Spend your time and energy on more profitable work in 2025.

CRE Success Principle: Your ideal clients are the ones who align with your values, respect your time, and allow you to deliver your best work—focus on nurturing those relationships.

Ever heard of a "get out of bed fee"? 🛌 💵

It’s a minimum transaction size that you stick to, so that your time and energy are spent on more profitable work.

Let’s make 2025 the year where you have set boundaries, say no to timewasters and know exactly who you want to serve.

This is your ticket to more happiness, higher productivity and faster growth.

I've created a simple framework to identify and create more golden opportunities.

If you like the sound of this, join me for episode 203 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Episode transcript:

What if 2025 was the year that you and your team do more lucrative deals with the most desirable clients?

Let's talk about how we can make that a reality.

Hello and welcome to Episode 203 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak. Hope you had a fantastic Christmas new year break.

And if you are still on the break right now, I hope you are still enjoying it.

And if you're back, I hope you're back with a bunch of listings to launch and a team that's motivated and ready, and you're motivated and ready for a fantastic 2025.

Now, before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to share a bit of an insight from one of my clients.

I spent a bit of time at the end of last month or in the middle of last month, really, because I was on holidays from the 15th of December, talking to my clients about their reflections from the year 2024 and what they were proud of.

And one of my clients mentioned that one of the things that he was proud of was the fact that he actually decided to contact me and take that first step towards, getting some help to get his business to the next level.

And my work with him is definitely not remedial. He's got a fantastic business and it's one which anyone would be proud to lead.

But it was one which he required some help with to get it to where he wanted it to be.

And for him to take that step to ask for that help, that was a big step for him. That was stepping out of his comfort zone to get coached.

It was possibly even swallowing a bit of pride. But he said it's one of the things that he's proud of because it was the right decision.

So, if it might be the right decision for you to get some help in 2025, I want to invite you now to be brave and to take that step to visit my Instagram profile. @cresuccess is how you can find us on Instagram.

And then you just send us a DM with the word ‘GROW’. And that'll tell me that you want to have a chat about growing your business in 2025.

So, let's get into today's episode. And it's all about how we can do more bigger and better deals with the most desirable clients in the market.

And the way that I want to present this concept to you is for you to think about an axis, a quadrant with on the vertical axis.

We've got at the top of the axis is 3 dollar signs. And on the bottom of the axis is 1 dollar sign.

And then on the horizontal axis, on the left-hand side, we've got the word ‘HARD’ and on the right-hand side, we've got the word ‘EASY’.

And the vertical axis represents the size of the opportunity. And the horizontal axis represents the ease of working with the client.

And in terms of how we can think about these quadrants, I think the size of the opportunity is pretty obvious.

But in terms of the ease of working with the client, you might consider how easy are they to communicate with.

Do they trust you? And do you trust them?

Are they able to make decisions in a timely manner?

Do they take your advice?

And also, are you in a position to be able to serve them and to deliver real value?

So, let's go through what the quadrants look like from the top left-hand corner in a clockwise direction.

So, in the top left-hand corner, if a client is not that easy to work with but is actually quite valuable in terms of the 3 signs, I'd call that a hard slog.

It's high revenue potential, but with clients that are a bit challenging. And these are clients that perhaps are changing direction a lot.

They might have quite high or even unreasonable expectations. Or they might need to have a lot of handholding.

And these clients can drag resources and they may not be sustainable in the long term because either you burn out from serving them or they just take up too many resources and they're not profitable to serve.

Although they can of course provide a short-term revenue boost to your business.

On the top right-hand corner, we've got clients who are easy to serve and also are quite valuable.

And those are our ideal clients. These are clients who communicate clearly, who respect your time and align with your values and expertise.

These are your golden opportunities, and we want to nurture and prioritize these relationships and opportunities as much as possible.

As we move to the bottom right-hand corner, so these are less valuable opportunities, but certainly they're easy to work with.

And these are our quick wins. So might be small deals, maybe they're one-off deals that don't require much effort and we can sort of get through them pretty quickly.

Might be the bread-and-butter transactions that you're doing off your rent roll.

And these can, I think, maintain cashflow and fill gaps in your pipeline when some of your bigger, more lumpy deals haven't landed yet, but we don't want them to take up too much of your time.

And finally, we've got undesirable prospects.

I'm not even going to call them undesirable clients. I'm going to call them undesirable prospects in the bottom left-hand corner because they're low revenue and they're difficult to work with.

So, these are clients with small budgets who still demand premium service or they micromanage you or they require excessive hand holding.

And these are opportunities which I don't want you to spend too much of your time on.

And I think as a business, we only want to be doing these deals if we have someone who has nothing else better to be doing.

So, as you think about 2025, I want you to be thinking about how can I get more of those ideal clients, those clients that are easy to work with and are quite valuable.

And one thing that you can do is just list your clients and prospects, and then plot them in this quadrant.

How many of your top clients are in that top right-hand corner?

How many of your prospects that you're chasing at the moment are in that top right-hand corner?

In episode 173, I shared the concept of a Dream 100.

Do all of the clients on your Dream 100 list qualify as being ideal clients? If not, then maybe they shouldn't be as part of your Dream 100.

In 2025, you've got the opportunity to make the commitment. They're going to focus more of your time on ideal clients, or at least spend more of your overall time that you spend on client work with those types of clients.

And I think the opportunity is also to then develop a strategy for you to transition away from undesirable prospects and also from managing hard slog clients.

One of the things that I talk about with my private clients is the idea of a get out of bed fee.

And that's just to say that if there is a transaction with a fee below a certain amount, that is below my get out of bed fee and that is not something that we're going to take on.

Or if we do, it's not going to take any time and attention from me.

Couple of ways to deal with more attractive ideal clients or ways to attract them is to make sure that your value proposition appeals to clients that fit that ideal client profile.

And also, to use testimonials and case studies from past ideal clients, to build credibility with future ideal clients.

And in terms of how you can be communicating with clients that perhaps aren't ideal clients, those ones which are undesirable prospects, or maybe also some of those hard slog clients, is just to learn how to diplomatically say ‘NO’ to undesirable prospects.

Understand that you can delegate those opportunities to your team.

And for the ones which maybe you do have to deal with or that you decide that you will deal with because they're quite viable, I think it's important to communicate expectations clearly and early to make those challenging clients more desirable.

So, a pretty quick and easy episode today to ease us into the new year.

Remember if you haven't written out what we've just gone through on the vertical axes, we've got 3 dollar signs at the top and on the bottom of the vertical axis, we've got 1 dollar sign.

On the left-hand side, we've got the word ‘HARD’ on the horizontal axis and on the right-hand side, we've got the word ‘EASY’.

And we've got clients that are a hard slog. We've got ideal clients, we've got quick wins, and we've got undesirable prospects.

The goal is to spend more of our time serving and going after ideal clients in 2025.

Thanks so much for joining us for the first episode of the year. I really do appreciate it.

And thank you so much for listening. I will speak to you soon.