Feb

Real Estate Summit Meeting

By Emily

Today I spent some time preparing for Grassland Investments‘ quarterly summit meeting which is scheduled for next week. My real estate company of five members, each living in a different state, gets together every 3-4 months to meet in person and discuss vision and direction for the company.

As I put together some notes of things I wanted to make sure we covered, such as:

Income goals – how much money do we want to make and distribute this year?
Acquisition goals – How many properties do we want to buy and what size. (For example, we’re moving away from working on buying property worth less than $5 Million because it takes just as long to find the deals and put them together, but it’s not as lucrative, and thus not a great use of our time.)
Charity goals – We currently support a number of charities, but how can we do more and/or get more leverage with our giving. For example, last year, we donated money to JDRF – and we made sure to give enough that we could get credited as a named sponsor in a golf tournament. As a sponsor, we got an opportunity to speak, to have our logo on T-shirts, to have our literature distributed AND to invite 16 people to the golf tournament. We gave some of the golf positions to key business partners and we auctioned off several of them to our investors, in exchange for a donation to the charity.
Lifestyle goals – All our partners work from home and value the work-life balance that comes from being your own boss, but not being a slave to your business. Since I am having a baby this year, and one of my partners is planning to adopt a foster child, we want to make sure that we have enough time to reach our business goals WHILE STAYING IN BALANCE with our personal goals.

While we clearly don’t re-set all our goals each quarter, we’ve learned over the past few years that it’s very valuable to re-assess our goals on a regular basis to see if we’re making progress toward them as anticipated AND to see if the goals still fit with what we want to be doing as a group.

We also review our mission and vision statements every time as a way to make these "living documents" (as discussed in the book Good to Great) which we feel is an important practice.

Even if you don’t have business partners to have fun with every few months, make sure that you keep your goals and mission out in front of you so that as you grow, and your business grows, you can make sure that things are happening in the way you want them to.

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