Episode #664 - Setting the Stage for Success - Business Goals with Larry Weidel

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

In regards to. We're halfway through the year. A lot of, like, not to date these things, but a lot of people like to set new year resolutions, things of that nature, goals for quarters, goals, halfway through the year, monthly goals. You're obviously somebody who has a very clear and direct purpose. That's obvious at the beginning of every year.

Now, what is your goal?

Does it change at all? Is it more personal? Is it more professional? As time goes on, has your mind pivoted to other things, do you think?

I think it's different. Depends on where you are in life and what your situation is, what your responsibilities are. And there were times for decades where I would run organizations and what I would do is. My number one thing was to make sure that I wasn't the one that limited what we did the next year because of my limited thinking. So I'd always wanted to have the biggest possible conceivable goal to kind of challenge everybody with, to get them excited, to keep me excited and. But I wouldn't. I think for a lot of people, the standard thing with the New Year's resolutions, great. But on the other hand, I would say, why are you waiting till then to do it? You should already have your resolutions. Why would you wait till January 1st? Why would you wait? Period? And I was always starting to think about the next year. The end of October 1st of November was always the most depressing time of the year for me because I would look at what I expected to happen the year before. No matter how great it was, it was never up to what I expected. And so it's like, okay, next year we got to really get it. But I'd be working for two months to get the plan in place. But I wouldn't be just planning for two months. I plan. I'd set things up. I'd get contests, I'd get new materials, new game plans, new training programs. And so that when it came time to launch, we'd have a warmup meeting in December saying, you know, we're going to, here's what we're going to do when we launch. And when we launched, it was a matter of executing the thing and not like January 1st. Oh, what should we do? And so I would say, as you get, you know, it's like Bill Gates when he was running Microsoft, he was doing those kind of things. But there came a time for the last 12, 15 years or something, he's retired from that executive role to where he's working with the foundation. So now he's chairman of the board with Microsoft. But he's not in there making the game plans and the executive type goals and strategies what we're going to go for. He's working on other things in another way and he's doing the similar type thing, but he's doing in the charitable type things. And so if he's doing a good job or if he's a saving mankind or if he's a demon from hell, you're going to get the whole gamut of opinion about Bill Gates or anybody else out there. But I do know that he's out there trying to do something good in his opinion of what needs to be done for the world. And I'm sure he's very organized about it. But he's not running Microsoft the way he did. He's got other priorities. So as we go in life, you know, as you get down the road, you get different situations and responsibilities. But personally it's important that you have things you can control and you can make something big happen. And I certainly have those. And sometimes it's starting new companies start working with, you know, you have a subsidiary that now you're going to put a lot of energy into and spend your time over there. So it's always important to have something great that you're working towards. And I don't think waiting to it goes far beyond a New Year's resolution. New Year's resolution is like for people to know they're living wasted lives and they want to try and recover it by have I'm going to lose five pounds in January or something and then, okay, now I'm living the focused life. No, I think that's missing the point. But if they get a benefit out of it, God bless it. But I just think if you're going to live a super successful life and I'm talking to you, you can't do childish things like that. That's for children, that's for mental children. Not to say there might be one thing in your life, you know, that you have a genuine. But overall, you got to have all the plans, all the goals, all the momentum, all the schedules, all the support things and you got to be rolling. And because anything you start takes a while to pick up speed to get where you're up at full speed. And so we need to be going now, not to wait in January, our one time sprint spread. This is a lifetime thing you want. You need to be thinking about what your lifetime goals are and lifetime purposes and what really fires you up and can give you the biggest satisfaction and payoff that would impact all the other areas of your life that are important to you. So that's when I looked at. I just kind of roll my eyes when I hear New Year's resolution is like, baby's got a resolution. Good. No offense everybody, but.

Huge difference in hitting the goal once as well and consecutively. I'm a huge sports fan, for example, and something that I love is obviously watching the entertainment aspect, soccer especially, but it's that consistent serial winner aspect where you listen to them talk about interviews where even post retirement and they're like, did you enjoy the win? Did you enjoy those trophies? No, of course I didn't. I was thinking about next season. It's completely not even a thought. It's just on the next, next goal.

Yeah. And they. The thing is that there's a maturity that comes in over time. But that's one thing that works against, I really think that works against continuous success. You never give yourself a chance to enjoy the success you had. You need to do some celebration. There was in biblical times, I mean, they had seven festivals during the year, these suckers did. They did festivals up and down the butt. I mean they never stopped with a festival because they were thankful for the harvest and they were doing this and they would take time and the family go to this. And I just think all of that stuff is great and that we should be doing more. Celebrating and enjoying and doing something. When you're celebrating other than getting drunk, you idiot. You know what I'm saying? It's just like getting. Celebrating, enjoying is not having an occasion to go get drunk. It's like do something with a family, go to somewhere, refresh and recharge. Because one of the keys to consistent high level activity is you recharge and regenerate the body. It's like I used to do this with people, you know, in our business it was always recruiting. You know, if you're in the people business, you're always trying to recruit. And if you're trying to grow, you're always trying to recruit and train and develop people. And after a period of time, you have attrition. And any real estate company, any financial company, any kind of company where there's people, you have attrition. People fall off, they age out, they retire. And teachers in a teaching system, you got certain Teachers are going to retire, not get sick, they're not going to be back. So you're always recruiting. And so in the financial services, we're pushing recruiting all the time. And so especially if you're trying to grow fast and open up new offices and things like that, the more people you can get recruited, quicker you can train them, the quicker you can have some stars developed. And so we always, we wind up talking about recruiting all the darn time. And so when I was talking to manager, I said, when do you talk about recruiting? They said, all the time.

All the time? All the time.

I said, in the morning? Yeah, in the morning, at night? Yeah. And I said, yeah. I said, now what I did is this. I started off, Joe, every month maniacal about recruiting. And it's like, Joe, how many recruits you get last month? Okay, you're going to take this month off. Are you going to get more this month? Are you going to take a vacation? Because I know it took a lot out of you, Joe, and so it may be you want to take a breather, but I'm trying to put together my recruiting team for the month and I need to know who I can count on. I can't make you do anything. You're only going to do what you want to do. So you tell me what you want to do. You want to have keep going? You want to see if you can go from two or three recruits to three or four recruits, Keep it growing up like that, or do you want to just take a breather here and come back in a month or two? Oh, no, I want to do it. Well, what do you want to do? Okay. Are you serious about that? I can count on you on that? Okay. And so I would hit it with a bit. And then I call everybody back. As soon as somebody got a recruit, it's the first of the month, I'd have this conversation. I call them back and say, hey, Ralph's already got one recruit and John's already got a recruit. He already isn't that great that he got one. Because I'm chat. You know, it's just like they broke the ice. They got the first one and. And then if they got this. But after a week or two, the numbers would start to come in and I could see the number add up to something where let it play out for the month and we're going to be there. And I'd let it ride. And so I'd start talking about production, training the recruits, production. And then I ended up the month talking about promotions. You Know, pushing it over the finish line. What do we need to get you a promotion by the end of the month? But then when I came back into the first of the month and started talking about recruiting with a vengeance, it was a little fresh. So you need to mix things you do all the time. You really can't do all the time. You got to have a rhythm to it. But you can have priorities. Recruiting is a priority that can never go down in my world. The way I judge myself was if recruiting went up in the month, it didn't matter what else happened. We had a great month. We won. I did my job. I don't care what else happened. But no matter what, good things happen. Biggest paychecks ever, biggest payroll ever, biggest production month ever, most promotions ever, most people qualify to win a contest, to go on a trip to Hawaii or whatever. Didn't matter if the recruiting was not up by one, at least I failed. And so that's. I had. I knew it started and ended with me. And so the thing is, but for me to do that, I couldn't nag everybody about it all the time because they'd get sick. They wouldn't even listen to me. It is one thing for you to talk about it, it's another thing is anybody listening? And so are you having the impact. So you have to pace it. But that means your priority never changes. It's always your priorities is the same. And so that's what I would find. So getting back to your question, let's get back to your question.

Well, my question's kind of brewed a little pot here. And it spawned off on another thing, something you were talking about. There was like pitting people against each other. And that's something that really sparked something in my memory where it's like, anywhere I've been before, it's always like, who's got the best team in the company. Well, you want to be your team. And you'll find sometimes that you'll be nagging your co workers and you'll be like, especially if you're in sales, which I was in the past.

And you'd be like, dc, he just.

Got sale or you're not going to get one. It's always about something, no matter what you're selling. We would have had a thing where another. Other team members or team guys from other teams would have come up and seen the board and seen what kind of scores we had. Maybe stand back and be like, I can't be real.

Yeah.

Is that possible?

Yeah.

And for me personally, I Always like to be in the guy closest to the board because it'd be less distance to walk to put my scores up as well.

Yeah.

Do you find, like pitting people against each other really work? What would be your kind of advice for people who are like coaches or trainers and that kind of sales capacity, especially where it can really be dog eat dog?

Well, Art Williams used to explain it like this. And by the way, before, what we were talking about was enjoying your victories and things like that and pacing. And that's why I was trying to get it to pace it. You know, it's just like it can't be relentless all the time. And I used to use. I was getting to where I was going to give you this example. It's like if I grabbed your hand and I said, okay, I want you to crush my hand, well, you might be so strong that you just about crush my hand. And then after a while you're going to let up. I said, don't let up. Keep going, keep going, keep going. And what happens is you just can't keep it. And so maximizing your effort, peaking for a win. A lot of sports, you know, with these teams and all you're thinking is the priority of winning, but not the maniacal every second of the day, you know, you got a space for your energy and your emphasis and all of that stuff. And to refresh, give your team, when they've made the maximum effort, give a chance to kind of refresh and get happy again and heal up from the injuries and reset their perspective and then hammer down and go again and get into a rhythm about that. But if you don't get a celebration of victory built, some way of enjoying it, and people are like, why am I pushing myself? This is just sooner or later you're gonna. You keep the most maniacal people and most successful people because they have biggest paychecks and things like. But you can drive a lot of people into the ground. And most. A lot of our success rises and falls where those people below the top tier, whether or not they're encouraged and they feel like it's worthwhile to keep pushing and things like that. And so competition, to me, the final word on competition is this. Ultimately, we're in competition with ourselves, okay? And that's why I always looked at is like, what am I capable of? What potential is put inside me and what gifts have I been given? Or people where if I do what I'm supposed to do in the equation, we'll have this kind of success. And so I chase Potential. And I just tell people your biggest enemy is mediocrity and you settling. You know, the Bible says the heart is deceitfully wicked above all things. And so it's real easy to talk yourself into, I'm not being treated right, I'm working too hard, I deserve this and I'm not getting that. And so it's really easy to get yourself off track. That's why wares work off results. They don't work off how they feel. I got this early in my career, like facts, faith, feelings. If you want to be a winner, you operate off facts. You put your faith in those facts. That if I do these things, so many appointments or I work, do so many things like this, you know, make so many, I come up with this, that and the other. I'm putting my faith in facts. And then the feelings come. But the thing about feelings is they come and go. We can be all happy and laughing and someone says one thing, then we're all ready to go to war over some. Just instantly, you know, something somebody does or say. So feelings come and go and you're not going to have the consistency in your life following feelings. And so with us, it's not good enough, Joe, for me, as your coach, manager, leader, to say, well, we got Joe, he's a great guy, great potential on our team. And I know I can talk to Joe and say, joe, you really want to pursue your potential, you want to be your best here, you know, and. And I can just leave Joe alone. I don't need to micromanage. I can just leave him alone. And he's going to push himself as much as possible and he's going to reach his potential. Wrong. Wrong. Because he's going to be making excuses to himself and believe in him. And to get Joe to perform. Art Williams had this phrase, he said it better than anybody's ever said. He said, competition is not always nice, but it's necessary if you're going to bring the best out of people. You got to set up competitive situations, short term, long term, simple, complicated, whatever. And you'll find almost invariably people have been the most successful. They build the most successful teams, they're the most competitive internally. They've got contests for this, they got content, they measure this. They measure what they do in an hour. They measure what they do the first Mondays when they get on a Monday. Is this the best Monday we've ever had? You know, all kind of stuff like this. Is this the first day of the month we've ever had? But they get Things down where they measure everything so they know the numbers but then they have competition off of those numbers. The important numbers. Not just any numbers but the important numbers. The numbers that drive growth. They measure them and then they get competition on that. Like even you can have professional athletes. They're out there making millions of dollars a year but then they'll have a little side bet five bucks with each other during the game. Whoever gets the most tackles and the most this or the most that and they will kill themselves to get that five bucks off of their other friend. And they're both y' all make millions of dollars but it's just that five bucks I want. You know it's the same thing with professional golfers. A professional golfer I'm sure now things are different. There's different kind of guy. But for the longest time a professional golfer could not play one hole of golf if there wasn't money on it. If it was a dollar. You know what I'm saying? You get Phil Mickelson, he just can't play if there's not a dollar on it. He just can't. You know his mind just goes up but he's. It just kind of sets him up to concentrate is how he, you know how he goes. Doesn't have to be a lot of money but that competition is not always nice. But it's necessary if you're going to bring out the best in.

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It's off. Larry inspiring of 4th July taking us back on the on path. How do you celebrate success? So you hit your goals. Is there a particular time in the year like is 4th of July your kind of holiday? Are you more of a Christmas guy? What makes Larry take. What makes Larry I think take office the shoes I suppose.

I think the secret joke to me is to rise above all that crap. You know what I'm saying? That's to me that's kind of when you celebrate with your family, it's good to celebrate with family because they can get off that time and they're thinking yeah, to me that's the only reason holidays are normal day with me. You know, because I set up my own schedule. You know, if I want a holiday a day off, I want to go a weekend off or a week, a month. I set my own schedule. But when it comes to families and doing something with families, then I might cluster it around those days. But I think that's for the masses. And the thing is high achievers, if you're going to be different, that's for them. Those things are for them, they're not for you. Okay, I'm sure I'm gonna get. It's not that we are better than them, it's just that that's for the masses. It tells them they're going to celebrate and tells them when in this and gets a holiday off and you know. Right, that's great. But that's for employees. That's not for entrepreneurs. That's not for people who run the world. You know her because when you're. You're different. You're different. And so now depending on how you were raised and whatever, that might be a big tradition and you get together with a family on yeah, great. But as far as me, I did it now when you know, when we the kids were growing up, you know, we had Christmas traditions and celebrated that and Thanksgiving we had Turkey Tuesday, Tuesday night before Thanksgiving because on Thanksgiving you go with a family down to see the relative somewhere. But on Tuesday night we would have close friends in the neighborhood in and we'd have a Thanksgiving Turkey Turkey Tuesday. And so we had the traditions there when the kids were growing up. And so I would say it's not for just a poison but for families with kids growing up, you know. But as you get on your own up you kind of go beyond that. And so we would have. We got to one point where we'd have a party in early thanks Christmas. We kick off December with a Christmas party. And we'd have our people from the horse world from our neighborhood. You know they have their. We had people from the church but they would on their car to have their name and they how they knew us from the horseshoe world from the neighborhood, from the church and the family and the business, whatever, you know like six or seven different areas. And all these people come in and. But it's a great mix and mingle once a year and we start every year we develop another Tradition, okay. Until I think my oldest son was about 15 years old and he said if we just start another tradition, we're not going to have time to even have Christmas. That's when I realized I kind of overdone the tradition. You know, those are phases you go through where you put a whole lot into it. But I mean, I did the thing where I was the one to decorate the Christmas tree. We had a big high ceiling living room and put a 13, 14 foot Christmas tree in there on a stand, a two foot stand. And I'd be the one to decorate the whole thing and do that every year. And so you have things like that, but I think you grow out of them and over time, especially if you're lucky enough to live that long, but they're still important and you still, certain times you'll go and do it. But I celebrate when I, I reached the point, Joe, where I wanted to celebrate all the time. So I wanted to live, I didn't want to go to resorts, I wanted to live in resorts. And so I got the place on the east coast that I thought for me was ideal, which is Palm Beach. And one of the signs is there's a lot of billionaires live there and a lot of boats and a lot of planes and people like that. It's like, well, I don't have to be a billionaire to be. To live in the place where they chose or to be a member of the golf club they chose to be at, you know, so that's why I'm there. And then in Aspen, Aspen has got more billionaires have homes on the mountains. And it's the place where, I don't know still, but it was where they always held the Gulf Stream convention because there had more Gulfstream owners had homes in Aspen than any place else in the world. And I said, you know what, I used to ski all over the place at Aspen was number one. So I said, I'm moving to Aspen. That way I go three months each place, you know, back and forth, getting ready to leave next Tuesday for Aspen. But it's like I wanted to live in resorts, I didn't want to have to go to a resort. And that style has worked out pretty well for me. And so it's kind of like the whole year's a holiday in a sense. And so to me, that's how I look at the celebrations. And every now and then you get the whole family together and you go somewhere to a trip to New York or wherever. But basically that's how I look at.

It Are there any traditions you keep for just yourself or anything? Like obviously Jordan has cigars. What does Larry have?

I the traditions I have for myself are the activities that I like to do. You know, I've got the best cameras for if you're not in a studio where you have medium format and you have where it's really work. But to be able to carry cameras around. I got the three Leicas, the M11, the Q3. I'm selling the Q2 so I can get the Q3 and then the SL2, which all of this is Greek to everybody. But I've got the finest lenses, the finest cameras. So when I want to take pictures, that's one thing I indulge myself in. The other thing is I live in Aspen and you can ski in the greatest mountains in the world and spend my time there. So that's how I kind of indulged myself. I got a ski locker right near the gondola that cost money and everything. It's scary how much money everything costs, but you know, you got to spend it on something. And so I've got the golf clubs, golf memberships that I keep up. So those are some kind of traditions that I keep up that allow me to have a lifestyle that's all year long, not just on a holiday or something. Because I don't like coming back from holidays too much. I like to be. I like to stay on holiday.

Awesome. Larry, Just kind of last couple of questions regarding the podcast itself. If you could have one person listen to your podcast, who would it be?

I don't know. You're doing pretty well now, Joe. I don't really have my boys know everything. I know they've heard me talk enough. So I just want the people who are on the way up to listen, have access to it and is to as much or as little as they want to listen to it. I mean, you'll follow your own instincts. But when they do listen, I want to make sure that they're glad they did. And so I don't really think in terms of one person like that maybe I should, but nope. Because most of the people around that I know pretty well listen anyway. So let's see who. I just can't think of anybody. I'll have to pass on that one.

I guess we can talk about it more of her and then looking ahead. Larry, what's coming next for you? What can listeners look forward to as well?

What I'm looking forward to tomorrow is a great day painting in the studio. We just had a great day today and went over to the framer and took about 50 images over there and ordered frames. And I got the photographer coming in and then I'm looking forward to packing up and going out to Aspen on Tuesday. And so every day is a new adventure, you know what I'm saying? It's like. And I got some of my staff down from Atlanta out to help in the studio. I got my assistant from Miami and here going to be here Friday, Saturday and Monday. And so yeah, it's just every day is like a holiday, you know, it's like I'm doing what I want to do. It was like, I enjoy this, I do things, I. I enjoy being productive. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger has a thing on net and he said his father was in many ways a sad, beaten, miserable guy because of the, you know, one of the. With the Germans and they got beat and you know, he's drunk and he just never got over it really. But he. The things that he told Arnold there were a bunch of good things that he was raised with. But one thing he said his father always told him, always be productive. Always be productive. And like, you and I both know when you accomplish something, you create like a painting. It's just amazing, the satisfaction. I think Jim Carrey said he's an artist. He said I can go in and in two hours I've created something that never existed before. And that gives you a certain satisfaction. And so I do. Or taking photograph. Taking pictures. So when you go to a place, Joe, you have a purpose. I'm going on a trip. If I'm going to the Alps, I'm going to the Alps to take pictures. I don't paint outside, so I'm not one of those guys, but I'm going to take pictures. And so any place I go, it's to capture some magic or something like that. And so I. In my business, we have a call every Monday morning at 9 o' clock and we talk to the best and brightest people in the company. We've done that for this 13th year. And so that's amazingly rewarding, that thing. So to me, that's like being on vacation. I can't think like laying on the beach in a hot sun, on a towel. Why is this fun? Are you laying in a pool and you have grease now? I've done all that stuff, you know, I worked at pools and everything growing up, you know, beaches and pools and stuff like that. It's like, that's not fun. And so I like doing stuff, I like accomplishing things, being productive. So to me, that's what I look forward to every day. It's kind of like the thing you say, Joe, if you had 30 days to live, what would you do? Same thing I'm doing now. Same thing I'm doing now. I wouldn't really give it a thought. Might run around and see a few of the relatives, but a few of the friends. But other than that, what would I be doing? Same thing I'm doing now. And so it's a great way to live. Really.

Magic. Chris, Sorry.

Yeah, it's a payoff for working hard and dealing with the things, you know, you're dealing with in your 30s and to putting yourself in a position to where it's worth it rather than you go out there and you have all these accomplishments and you're a miserable drunk in your latter years, you know, which is because you didn't think it through. It was like, where am I heading? You need to be thinking about that all the time. So anyway, yeah, it was fun talking with you.

Well, Larry, absolute pleasure, thank you very much for your time, Stan. Great sentiments to end on, I think as well. So listeners will definitely be able to take some actionable insights and a little bit of fun for the holidays from that too.

Yes, sir. Yeah, I hope so. We all need to be grateful for our freedom. It's hard fought and we're not guaranteed. So every day we're free, we need to be grateful. So I would say that.

Excellent scuff. There we are, folks.

Million Dollar Mastermind, as always, is brought to you by Larry Wydell. Find out more about winning strategies and definitely check this webinar out. It helps others break the million dollar barrier every year. Visit ydellonwinning.com and for the podcast, make sure to search for Million Dollar Mastermind with Larry Weidel and wherever podcasts are found, please leave a nice comment on there or a harsh comment if you will and we'll be sure to give you a shout in the future episode. Thanks very much. On behalf of the team, thanks very much for listening.