4 Strategies To Lead Your Team During Tough Times

Welcome back to the Business Freedom podcast. Another awesome episode, if I will say so myself. And it's only because these last three episodes. So the episode I'm going to do today, the one I did previous, was three reasons why you will fail as a team leader and the one before that. The ultimate shift storm is here. Are you ready? This episode I'm titling four strategies to lead your team well during tough times. So what's the things we need to do as a real estate team leader to make sure that folks know where we're going and how we're going to get there. And this is something what I'm going to go through here in these four strategies. This is really what we help do with our pilot program. So we've got something we call the pilot program. It's a free 30 day process that you go through with real estate B school. If you qualify, there's no obligation whatsoever. There's no strings attached. It's for folks that are a good fit for our community. So I will say that. And we go through these four things and we actually help you build them out. So they're super critically important. And I want to slow down here and just explain why each of them are really important. And I could have easily said four tools or systems or strategies to lead your team well during tough times. And what I mean by tough times and if you missed it is two episodes ago I covered the shift storm, pun intended. There's a lot of stuff going on, the four shifts that we're seeing right now. Number one, consumer shift. It's been happening for a while. We don't have a lot of respect and consumers just want to be served differently than most agents are serving. So number one, consumer shift. Number two, technology shift. AI is driving other industries in significant ways and it's coming into real estate and so there's just some stuff that if you're not aware of, you'll be displaced. Number three is just a business model shift, I'll say the ibuyer shift. So it's a lot of money coming into real estate claiming that the whole model needs to change and let me buy the home you want to move into, let me buy your current home. I'll make the process seamless. And it's just, it's really messing with a lot of markets. I'm in a major metro market and all the ibuyers are in my market. So the pie for what my team does is getting smaller. So that's number three. And number four is just a pending economic shift. So those are the four shifts. So listen to that episode. It'll help kind of set the stage here for the four strategies or tools that you need as a team leader to lead your team well through tough times which are coming 100% guaranteed. So number one is that you must have a clear vision for the business and also how your team fits into that vision. So what I mean by a clear vision, we call this in real estate B school, a three year picture. So for the business, you need to know exactly where you want to be in three years. And that's like with specific details on number of team members. You know what you want your top line to be, what you want your gross margin to look like, you know what you want the economic model to look like, your profitability, what you're doing in the business versus what you're doing now. Those sorts of things, like real sort of paint a picture around the business, but then also do a three year picture around the other five or six areas of your life that matter. And this could be your faith, this could be your as a parent, as a spouse, your financial life, your emotional life, you know, the key areas of life, your physical body, right? Doesn't matter if you're like crushing it in business, but you're spending more than you make and you gain 50 pounds, you get divorced and you don't spend time with your children and you lose those relationships and you're not happy anytime and you're not spending any time with God, right? What's the point of owning an amazing business if you're failing in other areas? So that is, number one is this. You have to have a clear vision of where you're going, where the business is going, where you're going, and then also help your team see how they fit in and where they're going in the different areas of their life. We do once a year a three year vision exercise with our team of the six areas of life that matter. Business. Let me see if I can remember them offhand. Business, financial, spiritual, physical, emotional and relational in their relationships. So we don't break out parent versus spouse versus you know, friends or fun. You can have a lot of different categories. The point is you need to be clear for the business and your areas and they need to be clear for their business how it fits into your business and their life, areas that matter. So that's number one, clear vision. Number two, a clear plan to achieve goals that get them closer, get you, get the business closer, get you closer and get your team closer to achieving this vision that they set out. We call this, so we call the first one a three year picture. We call this a one year plan. And we help in the pilot program, we help folks build out a one year plan for the business. Also we help you build out a one year plan in all of the areas of life that you said matter. And then we break it down a certain way and there's a process that we follow to help you do that. And so it's one thing to have a clear picture of the future, it's entirely a different thing to bring it back to a year and then even more than that. And I'll talk about that here in a second. So this is something I've always personally done really well. I think it's what separates real estate B school from a lot of coaching companies out there in that two things. I believe we call this a 319013. But also it's the fact that we do care about our members in all the areas of their life that matter. So that could sound like a pitch for real estate B school. I didn't mean it that way. I just want you to be really clear that it's not just the number of homes you sell, right? It's all the areas of life that matter. So number two, like I just said, is a clear one year plan. And so that's in your business, that's in all those other areas. Then help your team get really clear about their one year plan and be specific in terms of what it looks like to take the first step of three steps to get to that three year picture. So the one year plan is just a third of that three year picture. So you've got to be able to break this thing down. It'll make more sense here in a second. When I talk about number three tool or strategy is this quarterly rhythm. So three year picture, one year plan, we call it in real estate B school, the 90 Day World. So how do I take that one year plan in all the different areas of my life, including business? How do I break it down into the first quarter? That first year, right? What has to happen in the first quarter for me to achieve, you know, take a big step forward and build some momentum in all of these specific one year goals that I had? And that's really where this rubber starts to meet the road because we're, we started three year picture, we went to one year plan. Now we're talking 90 days, that's 13 weeks. And that's what I want to cover next. So number one through your picture. Number two, one year plan. Number three, the 90 day world. And lastly a weekly cadence. And we call this it's the 13. It's the 3190 13. The 13 just acknowledges the fact that there are 13 weeks in a quarter and in a given week you have five to six opportunities to crush the week. So we break down our quarterly into weekly and daily activities. So a good example for me was the second quarter this year. I had a physical, a health goal to lose. My goal by the end of this year was to get down to 192. I was up to 224 and I didn't necessarily feel unhealthy. I actually think that I distributed the weight in a way where people didn't think I needed to lose weight. And I just knew that I had a chunk of weight on me that didn't need to be there. And I broke this thing down over the year in a very specific way to do specific activities but to achieve certain milestones along that. It's a lot to say that I wanted to lose what, 20, 20. So 20, 30, 32 pounds overall. So it took me two quarters to do it. I'm actually weighed in at 190, 224.2 down to 190.6. So it's almost 34 pounds, 33 and a half pounds. And as I'm recording this, there's still two months, two and a half months left in the year. So now I need to maintain it, which is the hardest part. And I'm looking to get down to 188. So I'm looking to lose a full 30, 35, 36 pounds, which is super cool at the highest energy I've ever had. My point of saying all that is that you need to. It's easy to set a goal, but what's the system to achieve the goal? The system to achieve the goal is breaking it down into a weekly. So weekly I committed to clean eating except for Saturday date nights. So only get one cheat meal. No eating after 7 o'. Clock. Clean out the pantry of all the crap. There's nothing I can go into the pantry and eat that's really, really that bad for me. What's another system that I put into place? I bought a peloton tread expensive machine and I love it. And I crush crush workouts on that thing. And so that has really helped. I've increased from like walking or jogging two to three days a week half heartedly to you know, four to five intense, 45 to 60 minute boot camps where I'm running and lifting weights, kind of like orange theory type workouts, but in my home, so I don't need to commute, which I love, the efficiency of not having to commute. And so that weekly and daily cadence, you know, and then when you break it down from weekly to daily, what does your day look like? Do you have an ideal day? You know, when you wake up? Are you taking care of an area of your life that matters? For me, it's my spirit. I'm spending time in the Word, I'm studying the Bible, I'm getting to know Jesus right now. We just went through Luke and I'm going through acts now. So that to me, I'm feeding my spirit. Physically, I've got that part going the right way. My hydration, my sleep, my physical, my diet, all that stuff. Emotionally, I'm better at not bringing work into the home. And I'm taking more Fridays off and I'm disconnecting on the weekends. And we're doing some fun trips and those sorts of things. Financially, I got away a little bit from tracking my net worth. I'm now back to tracking my net worth. And on the 10th of every month, I track my net worth. And it's this process I go through. So I'm feeling really confident there as a parent. You know, I'm having really great conversations with my wife about, you know, where we need to be with our kids. And they're 9 and 11 and they're different personalities and they're uniquely created and just all awesome ways and really different and challenging in their own ways. And how do we train them up, how do we support them and coach them and all of that great stuff. So that's working in my marriage. How do I need to show up there? I'm impossibly driven and I have standards that are unreasonable for myself and they're exhausting. And sometimes I impute that others. And that's coming out a little bit. And I'm having conversations with Julie about that. And so how are you looking at these different areas? And then just the commitment to constantly be looking out three years, always building out one year at a time, breaking that down into four quarters, and then just committing to the weekly cadence and then just knowing that your decisions daily and even hour by hour, the time blocking all of that, that is the recipe. There is a quote and I want to mention it. I probably mentioned it before. It is from a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. The quote is this. And it says everything you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. You fall to the level of your system or Systems. And so this 319013 that I just laid out, this is a system to achieve multiple areas of your life more consistently. If you don't have a system like this in place, you are, it is likely that you are not going to succeed. A small example that I gave like, you know, I know if it is my workout day. Sometimes I can't fit a workout in the morning. I put on my workout clothes. I have actually have my workout shorts on right now. Even though not that this T shirt is, I'm wearing a grateful dude T shirt. But I know that I have these shorts on. These shorts are to remind me this is a trigger that I need to get a workout in. Today. I'm going on my annual honeymoon tomorrow which is a surprise trip a week long like honeymoon level trip I take my wife on every year. It's our sixth one. We've been married 13 years. And six years ago, maybe even seven years ago, I decided to commit to an annual honeymoon. And that's just another system I put in place for my wife to feel honored. And I go into this week with a real commitment to treat it like a honeymoon. How can I just honor her for the week as if we just got married and bring that energy and enthusiasm and engagement that I had back then so we don't lose it over time. As our kids get older, eventually we're going to be just sitting at sitting in the living room looking at each other like I want to be really connected with my wife. And so that's just another system I put in place to help with that. We do weekly date nights. I just started adding a series of questions to date nights. The date night in and of itself. Every Saturday we arrange for my sister or sitter to come over if we're in town. It happens all the time. Very rarely does it not happen. That's a system. That's not a goal of being more connected to Julie. The system is date night. And now I started asking a series of questions to make sure that we're really connected. Having those questions show up every week. I snooze it every week till 5 o' clock on Saturday with a reminder. And then I know that I'm going to pull up those questions when we're having dinner and we're going to go through them. It's a system. So the goal of being more connected to Julie, you don't rise to the level of that. It's the systems that you build out that help you get there. And I hope this was really, really helpful if this is kind of something that you're not doing and you don't know how to do it. Real estate B school exists to help real estate team leaders, really small to really big teams, succeed at the highest levels. And for the team owner to succeed in multiple areas of your life, all the areas of life that matter. So if you're at the point where it's just not working and you're like three year, like three or what, like I can't even see past next week. I can't disconnect. I can't even see that 31 90, like you lost me and it sounds like I need it. And you're running a 500,000 GCI little small team all the way up to a $5 million team. But it's not feeling like it's going in the right way and you don't have these processes in place and it's not a sustainably sort of set up business. The only thing I can offer you is a conversation. Just go over to realestatebschool.com, click on that orange banner on top. You can, while you're over there, you can check out our case studies, you can check out our podcast episodes. Past podcast episodes, just book in a business growth strategy section. We have something called our pilot program. I mentioned it here on this podcast. It is essentially a free look at what we do in real estate B school. If you qualify. And we help you build out this 319013 and get really clear on where you're going and how to break it down so you'll have a high confidence that you can get there. And if we can do it together, we're going to do it together. And if you see the value, you will stay with us. And so yeah, if a conversation about the pilot program makes sense, we'll definitely have it. So go to realestatepschool.com if that's you and this resonates with you and we'll see you over there. You good?