How To Climb To The Top - Part 2

Let's talk about part two, how to climb to the top. And we're going to look at how they did it and look at some examples from a variety of parts of life. And we're going to keep hitting on the principle, which is the process you go through. And what is that principle and process? It's you've got to go through to get to. I was in a couple examples just thinking about this yesterday. So let's underline this. How to get to the top. Here we go. Just came out. We had one of our top people in the company for many years, Greg Fitzpatrick was talking about when he got started. He had, you know, he got excited about doing something with his family, wanted to do great things, but he started as a basketball coach and he started part time in financial services. And he liked helping people and he liked that, but he really liked the idea of building an organization, getting his own office. If we use the real estate example, it would be like he didn't mind selling houses, but he would much rather be somebody, go from realtor to broker to have his own office and have a team of realtors underneath him. And it was a similar thing in financial services. He liked working with the public, but he was more excited about taking this and doing something big with it. So the guy running things, who was Art Williams, you hear about art all the time. Art Williams told him. He said, greg, you're gonna have to. To do something to make that happen. What is it? You're gonna have to recruit. In other words, you're gonna have to learn how to deal with people, train people. You've got to recruit and TR. Or at least recruit 100 people, train them and see how many managers you can develop. In other words, can you duplicate yourself? You've got to learn how the technical skills and the people skills so you can duplicate yourself. If you can't do that, you're not gonna be able to open an office because it'd just be an office of one person. You. So Greg Fitzpatrick says, okay, to get a hundred people, that's gonna take forever for me to get it. And so it clicks in his mind, I've got to get some people helping me. So he recruits a bunch of people, I don't know, 5, 10, 15, 20. Takes as many as he can to a company convention, crams them all in one room. I forget, Greg, how many you told me or you told the crowd. But two of them came back on fire. They wanted to help him. So he now had gone from just Greg one guy to now There was actually three him plus two others. He worked through those again, recruiting, training himself, but then working through them, their recruiting and training and in way less than a year, I think he said they had 138 recruits. So he had to go through this process that Art Williams lined up for him. He didn't argue with him, he did debate it. He said, okay, how can I do it? He put his mind, that's what winners do. They put their mind on how can I do it? Immediately said, well, well, I'm not going to wait around for me to do everything. I'm going to go get help, put it together. He used the resources he had, took advantage of the company convention to help him train his people, get them to see things, get them to make the commitment. Had two that made the big commitment. Out of 138 people or together, they did got not a hundred, they got 138. And as a result, Greg went to regional vice president. And from regional vice president he not only has become a multimillionaire, he's got a hierarchy, a coast to coast organization of offices. See, he went to get his own office and it turned out to be much better than that. Coast to coast and sizable group up in Canada. Huge. He's taken trips all over the world. In fact, they even rent out the entire cruise liners and go on cruises together. He and his organization done that for years just to have fun together and enjoy each. But it wouldn't have happened. See, he got to this life because he was willing to go through this part. All right, so that's Greg. Now let's go on. Let's talk about another one who actually was over there speaking at the same meeting. Another one was Omar or a peso. And Omar started in Miami, young guy and you know, started with not a lot of resources and living with his mom, barely making it through college like a lot of us. And see, Greg was in, had the experience of coaching and dealing, you know, in the leadership. Omar was just a kid out of college. He immediately came into this thing and so he had to learn everything from scratch. But he got involved in the business. He joined, he learned the sales side of it. And then he said, I want to go big. So he earns his promotion. But he said, I want to be like Greg. In fact, he was inside Greg's organization. He went to a Y2K party Greg threw out at his house and you know, hundreds of people there, very successful. Omar said, that's what I want for myself. Now Omar was not a Person who could go out there and, you know, go out to Hollywood and they pick him as a leading man. And he's making $20 million in a picture because he's elbowed Tom Cruise out of the way for the leading role. Omar is like the rest of us. He had to work his way up. So he went out and recruited and trained and developed 10 per year himself for 10 years steady. See, it was a 10 year process. 10 per year times 10 years. Hopefully you understand it. In other words, a total of 100 plus people. A few more than 100, but 100 plus. But see, what happens is it compounds, it adds up. Now he has, you know, Mar will get all over me if I don't get this right, and I won't. But he's got about 15 people in his organization. Not only is he closing in on a million dollar a year income, a fellow who started with absolutely nothing but credit card debt and college education. Fifteen direct people have emerged his organization. Well, I don't know if they're directly in his organization making $100,000 per year. He's closing in, knocking on the door of a million dollar a year income. He's living in his dream home in the golf course, got the two kids, the gorgeous wife. And how did that happen? For 10 years he kept his head down and he went through the process so he could get to this. It doesn't matter how you do it, folks, or what profession you choose, that's the process you got to go through. Now me, I started, I had to go through. There was nothing, you know, you got to distinguish yourself, you got to prepare. So I went in, one of the few in my family, I guess behind my cousin Edward. I was the second one to go through college at Georgia Tech. Not a particularly inspirational experience, but I did get the degree and got a job. Four years building houses in North Atlanta, residential construction. Built 100 houses and learned how, you know, that's where I got my real education. Learning how to delegate, run crews of people, keeping up with teams of people, keeping them on track, keeping up with the details, getting things done through them, but also making sure that they got done what they were supposed to do by the deadline. Because I had a 18 wheeler showing up with a house full of kids and furniture that had to go somewhere. So we had to be ready by that deadline. Usually they all wanted to move in in August. And so, you know, you learn things by going through it. These are things. I went through this to get to this, to start in this business. And in starting in this business, which was a sales and management training thing, I'd never done sales or management training, but I knew that sales is where the big money was made in life. Unless you were going to be a professional, unless you're going to be a actor or an athlete or something like that, that's where you made your. Most of the people made the big money. So I said, well, I. I'm going to get into that business. So I spent four years learning that, getting the skills up there before we went through our big explosion of going from recruiting 56 people in one year and a new expansion up to North Carolina in 1979 to where the next year we recruited 1800 people. And we launched the explosion that really set me off to life of financial independence, big income, a lot of fun, a lot of doors opening up. But you have to go. That's what it took, you know. Two, once you make your big breakthrough, it's kind of like where Greg is, where Omar is. Once you open up the door, you get two. It opens up all kind of exciting stuff that you never knew, but you have to go through to get to. And this true. Like John Elway. Let me just give you a couple examples. In football, John Elway, he was a superstar all the way up, highly recruited. He gets in the pros. He goes, I think 14 years, never wins anything. Last two years, wins two Super Bowls. See, he had to go through a lifetime of grinding, playing, getting knocked out, humiliating, hearing that he wasn't good enough so that he could stay, you know, and he stayed. He didn't quit. He kept fighting. You know, he was older, he didn't have the resources, but now, forever, he's looked at as super bowl champion. John Elway, he's got those rings. Another example would be Harrison ford, you know, Mr. Star Wars. Harrison Ford. What did he have to go through? He was a nobody in Hollywood. He wanted to be an actor, but nobody would pay him any attention. So he made a living doing carpentry. Wasn't necessarily the world's greatest carpenter, but, you know, he did odd jobs. They had him in there, I think, to fix a door for George Lucas in the studio, and then they gave him a little more work. So he met George Lucas, and because of that, he got a tryout. He got an audition for this little art flick they were doing, Star wars. And guess what? He got the lead. One of the lead roles in Star Wars. And then what that did was open him up to this kind of stage of his life. If you want to get to that stage of life, folks, you got to go through the grinding grunt work that we all do to prepare us and to open the doors and make the contacts and develop the skills so once you get there, you can capitalize on it. That's how person after person after person gets to the top. And that's how you're going to get to the top, too, if you actually get to the top. Now, we got another way of looking at that in how this process works, and I'll tell you that on part three.