Who Set the Standard You Are Working To?

Almost every agent carries a number in their head that represents a respectable year. It is rarely written down and it is almost never explained, but it is firmly held, and most people can tell you within a second whether they are above or below it.

The interesting question is not whether you are meeting it. The interesting question is where it came from.

The comparison you did not choose

Standards are usually absorbed rather than selected. They come from the agent who sat next to you when you started, from a leaderboard in an office you no longer work in, from a conference stage, or from somebody on the internet whose circumstances you know nothing about. Absorbed standards feel like your own because you have carried them for years, and they are rarely reconsidered because they were never consciously adopted in the first place.

What a production number leaves out

Transaction counts and volume figures are useful because they are comparable. They are also comparable precisely because they omit everything that makes two businesses different, which is the cost of getting there, the hours it consumed, the staff and marketing that were paid for out of it, and whether the person doing it intends to still be doing it in five years.

An agent comparing their net position to somebody else's gross position is not being hard on themselves. They are comparing two different quantities and treating the result as a verdict.

The same applies to time. Two agents can produce identical numbers, one across a five day week and one across a seven day week with evenings, and the figures will not distinguish between them. Whichever of those two lives you would choose, the number alone will not tell you which one you are currently building.

Borrowed standards and what they cost to carry

A standard borrowed from somebody whose life does not resemble yours tends to produce one of two outcomes. Either it is permanently out of reach, in which case it supplies a steady background sense of falling short regardless of how the year actually goes, or it is met and turns out to have been the wrong target, which is a more expensive discovery because it takes longer.

Neither outcome has much to do with effort. Both come from the standard itself never having been examined.

A standard you could defend out loud

A standard worth keeping is one you could explain to somebody sensible without embarrassment. It would say what you are trying to build and over what period, what it needs to pay for, and what you are unwilling to trade in order to get it. That is a harder thing to write than a number, which is probably why the number persists.

None of this is an argument for lowering your sights. A standard you chose deliberately is frequently more demanding than one you absorbed, because you understand what it is for and you have agreed to its price. The difference is that you can tell, at the end of a year, whether you actually met it.

A question to sit with this week

Name the number in your head and then try to trace it. Whose is it, when did you first encounter it, and what did you know at the time about the business that produced it? If you had to defend it now, in a sentence, to somebody who knew your circumstances well, what would you say?

Where to take this next

If you want to set a standard that belongs to your business rather than somebody else's, book a discovery call and we will work it out properly.