Believe it or not, putting revenue first in your real estate business is not as easy as you think.

Cash Is Like Oxygen For Your Business

I read… A lot.

And almost every book I read is a business book that tells us to “put revenue first.”

And that makes total sense to me because revenue is the lifeblood of any business. Cash is like oxygen – without it, your business dies.

What didn’t make sense, though, was how to actually put revenue first – especially when you’re first starting out and you haven’t even generated any revenue at all.

Stop Being Cheap

So most agents interpret “revenue first” to mean “be as cheap as possible”.

That could not be further from the truth.

Anyone with a license can start a real estate business. The low-cost of overhead makes the barrier to entry extremely low – which also makes it one of the easiest businesses to start.

But just because something is easy to start, doesn’t mean it’s easy to succeed.

What most agents don’t realize is that no matter what business you start, it takes money to make money.

Because any dollar amount multiplied by zero will always be zero.

Where Revenue Comes From

To put revenue first, we need to ask ourselves where revenue comes from in the first place…

Revenue comes from sales.

Sales come from leads.

And leads come from marketing.

So you actually have to put marketing first. Without marketing, you have no revenue, and without revenue, you have no business.

Just a really expensive hobby.

It’s An Investment, Not An Expense

At this point, I’ve worked with thousands of real estate agents. Out of all the top producers I’ve worked with, none of them are cheap. In fact, they love to spend money on marketing. Because they know that the more marketing they do, the more money they make.

And that’s the difference between the agents who have built businesses and the agents who have built hobbies. Business owners deal with investments and hobbies deal with expenses.

If you went to Las Vegas and found a broken slot machine that gave you 9 dollars for every 1 dollar you put in, would you ask how much money you should spend? No! You would ask where can I find more money to put into this machine!

That’s how you have to look at your business. As long as you’re getting a return on your investment, you should be gathering up as much cash as you possibly can to dump into it.

A Simple Way To Put Revenue First

The good news is that you now know what it actually means to put revenue first.

You have to start with marketing.

The bad news is that you can’t just market haphazardly, because you’ll end up spending all your revenue on marketing.