Business Planning

Cross These Off Before You Write Your 2027 Business Plan

A 20-minute exercise to run before you add a single new goal.

It's the first week of November, and you've probably got a Saturday morning set aside for planning. Coffee, a blank spreadsheet, and a GCI goal at the top that's bigger than this year's.

Then the list of new stuff starts growing. A new lead source, daily video, maybe a podcast, and that CRM half the agents at the last conference kept bringing up.

Come February, you're running this year's business with all of that stacked on top.

So this year, try starting with what you'll stop doing. Cross a few things off first and build the plan around what's left.

Your costs are growing faster than your income

NAR's 2026 Member Profile, which covers 2025 business:

Sources: NAR 2026 Member Profile; NAR 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers

Put those side by side. Expenses grew almost ten times faster than income, and two out of three sellers still show up through someone they already know. Cutting the right things is probably the fastest raise you'll get in 2027.

What you need (about 20 minutes)

• A list of your 2026 closings
• Your last 12 months of bank and card statements

If you can pull up those two, you can get through the whole exercise in one sitting.

Cut 01The lead source that cost money and closed nothing

• Next to each closing, write where it really came from, even if the answer is less exciting than you hoped.
• Add up what you spent on each paid source this year: portals, ads, referral platforms, sponsored mailers.
• If a source took your money for 12 months and isn't on the closed list, cross it off.

For the sources that made the cut, do one more bit of math: what you spent divided by the closings it produced. That's your cost per closing. Compare it to what a referral cost you, which for most agents was a lunch and a thank-you card.

Most agents who do this find their year came from three or four places. Those go in the plan.

Cut 02The software you pay for and never open

• Pull every recurring charge from your statements.
• For each one, ask whether you've opened it in the last 30 days.
• If you haven't, cancel it today while you're looking at it. Waiting until planning day is how it survives another year.
• If two tools do the same job (two schedulers, two design apps, two CRMs), pick one.

Small subscriptions add up quietly. Eight of them at $39 a month is $3,744 a year, close to 40% of the median agent's total expenses.

Cut 03The hours that never turned into a deal

Open your calendar to a normal week from this fall and highlight every block that didn't move a deal forward. Then pick your three biggest time sinks from the year. They often look like:

• A weekly newsletter that never gets a reply
• Six months with a buyer who was never going to buy
• Doing your own transaction coordination at 10pm

Decide what happens to each one: stop it, simplify it, or hand it off.

Cut 04The goal you've copied into three plans in a row

Pull up last year's plan. There's usually one line that's been on it since 2024, like "start a podcast," "post every day," or "farm that neighborhood."

If it's been sitting there for three years, it's turning into a source of guilt more than a goal. Give it a first step and a date this week, or take it off the list and stop carrying it around.

Cut 05The job you're doing alone that someone else should own

Most agents skip this question: what are you handling by yourself only because nobody else is set up to do it? For a lot of agents it's some mix of:

• Marketing
• Admin and systems
• Accountability
• Having someone to talk a tough deal through with

A lot of agents who had a hard 2026 were working plenty. They were just doing every job themselves. You don't need to solve it in this exercise. Writing it down is enough for now.

Before you cross anything off, check these

It's easy to cut too much, so look for these first:

• Referrals don't show where they started. A coffee meeting or a pop-by shows up on your closed list as "referral," which makes the activity behind it look like it produced nothing. Trace each referral back one step before you drop whatever earned it.
• Some work takes more than a year. If you started a farm in June or began nurturing your database this spring, it probably hasn't paid off yet. Give it the time it needs before you judge it.
• Check how much you actually did. If past-client calls "didn't work," count how many you made. Two calls doesn't tell you much.
• Leave room for one new bet. If you cut every experiment, 2027 will look a lot like 2026. Keep one, with a budget cap and a date to review it.

Now write your 2027 business plan

Before you open the spreadsheet, fill in your cut list. Screenshot it or tape it to your monitor.

What's left is a shorter plan, and one you'll actually be able to run in February.

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