The secret to most successful businesses starts with a great idea, motivation and a business plan. But if you’re thinking about avoiding that often-dreaded third element, you may want to reconsider.

A business plan can help you:

Keep Your Goals In Check

Your business plan is the perfect place to keep track of the goals you’ve established for your business. Having a clear snapshot of what you want to achieve can actually help you achieve more.

Keep your goals clear and simple and build them around what you consider important to the success of your company. Set realistic goals and tie them to your mission. Try using the marketing SMART goals acronym to help you decide which to pursue. SMART goals stand for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. With a business plan, your goals are within easy reach for a quick reference to help keep you on track with your career.

Develop & Grow Your Contacts

Generating leads is going to be one of your top priorities as a real estate agent. When you write your business plan, the execution section will give you the opportunity to compose your marketing and sales strategy. Here, you can build the roadmap of how you are going to reach your customers, how to keep them engaged and how to market to each audience. When you have a clear view of your lead generation strategy, you can easily stay focused, conserving time and energy later, down the road.

Keep Track of Your Finances

Don’t start your real estate business without a financial plan. Creating a business analyses and budget can help you set income goals for next year. Track your number of transactions broken out by buyers and sellers, your gross commission income (GCI) and total business expenses. By calculating your average GCI per transaction, you’ll be able to figure how many more transactions you need to execute in order to reach your financial goal for next year.

While creating a business plan may seem daunting, just take it one step at a time. Put a plan in place, execute and stick with it. Revisit your plan throughout the year and analyze what you set out to do. When it comes down to it, the point of a business plan is to help keep you on track to meet all of your goals.