Don’t Major in the Minor

Don’t Major in the Minor

I saw a segment on a morning show this week where the panel talked about the best advice they had ever gotten and the one that really struck me was the advice to Not Major in the Minor.  Along the lines of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, this advice is something I have to remind myself of regularly.

We are a national virtual tour company so we have many details to juggle that the average real estate virtual tour photographer does not deal with.  We travel more than 50,000 miles per year and are on the road about 75% of the time.  Don’t get me wrong – with a virtual tour business like ours, we have to focus on the details…but the key to our success is to not get bogged down by the details.

For us the key to that has been to implement systems that allow us to automate the details and to set realistic expectations for ourselves.  In Part one of this blog, I will talk about three of the systems that allow us to focus on the big picture and automate the details.

RTV Virtual Tour Software — Choosing the right virtual tour software is mission critical for our Charleston virtual tour business.  Using a platform that is not only highly versatile but also easy to navigate through and create hundreds of virtual tours annually was our most important decision.

Quickbooks Online — One of the best investments we have ever made was moving to Quickbooks Online for our bookkeeping software.  This program allows us to have an easy overview of our finances no matter where we are.  Every morning, my husband gets online and updates our Quickbooks which means that from my computer, ipad or iphone, I can look at the status of all our accounts, who owes us and who we owe.  I can take a look at our Profit and Loss for the month or quarter or year.  I can see a balance sheet that shows us all of our liabilities and assets in real time.

SalesForce — I currently have over 32,000 messages in my “All Mail” folder of our email.  In addition to that, I have 1,200 individual prospects that I have entered into SalesForce.  We have photographed almost 1,000 virtual tours.  Want to talk about details?  I am a great strategist and big picture thinker but I am not known for my short term memory or attention to detail.  This means that I rely heavily on my contact management system to gather all these details into a manageable system.

Apple iCloud — We are a tried and true Apple family and for good reasons.  We each have our own MacBook laptop, iphone and ipad and AppleTV.  We love our Apple devices but we really love the fact that with the iCloud, all of our devices communicate with each other.  I can put an event on our calendar and immediately it shows up on all of our devices.  We can easily exchange documents and pictures and have the most updated versions of everything available to us.

These are just a few of the systems that we use to make our virtual tour business run smoothly.  Remember that systems are only as good as their users.  If we don’t keep the systems updated, then the details get lost.  The key is to integrate systems into our daily lives so that the systems work for us!

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