Critical Questions for Strategic Thinking

What is your winning aspiration? Asking yourself this question sets the frame for all the other choices. A real estate brokerage must seek to win in a particular area, in a particular way. If it doesn’t seek to win, it is wasting the time of its people and the financial investment made to make to fund the company.

The next two questions are where to play and how to win. These two choices, which are intertwined with one another, form the very heart of strategy and are the two most critical questions in strategy formulation. Your winning aspiration broadly defines the scope of your real estate company or team’s activities; where to play and how to win define the organization’s specific activities—what your organization will do, and where and how it will do this, to achieve its aspirations.

Where to play selects the playing field and how to win defines the choices for winning on that field. It is the recipe for success in the chosen segments, categories, channels, geographies, etc. If you reframe your goal setting and strategy in your real estate business with these questions in mind, you’re already halfway there.