I’ve always been fascinated by the simplicity of a scoreboard. Whether you’re watching football, baseball, basketball, or just about any competitive sport, the scoreboard has one job. It tells you where you stand. It doesn’t know how hard you practiced, how much preparation went into the game, whether you caught a bad break, or how badly you wanted to win. It simply reflects the results.
Business has a scoreboard too, and whether we like it or not, it can be equally unforgiving.
Most of us begin the year with good intentions. We set goals, make plans and identify the things we’re going to do differently. We’re going to prospect more consistently, do a better job staying in touch with our sphere, follow up with old clients, hold more open houses, improve our marketing, or simply become more disciplined about the activities we know lead to business. There is certainly nothing wrong with those intentions. In fact, every meaningful accomplishment probably begins with one.
The challenge is that intentions don’t appear on the scoreboard. Actions do.
In real estate, it’s easy to look at closed transactions or income as the ultimate measure of success, but I think there’s another scoreboard that deserves even more of our attention. It measures the activities that eventually create those results. How many meaningful conversations are we having? How consistently are we following up? How many appointments are we creating? Are we asking for the business? Are we staying connected to the people who already know and trust us?
Those numbers may not show up in a commission check today, but over time they have an interesting way of predicting what that commission check will look like tomorrow.
I also think there’s something healthy about looking at the scoreboard, even when we don’t particularly like what we see. A scoreboard isn’t there to criticize us or make us feel bad about our performance. It gives us information. It tells us whether what we’re doing is producing the result we hoped for, and perhaps more importantly, whether something needs to change.
As we move deeper into the second half of the year, there is still plenty of game left to play. Whatever your goals were coming into 2026, there is still time to create momentum, change an outcome, exceed an expectation, or completely rewrite the story of your year. But doing so probably won’t come from simply wanting the result a little more. It will come from changing the activities that ultimately create it.
So maybe this is a good week to take an objective look at your own scoreboard. Not as a critic, but as a coach. Ask yourself what the numbers are telling you, identify the areas
where you need to improve, and make the adjustments while there is still plenty of time on the clock. Because at the end of the day, the scoreboard doesn’t care about our intentions. It simply reflects what we chose to do with them.
TERRY Talks 