Reinvention – The Spice of Life

Companies go stale. Keep doing the same thing for long enough and eventually the company loses its edge. A complete reinvention can do wonders for team enthusiasm, market awareness, and public perception. Reinvention IS the spice of life. Well, corporate life at least.

Branding

How long has your company had its current logo? It might be time for an image update. I don’t mean change your name, although it might need to be brought into the 21st century. For example, in September 2014 Pittard Training Group changed to Pittard. Having ‘group’ in a company name was fine in the nineties, but these days it’s just that – nineties. So out it went.

Marketing

The old Mortein slogan, “When you’re on a good thing, stick to it” is apt when thinking of marketing. If your marketing works, stick with it. But check and test the response and change when your statistics indicate a fall in enquiry.

Website

Many corporate websites need a good shake up, and chances are yours does too. Ours did. Every year you should review the content on your website, removing out of date material and posting fresh items loaded with keywords that improve your Search Engine Optimisation rating.

Every five years – MAXIMUM – your website should receive a complete ground-up rebuild. Websites are subject to fashion trends too and many real estate agency websites look tired and dated.

Internal systems

Review your internal systems. Can you find ways to be more efficient? As the leader, you don’t have to think of everything. Ask your team – no doubt you will receive plenty of good ideas for improving systems and streamlining procedures.

Training

Too often, good training is wasted on people who don’t use it. Set standards with your team for not only training, but action.Results should improve after training. If not, the training is no good, or the people are not using it. My guess is number two. Getting salespeople to work on the right actions is the number two challenge leaders face (number one is finding good people).

Train your people, and set minimum action expectations.

Do things differently

The purpose of a reinvention is to force change, to do things differently, to remove stale practices and to renew corporate energy and enthusiasm.

Do it properly and you will revitalise your company’s image in the market, improve team morale, and it will inspire you to seek other opportunities within your market.

I am not suggesting that you do something that we would not do at Pittard. In the last three months of 2014, here are just some of the things our company went through during our reinvention:

• New branding
• New website
• Rewrote and launched our management system – the Agency Profit System was born. This was a massive task and the last time I did it, the task took nine months alone. This ground-up rewrite saw us revolutionise hiring, allowing our offices to find good people and make them an offer of employment within seven days.
• Rewrote all of the marketing for our offices.
• Launched an industry-first training streaming service callediTrain™.
• Bought an office, fitted it out, and moved the team.
• Introduced career information webinars for our offices.
• Introduced salesperson coaching for our offices, embracing the latest Virtual Classroom technology.
• Hosted what many said was our best three-day annual convention ever.
• Engaged Dr Denis Waitley to speak at the Pittard Leadership Conference in June 2015.
• Began training in South East Asia – our first two seminars in Singapore were planned during our reinvention and presented in February 2015. More are scheduled.
• Other innovations that we might keep to ourselves so our competitors don’t find out until we want them to!

And we had fun. These were exciting times that positioned Pittard as the industry leader in real estate business systems and real estate training. We finished 2014 knowing that we had, as a team, accomplished something special.

I promise you that a good reinvention will invigorate you, your team, and your company too.

Give it a go. You won’t be sorry.

Gary Pittard