To Go Big Start Small

So often we see an idea, a new training class, or go to a seminar and are ready to revolutionize our worlds. We see HUGE opportunity by making HUGE changes and then what happens? More times than not, nothing at all. Big change looks scary and we often shut down, we plan to do the new idea, but every day we walk up to it and push it back another day until we forget all about it. 

  Change is hard, that sentiment is so widely accepted we don't even question it. Just look at New Year's Resolutions, which almost always fail. The average American makes the exact same resolution ten years in a row without success. Within four months 25% of resolutions are abandoned and those who eventually succeed usually do so only after five or six years of failure. Yet, business books and gurus come to us with these quick fix overnight promises that we treat very much like those resolutions. 

 However contrary to popular belief, changes don't have to be hard. Not if you use proven techniques to help you eat that proverbial elephant one bite at a time. It comes with working with how your brain is wired as opposed to against it. We, as humans, have three distinct parts to our brains, the reptilian brain or brain stem that makes sure we breath and our heart beats, our Middle or Mammalian brain where you would find the fight or flight reflex, and our outer more advanced Human brain, the Frontal Cortex. When big change comes to us, it often stimulates the fight or flight portion and we freeze. It literally shuts down our ability to think, it was designed to so we wouldn't analyze the tiger but run away. It also shuts us down when we face tests, papers when we get "writer's block," or when we try to implement new changes that seem too big for us. 

 So, the Kaizen Way of doing so, that came from the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. If you haven't heard of Deming, he is the man who taught the American manufacturing industry this method of incremental improvement that allowed America to win WWII. He then was hired by the Japanese to come turn their manufacturing around and did, from a conquered nation to the most powerful manufacturing nation in the world for many years. It could be said, that Deming changed the world twice with his teachings.  I strongly recommend that you pick up this little book on it and read it for yourself. 

Small Steps That Can Change Your Life.  

 Today, as I was coaching one of our agents. She told me how she is using this method to overcome a fear that has held her back. She is terrified of role playing scripts, but she sees the value in them. So she has taken to reading our Buyer Conversion Class and Seller Conversion Class workbooks every day, reading all the scripts and pattern inside. She is speaking about how much more confidence she is already feeling. We discussed that the next step for her might be shutting the work books and trying to write down the scripts from memory. Then the following step might be speaking them to her children or even her dog to get used to them coming out of her mouth. If these small steps are made then, even that which she has feared, will soon be easy for her. 

 We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but greatly underestimate what we can do in five years. When we overestimate, we then start beating ourselves up over our "failures" and make development of our skills and habits even harder. If we embrace a slow steady growth, we won't believe the people we will be in five years from now, actually a whole lot sooner. 

 A rule of thumb on starting something new that has scared you in the past is break it down to the absurd. If you want to develop the habit of reading and you have set a goal to read but then don’t, maybe set a goal to read 15 minutes a day. That 15 minutes a day would allow you to read an average sized book in a month. However, if you set that as a goal and three days go by and you aren't reading, cut it back. Maybe try a paragraph a day, if you don't do that, try a sentence a day. Start small to go large rather than start large to give up. 

You can do it, one bite at a time!!! 

The 8th Wonder of the World Friend or Fiend?

 In Momentum Complete Agent Development classes,  we have seen an example of the cost of wasting one hour of productive time every day. It shows that by wasting that one hour of  opportunity costs five times a week over 48 weeks amounts to 240,000.00 in lost possible revenue had it been used for vital business activities. 

Think of the hours you dedicate to your business each day.

1. Are you getting the most of them?

2. Are you consistently operating at your highest and best use?

3. Do you know your highest and best use of your time?

 The 8th Wonder of the World is compounding interest, be it return on your money or your time. The good news is once in motion, it will work for you; the bad news is it will just as effectively work against you.

To see that power, there is an old story you may have heard before, but have you seen the math?.

 If I were to offer you a job to work for me for 31 days and offered two different options for your compensation, the first choice is one penny doubled every day, the second 100,000.00 flat salary for that 31 days work. Which would you choose?

Obviously, one would be work 31 days and you get 100,000.00.

The penny doubled scenario would work as below:

1 penny  = .01

2.            = .03

4.            = .07

8.            =.15

16.          =.31

32.          =.63

64.          = 1.27

1.28.       = 2.55

2.56        = 5.11

5.12.       = 10.23

0.24      = 20.47

20.48.     = 40.95

40.96.      = 81.91

81.92.      = 163.87

163.84     = 327.71

327.68.     = 655.39

655.36.     = 1,310.75

1,310.72.    =  2,621.47

2,621.44.      = 5,242.91

5,242.88.      = 10,485.79

10,485.76.     =  20,971.55

20,971.52.     =. 41,943.07

41,943.04.     = 83,886.11

83,886.08.      = 167,772.19 (24 days)

167,772.16.     =  335,544.35

335,544.32.     = 671,088.67

671,088.64.     = 1,342,177.31

1,342,177.28.   = 2,684,354.59

2,684,354.56.   = 5,368,709.15

5,368,708.12    = 10,737,418.30

10,737,418.20.    = 20,474,836.50.   ( 31 days)

This is why most people over estimate what they can do in a year, but greatly underestimate what they can do in five years.  Think of this the next time you're not working in your highest and best use of your time. Think of it this way, if you don't want to make 15.00/hour-- quit doing 15.00/hour work and make compounding your friend.

 Think if you simply take one new skill from one of the Momentum classes each time and apply it, the compounding effect would change the course of your life. 

10 Steps to Wealth in Real Estate.

There are three distinct phases that exist in the real estate business. The good news is it is your choice how you want your business to be. Keep in mind that today you are exactly where you chose to be. No matter what your business and life looks like today, it is the culmination of all the choices you have made to date. If you are happy with it, congratulations. If not, maybe it's time to make new choices.

 In Phase One, we have three distinct and important decisions to make to determine our level of success. It begins with a commitment to doing the business. It then requires we develop our confidence in how we operate our activities of our practice. We learn how to do a buyer meeting, a listing appointment or any other part of the process by first getting out of our comfort zone and learning how, until we have confidence in what we need to do. From there we must establish a consistent effort to make our business grow and prosper.  If you experience cash flow issues in your business, the problem is often found in these first three disciplines.

 In Phase Two, we chose to really step out of our comfort zone by moving out of the easy way of operating in a spontaneous and reactive way, consistently being pulled in a million directions by the crisis of the moment. This leads to a lot of wasted work chasing our tails and coming home at the end of long days frustrated for getting "nothing done" all day. So Phase Two starts with the discipline of Endurance, something that is always required in acquiring a new habit or skill. You will do well some days and poorly others, until those new skills are new habits. You will keep enduring until you can be fully Effective doing what is vital. What is important instead of what is urgent most of each day. At this point, you will see Efficiency where you not only focus on the important vital activities but the highest and best use and most dollar producing most of your days. If you want to be a Rich agent, this is all you need to focus on, and ever improving Effective and Efficiency of effort.

 If you want to leverage your time and money and gain wealth, then you must go to Phase Three and leverage other people's time. In Phase Three, you begin by developing the discipline of  Patience. Keep in mind you just developed your own endurance, effectiveness and efficiency in new skills and focus on only being vital in every activity throughout your work day, and now have hired others who have no idea what that really entails. So now you must be Patient as you coach them to understand your systems and have buy in to them. You will then need to Promote to them your systems and help them understand what benefits they will have as they too adopt them.  Once they do you will be guiding them to a Proficiency that they too are staying in their own and your teams Highest and Best Use of time.

Unfortunately only about 1-3% of agents and teams actually put themselves out of their comfort zones and through Phase Two, most simply bypass it and go from One to Three and take their lack of systems and chaos and add the lack of systems and chaos of other people to it.

If you want to know the path through Phase Two that is the commitment that Jimmy Dulin and I have made to keep our ongoing Momentum Training consistently offered throughout each year for you.

The Worst Enemy of Great is Good.

 "People assume everyone wants to reach their potential and be the best they can be. I've concluded most only want to be average and do just enough to get by." Nick Saban.

To realize your potential, it is reaching your capacity and has nothing to do with comparisons to anyone but yourself. Almost all unhappiness comes from comparing to others. We either compare our weaknesses to someone else's strengths and then feel badly about ourselves, or we compare our strengths to someone else's weaknesses and over inflate ourselves. What we should be doing is comparing our current selves with who we once were and celebrating the growth, and then comparing our current selves with who we could be and striving forward.

 How do you do it? You commit to being an active learning based individual rather than knowledge based. When I was hiring sales people, one of my questions I asked in interviews was "How many years of experience have you?" Then followed up with however many years they said, "Was that X years experience or one year experience repeated X times?" In other words tell me about the last class you took, the last seminar you attended, the last book you read or audio or video you consumed and what changes did you implement and what are the results?

The worst enemy of great is good. The "I'm doing good, I'm making money, life is good." holds more people back from what could be. It creates a temptation to be knowledge based where it is easy to dismiss out of hand "I've heard it all before." But are you doing it? If you were brought up on charges for knowing what you say you know, would there be enough evidence in your every day activities to convict you?

 The only way you can be Learning based is to force yourself out of your comfort zone. The most dramatic story that I can think of was Tiger Woods. Three times in his career, he hired coaches to relearn his swing. That was courageous to mess with a winning formula to reach a higher level. We too will have to step out of the comfort of what's already working for us and learn new ways of improving them.

 We begin by seeking new information, that 1%er thinking we spoke of last month, then we must learn to S.P.A.R. (Study, Practice, Action, Review.) After taking an active role in learning, we take that information back and study it-- maybe by learning scripts or the basic flow needed. We then must practice before we introduce it into our business. After that we take action and use these new developing skills with our clients, as we do so, we will learn where we may not yet have it right and we go back to class and review again and once again start that S.P.A.R. process until it's part of our new comfort zone.

Remember, to know and not to do, is not to know.

1 Percent Thinking

 Far too often I find myself asked "What does the average agent do?" This could be directed in any numbers of ways, but my answer is always the same, "Don't be average, average sucks." As one of my cherished mentors always described average "Average is the top of bottom and the bottom of the top, it's the cream of the crap."

What is average? What does it look like?

According to the National Association of REALTORS, last year:

The Average Agent completed two transactions.

The Average Agent, with five years of experience and above, had a gross commission income of 49,000.00. Which means they had a net nearer to 25,000.00.

RE/MAX reported that their Average agent had a gross commission income of 115,000.00 last year, much better, but keep in mind that means for every agent who earned a million last year that would mean as many as nine could have earned zero.

 The Average small business, no matter what it is, closes permanently within five years.

So what is our Aha here? Don't be average, it sucks. To not be average requires one common thing, the firm decision not to be and to follow up on what that means.

 Rick Setzer, one of my most admired mentors explained it this way, he taught the "Rule of 95%."

 The Social Security Administration has long had a chart that is used by insurance agencies and others as to what the financial outcomes are for people at 65 years old.

Out of every 100 people at 65;

36 would be dead.

54 would be dead broke, living off friends, family and the government.

5 would still be working.

4 would be financially independent.

1 would be rich.

If these numbers are true, and they are, it means that 95% of what you know you learned from someone in the 95%, true or false?

If true, what group would you have a 95% chance of eventually falling into?

How can that change? Learn to think like a 1%er.

Because you don't know what you don't know, and that is why you don't have.

Because if you knew what you don't know, you would have what you don't have.

And to know and not do, is not to know.

There is a lot of truth and wisdom in that seemingly silly little prose. Today there are so many ways to learn to think like a one percenter. There is a vast library of books, speeches and interviews with one percenters at a click of a search button.

RE/MAX has given us all a gift of a copyrighted program of 1%er training in the Momentum Complete Agent Development System. The information is there. It is up to you to choose if you will be an active learner or just know and not do. We will discuss this further in an upcoming blog.

We will also be discussing that "average" can have other scary definitions, when it is a landing pad called good when great is something you're capable of.

 It is your choice if you want to be Learning based not Knowledge based. Learning based is about active learning by Study, Practice, Action and going back to Review. Knowledge based is that Dead Sea of "I've heard it all before, I know that, that's old news, I don't need that." Remember to know and not to do means not to know.

To be continued.......

Tis The Season To Weigh Our Past, Present and Future

Tis the Season when we pause to reflect, take a look around at where we are, remember old times and put together our plans for the future, at least the next year. As we do this, how does this year differ from the last, or the past ones that keep getting further and further into our rear view? What is different today than then? What will be different tomorrow? Why?

 A couple weeks ago I was cleaning out some dresser drawers to remove the clutter and things long ago that should have been gone. While doing so I found an old journal I had been writing in until it sank below the surface of each weeks laundry out of sight and mind. Reading it was an interesting time capsule into my own life. It contained some very momentous days personally,  some infamous days historically, and it was interesting to see my impressions fresh at those moments.

 One of the things that spoke volumes to me was seeing what I thought were important to me at the time of the writings, but even more interesting was seeing the underlying comments that proved what was truly the most important then, and now. It was those that always won out in the end demanding my focus and attention, while what I thought was important rarely did.

 As we are working together on the Momentum Complete Agent Development System, we speak of finding your "Why," and how critical it is to moving you to success. There is little more important in that quest. What is yours? Why does it move you? Does it have you by the heart? It will never be money, it may well be something that money can help you do, but it won't be the money itself.

 Find your Why, develop your dreaming muscles once again. We all can dream as kids, but we have it driven out of us as we get older, or at least most do. The people we admire and talk about how they are special or geniuses in their chosen endeavors are actually people who somehow never quit dreaming, or relearned how.

 If you have a challenge with letting yourself dream again. Let me recommend a book that Lou Holtz claims turned his own life and career around. The Magic of Thinking Big.
Make the time to allow yourself to explore the idea of What if again.

The Magic of Thinking Big

Why Walk Through The Weeds When There Is A Path?

 Even though I often warn our agents to be aware of the language they use with their clients, that they don't use industry buzz words that all agents understand but clients who don't live in this industry may not. However, I just got caught doing the exact same thing with our agents. I learned that I might just as well have been speaking Chinese for the last few years.

 Recently we have added the copyrighted Complete Agent Development program, Momentum to our ongoing services for our agents to get free training in their practices. I have to confess that I love this program. It is very complete and really gives agents a clear path to operate their businesses in an intentional and proactive manner and moves away from the spontaneous and reactive state most REALTORS and small business owners find themselves. 

While leading a class on Buyer Lead Conversion I discovered where I was at a disconnect. As I was explaining that the course led us through a very effective Critical Sales Path system with scripts moving the client through the five stages of you must move them through. When the look of deer in the headlights reflected back to me I asked, who was currently using a critical path system? When no one was, I asked who has ever heard of one – again the same results. Out of eight classes around the state I only found a few who knew or were using this process, and all of them came from a professional sales background. This was a wake up call, where my message had often been poorly communicated by me, including when talking with our agents about the design of our Listing Presentation we create each year for all our agents. I would speak about how it was designed to follow a Critical Sales Path approach, overcoming objections with Silent Sellers throughout with attention to all four of the DISC profiles. What this taught me is that I was trying to explain a tool for them in a language that negated the message. 

So my next quest is to now teach it, but before doing so, to explain why you want to know it. What's in it for you to know? To get an image in your mind, if you are at all skilled with playing checkers or chess, this is much of what it is like. It is doing a "move" now that is setting up the "move" several turns away from now. It is like you are doing a play where you know the story and script but your client doesn't and you lead them to where THEY WANT to be by your questions. 

 Why do you want to learn this? Let me explain my very first year selling homes was in 1983 where we enjoyed 19.6% interest rates. You can imagine no one who was living in a home paying 6% mortgage interest was moving to one with 19.6%, so we had to target renters. We would send out letters to apartments that said, "If renting made sense your landlord would do it." We then told them if they made X amount of income and made an appointment at our office and bring a check stub and rent receipt we would pay them 50.00. We later learned that 25.00 worked just as well.  When they came in they couldn't be more skeptical they assumed it was a scam or something like a time share. I would book 7 appointments a day and when you sat down with them I would ask for the rent and check stub and cut them their check immediately, once done you could visibly see them relax. 

From there we started the critical sales path, we did a warm up to create a friendly environment. We did a needs and wants analysis, a financial assessment then showed them the differences between renting and owning. At the end of the hour they were getting excited! They came in for the 50.00 and had no interest in being in the home market, but now they realized they could and were excited. I then took it away from them, told them to go home and think about it, ask family, accountant, etc, but offered an opportunity for them to lock up the price and location of a home with a "lot deposit" that would last for 48 hours. If they decided no, come pick up the check and no harm, no foul or they could just do the paperwork on their new home.  

 This approach, this sale path, this checker board, took people who had no interest in a home walking in the door to giving a check to hold one in one hour.  7 per month wrote an agreement, with about 4-5 that actually qualified and closed.  I am not suggesting that exact thing is what you would use, but the critical path approach allows you to serve your client by helping them move through all the stages of the process the most efficiently in an intentional and proactive approach. This will lead to, not only more closing for you, but more referrals. Clients do not refer to agents just because they like them, they refer to experiences with systems they like. 

 I look forward to going into detail with you in upcoming classes.