How a business plan changed my life

Hi, everybody. Cheryl Knowlton, coming at you with today’s Dynamite Tip of the Day. This one’s going to be a little bit longer, but I promise you, it will be worth it. This is one of my signature stories, and honestly one of the most important stories of my life.

A business plan can change your life

What would you say if I told you that having a business plan could absolutely, positively, completely change your life and your business? You’d probably roll your eyes. I saw it. You’re like, “Eh, no. Business plan? That’s for other people.” Your broker’s probably been telling you for years that you need one. 100% of brokers tell their agents every year they need one, and guess what, like 7% of you have one, so handle that.

Here’s why. I was on the leadership team for a very, very successful and very large real estate brokerage in the Salt Lake City market a few years ago, and my boss required me, and everybody on the leadership team, to put together a business plan for the upcoming year and present it to him, and it had to have two components: what we intended to do professionally and what we intended to do personally, and we needed to give that to him, and of course, I wanted mine to stand out from everybody else’s on the leadership team, so mine was pink and hot pink to be exact, and I handed that to him, and I gave it to him, and we had to sit down with him and go over it.

He’s sitting there. His name was George, by the way. George is going through it, and he’s looking down, and he gets to the personal goals, and his finger stops. He looks at me and he says, “What are you doing about number 14?” I don’t know what I’m doing about number 14. I wrote that three weeks ago. How am I supposed to remember? And I’m like trying to read it upside down. I’m like, “Yeah, that font is too small. I need my glasses. I don’t know. What’s number 14?” And he said, “Find my birth family.”

I thought, “I don’t know what I’m doing about that. I copied and pasted what I wrote last year. The goals that I didn’t achieve last year just became this year’s goals.” I mean, that’s the way I used to goal-set, right? And just like a lot of people. Now I know a little bit better, and I said, “Honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing about number 14,” and he said, “Have you ever heard of 23 and Me?” And I said, “No, I have not heard of 23 and Me. What’s that?” And he pulled it up on his computer, turned it to me, and showed me, 2, 3, and, A-N-D, M-E, .com, was a global DNA testing service, and he said, “All you do is you order this little kit,” and he showed me the kit, and you send it in, a little DNA sample. You spit in a little tube, and you send it in, and they’ll send you back all kinds of really cool information.

He challenged me to just do it

I had never heard of it, and I said, “Okay,” and George said, “I challenge you to do that.” Now, nobody takes a challenge from George without doing it. I mean, that’s just like not even a thing, especially if you work for him. Like, “Okay,” so I went home. I ordered the kit. It came, I spit in the tube, and sent it in. A few weeks later, I got the results back, and frankly, at first, they were a little bit disappointing. It was kind of my genetic makeup, but the relatives, that’s what I really wanted, right? Was the relatives. Everybody was third and fourth cousins, and I thought, “Oh, jeez. We don’t even share the same great-grandparents. What am I supposed to do with that?”

Fast-forward a little bit, to December of that year, and all of a sudden, I got an email from 23 and Me, “We have a new DNA relative for you,” and I clicked on it, and this time, it said something entirely and completely different. It was not a third or fourth cousin. This time, there was a name next to the words, “first cousin.” I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is it. I have actually found my birth family.” Fast-forward 48 hours, of course, I messaged him right away, with the help of my millennial daughter. She researched on Facebook, found three individuals in the United States who had that unique name. We only found one who fit the profile, kind of looked like me, was from California, from the Bay Area.

Reached out to him. I sent him this really weird message, I mean, you think about how weird that would be, right? Like, “Hi. If you’ve ever done 23 and Me, we’re first cousins, so call me.” I mean, what do you say, right? I came up with something, and it took him 48 hours to respond, and he messaged me back, and he said, “I was really confused when I got your message, but after making some phone calls and talking to some family members, I have every reason to believe that you and I are in fact first cousins,” and I’ll tell that full story in another post.

I have now met my three of my siblings on my birth mother’s side

Fast-forward to today. Today, I have met my birth mother. I have met my birth father. I have met three siblings on my birth mother’s side, who are all spectacular individuals. I have met two of my three siblings on my birth father’s side, spend quite a bit of time with one of my sisters, as we make up for many, many decades of lost time. And fast-forward to the fact that I felt very strongly this desire, this unquenchable fire to give back to George what he gave to me, and helping him find his birth family, which has now occurred, and the joy that he feels every day, and every day when I see posts of him meeting his birth family, it’s a magical, beautiful, wonderful thing.

So, when I tell you that having a business plan can absolutely change your life, it absolutely can, but you have to create it and you have to absolutely execute, and if you do those two things, I promise you, you will see crazy, magnificent, and truly magical results.