What I’ve Learned While Working With A Billionaire With Geoff Woods

You're listening to Freedom Fast lane, presented by capitalism.com this is the show about building businesses and investing the profits so that you can live life on your terms. And now, your host, the future owner of the Cleveland Indians, Ryan Daniel Moran.

Hey everybody, Ryan here. Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. I've got a really cool episode for you today that I think you're really going to enjoy. If you've been listening to Freedom Fast Lane for any length of time at all, you know that you've heard me talk about a few books that I think are particularly impactful. For example, the Primal Connection by Mark Sisson is a must read for all entrepreneurs because it goes into how our modern lifestyles reflect upon our genetic expression and what we can do in the modern world to adjust and kind of return to our primal connections. I'm also a big fan of the Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, which argues that extraordinary results come from compounded habits rather than big jumps. And I also really love the One Thing by billionaire Gary Keller, the founder of Keller Williams, which is the largest real estate company in the world. And they talk about the simple truth behind extraordinary results. Well, my buddy Jeff woods is the vice president over at Productive, which is the company that produces all things related to the One Thing. They produce the podcast, they produce their courses. So he works side by side with billionaire Gary Keller and he's building out their empire and he's been on the podcast before and he talks a little bit about the high level strategy because behind how they build empires. So if you go back and just search for Freedom Fast Lane Jeff woods, you'll go through their idea of building a Disney, how they hire, how they recruit and what the foundational principles are for building these large big empires. That episode did really well and it was really well received. But we left the conversation at just the Big Vision. So I wanted to have Jeff back on and talk a little bit more about the tactical pieces and give regular updates to how is the empire building going? Because I want to see a live case study playing out of someone who is building a really big vision and a really big empire. So this is the first billion dollar Vision update with Jeff woods. If you like this. Jeff controls and manages the One Thing podcast which is one of the few podcasts that I actually subscribe and listen to. They're really well connected over there and it's really good stuff, especially for entrepreneurs who feel overwhelmed and way too busy. Cause that's what they are all about fixing over at the One Thing. So if you enjoyed this episode make sure you check out his podcast on itunes called the One Thing. Enjoy this episode with Jeff Woods.

It seems like every time I speak with someone like you, an entrepreneur, someone who wants to build a really big business that makes a massive impact in the world and delivers real security for your family, we all have a problem and that is our time. How do we manage it? I'm curious if you ever feel like deep down inside that you're not really in control of your time. It's so interesting. You know, technology has provided all of us so many opportunities to expand our business faster than ever before in less time. Yet the downside of that technology is the fact that there are more distractions than ever. But before, whether it be a countless number of emails, all these notifications on our phone, social media, it's just crazy. How do we get it all done? This is something that has hit home really hard for me because this is something I struggled with for several years. But in the last year, very specifically, something's changed in my life to the point where I went from feeling helpless when it came to managing my time to now feeling like I own it. And that happened when I stepped inside the world of Gary Keller, who is the co founder of Keller Williams, the largest real estate company in the world, and his co author Jay Papian. They co authored the best selling book the One Thing Together and they brought me aboard to start a company with them to turning the One Thing into a productivity empire. We're going to rewind before that though, and I'm going to tell you my story of when this first became a really big challenge for me, when I what exactly happened and the very specific lessons that I learned that hopefully will help you take more ownership over your most valuable resource, your time. For five years I was in medical device sales, which was a job I absolutely loved. Every day I wore scrubs, I ran through hospitals selling a device that saved lives. It was a great gig. But deep down inside, kind of like you, you entered into entrepreneurship because you something was missing. You knew deep down that you weren't living your calling. That's where I was. But here I am. I've got these really comfy golden handcuffs on. You know, I'm making great money, not working too hard, get to work from home, get to try to get my wife to call me McDreamy. She refuses, but that's okay. But I knew deep down I was destined to build a big business that made a massive impact and delivered real security for my family. Then two things happened. The first was A colleague of mine had a stroke at the time. He was only 35 years old. And that was very eye opening for me because my wife Amy is a stay at home mom. We had just bought a house in Orange county, just had our first child, and I'm realizing that if something happens to me that would be incredibly disruptive for our family. In the next week, my company, in order just to remain competitive in the marketplace, had to make a shift to our commission structure. And overnight my income is slashed by 40%. Now, how many of you out there have suffered a massive pay cut or a devastating job loss?

Things got really hairy for us and it got so bad that we almost ran out of money completely. And that's when I hear this Jim Rohn quote that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I remember thinking to myself, who are my five? How many of them are already business owners making a massive impact in the world and having real financial security for their family? The answer was zero. You know, that's, that's a big part of why you follow Ryan, that's why you're a part of the Freedom Fast Lane tribe, is because like minded people come together. I've never seen a group of such tightly curated business owners. It's incredible. Well, I didn't have that at the time. And so I set out on this mission to upgrade my five pretty quick. I got some really interesting mentors, started a podcast on it called the Mentee, where I was the mentee, and I was just recording the private conversations with my mentors. And a few weeks after I launched that podcast, it's our national sales meeting. Jay Papan, the co author of the One Thing, was our speaker. And I remember walking into the room, they bought a copy of the book for everybody in the company, which, that said something to me. And for the next hour, Jay just proceeded to blow my mind on what it takes to. To own your time, to truly control it.

Now, keep in mind, folks, I'm realizing I need to upgrade my five. And here is this guy in front of me that's sharing probably one of the most powerful secrets I could have ever heard at that time, how to master your time. And so as Jay came off stage, I basically tackled him and asked to interview him for the Mentee. He said yes. And I continued to follow up for a series of months, just asking, what are you working on and how can I help you? And it wasn't until probably asking that four times that he said, Gary Keller and I are looking for A CEO for a new company. I said, well, I know a lot of people, let's talk. If I can connect you with the right person, great. In the back of my mind thinking that that would be me bringing value to Jay. When Jay and I got on the phone, he told me what they were looking for. And I realized at that moment that it wasn't the people that I had in my mind, it was me. So I threw my name in the hat, ended up getting the job and moved my family to Austin, Texas. Now let's talk about what happened prior to moving to Austin, because here I am holding down a full time job. I also launch the Mentee podcast. I turned that into a six figure business in a year. So I got two full time jobs, right? Medical device job, my business behind the Mentee, and, and for all of you business owners, you know, starting up, how time intensive that is. I also have a family and we just had our first child. So managing that time and living a quote unquote balanced life, or as we like to refer to it now, a counterbalanced life. I was failing in a. I remember recording an episode with my wife, Amy. I think it was episode 50 of the Mentee.

You heard her say that she could count the number of times that she fell asleep next to me or woke up next to me in the last year combined on her ten fingers.

Think about that. How many of you are in that place in your business right now where there are just not enough hours in the day. No matter what you do there, there is too much work. You're having to work the full day, you're having to burn the midnight oil, you're having to wake up at the crack of D and get after it again. And in the process, whether you realize it consciously or not, you're having to sacrifice some of the things that matter most to you, the relationships with the people who matter most. Your health.

It's exactly where I was. I'll never forget one night, late at night, it's got to be after midnight. And I am. I'm so tired. I'm just so fatigued. I remember looking up, asking, when is this going to end? How am I ever going to get out from this hole that I seem to have dug myself into? I have to continue performing in my day job because that's what's keeping the roof over my head. But I can't stop on this business. My family's future depends on it. When will it end?

It was right about that time that I had that connection call with Jay Trying to help him find their CEO for the business they wanted to start.

When my family and I moved to Austin, I had a feeling that I would learn a tremendous amount. That was a huge reason of why I chose to take the leap going from employed entrepreneur, quitting a quote unquote secure sales job to do a startup. But in my heart, I knew that if I had a guy like Gary Keller, who's built the largest real estate empire in the world, and I had his co author Jay Papazian there to mentor me on a daily basis.

Something great would happen.

And over the next 12 months, I proceeded to have the most mind expanding year of my life. And that's the purpose of today's episode, to talk to you about the very specific things that I learned. When you get a playbook handed to you by a guy like Gary playing at that level, who is just a master of systems, he has systemized everything. When he hands you his playbook and says, here you go, young man, now go take action.

Cool things happen. So we're going to talk about that playbook. We're going to talk about some of those things that I have actually implemented that have helped me more than double my productivity and now share it with close to a thousand other people who have seen a 50% increase in their productivity as well. I remember right off the bat, in the first 90 days, they told me they were going to assess me on three very specific things. Number one, my ability to cast a vision. If I want to earn the right to be the CEO of this company, I have to demonstrate that I can cast a really big vision that would be worth being in Gary and J's world. Number two, I had to prove that I could lead with revenue. I had to deliver $100,000 in revenue in 90 days or less. And number three, I had to prove that I could recruit and attract amazing talent. Because if you want to be the CEO, you have to be a magnet for talent. Otherwise you don't earn the right to keep your job.

So let's start with vision. I remember one of my first meetings with Gary and Jay. We walk into Gary's got this private lair, if you will, in the Keller Williams corporate headquarters. Most of the people in the building don't even know that it exists. And I walk into this lair, just beautiful, nice rich oak floors, amazing view of Austin, Just complete greenery surrounding us. And at this conference table is Gary and Jay. I walk in and I bring. I have my business plan on me, my vision for the company. Very, very simple business Plan. It was a single sheet of paper at the top. It had a goal for the year, and then it had three priorities that I needed to accomplish in order of priority that would make that goal happen. Priority number one, priority number two, and priority number three. We sit down, I start talking about priority number one. Gary and Jay ask a bunch of questions about it. I answer them and I say, we good? They go, yep. And I start talking about priority number two. About halfway through priority number two, Gary stops and starts asking more questions about number one. I don't think anything of it. I just answer the questions. And when I feel like I had answered them to his satisfaction, I said, are we good? He goes, yep. And I started talking about number two again. I finish up number two, and I start talking about priority number three. And Gary starts asking more questions about number one.

At this point, I'm going, what am I missing here? But I answer him, I say, we good? He goes, yep. I start talking about number three for probably no more than 10 seconds before Gary stops me a final time and says, quick question. Do you need to accomplish number three to accomplish number two? I said, no. He said, do you need to accomplish number two to accomplish number one? I said, no. He said, then do me a favor. Go ahead and draw a line between number one and number two. Or even better, cross it out. Rip the page in half. Don't even think about number two and number three until you have earned the right to by mastering number one.

How many of you right now in your businesses, you know that you have a lot of things that you need to do. You have a lot of big rocks. I mean, by definition, that's being an entrepreneur, right? You've got all these balls up in the air, but when you're focusing on trying to juggle all these balls at once, what ends up happening is you end up mastering none of them. And this is what Gary said. He said, and I'll be very specific about what the priorities were. My first priority was was creating a profitable evergreen funnel around a course that we have called Time Blocking Mastery. I need to be able to put a dollar in on Facebook and get more than a dollar out. That was priority number one, because that would scale. Priority number two was to launch the One Thing podcast. And priority number three was to recruit my first employee, which is an executive assistant. And I was taking action on all three of them. And Gary's going, what are you doing focusing on a podcast? If you haven't even first and foremost mastered your funnel, that's going to allow you to stay in business. Why are you even thinking about hiring an employee if you haven't mastered that thing that's going to underwrite that employee's salary?

How many of you are dividing your attention and your focus across a bunch of different priorities that in all fairness, they're all important.

But when you wonder what allows a person to scale up a true empire, the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results. It's that we all recognize there's. We all have a lot of priorities, but it's about getting hyper clear on the one thing that you can do such that by doing it makes everything else easier or unnecessary.

Over the next four months, I said no to creating the One Thing podcast. I said no to recruiting an executive assistant. And all I did every single day was worked on that webinar. I spent over 200 hours personally rewriting this thing, testing it, tweaking it, working with my traffic team, working with my funnel team, making tweaks every single week until it was profitable. As I look back on it, if my focus had been divided, I don't know if I would have gotten it done. Because you know what? It sucked. I am not the person who should be in front of a computer writing out a webinar. But it's what was required to master my One Thing. There were days where I was pissed, I was depressed, I didn't want to do it. But when I had that level of clarity that my one thing, the one thing that I could do for my business that would make everything else easier or unnecessary was to get this one webinar to convert profitably. And I didn't earn the right to focus on anything else until that one thing was done. There was no other choice. It was hyper clear. The level of personal accountability was through the roof. If I'm attending another meeting, then inherently I am not showing up in the world as the highest leveraged form of myself.

When you move throughout your day, are you aware of the times when you're sabotaging your business because you are not focusing on the things that matter most?

Now let's take a step back because one of the biggest misconceptions of the One Thing is that you only focus on one thing. That's just not the truth. Did I have to be in my email? Yes. Did I have to attend certain meetings? Yes. Were the things that I had to do that were not the highest use of my time? Yes. The difference is, folks, I was hyper aware of it.

Sometimes I chose to be interviewed on another podcast or to interview somebody for the One Thing podcast. Because I just. I just needed to do it. I just wanted to do it.

We all fail. Nobody's perfect at this. Jay's not perfect at it. Gary's not perfect at it. But it's that awareness, and it's looking at where you are today in terms of your baseline. How much time are you focusing on your most important work and asking the simple question, how can I do better tomorrow and then do it, and how can I do better the next day and do it? It's not about being perfect. There is no perfect. It's about your road to mastery, enjoying the journey. That's a huge part of it. You know, I have in front of me a piece of paper that we use internally called a 41 1. It's how we establish our goals for the year. Then we establish the goals that we need to accomplish for the month to be on track for the year, and then we have the goals for the week that put us on track for the month. This is used throughout Keller Williams, throughout. You know, 155,000 people use this. It's powerful. If you guys want to see an example, you can go to theonething.com411 that's with the number one and the number 411. But I'm looking at my goals for the week, and I see number one, meaning the one thing. If I can only get one thing done this entire week, it is for my executive assistant who's coming on board, finalizing their 30, 60, 90, meaning the things that they will have to accomplish in 30 days, 60 days and 90 days to earn the right to stay in my world. It's not. What do they have to. What's their job description? What are they going to do? It's like, no, what are the two to three things they have to be able to do exceptionally well in the first 90 days, otherwise they get fired. That's a different way of looking at it. This is what I'm talking about. Taking a play out of Gary's playbook. I would have never thought this way, but he's got it systemized. It's a book. He gave it to me, said, go follow this. Cool. That's part of it. Number two, conduct interviews for another open position that we have. Number three, podcast. I've got very specific things I have to do for the One Thing podcast this week. Number four, launch a welcome automation for our email list. Now, I just named four things off to you. These are the biggest rocks that I need to accomplish this week. I'm not Done with number one, but I'm done with number four. That welcome automation. I did it. I already did that. That was my fourth priority. I still haven't mastered number one. I still haven't mastered number two. I'm the guy who's behind the mic telling you about this. And the reason I'm sharing this with you is because I want you to understand that I'm not perfect. I've been in Gary and Jay's world for over a year now and I'm still not perfect. So give yourself permission to fail. Give yourself permission to acknowledge the fact that you're gonna act out of, out of priority. You are not going to show up in the world as the most effective version of yourself.

What I'm hoping that you take away from this is can you raise your awareness? Can you raise your awareness of what your most important work is and when you're not focusing on it? Because I will tell you, I act in order of priority a lot more than I used to.

So let's make this hyper, hyper tactical for you. Let's talk about exactly what you can do to take action on this so that you can implement it. Grab a piece of paper, write down your to do list. We all have them, right? Write down all the things that you need to do. Right? What most people do when they have a to do list is they feel inherently that they have to get that down to zero. Kind of like email inbox. We want it to be down to zero. So what are you gonna do first? Most people do the thing that's easiest. There's a reason for that. When you do something and you get to cross that off your list, there is a chemical reaction in the brain where dopamine is released and all of a sudden it feels good. So you're off the hook. Not your fault. That's the way you're set up. Here's what Gary would suggest. Instead of doing the thing that seems like you want to do it first, it's the easiest to cross off. Go ahead and number them. If you could only do one thing on that list, what's the one thing you could do such that by doing it would make everything else easier or unnecessary and put a number one next to that. And then should you earn the right to focus on something else, meaning you already did your number one, what would that next thing be? Put a number two next to that, then open up your calendar. If we were to look at your calendar together, would I see time blocked off for you to do your most important work.

Or Would I see a bunch of meetings? Would I see some random to do's that you wanted to remind yourself to do?

When I look at Gary's calendar, if you were to cut that audio team, if you were to look at Gary's calendar, if you were to look at Jay's calendar, if you were to look at my calendar now, you don't see a bunch of random meetings, you don't see a bunch of little to do's that you're trying to remind yourself of. What you would see are big blocks of time that are blocked off. We call it time blocking to do your most important work, meaning when somebody stops by with a question or a random, got a minute? The answer is no. When someone calls you on your phone, you don't answer. Means you're logged out of email, you're logged out of social media. For some people, they turn their Internet off. Sometimes it means removing yourself from the environment that has a lot of distractions in it and going someplace, a bunker where you can hide and get your most important work done. Would I find that time on your calendar? If not, I suggest you try it. And again, think big in terms of your vision, but start by taking action on a small level. That's what Gary says. He goes, it's great to think big, but most people think big and act big. You need to think big and act small. Can you prove to yourself that for 10 minutes today you can go into, quote unquote, your bunker and do your most important work and crush any distraction that comes your way? Literally challenge yourself. Can you, for 10 minutes, focus on your most important work and say no to everything else? Because inherently it's not as important. Prove to yourself that you can do that. And then can you do it for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and you expand it out and out and out until the point where you get to a level where a Gary or a J is, where they can control, where they can control blocks that are multiple hours long and avoid the distractions. That's when you get real productive folks and watch what happens to your business when you form the habit.

Of saying no to everything so that you can say yes to your one thing.

And that's the secret. Apply your discipline, apply your willpower to doing this on a daily basis until the point that it becomes a habit. Just like how you put a car in auto drive or autopilot. It no longer takes effort for you to get into your time block. It no longer takes effort.

For you to say no to all the distractions that are unconsciously sabotaging your productivity. That, folks, is a surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results.

And this is what I have learned to make a habit and live over the last year.

Hopefully that's added value to you.

We take the one thing principle very seriously here at Freedom fast lane and capitalism.com because I know how easy it is to get lost in the woods. To get lost in the woods. You get it. Like Jeff Woods. Okay, well, what was I saying? So we know how easy it is to just get completely lost in the massive amount of things that need to get done. But things get a lot simpler when you simply ask the question, what's the one thing that. That by doing it makes everything else easier or unnecessary? That's how we prioritize things. That's how I prioritize my life. So the One Thing podcast, the One Thing book, I think, are both useful tools to both give your team and also to have on your itunes list. And also it's probably one of the books I've given out the most often to both my team members and other entrepreneurs that I know. So I'd highly recommend that. That you subscribe over there and that if you haven't read the book, that you go get the book. So this is. This is fun for me hearing these regular updates of what's going on in the overall build out of the vision of productive and what Jeff is doing over there. So my hope is that he'll come back every once in a while and give us vision updates of how they're doing it. Because it is fun to see how a big vision gets chunked out, especially when their company is built on the idea of the. The most productive things that you can do in order to build that. If you haven't heard the first episode with Jeff where he goes through the key hires that you make and how you determine what the vision is going to look like, I'd highly recommend that one. It was extremely well received and I think you'll enjoy that. As always, if you found value in this, please share it with somebody that you know needs to hear it. And if you're not subscribed to the podcast, let's make this official. Quick. Kidding around. Head over to freedomfastlane.com iTunes. Hit the subscribe button. It'll help us rank higher. And also, you won't ever miss the show. Thanks so much for listening to Freedom Fastlane. Your support means the world to me. I'll see you guys in the next episode.