their back on legal, compliance, and the deal that goes sideways at 9pm on a Friday.
Development — agents want to grow. Stage-appropriate training, coaching, accountability, and mentorship pull hard, especially on agents who feel stuck.
Differentiation — agents want to be proud of the name on their card. What makes you meaningfully different from every other option in the market?
Direction — agents want leadership with a clear plan, high standards, and a vision for where the office is going.
Dollars — agents want their true net. Not the split. The split minus fees, caps, lead costs, and support costs.
Dynamics — agents want a culture where people collaborate and hold each other to a standard. The day-to-day feel matters more than most brokers admit.
Digital — agents want tools that work. Automation, lead systems, tracking, marketing assets that produce measurable results. Not shelfware.
One of them is what makes them listen:
Dissatisfaction — when an agent is unhappy enough with their leadership, their culture, their comp, or their trajectory, they become reachable.
That eighth one is the whole ballgame, and it’s the one you can’t manufacture. Dissatisfaction is never announced. It shows up in the questions agents start asking, the frustrations they let slip, the call they finally return after nine months.
You can’t create the moment. You can only be in the conversation when it arrives. That’s what persistence actually buys you.
7 Keys to Setting Appointments Daily
1. Make it non-negotiable. Appointment setting isn’t what you do when the morning frees up. It’s the first block on the calendar — before email, before admin, before anything. Pick the window and defend it. Mine would be 8:00 to 10:00; yours might be different. What matters is that it’s the same two hours every day, and that everyone around you knows not to touch them.
Run the math once and you’ll stop negotiating with yourself: two appointments a day, five days a week, is about forty a month. Nobody who sets forty appointments a month has a pipeline problem.
2. Expand your definition of a win. A real conversation with a past client is a win. A preview with a curious buyer is a win. For recruiters, a ten-minute call where an agent finally tells you what’s actually frustrating them is a win — that’s Dissatisfaction surfacing, and it’s worth more than a polite no. Volume and consistency build pipelines. Perfection builds nothing.
3. Get your head right. Your mindset walks into the room before you do. If you believe you’re bothering people, your voice will tell them so in the first four seconds. Say it until you mean it: I provide real value to the people I talk with every day. You’re not selling. You’re serving. Recruiters — if you genuinely believe your brokerage offers agents a better future, the call isn’t an intrusion. It’s the service.
4. Work your CRM like a business partner. Because it is one. Every lead, every past client, every agent prospect, in the system with a follow-up date attached. If it’s not in the CRM, it doesn’t exist. And a great CRM is only as good as the person opening it — daily.
5. Find your Automatic Shot and run it. Everyone who’s winning has one source that reliably produces. For most agents it’s past clients and referrals. For others it’s a farm or a niche. For recruiters it might be a production tier, a specific competitor, or a geographic pocket you know cold. Identify yours and work it relentlessly. Don’t chase the shiny new lead source — master the one already paying you.
6. Get sharp on objections. The difference between people who set appointments and people who don’t comes down to what happens after the first no. Don’t memorize scripts — learn to listen. Ask the second question. Understand what’s really underneath. Lead with curiosity instead of a pitch and objections turn into conversations. I went deeper on this in Persistence Part 1.
7. Stay goal-focused, not outcome-attached. Your job today is to set the appointment. That’s the whole job. Stop trying to diagnose whether this person will list, buy, or make a move before you’ve had the conversation. Hit the daily number. The deals — and the recruits — follow the appointments every time.
Walk In With Something They Haven’t Seen
Before any appointment — buyer, seller, or agent prospect — know your market cold.
There’s a version of the opening line that changes the temperature of the whole call: “I was looking at the data for your area this week and noticed something I thought you’d want to see.”
That’s not a sales call. That’s a resource. Resources get appointments. Real-time market data — [I use Altos Research Reports] — is what makes that line true instead of a setup.
For how this connects to persistence and long-cycle follow-up, see Persistence Part 2.
Start Tomorrow Morning
Three things, before lunch:
Block the window. Same two hours, every day, starting tomorrow. Put it in as a recurring appointment so you have to actively cancel it to skip it.
Name the D. Take the first ten names on your list and write which D you think is driving each one. That’s your opening line, already written.
Pick your number. Not calls. Appointments. Write it on something you’ll see at 8am.
The Bottom Line
This business rewards the consistent, not the occasional. Every agent winning right now has one thing in common: they’re talking to people daily. Not when they feel like it. Not when the market cooperates.
Same for the recruiters building brokerages worth joining. Discipline over feelings. Consistency over intention.
That’s how you win the day.
A System Will Produce What A System Will Produce, Nothing Less and Nothing More!
“A coach is someone who helps you see what you don’t want to see so you can be who you’ve always wanted to be.” ~ Tom Landry
One of my former associates, real estate team leader and top producer from Austin, Texas, is also a “coxswain” and a rowing coach. He told me a story about a new rower placed on a boat with eight others. He noticed she appeared to be working very hard and sweating profusely. Yet, her technique was so off it wasn’t helping the team.
Can you relate to a time when you’ve been working hard and not getting the result you intended?
A rowing team – and your business – need more than just quality, skilled resources. You also need all your resources in the right seats, doing the right things.
Here’s the thing I learned about rowing: in an eight-person boat, each rower has one oar—four on port and four on starboard. If one side pulls harder than the other side, the boat turns. If one side’s oars are raised higher than the other side, the boat tips. To find the set and create a swing, everyone must work together to balance the boat and have the exact timing. Your hands must be at exactly the right height as you slide up to the catch. Every oar has to drop into the water at the exact same time. Everyone needs to pull under equal pressure. All the blades need to come out of the water and release in unison. Any deviation disrupts the boat.
So, what can we learn?
First, have a clear direction, but an easy hand on the steering: The “coxswain” job is to keep the boat on course and steer the straightest line possible. Steering too much means zig-zagging over the course and rowing far more than 2,000 meters, which adds to the time. The trick is to keep the end in sight and steer to a center point far down the course, not trying to keep coming back to the center every stroke. To do this, the coxswain calls out increased pressure for a few strokes on one side of the boat or the other to correct the course rather than use the rudder, which slows down the boat.
Learning: High-performance teams always keep the end in sight and know the ultimate objectives of their work. Without a clear picture of the goal, teams thrash with the process and fail to achieve proper alignment in their activities. Going in the wrong direction as fast as you can doesn’t get you any closer to the finish.
Second, it’s not how hard you work; it’s how hard you work together: It turns out that pulling as hard as you can without pulling together actually slows the boat down. Imbalanced power will veer the boat in one direction and throw off the catch and release timing. Uncontrolled straining at the oar can tip your weight left or right and toss the boat side to side. A successful team pulls in perfect balance and with perfect timing.
Learning: Successful teams know that performance is a function of collaboration and coordination, not a sum of individual effort. Knowing how your contribution affects the outcome and staying highly aware of what others are doing while staying in sync are critical to delivering results. Reacting quickly, deliberately and in a coordinated fashion allows teams to adapt to changes, handle new information, and stay on target.
Or you already have a team and are now questioning that choice?
Maybe you already have a team performing at a high level, and you are looking for a boost?
You see, we’ve just about seen it all:
Starting a team too early;
Starting a team for the wrong reasons;
Starting a team without a straightforward value offering;
Starting a team with no or poorly written team agreements;
Letting your team and performance get stagnant.
In the most successful teams we know, the leader assumes the CEO role of the team, and they always lead with revenue! And they understand this:
“A system will produce what a system will produce, nothing less, nothing more.”
Here are a few thoughts to consider as it relates to team leadership:
Team Requirement No. 1:
Do you have a clear and compelling value proposition?
Will you be a lead provider?
Will you be a coach, trainer, and mentor?
Without a clear value, turnover will be the challenge you face.
Team Requirement No. 2:
You’re on Target or Ahead of Your Production Goal
Bringing additional team members aboard is not only a big responsibility… It’s taking on a serious expense.
If your income cannot support additional team members, you only set yourself up for failure.
Get your house in order, and then consider taking that next step.
Lead with revenue first
Team Requirement No. 3:
You Have At Least 4 Successful Pillars of Lead Generation
You have solid influence strategies (referrals) in place or control strategies (online leads) in place.
You’re tracking and measuring all your leading indicators, right? (If not, you’re not ready for a team.
When you look at your lead sources, are you producing multiple sales monthly from AT LEAST four different pillars?
The key here is to ensure your business is diversified sufficiently to support additional sales agents on your team.
Team Requirement No. 4:
You Have Lead Follow-Up Systems in Place That Create Raving Fans and Ensure a High Level of Service
Are your systems in place to the point that you can say you’ve operationalized your business?
If not, it’s not a total deal-breaker, but know that developing systems as you grow your team will steal precious time away from your more immediate dollar-productive work. Can you afford that?
Team Requirement No. 5:
You Have an Accountability Structure in Place That is Utilized Daily
As a team leader, you need a built-in system to hold you accountable to your schedule, the systems you have in place, and the others on your team.
This accountability structure begins with you and must extend to all who join your team.
Suppose you’re not consistently sticking to a morning schedule and setting that example for others. In that case, it will be difficult for you to expect team members to perform with the necessary daily discipline to succeed.
If not, you might want to work on your discipline a bit before putting yourself out there as a role model.
Team Requirement No. 6:
You are on a mission to grow your leadership skills and serve your team members
Face it, some of us just don’t want to “manage” others, and all that entails
If you are not into people with a decent EQ level, you might want to consider options like a sales or operations manager who can handle those things.
Now that you’ve considered six factors for team success, I have a practical exercise to start the process.
Why do you – and your team – do what you do? This may sound like an odd question, yet one example could be: Are you in the real estate business (I sell real estate) or the problem-solving business? (We help consumers navigate the complex process of buying, selling, or investing in real estate with ease, transparency, and less stress.) See the difference?
How are you different or unique? And does that matter to the typical consumer?
Who is our ideal client? And how do you reach them in relevant, consistent ways?
Hyper-local. Are you constantly working to become a hyper-local expert? The portals and national chains can never be the hyper-local expert.
Growth plans – what is your vision? If you are in one city, do you want to expand into other cities or even another state?
There you have it; the opportunity is yours.
Consider this…
With all the plans, strategies, goals, innovations, business practices, and culture that make up your team, you are getting exactly the results your business systems and processes are currently capable of producing – nothing less, nothing more! Looking to be more outcome-focused? Read this blog from Mark Johnson, co-founder of CoRecruit.
To get better results, you must improve the design and execution of your business systems and processes—at the detail checklist level.
The law of cause and effect governs all business outcomes. To change an effect or result, you have to change the cause.
Leaders make one thing more than any other: decisions.
Every environment has constraints, and the decisions about how time and resources are allocated – about what to do next – drive all outcomes.
How do leaders decide what’s next? Is it based on urgency, proximity, or values? It’s a mix of each, yet the top 1% make more value-based decisions.
The top 1% know the first in + first out approach is not an effective strategy; it’s typically an excuse or by default. Even worse: defaulting to the squeaky wheel strategy. Leaders minimize the whirlwind. By design vs. by default.
By design vs. by default
PS: Need help with talent attraction, selection, or sourcing accountability? Just a DM away.
