Now that your fledgling real estate business is off the ground, it’s time to start thinking like a real business owner. You may have gotten away with making it up as you go during your first year in business, but continued success requires planning and strategy. While these behind-the-scene tasks aren’t nearly as glamorous as meeting with clients and closing sales, they’re necessary if you want to grow your real estate business.

Boost Your Marketing

In real estate, image matters. Cultivating a compelling professional image through marketing is one of the most important things you can do to grow your business. Without effective marketing, you’ll have a hard time reaching the new clients you need to keep your business afloat.

It’s important to have a professional website, but a website alone won’t bring in business. You have to reach customers where they already are — and that means diving into the world of social media marketing. Rather than choosing just one social media outlet, make profiles on several platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and use cross-promoting to create engaging content on each platform. You can drive traffic toward your website by using social media to highlight listings and link blog posts from your site.

Outsource Tasks

Keeping a small business running requires a broad range of repetitive, administrative tasks that, while not income-generating, are necessary. Rather than spending your valuable time on work that doesn’t generate revenue, outsource administrative duties so you can focus on client-facing work.

Jobs to outsource include bookkeeping, gathering and distributing information about listings, processing and delivering documents, creating advertisements, social media marketing and placing and removing signs. Because managing contractors is time-consuming in itself, it’s in your best interest to hire someone who knows the ropes of real estate. You need a super real estate assistant — someone who is licensed in real estate so they understand the business and don’t require micromanaging. Opting for a virtual assistant over in-house help lets you skip the hassle of payroll taxes and added office space.

For easy jobs that do need local hands, like placing signs, a high school or college student is a cheaper source of labor than an administrative assistant. You can learn more about the differences between contractors and employees at Investopedia.

Get Your Finances in Order

For most new businesses, the first year is about learning more than earning. You may not have had the best record-keeping habits during your first year in business, but financial systems are essential for long-term success.

Have a budget. You should have a general idea of your business expenses and revenues based on previous years. Use your business history and projections to create a cash flow forecast for the coming fiscal year. In a business like real estate where sales are high in certain seasons and low in others, it’s important to have a solid grasp on cash flow so you can pay the bills even when business is slow.

Managing business expenses is much easier when you keep business accounts separate from personal accounts. A business credit card is a must for most small business owners, but with so many options on the market, it’s hard to choose the right one. Read reviews that break down the various options so you can choose the card that’s right for your business.

Make sure you’re keeping thorough records throughout the year. This not only helps you at tax time, it also makes it possible to identify and eliminate waste in your business model so you can increase efficiency and profitability with every passing year.

Long-term success in real estate doesn’t happen on its own. As The Balance points out, assuming things will just work out is part of the reason so many real estate agents fail. If you want your real estate career to thrive, you need to have systems in place to generate new leads, manage your finances and keep your business running smoothly.

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