5 Business Growth Tips from a $3 Billion Real Estate Visionary

“Every distraction costs you a fortune,” my friend Sharran Srivatsaa said to me on a beautiful SoCal morning. We were at the Newport Beach offices of his new project, Kingston Lane, a company that is developing an app to help real estate agents generate new leads.

Sharran, known for growing his real estate company, Teles Properties, ten-fold (from $300 million to over $3 billion in annual sales) in just 5 years, insists that entrepreneurs have singularity of focus.

However, too many business owners boast about having “entrepreneurial ADD,” dabbling in a slew of projects at the same time. They have a habit of beginning projects, writing books, starting clothing lines, etc., simply because their peers are doing it.

But this chasing of shiny objects—because the grass always seems greener on the other side of an opportunity—often leads to more stress and less success.

Find your focus

Sharran is clear on this point: Singularity of focus is the key to success, not only for the business leader, but for the team as well. No more ADD project development.

“Every day while building Teles Properties, I had 15-minute phone calls with each of the core groups (agents, marketing, and so on) beginning at 9 a.m.," Sharran explained to me. "Everyone showed up ready to explain what they did the previous day and with a plan for the current day. After that, I had a longer meeting with the executives of the company. Those two hours of meetings gave our team a company-wide singularity of focus that supported rapid growth.

“Immediately after our meetings, everyone went into what I called our ‘Hour of Power.’ Every organization needs one. This is the time you work as an entire organization to create momentum on your most important metric: leads, active users, appointments, etc. When you have this in place, you know that real work is getting done because the company is sticking to a singularity of focus.” 

Grow profits with more efficient processes

Not only does Sharran see the importance of focus, but he also has a gift for identifying the processes in businesses that can be streamlined or improved—all to secure higher profits. He does this by crunching the numbers and creating efficient systems that support the biggest possible revenue.

In fact, my nickname for him is “The Machine.” He helped one of our Empire Mastermind members, Tom, go from $4,000 per week to $4,000 per day in sales.

Sharran did this by working with Tom on phone sales scripts and building a system to generate higher quality leads from the hard work that Tom’s team was already doing.

“Tom was already focused and doing the work,” Sharran said, “so I just helped him make his efforts more effective. Too many business owners attract the wrong prospects, even though the perfect prospect is just as easy to attract. The first thing we had to do was change Tom’s targeting. It was too scattered, and we simply narrowed it down to a more focused, and profitable, prospect."

Fine-tune the sale process

“Another area where most business owners fall flat is the sales process. They are just ‘winging it’ on the sales calls. But,” Sharran said sternly, “if you don’t script, you don’t care.

“Back when we started growing Teles, I went out on over 100 agent appointments. Over time, we refined the entire home-showing process down to a series of specific questions that agents were required to ask. When they did, their closing rate went through the roof, and our sales doubled, tripled, and then 10X’d.

“Pro’s don’t wing it," Sharran tells me. "Broadway plays aren’t made up as you go along. Sales appointments can’t be random, either.”