Episode 336: Why it Grew Exponentially with Larry Weidel and Host Bill Orender

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm Larry Weddell.

And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm here this afternoon with Bill Larinder. Hello, Bill.

Good afternoon, Larry. Good afternoon, everyone. Glad to be on. I'm really looking forward to this, Larry. This is going to be fun. I've been looking forward to doing it for a long time.

Yeah. Bill is going to be interviewing me on this and I'm on the hot seat. And the thing for those of y' all who've listened to the podcast, you know about Bill. Bill is a legend in business, has spoken. He's been the keynote speaker at hundreds and hundreds of events all over North America and Canada. And he's always the speaker on the agenda that people get most excited about hearing. If he's going to be on. Everybody's in the room. So, Bill, it's exciting always to talk to you and I'll do my best to not be boring on this thing to come up with something for you, but I'm going to turn it over to you.

Well, Larry, the things I want you to talk about have to do with the foundational thinking that caused the growth of your company over 38 years to plus and without it was continuous growth. And there's you laid the foundations early on that caused that then. Everyone in the company now is enjoying and seeing the great leadership that's coming out even 38 years plus years later. But I remember when you and I first got started, you were not what you are today. You're okay, you're a producer, you recruited, you built, but nothing great. And then you went to North Carolina and you kind of simmered there, it seemed like for six months or a year. And then something happened and the transformation took our breaths away. The numbers you start creating, the income you had seemed like it was overnight. And what was the trigger point? What were those the mindset that caused that? It wasn't sudden, I know, but what started all.

Well, I was always simmering, trying to do something great, put something great together. But a lot of it is finding where to start. You know, you want to build a bonfire, but you can't get a spark. So you see the people, they rub rocks together, get a spark and you try that and then that where then you get a stick and Rub that together. But, I mean, a lot of it was trying to get a spark and a nucleus and, you know, get something going. And I did what I knew to do and what I could control, which was get better and do what I think is the best thing to do at all stages. And this is why I do the big hitter call with a company and why do the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast here is, you know, follow the leaders, follow the people are actually getting it done because they know things, they do things, they understand things, and they're the ones to follow and get your stuff from. And it's not that you're going to copy everything, but that's where you can find your missing pieces. And so that's why I was such a big student of you and Art, Bob Turley and different ones in the company, because I knew I was missing something and I was just trying to put it together. But along the way, you pick up strategies, you pick up experience, you pick up relationships which inform you that, you know, a failure today can lead to a success tomorrow when you get in that same kind of situation. And so, you know, I was accumulating experiences, but it's painful when you don't have a team. You don't have an organization. You see that all the time, people running for president, they're all over the country and the media is following them. Buses, planes, every, you know, helicopters. They don't have a minute, a second to themselves 24 7. And then the minute they lose the election the next morning, I'll never forget the story of John McCain at 10am in Phoenix, standing in line in Starbucks, getting his own cup of coffee the day after, the morning after he lost the election, you know, and, you know, nobody talking to him. And before that, I mean, you know, you would kill for just a second of his time, ask him a question and whatever. But, you know, without a team, you could be the same person. Andrew Cuomo's finding that out right now. Without a team and a situation, it's hard to really show what you can do. You know, I remember I've been down skiing and Portilla, Chile, and it, you know, this big hotel which is like a cruise liner on ground. There's the only hotel in the whole resort. And so they've got one of everything there. They have a nightclub, and at night they had this great band. And all of a sudden, out of the crowd, this guy got up. Who's one of the guys listening? You know, he was a tourist or someone staying at the hotel for the week, skiing he gets up, kind of a friendly guy, brings his can of beer, got his glasses rumpled and they somehow they knew he was a drummer and wasn't going to let him sit in. So he got, he walks up, he was this big, kind of dumb looking, nobody friendly, but quiet. They put him behind the drums and he became a monster. It was just like a transformation. So you need a setting, you need a someplace where you can show what you can do. And in the beginning you got to put that together. And it just takes time. And the one thing you can be sure of is going to be worth whatever it takes. Because while you're putting things together, you are learning stuff. And you're going to need to learn all of it. It's all necessary, unfortunately. And so I was learning things. And occasionally you'd have a little success, but we. What causes you to get big is sustained success. And that's why I wrote the book serial Winner. You know, going from success to success to success, where you're not the opposite of that bill is floundering.

Right, right, right.

And you get sick of floundering and starting over all the time. So I did hear all the things everybody else heard, but it seemed to stick with me more, you know, and they say the people who do well in certain activities is because they love it more, they take it more serious. Well, one thing I took, you know, I despised floundering. I didn't like, not like it. I loved winning. One thing I learned from high school sports, winning is better than losing. That's one thing I've got in common with professional athletes. I like winning. Unfortunately, I didn't have the physical tools to be able to go to college at pros. But I like competition and winning. It gives you a chance to win. It gives you a chance to measure yourself, to accomplish and to get in a setting where you can do things. And the deal is you get better, you get worse. That just hit me hard because since I liked winning also, I went through all kind of downs. You know, I had the degree from Georgia Tech, I went out, got the great job. I was a big superintendent in building houses until Jimmy Carter ran the country into the ground. I blame him. And the economy went down the toilet and people couldn't get loans, and so I was out of a job. We were home builders in north Atlanta. We did a great job. I'm the one who actually built the stupid houses. And the guy that I, after I left the company because I had to go because he didn't have enough to pay my Salary and his salary. He and his wife had a prayer meeting the night before, and they miraculously, the Lord voted in favor of their family getting the money instead of me. And so I'm suddenly, the week before, it had come back through the grapevine where I bought something on credit for Christmas present for my wife. And it came back to the grapevine that when he. They were doing reference checks and he had told them that I would be in business with him for the rest of his life. You know, so I was on the impression I had incredible job security. And then, like three days before Christmas, 7am in the morning, out in Roswell, a subdivision in Roswell, Georgia, I get the news that it's over. And so quite a shock. And so, you know, I didn't know how to handle it. I had always been. I'd always been successful, you know, president of the school, president of the National Honor Society, lettered in every sport, you know, applied to one college, got in. And, you know, I wasn't used to being thrown out in the street. And so I was reeling. You know, I went. I said, one thing I'm going to do, I'm not going to take the first. I'm not going to just take any job. I'm going to take the time, catch my breath and find something I can get excited about, where I can be independent, where I can make at least above average income. And so, you know, not a ton of those places out there. I knew it was probably something to do with sales because I knew enough about how the world worked. And it took me nine months. But during that nine months, I was on unemployment for a period of time. I was on food stamps. And that's a great experience because I had never had those kind of negative things. I'd always been at the top of everything. But you get to where, you know, you despise that. It's not that you don't like it, you despise it. And so when I heard Grow or Die Bill, that did something different to me than just a little fact, a little trivia question. It was like at every stage of your life, in every area, you know, your relationship with your kids, your. Your spouse, your business, your health, if you're not improving, you're gonna die. Now, the die process, it happens slowly. You know, it's like how you boil a frog, you know, and tell him he's gonna get a bath and put him in a nice cool pot of water on the stove, and when he's not looking, turn on the burner, and then eventually, by the time he realized it's hot, he's. He's boiled to death. And so that's how dying happens.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellawinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

I knew the first stages of dying, and I would be, you know, left to my own devices if I didn't look at the numbers, if I didn't. If I wasn't honest, I could lie to myself, and I would have already started diet. So I had ways I put things in place to where I could measure. I always had projects, always had, you know, something a little bit bigger, something a little bit more exciting, something different, something new to where I could demonstrate we're getting better. And in the business, you know, because the thing. The dying process is so seductive because you go into this thing where you, you know, you make excuses. That was a fluke. It wasn't my fault. And then eventually you start to realize, well, maybe it was my fault. Yeah, yeah. And then it's like by the time you realize you got to turn things around now, you're really down the toilet. And now you go to work, and then it takes another period of time before you know, the line, the improvements and the benefits start to kick back in, and you climb back up to where you started. That's why I always, you know, I had numbers to show that. If you ever had a recruiting slump, Bill, I mean, I had. I used to get at one period of time for 10 years. I got daily downloads off the mainframe in Atlanta onto my computers. I had $100,000 a year tech guy working, and I had charts and graphs, and all of my guys, I could show you thousands of examples of if somebody had a recruiting slump in a month, it would last average, at least minimum, five months. Because first month they'd say, well, that's not right. I sent in a bunch of recruits, and they didn't get on the computer. And then the second month, they'd say, huh, all those recruits I thought I had, they're still not showing up. Where's all that by the third month they're realizing, wait a minute, we have really stalled out. The fourth month they start to get themselves some game plans and some effort going to turn things around because they really realize they got a problem. And then the fifth month they start, it takes five months before bigger numbers start to come back in. You know, there's a time lag on results. And so I just despised a slump. Even by, you know, if we were going to grow recruiting, which was my, I knew for us to expand around the country and you know, take advantage, we only do them 1% of the market. So I said, you know, we, we just gotta need a ton of people. And so you gotta recruit them and then you gotta process them and train them and develop them. And the first thing is that I could control is bigger and bigger recruiting numbers coming in. You know, stuff the pipeline and then improve your, you know, improve every step of the pipeline was, was the follow through. And so I figured if I could out recruit people, out promote them, you know, out train them and out promote them and we could have good quality business, nobody could stop us. And it all started with that recruiting number. So I was a maniac about recruiting growth because I did believe that if you're not growing, you're going to flatline, then you're going to slump. Because what happens is when you don't grow, you get bored and your mind wanders. It's just if you want to control yourself, grow, you want to keep, you know, because what happens is when you grow, your organization is having success and they're challenged and they're happy because they got more things to do. I promise you the people at Tesla are not flipping quarters second guessing.

Must.

Decisions on this, that and the other. They're running like dogs just trying to keep up with these production quotas and everything. Open factories and doing this, that and the other. And so the thing, and you know, getting bonuses in the process. So if you slow down, your organization goes stale too. And then people start, you know, the idle people that are idols become busy bodies. They stick their nose in other people's business. Yeah. About stuff. And it's just like you, you know, if you're driving your car and you.

Go.

To the store and you're driving like 15 miles an hour in a 35 mile an hour zone.

Your mind.

Is going to wander. You know, it, it's just that's what the mind does. And unless you, you know, hit the speed limit and make some progress, your mind is going to wander. You're going to notice, oh, I got an itch in my butt. You know, I've got a. I'm hungry. I need to get something to eat. And you know what I'm saying? It's like, yeah, yeah. And so all these. All of this stuff in a bit plays out in business in distractions because the minds are wandering, you know, the people don't recognize the real problem. The problem is, you know, my people just creating problems. Yeah, because you're not growing, you know, you're not challenging yourself.

You're not.

You're not raising everybody's expectation. You haven't put a bigger goal out there. You haven't got them excited about doing something bigger, faster, quicker, better, making a, you know, a noise for a name for themselves, you know, yet there's. That's the job of the leader. And so, you know, it's like we were talking in the past where I said, like, the Joe Covington guy was one of the phenomenal people we had in the 80s. He would say, I spend 90% of my time thinking about how to. Thinking and working on motivating my people. And what he was saying was he spent the bulk rather than administration, rather than this, that and the other. He knew he had to keep growing. And so to do that, he had to keep challenging his people, you know, selling them on, doing it bigger, making improvements as a team, going after, you know, bigger projects, bigger expansion. Like John Addison used to say, you know, a company or a team, you have to have a new beachhead somewhere, something new, you know, some kind of new product or new innovation or you gotta grow. So I think I had that.

Mainly.

At my core, because I was on the bottom bill, and I despised it. And then when we fought our way up to the top, I knew that death comes quicker than growth. You know, you chop a tree down that took 100 years to grow, you chop that down in a few minutes and with a chainsaw, less than that. So I knew that growth takes time and you have to make it happen. But if you don't make it happen, the unraveling can come very, very quick. And I just didn't want to have to do it again. I just enjoyed living the growth, winning, success life. It seems success happened to our people, you know? You know, I just like winning better. You know, I just like winning better.

Well, that's a good place to stop, Larry. So let's stop right there for a few moments, and we'll get back in a second.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world. I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning. Com Webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Widell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go.