Most agents launch their business with the same plan. Work hard, be helpful, give great service and trust that if you keep doing the right things, the business will look after itself. And for a little while, that approach can work. You’re busy, you’re picking up instructions, and it feels like you’ve got momentum behind you.
But then the launch period fades.
Because once the initial excitement calms down and the market isn’t doing you any favours, you start to see how fragile everything is underneath. One quiet month suddenly feels huge. A couple of fall-throughs throw the numbers off completely. Your marketing becomes stop–start depending on how chaotic your week is. And the whole business swings between good months and bad months with no real sense of control.
This isn’t because you’re bad at being an agent. It’s because you’re trying to run a business with no actual structure behind it. Everything depends on effort, energy and hoping that whatever worked last month decides to work again this month. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it absolutely doesn’t.
If you look outside the estate agency world for a moment, you’ll see this pattern everywhere. The survival rates for small businesses aren’t as comforting as people assume. Around half of new independent businesses in the UK don’t make it past their third year. Plenty don’t even make it through year one. Compare that to franchise businesses, where fewer than one percent close due to commercial failure in any given year, and the gap is really hard to ignore.
This isn’t a nudge to go out there and buy a national franchise. But it is a reminder of why those numbers look the way they do. Franchise businesses work because they run on a formula. A model that’s already been tested, broken, fixed, improved and proven long before anyone opens their doors. It’s not about branding or office design or national marketing. It’s about the fact someone else has already figured out the right way to do things, and everyone who joins simply follows the same structure.
Most independent agencies out there don’t have that luxury. They have things they do well, things they do inconsistently and things they never quite get around to. But they don’t have a formula. Not one clear, repeatable way the business runs, no matter how busy, tired or distracted you are.
Ask a lot of agents how their business actually works and you’ll get vague answers. “We get plenty of recommendations.” “People know us locally.” “We pride ourselves on service.” All of which are nice ideas, but none of which tell you what the business actually does, day in, day out, to bring in clients and move them through the process.
A proper formula is much simpler than people imagine. It’s the same steps happening the same way, every time. From the moment someone first hears your name to the moment they hand their keys over on completion. How you generate leads. How you prepare for valuations. How you follow up. How you communicate with sellers. How you progress sales. How you turn clients into people who will recommend you without hesitation.
When you’ve got that, the business becomes predictable. When you don’t, it becomes exhausting. You spend your time reacting instead of leading. Firefighting instead of progressing. Trying to rebuild the parts you dropped during your busiest moments. And because the experience changes from client to client, so do the results.
The agents that survive aren’t always the most talented. But they are the most consistent. They know exactly what happens in their business every day, even when they’re not directly involved. Their marketing goes out whether they feel motivated or not. Their follow-up happens whether the market is booming or flat. Their service standards don’t wobble when pressure hits. And because the business behaves the same way every week, the results eventually settle and then scale.
The good news is you don’t need a complicated, corporate-looking blueprint. You just need to decide what the best version of your business looks like and make that your standard. Not when you remember. Not when things are quiet. Every single time. Document it. Follow it. Refine it. And stick to it even on the days when it would be easier not to.
Because the agencies that grow aren’t the ones working the longest hours. They’re the ones who remove the chaos and replace it with something repeatable. Something stable. Something that doesn’t rely on how energised the owner feels in any given week.
Once you have a formula, you stop hoping your business will grow.
You start building a business that actually can.
Chris Webb is the founder of The Estate Agent Consultancy.
