From 56 To 1800

I get asked about this a lot, so I'll go ahead and tell you. Sometimes the simplest things are the best. And sometimes all you need. When you're locked out of where you want to go, there's a lock and all you need is a key. And a key is a simple thing, but if you don't have it, you're locked out. But if you can take a simple key, stick it in there or turn it, you can move to a whole new world. Maybe I need to do a video on that, but I'm going to give you a key. I used to launch our recruiting. We started my first year of expansion into North Carolina with a gold building organization. We had 56 recruits. The next year we went to 1800. And there was a key idea concept that I used, the key used to launch this explosion. And there was a lot of ideas, a lot of concepts. But there may be. I don't know where you are in your life, in your business or whatever, but this is a great key you can use for bringing your team together, whatever your goal is. Because the mark of teams is that everybody tries to go their own way. Everybody's got. They don't understand when you talk to them. But successful teams are unified behind a mission. An unsuccessful team, you have people going in 40 different directions. You know they're, you know, they're, you know, there is, there's no forward thrust because everybody's got their own ideas, everybody's doing their own things. That's a mark of failure. Now, on the other hand, the winning teams are like, it's like tug of war. They're unified. Everybody is behind the same purpose. They're like swinging an ax. All of their force is put behind the, like the axe head of the team moving together as a unit and that everyone's power is harnessed for one goal. As a result, you're in a situation here to really move forward and blast through any kind of obstacle in your way and have unlimited success. Whereas over here, you're just kind of spinning in circles. And that's where most people spend their career. They might make a little progress and they kind of spin back. They're just, they're just like little fleas or something. But here, here's weird idea. I read a book about Andrew Carnegie and supposedly when Carnegie went to the took over the steel mills in Pittsburgh, he went in the first day and said, how many units want to meet the men and say hello? So he went and saw the men and he said, by the way, as he was making small Talk. How many units do you guys produce a day? Now everybody had to go by where the time clock was and clock in and put their time cards back up. So that was the focal point. Everybody went in out of that point. So he's talking and he says, well, how many units do you guys do a day? And they said, well, we do 11. About 11 is how many units we'll put out during a day. So then he came in at night and he said, that's great, let them go their way. And then he went into the night crew and when the night crew came in, so he took that 11 and he wrote it up on the board right above the time clock. You get your. Put your card in there, you get it stamped. And so right above that he wrote 11 and a chalk right above it on the wall. Everybody had to come through here. So when the night crew came in, they came in and they saw this 11 up there, and he was still hanging out there and introducing himself to them. And when they said, came in and they said, hey, what's up with this? Okay, what's the 11 about? So he told the night crew, he said, well, you know, we have our better people, superior people here in the day, and, you know, they've got more experience, etc. And so they produce 11 units. So we put that up there, kind of a badge of honor. This is what they get done in a day. You know, our first class team, well, the night crew, of course, a little bit offended. So when. The next morning when the. So anyway, they were wondering what's going on and they got a little pissed. And so the next morning when the day crew came in, they saw the 11 crossed out and 13 there, because it seemed like the night crew had something to prove. So when the night crew came in, Andrew Carnegie was there, had his breakfast early. He was sitting there waiting for him with his coffee and hi, guys, how you doing? And they said, hey, what's up with the 13? And he said, oh, don't, don't make anything out of that. We said, we've got our best and brightest people working at night and without distractions at night, there's no distraction. And they could of course get more done. Don't take that personally. But he said, you know, they're a superior outfit. They get. That's how much they get done at night. 13. Well, of course now the day crew is pissed. They've got something to prove. The next time when they, the night crew comes in, it's up to 15. And so that's how he ratcheted up production at his steel mill. It helps if you read. If you want to improve, you could pull ideas from other industries. So I went in and I said, this is a. I like this idea. So what I did was I told everybody, I said, here it is. This is 1980. We're going to turn things around. Made up my mind, I'm going to go for it. We're going to go for a recruiting explosion. You're either with me or against me. You don't have to go with me, but just don't mess with me if you don't want to get involved, because here's what we're going for. And so we put a total focus. And so in January, we did seven recruits. Now, I went up and I put. I got pieces of paper and I put seven, just white sheets of paper. I don't know how many I had. I had. I had one on the front door that they would see as they left the door, as they left the office. I had it up with a bulletin board. I had it up on the wall behind my head on my desk. So if they looked at me, came in and talking to me, they could see the seven over. I had it. I had it everywhere. Sevens. And so, of course, they came in. As the guys came in, we started February, they said, what's the seven all about? I said, well, that's seven recruits. That's our best we can possibly do at this point. And I told him the Andrew Carnegie story. And I said, I'm going to find out if we got any competitors, and we're going to see what we can do in February. Okay? So in February, we went out, and as we went through the month, it was a race to see how quick we had these signs up in the office. And it was a race to see how quick we could knock that out. And once we got past that, we crossed that out. We said eight, and then we crossed that out, put nine. By the time it was over, we had like, 13 recruits. And so I put 13 up at the end of February, starting March. Now, in March, we went out there, same thing. As soon as we broke through the 13, we were writing 14, 15, 16. We finished that. We had 18. Now, at this point, things started to get a little crazy, and we outgrew the office, and we were working in several different locations because I had a tiny little office to start with. So this didn't really serve the purpose, but I put that on my leader sheets, my scoreboard that I would pass out every week. And we keep track of that way in April. In April, we went to 30, 30, 32 recruits. May we went to 56. June we went to, like, 58. July, which historical, historically, a bad buck to see what I started doing here. Once we started getting teams to form and everything, I put up on the wall each team's numbers. Some would have four, some would have seven, some would have three or whatever. So we put this up here, you know, like Johnson 4. And so everybody would know what each team had done month before. As soon as they break it, they're up to five and create a little competition. And that's what drove these numbers up. And in July, it exploded 147, and then it went up to, like, two, I don't know, 202. But it was like we were in the three hundreds, four hundreds. We finished the year 1800. Recruits, if you mind the little things, you set the patterns. In effect, you get the habits, the patterns, the focus. When you're small, you can grow out from that. But if you don't get your small teams unified and working for the same goal, you'll never get to the big numbers because you'll never had them unified. Instead of, like, marching ahead with everybody behind the same goal, you're going to have this thing where everybody's spinning in different directions. This group down here might be working harder. They're just not going anywhere. Whereas this team is moving forward like a tank and doing things that, you know, never could have been done individually with everybody doing different ideas. So that's just one little monitoring idea that I used, and it turned out to have incredible results. Maybe you can use that idea somewhere in your business.