Don’t teach your horse not to eat

My wife, Synnove, is from Finland. In the Old Country, she says, they have a saying: “Just when I taught the horse not to eat. It died.” That’s a good lesson for today’s real estate professionals. When looking to cut your expenses, just how much is enough? Most Rainmakers say they look at the decline in volume in their personal GCI or MLS market units. For example, their volume or the market may be down 10% or 20% in 2009 vs 2008. Rainmakers cut roughly one-and-a-half times that reduction in their marketing expenses. That means look for marketing savings of 15% or 30%. One top Rainmaker we work with reduced her newsletter mailings to her sphere from bimonthly (6x/year) to quarterly (4/year). That’s how she cut back 33%. She was careful not to drop out and stop entirely. That’s because her sales-source tracking shows that referrals from her mail list database produce most of her listings (about 64% consistently). Another Rainmaker revisited his database and trimmed the number of contacts by 40% — and his budget along with it. They’ve learned how to feed the horse less but not stop feeding it all together. The old lessons are still valuable today!