What have we learned from the curve balls that life can throw us?

If we asked you five years ago what disaster planning for businesses might look like, you’d be forgiven for telling us that the worst outcome to plan for might be flooding, or in business things like data outages, power cuts, and if the phone lines go down for a few hours.

It’s fair to say that none of us planned to become school teachers, short-order chefs, or remote workers. Remote working and flexibility were some of the buzzwords that we may have been sure that we were ready for but these past couple of years have shown us that, as businesses of any size, when we have to, we are capable of working true flexibility into our previously rigid set-ups. We can provide truly remote working. We have managed to grow and adapt quite admirably, and the Estate Agency industry can rightly claim more than a bit of pride for its response in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Over time, we have also shown ourselves capable of caring more. We have begun to focus more on the importance of mental wellbeing, and we are starting to invest in ourselves and our mindset.

In short, we have come a long way in a short time, and we know the value of having a team that is ready for anything. But are we truly ready for anything?

As any sports coach will tell you a sense of readiness doesn’t come easily and that the one thing that guarantees a team’s ability to succeed in the face of a few curve balls is training.

Industry trainer Stephen Brown, interviewing prominent organisational psychologist, Damian Hughes, discovered that sometimes the difference between good and great is all about mindset and training.

“When you look at top athletes of a certain level, the physical differences are relatively minor and don’t necessarily account for their success. The athletes who outperform most of their peer group and demonstrate themselves to be truly exceptional comes down to mindset and training. The same can be said about our businesses.”

In the past, there were many reasons why training wasn’t always our priority. Some of it was complacency and some of it was down to costs, both in terms of the level of investment of time and money.

Luckily, that doesn’t need to be the case anymore, along with great efficiencies of working remotely came the ability to deliver great training at a distance.

Online learning platforms such as Kerfuffle Kampus now mean that you can access and participate in training from wherever you are on the planet, as long as you have an internet connection.

Gone is the dilemma of choosing between losing members of staff as they travel across the country to receive training. You might also have previously worried about taking the time out or losing your entire team in one go by inviting a trainer to run a session in-house.

Instead, Kampus allows you to train for as long as you like, whenever you like. You can choose to train at quieter times of the day, in the evenings or weekends if you are really conscientious!

The costs of learning are now so minimal that there is no excuse for any forward-thinking businesses not to invest in training for their staff. It's the golden age of learning and team development, and we’ve shown that so much can be achieved when we are properly equipped and prepared for whatever life or the market might throw at us.

Estate Agency is an industry that is perfectly suited for training - there are plenty of set-piece scenarios that we all encounter at every stage of the marketing and moving process. It makes sense to practice these set-pieces time and time again, exploring which bits of scripts or dialogue help. When does the follow-up come? How can we streamline our processes? How do we make every pound spent on marketing stretch further? How do we deliver truly excellent customer service?

All these questions can be answered in easily digestible, learnable behaviours that come through practice and training.

And when it comes to your choice of trainers, we are truly privileged in our industry to have an excellent range of time-tested experts who have honed their skills out there on the front lines of Estate Agency, through their own hard-won experience. That adage of “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” couldn’t be further from the truth. In our industry, those who can, lead from the front and share their experience with like-minded agents.

Choosing the right trainer is also important. Shaping the future of your business through training means that you will need a trainer whose learning style, personality, and approach is best suited to you and your team.

With Kerfuffle Kampus we are constantly updating our Netflix-style, on-demand training platform with engaging and relevant training courses from a broad selection of the industry’s finest trainers. Kampus gives you and your team the ability to gauge which of the trainers’ approaches you prefer and the opportunity to get to know them and work with them further.

Whatever the future holds for us, we know that it’s worth planning for, worth training for, and worth investing in ourselves and our businesses. Those who do, will succeed.

Have you tried Kerfuffle Kampus? To find out how Kampus can support your agency’s training needs, get in touch with our Agent Success Manager, Carly.