The Database Chart of Accounts

If I asked 5 mega agents to send me their Profit & Loss reports and laid them out on a desk in front of you with their names blacked out, you’d see that each one is roughly the same and largely indistinguishable from each other. This is because the P&L in Keller Williams is really just five categories: GCI, Cost of Sales, Gross Profit, Expenses, and Net Income (or Profit).  Gary Keller created this chart of accounts in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent and it has been one of the cornerstones of a successful real estate business that has been widely practiced for years now.

The agents using this model are all speaking the same language, and largely following the same play. Because of this, I can take a look at any company’s P&L report and quickly get a good sense of its financial health. What struck me recently is the power of this approach when applied to your database.

Accounting for your relationships

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All of the relationships that flow into your business need to be captured and coded into a chart of accounts, just the way that your dollars do. Capturing and coding allows you to follow through on powerful communication plans that increase the quality of the relationships your community has with your brand. Below we have a link to a document you can use to track all of these relationships. Use this at the end of the month, just like a P&L report you would run for your company, but for tracking the health and performance of your database.

The benefit of the database chart of accounts is that it helps you to identify where your relationships are falling off and where your contact’s paths are getting tangled. And as we mentioned before which communication plans will bring them back out of the woods. Being able to identify at a glance where those paths are failing will allow you to turn them into efficient highways that lead to conversion and sales.

Ultimately, just as any successful business owner needs a dedicated financial bookkeeper, you need someone who is dedicated to being the database bookkeeper, someone who is responsible for accounting for each relationship in your business and making sure it is captured, coded, and communicated with properly.

I believe this is one of the biggest elements missing from mega agents’ toolboxes. Whether you use our database chart of accounts or something similar, I challenge you to begin accounting for your relationships and see the difference it makes in your business’s health.