Five years ago when my oldest daughter started middle school volleyball, I declared to her after observing a few matches that I could coach a winning team by doing just one thing. I would, I told her, spend every practice having every girl practice serving. 100s of serves each, every practice. Not until every player could serve with 90% success 90% of the time would we even practice anything else. And by serving well and consistently, the team would win every game. Of that I was certain.
And now my youngest is playing girls middle school volleyball, and nothing has changed on these middle school teams. I watched two matches last night. If a coach, at that level, were to do nothing other than teach every kid how to serve the ball over the net with 90% success, that team would win every game even if they lacked the ability to do anything else.
How did I become an expert at girl’s volleyball? Simply by observing the mathematical fact that very few serves are successfully returned. Often, less than 10%. Get a serve over, you get a point, 9 out of 10 times. And most players can’t get a serve over. Thus, the games are reduced to a contest of missed serves and missed returns, with very few actual volleys back and forth.
At the level of play I was observing, the team who got the most serves over the net won, period. To confirm this, I even kept a scratch sheet one match, tracking the number of serves made and missed by each team. And the theory was proven. No team ever wins without getting the most serves over the net.
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Having run out of magazines to read around the house this month, I perused my bookshelf of old books the other night and pulled down my old copy of Eat That Frog! and started rereading it. There on page 19 is the chapter about the 80/20 rule, or Pareto’s Principle. Vilfredo Pareto would have been a successful Realtor because he would have understood how to use his time and focus his efforts. The rule says, simply, that 20% of our efforts account for 80% of our results. Or, stated the other way around, 80% of what we do accounts for only 20% of the results. We should, therefore, figure out what activities or efforts produce the most solid results, and focus on doing a lot of those things and less of the other. This is actually the same observation about serving that one can make while watching middle school girl’s volleyball.
Were I to coach a 7th grade girls volleyball team and employ my serving theory, my team might not consist of the most well rounded players, but they’d know how to serve consistently and we’d win every game. We’d be champions by doing just one thing really well with consistency.
So what’s this have to do with real estate and whether Realtors are successful or not?
It has everything to do with it. When other agents or even regular people we know ask me and Sylvia “how’s the real estate business?”, and we say, “great, we’re staying really busy”, they often seem surprised. “I thought it was a terrible market in Austin and everybody is really slow, how do you guys stay busy?”, they ask. The question is answered in 5 simple words…
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