How To Produce Independent Super Star Leaders #4

Let's now talk about how to teach rookies. If you're going to explode your business, you're always dealing with rookies and you've got to have a system. So once I want to give you some ideas that I always use, teach rookies or trainees, however you want to look at it, how to make things happen. So this would actually be how to teach rookies how to make things happen. It's easy to teach them how you make the sales and how you answer the questions, but making things happen, making growth occur, stirring things up, and that's how you get into the superstar level when things are going down, how to turn it around, you have a problem, how to solve the problem, make it turn out good, how to inspire people who are stalled out and get them back on track. That's what superstars wind up doing. And if you have a system, you have that in your mind to teach your people how to do that and assisted for doing that, you're going to be more successful than somebody who just hopes it happens. And is this something that'd be fun for you to talk about and why?

Yeah, of course it's fun to talk about because one of the things is that you're always dealing with new people. And the key in this business is you got to learn how to really teach someone from the start how to make something happen. Because if they start making something happen for them, they can make something happen for others. And then you start seeing a light bulb click and they start wanting to be more of a student, get more into the training.

It's just this is.

This is a key element right here.

Yeah. The thing is, while they're in their training phase, you want to get them to master those five things, five aspects of becoming a scar. You give them a good foundation, five foundational type areas. But as you're doing that, you also want to get them to where if they never saw you again when they graduated out of the training center, if they never saw you again, they were dropped out of the sky. That's what you talk our people about. If we took you in out of here and dropped you out of the sky with a parachute and he parachuted you into some new state, come to the town and we said, colonize that forest, open it up, build a business, get our name in there, pioneer that area for us, be the pioneer. That's what I was. I was the first one to expand north of Atlanta. Bill Arundel was the first one to go west. He went to Dallas, I went to North Carolina. We were the pioneers. So I was certifiably insane. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. But that's a requirement for being a pioneer. A lot of times you can't. Or an entrepreneur, you can't be too worried about what you're getting into. You're more excited about what you're going to do and confident in your ability and your support system than you are about what you're going to run into. Wherever you run into, we're going to solve it. And so you want to get them to that confidence. These five things, how do you get them to that point where they not only have it, but they're confident about it? I always say I was certified for being sane, but I was confident. Maybe it was not that well founded, but it must have been. It turned out pretty well. There's confidence. If I didn't know it, I would learn it. If I didn't know it, I would ask questions, I'd figure it out. And so you've got to have. The idea is hopefully they won't ever be dropped out of sky, won't have to stop. I mean, start from scratch again. But you have to be prepared for it. If you're prepared to do this, Joe, you're not afraid of it and you can't. And leadership and management, you can't be afraid of stopping, starting over. And disasters happen in life. You've got to call shots. And if you're worried and you're being defensive, you're never going to call the right kind of decisions. You're going to be hesitant, you're going to be doubtful. And so this is. Is a key. Hopefully you never have to do it, but you got to be ready to do it. You agree with that, Joe?

Oh, absolutely. You have to be ready at all times. You never know when things are going to change. You never know what's coming.

And the other thing is for you, running a training center, you know, you're up in Jersey. Have you expanded? Are you in New York yet?

No, no, I'm in Jersey.

How many locations do you have?

We have one location.

One location. So, I mean, you know, like if a nuclear warhead came out of, you know, the Taliban decided they're going to blow up New York and they start New Jersey and they started with your office. You'd be sucking gas, I'd be sucking wind.

I would just hope my RVP's are not in the same office at the same day.

Yeah. Or, you know, again, if the hurricane hits or whatever, you know, anything Happened. You're Boulderville, so you like multiple locations. And for that to happen, you know, you've got to duplicate. You got to put people out there. You want to get in multiple states, you know, why not? You know, you have a vision for expansion so that you can have stability. You want to take the message of your business to the marketplace. That's just a natural process of growth. And once you outgrow the United States, you want to go global. So to develop rookies, you want to develop rookies. But the problem is a lot of. As you develop rookies, you start turning control over to your. Your team. You wind, you know, and they're on train. You know, you could. You could probably do more yourself than 20 of them combined, because they're gonna. You. You're actually gonna be doing it. They're gonna be stumble, fumbling around, sticking a pin in their eye, and you're out there producing. But you're always going to be producing if you don't turn it over to them. And if they're stumbling and fumbling around this week, next week, they could be better. So you have to develop those rookies. But a danger is slumps, isn't it? Because you don't have the control in. It is one of the problem is how can you not only develop rookies, but explode also? Explode your business. Have your business. See, if you explode your business, that means your rookies are doing well. That's how you explode your business. And then the ones that do very best, they get promoted out and they open that new location, that new outlet for you and opening up, pretty soon you're in multiple states and you're starting to compound they're producing themselves. But to get that going, you got to start turning over, delegating a lot of these things over to the rookies. And that does lead to swaps. Have you run into that, Joe? Yes. Yes.

That's the key right now. I'm ready for it. How do you.

How do you get out of those slumps? Not only how do you get out of it. How about. How about if we avoid entirely once you're in a slump. The thing about a slump is usually it takes five months to get out of a slump.

Wow.

Yeah. Usually it's five months. And you know why? Why? First month. First month, you're in denial. We really didn't have a swamp. We just didn't get a lot of stuff in a little bit. That and the other didn't show up in the computer. So the first month is denial. The second month still in denial. Third month, you start to come out and say, oh, we're in a slump. But by this time you're into it. The fourth month, you start to. Now you start to come back up. You start your turnaround. And then by the fifth month, you go on an activity surge, an advertising campaign. Let's get some people in here. Let's get the activities stirred up here. You turn up, you ramp up your activity. You say, we got to change. Third month, you're making your changes, installing your plan. You're out in the streets making your change. In the fifth month, it shows up. I'm not saying that happens 100% of the time, but I am saying it happens 98% of the time. Only because I've got 40 years of records with a hundred thousand people to show. This is how slumps go. Five months. So rather than how to turn around, I'd rather avoid it. I have a mortal fear. If I'm running my business, I have a mortal fear of a slump as a result. I didn't have slumps because I had a mortal fear. I had a respect for the damage they could do to my business as a result. That starts from, you know, I started when I was on food stamps and unemployment. When I found this business, you know, came out of all my degree from Georgia Tech and five years of success in the construction business. When the economy went down, I was all of a sudden flattened out of my face with two kids and a wife to support. And the economy had thrown down like a lot of people that have been thrown out today. So once I got things going, Joe, I was like you. So you and I didn't have an easy getting started. No, we weren't Michael Jordan. No one said, hey, that's the next Michael Jordan. We had to grind and grovel our way to any kind of success. And so as a result, I had a mortal fear of a slump. Because I knew if he got in the slump and once you in a downward spiral, you could slump all the way back down to the bottom. Wow. So how can you develop rookies? See the key this gets into this other area and we're just talking about why this is important. But you gotta have a system for it is what happens. People that go through this, they become paranoid about turning over control. So what they do is they turn into control freak. So how can you control your numbers, your activity, your growth? How can you control that without being a control freak? This control freak is no good because nobody can develop. And we're not creating robots we're letting people develop into the best they can be. And nobody is exactly like anybody else. And if you're trying to. When you're control freak, you're always slapping them on the hand, trying to get them to do it like a little robot. Exactly the way you do it. That makes them scared, intimidated, because they never have confidence, because they're never sure they're doing it exactly the way you want to do it. And control freak really builds your approach to the business. Really build you a stagnant, insecure, fragile type thing. You never really go anywhere with that either, do you? And you've seen that, haven't you, Joe? Oh, absolutely.

I've seen it and experienced it with my team, me personally doing it to them, you know? Absolutely.

Oh, have you? Or I mean, we do. We have a recovering result. Recovering control flank. Well, at least you admitted it. You know, you're also supposed to recover. Yeah, I'm.

I'm off. I'm. I'm off the road. On the road.

I'm on the wagon still. It was all up. Yeah. So here's how I did, you know, I don't know how, but what have you learned? What have you found so far, like your steps that you've learned? Because you know, you have slumps, you have control, you turn the control, you delegate it over them so they can do it. It falls apart. Then you take control back, you start, you stop. Usually you learn some things. What are some things you've learned along the way? So I don't duplicate what you already know about, but we're talking about how to avoid slump, how to build, develop great leaders out of your training center without showing your future way. You can build independent. You know, the thing is, you and I talked about this is like how to build independent, responsible leaders. They're responsible for getting the job done. They're independent, they have their own ways of doing it, but they're trustworthy. And when, by the time the month is over, they're bringing the numbers in. If you give them the football, they're going to take it into the end zone. So how do you do that? What have you learned about that? What do you know about that you feel good about? Well, a couple things.

One is that when there is a slump coming on or I'm with you, I try to avoid that and try to predict when the team is going down. So the fastest way to do it is to one, find a new hero or a rabbit that could take away all the excuses so that people could chase them a new Fireball number two is find a couple of key leaders on your team that could sell out to doing something big quick, do a massive activity, break some records, throw out some competitions, and that way we could stir up the recruiting and then just plow right through.

That's really.

And I think one of the keys is when you really look at the business, I always look at, you know, December is that time of the year where people start getting this focus and the slump starts to come. So, you know, I always look at how can I stir up the recruiting, stir up the activity, so that way we get off the fast start in January so we don't fall too far.

Because, you know, if you look at.

The numbers, you see historically, you know, December's numbers are lower than any month of the year. So how do you not go down too far to where you don't? It takes too long to recover.

Right. And the main thing is that you do one thing you do a good job of, and Frank's always did a good job, is you have. You constantly know what the numbers are, right? Yeah. Yeah. You're constantly monitoring. And every business, every successful business knows exactly where they are, the numbers that matter. And while Sandy Weil was running Travelers on the way up to becoming Citigroup, on to become the number one company in the world before it did its face plant, when he stepped out, he would have all day long while the stock market was open. Every 15 minutes, somebody would come up to hand him a piece of paper that had the stock price, the company, and he would know every 15 minutes all day long term, while the market was open, how they were doing. He knew because that was the key number. We have other key numbers. But he knew that led to the growth. And when he went home at night, he knew how the stock had done. He would take the numbers. He would take numbers home with him, and he would look, instead of watching tv, he would pour through the books every night. So he kept up with. It was a lot of numbers to keep up with. But one of the lessons you've learned is always know the numbers. And I found that in our business, anytime you talk to a star, they know the numbers, they know what they're doing, they know what their people are doing, and they know what other people are doing because they plan to win. But so how do you go beyond this? Are you curious at knowing how you go beyond this right here, which are the normal things that top people do, how you can take it another notch? Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Okay, let's do this. Let's do that in the next one. Let me show you how I did it.