A Mindset of Accountability with John Mikesh

Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. This is Lars Hedinburg, founder of Real Estate B School. Today we have a single episode and it's called A Mindset of Accountability. And this is from John Mikish. We had him on our Business Growth Summit. And if you've been listening to the handful of episodes before this and probably the handful of episodes after this, this is from our Business Growth Summit. So twice a year we have the best of the best come in and share their best stuff. I was fortunate to spend three years with John consulting into his business. He was eyeballs up in his business, just working on production evenings, weekends, you know, it wasn't where he wanted to be, let's put it that way. And he built his business out in a way where he was able to achieve true freedom. He actually lived, traveled the country for a year and settled in Bozeman, Montana. And his business is just north of my market. And so he was 1300 miles away running a multimillion dollar real estate team. So this episode, and it's just one part, is going to help you understand how accountability can change everything in your business. Stay tuned.

Well, before I dive into material that I have planned for you, I just want you guys to realize, listening to this, it's like a full circle moment for me because I got the opportunity and the honor of working with Lars. The side of the story that he doesn't tell is that I actually sat on the sidelines for a year when he started his coaching company. See, Lars and I had been in other people's coaching organizations. And the common denominator in all of those interactions that we had was that he was the top of every company that we coached with. So as I coached through these other organizations, he was always the number one person in the coaching, you know, as a student. And so when he started his own coaching company, I knew he had the sauce that I needed. I just didn't believe he was going to give it to me in my market. And it wasn't until I really got to know him in a coaching relationship, which took me about a year to dive into, that we were able to really start to do some amazing things together. And I actually learned about him and what his heart was, which he has an uncanny elevated desire to help you guys win. And I think all of us that are on this call have that in us or we wouldn't be leaders and we wouldn't be like where we are right now and leading people in most cases. But some people just have it off the charts and you know, he talks about accountability, and that's what I get to talk to you about today. And I really think it's a privilege. Accountability is one of those things where you can gloss over and you could be like, oh, man, like, accountability is, like, boring, or we don't want to talk about it. But Lars isn't just saying what he said to open up this call. Like, I know of no leaders, no people in my life that I have a personal relationship with that have a desire to be accountable more than he does. And there's a whole bunch of things we do. Like, we're wearing a whoop right now. He's already messaged me and AJ Today about our status. Hey. Hey, man. Looks like, you know, either the altitude's bothering you guys, or you guys were out drinking way too much last night, and the altitude is bothering me. But I do have this can of oxygen, so we're going to. We're going to crush it today. And I think that what I want to share with you before we dive into the material is it's less about the material. It's less about the thing. It's less about the platform, and more about the energy that you bring to any one of these topics. So as you are leading your people right now through fear, uncertainty, and doubt, you have to bring the fire with everything you do, because people are desperately seeking to align with somebody who has a positive energy and is going someplace. So I get to talk to you about accountability. I think it's amazing. I'm going to share my screen real quick, and we're going to dive into what I have prepared for you. But really, what I want to talk to you about is a mindset of accountability. And for some of you that are listening to this, because we have over 100 people on this call right now, and I take that as a tremendous amount of responsibility, and I'm going to bring everything I've got for you from real world, applicable scenarios. But this mindset of accountability, there's going to be a temptation for some of you guys to check out. And I promise you, if there was ever one thing, like, if there was one thing that you could bring to your business, especially in a time like right now, a mindset of accountability is going to do more for you than any magic button you're looking to push, any super awesome, slick software you're looking to get, like, this is the backbone of every great business. So from an introductory standpoint, I want you to understand that, like, accountability is not something that can be given or assigned to a person. It's something that you have to be willing to take on yourself. And in that definition is a secret sauce to laying out accountability in your organization. You've got to get people to see the benefits of accountability because. Because it will enhance everything that you guys do together. It will add more transparency, and it will help you make better decisions about what is possible and what is impossible. I love this quote, and I'm going to share several quotes with you throughout this presentation that are really going to just highlight some important points about accountability. But leaders inspire accountability through their ability to accept responsibility before they place blame. So the buck stops with you guys. You have to be the ones that are willing to say, I'm going to run an organization of accountable people. And that's not always going to be easy. We're going to talk about that. But it's essential, guys. It's essential to trust to transparency and responsibility within your organization. And without those three things, you're never going to build anything great. It's going to be like, you know, you're. You're building this business and you're trying to hold on to all the pieces, and it's going to feel like a heavy weight, and it's going to feel like you're herding cats and you're trying to, you know, hold water in your hands, and it's always going to be leaving you and you're going to wonder why you're always just spinning your wheels. It's until you get this trust, transparency, responsibility that comes from accountability. That's when you're going to be able to do great things. That's when you're going to be able to take over market share. Not in a fleeting moment, but in a long standing. Like, I'm building a career here. So when we get that, by the time we get done with this presentation, I just want to illustrate to you guys how all of this is going to come together into a plan. Like, I want you guys to have a plan for your business that when you come out of here, that's going to increase your performance, the overall morale of all of your people, and the overall productivity. Because I would have to bet in knowing how many realtors I know across the country and just their businesses and what's going on. That morale is probably not where it was 12 or 24 months ago. That productivity in 99 out of a hundred cases is not where it was 12 or 24 months ago. So either you're going to become a victim to that or. Or you're going to reset the thermostat. And I really believe that this presentation is a catalyst to help you do that. So accountability is the glue that bonds commitments to results. We're going to, if we're going to get new results, we're going to have to make new commitments. And part of the challenge is that the market has been what it's been over the last three to five years, and it's allowed us to get a little bit soft. And, you know, I take this personally, too. Like, it's not just you that I'm talking to. I'm talking to all of us, myself included. Like, the market's just been up, up, up, up. But when we get, when we get into a market like this, where it's changing, it's either going to promote you or expose you. And what I want to do is I want to help you guys get a foundation that's going to help promote you and help you capitalize on everybody else who's going to be exposed. So what are the benefits of accountability? Well, we talked about responsibility, we talked about trust and transparency. All of those things are going to happen. But you want your organization to be so transparent to where any document. There's no, like, hidden corners in your business. There's no special scenarios. I find that when we're all accountable and we're all open about what that accountability is, that's when we find great culture. See, I think this business often gets it wrong. And when we go to events and we see people on stages, we're like, wow, that person has an amazing company. They have an amazing culture. I want a culture like that. And, and we have the tendency to sit in those chairs in those rooms and think it's about something that they're doing that's creating the culture that's fun, maybe, like events, happy hours, cruises, all things that we've done in our business. But the, the core of that culture, the core of that community, comes from the accountability. It's. We get to celebrate and do all those fun things because first and foremost, we run a great business. And that business starts at the level of each individual agent. And it's going to be led by how you treat yourself and you comport yourself in that. It's going to lead to increased feelings of competency. It's going to enhance your personal responsibility, and it's going to help develop your talent. And we're going to talk more about that in a minute. But you, as the leader, are going to have to share the vision for your company and you're going to have to handle what are the current expectations and responsibilities of everybody that's involved in your company right now. And you're probably going to have to do some realigning and correcting of expectations. So the way that we talk about this and the way that we do this is we set what we call KPIs Key Performance Indicators and we establish benchmarks for each role and we get their buy in. So what's a practical way that this would look like? Okay, so you have an organization of agents and maybe production's not where it needs to be and it's starting to affect the morale. You could really have a meeting with them and say, hey guys, where do you all want to be? Like, where do we want to go together and help them understand that we're not going to get the same results by doing the same activities. And if we want to go somewhere different, we're going to have to change the amount of activity, especially this time of day, and get their buy in on that and ask them, what would that look like for you? What would it look like if you were to have the best year you ever had in real estate? You can do this one on one to prep that meeting and then when you go into that meeting, you can do it in a collective manner so that their buy in, they're helping to create the new program for your company. Now you as the leader know where it's going and you can frame that and set that up and help them get there. But they have to understand that it starts with you. And a great way to do this is to take on some new accountability for yourself. And then you develop a method for tracking and collecting the KPIs on a regular basis. You're going to establish a weekly rhythm of reviewing the KPIs in a public setting. And you're going to define and communicate the performance improvement plan up front. So meeting one, we're going to talk about our need to increase our activity to set new KPIs. We're going to ask what do you think those KPIs should be? Should it be new contacts? Should it be appointments set? Are we going to focus on 1, 3, 5, 10, 20? What are you currently focusing on? So you guys are going to do this together so that they feel like they're turning the ship together. It's really important. And then once you establish what that new weekly rhythm is going to be and what you're going to communicate, you're going to define that new plan to them. Collectively and get everybody's buy in. If you're going to be a leader, you're not going to please everybody. You have to hold people accountable, even if you have that moment of being uncomfortable. And what I want to say to you guys here is, like, my natural way is not to be like a driver. Like, running a call center was not what I wanted to be or what I thought I was ever going to do. But the more that I took my skill sets and my desire to help people and aligned it with that type of accountability, the better the results I have. And over the years, you know, we tend to do things that work really well, and then for whatever reason, we stop doing those things. And I'm sure that's true for all of you on this call. And for me, it was like, whenever I moved away from accountability or I made accountability easier, my company suffered. And, you know, right now, we just got to get back to it. So it starts with you, the leader, and I just really want to impress upon you that it's going to be uncomfortable, but that that uncomfortable. This is the start of all the growth that you guys are going to experience. So just encourage transparency and honesty. Let them get it out. The goal is to foster an atmosphere of excellence. And if we can have some open and honest conversations as a company, then we can take some positive direction after that, and we can move into an account where we're personally accountable. And accountability requires mindfulness, acceptance, honesty, and courage. And that's going to happen at your level and at each individual team member level on your team. So, you know, share stuff like this with them. You know, explain to them like, hey, guys, we're going to have to kick it up a notch as a company. We're going to have to do more. We have to understand what's going on in the marketplace. We have to understand that the activity that we're doing is not going to get us to where we want to go individually or collectively. Once we have that acceptance and honesty with ourselves now, we can be creative and we can take on some new activities. So what are ways that we do this at a company level? So I say that all change comes from challenge. So here are some main ones to be aware of. You're going to have Resistors. In most cases. It's not just going to be, hey, it's going to be awesome. Let's go do it. So one of the ways that we fleshed out Resistors in our company in the past, and we did this, I think, at three different occasions. One time when we were at ReMax and then twice when we were an independent real estate firm, we would read the Energy Bus as a team. Like, I would just come home and I would complain to my wife Jan, and I'd be like, man, these guys are weak. They're off. Like, they're just, you know, I got a couple players that are doing most of the work and I got a whole bunch of people that are not. I'm like, what am I going to do? Like, how am I going to correct this? And she would just be like, hey, let's read the Energy Bus again. Because the Energy Bus is a fable. It's such an easy read. And you could have. What we did is we used to do one chapter a week and we would get through the book in 60 days or so and we would just go through a chapter and then talk about it together. And it's amazing how the book, the way it's written in this fable sense how people will identify with the different characters of the book and they will start to call each other out, they will call themselves out, which is the best way, right? Because if you're constantly dictating to your people and calling them out, it's not going to be the type of environment that people want to be a part of. But if you can create this atmosphere of excellence and people start calling each other out now you're onto something. Now you're going to have a special organization and people are also going to lack buy in in the process. They're going to be sitting in the chair in your office, in your team meeting and they're going to saying, what is? What is in it for me? What is? It's not worth it. This is something that's trying to benefit the company only the leader only the owner only. But you've got to get them to see how it's about their individual goals and us fostering an atmosphere of excellence that's going to help them hit their goals and help them hit goals that they wouldn't be able to hit on their own. And I think that's like the true definition of a great organization is that each member of that organization can achieve success and results that they wouldn't achieve if they weren't part of that organization. So you've got to help them connect those dots and that will help create clarity. So a lot of times, you know, you as the leader, you lack clarity. You don't know, like, you just think, I don't want to do this accountability thing. I think people aren't going to want to be a part of that. I think I'm going to lose my top producer. You think all these things in your head and I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute, but it's really just in your head. And what I found is that as my company became more and more of an accountability structure, there were certain pieces in place, right down to our lead management policy, right down to our independent contractor agreement. And when I was recruiting agents, a lot of times I was the most expensive place for them to be. But when they saw the plan and they saw the clarity of what environment they were walking into, that gave them the courage to walk into that and say, okay, this is what's going to be best for me. And that that happened for me, guys. Like, I didn't want to work with Lars. I wanted to because I wanted the benefits and the results. But when I went through his initial coaching questionnaire, I said to myself, like, this is going to be painful. My stuff is so jacked up that it's going to be painful. But I knew I wanted the result. So it took me about a year to get up my courage and, you know, just believe that he was going to coach me in his own market. But also just to get over the hurdles of like, I have to start doing things differently. And if that's how I felt as a leader, imagine how much more our people that work with us feel about that change. So I had to have that courage to step forward into a new environment to get a different result. And what happened with, with my time with coaching, with real estate B school is that I was able to get out of production profitably. I was able to get out of the day to day successfully and I was able to build and live a lifestyle of my dreams. And that all happened before COVID and then Covid happened and we just continued to grow. But it was that foundation that we put in place where I had to get clarity first as the leader of what was going to be a non negotiable for me. And I had to be willing to step into that unknown to get consistent. A lot of you guys are lacking consistency as a company. You start things and you stop things. You buy this new program and then you buy another new program, you start an accountability plan and it's just about to bear gold. And then you give up on it because one person in your company doesn't like it. Like, I know this happens, this happened to me and you guys are no different. So it happens to all of us. So how do we overcome these challenges? Well, we have to develop a thorough strategy. And what we did is we defined our KPIs and our benchmarks for each KPI. And like, here's an example, this has to be done for every role in your company. But for our buyer agents, you know, we developed their KPIs and they were seven things that we tracked religiously. We tracked attempted contacts, new contracts, new contacts, appointments that appointments had, agency signed follow ups, and new contracts. Now each one of those things is fairly simple in nature, but it still required a thorough definition which we put together in our lead management policy. And an example of why that's important is because if I let you determine what is the definition of follow up and I asked 10 of you, I would get 10 different definitions. So we had to, as a company say follow up in, in the terms of our KPIs. Is anybody that you've met with that's not under contract. So a very clear definition. Because if we're all working off a different set of definitions of what attempted contacts looks like, we're going to have distorted data and that data is not going to drive results. So one of my pet peeves as a real estate team leader was, you know, this idea of just sitting down with my agents one on one, which I believed was important, but sitting down with them one on one and saying, so how's it going? Like, they're going to tell me any number of things that might largely be dictated on stuff that they're going through in that moment that has nothing to do with our working relationship. And I just found it to be a colossal waste of time. And that colossal waste of time was robbing me of my core number one motivator, which is freedom through business. So it just didn't, it didn't work for me. So we had to get clear on like when we sit down together, how do we move the needle? And by tracking these seven things, I could sit down with my buyer's agents on any given day, we could go through the numbers and I could find a hole in their boat and I could say, hey, you're doing the attempted contacts, you're having new contacts, you're not setting any appointments. What are you saying? When you're talking to new people. And we could role play that right then, and then we could fix it and we could set a new target for that KPI. Between now and the next time we would sit down together and we would book that next appointment when we were sitting down from them, all of this is not rocket science, guys. But what I find is that many of us don't do it, and we don't do it for a variety of reasons, which I won't get into in my talk here today. But you just got to ask yourself, are you sitting down with every member of your team at least once a month to go through your KPIs? And if you're not, there's so much meat on the bone and there's so much talent development that's available to you, and all of that is going to make your company grow and scale and succeed at levels which you're not capable of until you start doing these things. So defining those KPIs, and maybe like for a transaction coordinator, maybe there's only three KPIs, maybe there's only one, and that's okay too. But you've got to decide what are your KPIs for each role, and you've got to start to track those things and hold them accountable. When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. That is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or choice. I promise you that if you have a problem with a certain person or you think back to a team member where it was just a bad situation, it's because you failed to set clear boundaries with them and hold them accountable to those boundaries. And as a result, you felt like that person took advantage of you, that they weren't fair with you, that they were a bad person, and you started to attack their character, which is just a bad place to be. Right? We don't want to be there. That doesn't feel good. We don't want to spend our time of our lives like in a business, during some of the best years of our lives, being in relationship that way with people. But when you do the opposite, when you set boundaries, when you hold people accountable, magic happens between you and them. And even if you're totally different types of people that maybe wouldn't, like, naturally hang out together, you don't have to be best friends with everybody that works for you, but you can help them achieve a result and they will forever respect you and there will be a relationship of trust between you and them. That I think is just the best part about this. So overcoming accountability challenges. Develop a strategy that includes these following things that I'm going to share with you right now. You've got to have recognition. We talked earlier about not being a dictator, not just talking to them, you've got to have a recognition plan. And through words of affirmation, through incentives that highlight individuals and the successes and the winnings that they're having, you're going to encourage others to want to win too. I've noticed too many teams that reprimand and demotivate their salespeople instead of lifting them up. So what's interesting is like, hey, there's always things that the organization is not doing well. And there's always things that people are not doing well. If you're constantly harping on those things, you're probably going to push that person away from you. But a lot of times what we can do is we can love on the person for the things they are doing well. And just by doing that and not talking about the things they're not doing well, they know what they're not doing well. And if you have this, you know, environment of accountability, it's going to be clear what they're not doing well. But by recognition, they're going to want to do those things well and get better at them. You also need to provide one on one support. You are a leader of your company. You should be meeting with each team member individually on a monthly basis. You've got to inspect what you expect. This is going to help them stay on track. This is going to help them course correct before it goes three months, six months, and all of a sudden like they can't get back on track. And this is what a responsible leader does for his or her people. And if you're not the person doing this, there's been times where I've been running my real estate organization where I'm not the person doing this, that's okay too, but you better have a leader that is doing it. When I was traveling with my family around the country full time, we ended up traveling full time for 14 months. And then Covid happened and we stopped. During that time I was only in communication with one person, my leader of my company. But I was managing the KPIs that he was managing. So I was managing him to make sure that he was doing this with all the people at the company. So it's really important. If you're not going to be the one doing it, it's okay if you delegate it, but don't delegate it and abdicate it. You have to still stay on top of it and make sure it's happening. Ownership. When you show them how to do something consistently and correctly, you help them improve their results. When you can tie their success and the Success of the company back to activities that drive those KPIs. You're going to create an organization that becomes self accountable. I remember when I look back when my company was running at its peak, it's because I had done the thing at a high level. I was holding them accountable to doing it at a high level. And I remember walking in my office sometimes seven, eight o' clock at night and seeing my top agents in there doing their prospecting calls because they were so busy during the day with clients that were, they were showing houses, they were coming in from out of town. You know, we'd have a really busy summer season at Lake Norman that they would self be self accountable and they would say I've got to get my calls in, otherwise I'm going to have a hole in my business in 30 to 60 days. That's amazing. Like that warmed my heart and my soul. Like I can't tell you guys, but that doesn't happen if you don't instill a sense of ownership in your company. So I believe that when it comes to best practices, we have to do weekly meetings. This weekly cadence gives you the opportunity to highlight each individual the accomplishments of the week and whether or not they hit their benchmark. I love this quote. I operate by this in every type of business setting. I do. And it's what is measured improves. But that which is measured and reported publicly improves exponentially. Should say publicly in there, that's really important. And when it comes to recognition, do it publicly. This is the great combination locked to the soul of your people. If you will recognize people publicly for what they do. It just has like amazing benefits to your organization. So what we used to do, and these are just some ideas or suggestions for you, there's a lot of things that you can do here, guys. I'm just going to share proven things that we did that worked for us that were simple to manage. Because if the things you're doing are too hard to manage, you're probably not going to remain consistent at those things for long enough time to see fruit. So whenever I implemented something new, I did something new very carefully. And it had to be something that I felt like could be scalable to infinity. So we bought a whole bunch of Vegas weight poker chips. We had those poker chips embossed with our logo on them and we would hand these out every single week. And we had a Google form where people could nominate others for this. So let's say that I'm busy, I'm out showing property and one of my other Clients calls me and wants to look at a property that just hit the market, and I'm like, tied up with out of state clients. Well, I might make a call to one of my coworkers and say, hey, would you open this house for me that just came on the market? They want to get in and see it. And that agent says, yeah, no problem. I got your back. And that's like, what you want to happen? Well, that agent might nominate that other agent for that good behavior that highlight that behavior. And they would send these things in, and I was happy to pay it, because when they started taking ownership of, like, sharing and giving these things out, it was awesome. And they would represent $5 per poker chip, and people could use that to buy swag. They could use it at poker or happy hours that we would do, and team events and meals that we would have. It was awesome. We would also do make it rain, which was an incentive structure to help stretch them. So make it rain was pretty simple. If they had a certain amount of volume in the month in sales volume, they would get a certain cash prize. If they would. If they would hit another level, they would get a bigger cash prize. And I would go to the bank. And this is like, one of my favorite things I ever did as a team leader. I would go to the bank, I would walk up to the teller at bank of America, and I'd be like, hey, I need $5,000 in ones. And they would be like, in ones. And it was like, you know, I had a few different banks that I would go to, and then they got to know me, and it was like, it was just so fun. And then the bonus would be either, you know, 500 or $1,000. And I would walk up to that individ, literally make it rain in front of everybody else on them. And it was just so much fun. One of the best incentive things we ever did, and we would call it shoe money, because the ladies could buy whatever they want. They could buy expensive shoes, handbags, whatever they want and not feel guilty. The guys could buy shoes for their ladies, and they wouldn't know because they were usually tied to the accounts. So it was just like fun money, free money that they got, and it made everybody else in the room want to get that praise and get that make it rain money too. So it just had a lot of power. And we did this very successfully for years. Challenges. So I. I would say that, you know, challenges, you're going to have seasonal fluctuations in your business. You can have challenges, and then you can Reward those that do the challenges. So we would do an annual challenge called March Madness. That's kind of ramping up into our spring market. We really want to get things going. And we would divide the company into teams, and we would do it kickball style, where we pick two captains, usually our two top producers, and then they would get to pick, one by one, the rest of the people, and we would create two teams. They would get to name their team, they would get to manage their team, create another level of leadership, and then one of those teams would win at the end of March. And usually they get to go to a fancy dinner or something like that, and the other team would have to hear all about it. So these are just fun things that you can do. We'd also do annual incentives. We did a company cruise, all expensive, paid, and their spouse or significant other. We did that for years. We went on many cruises. It was so much fun. And, you know, it just really helped people buy in. So accountability doesn't have to be boring. You're going to be the determining factor on whether it is or not. When it comes to books. When I think of. And I'm a reader, guys, so, like, I'm always reading one or two books at any given time right now. I got two books on my nightstand in there that I'm reading and I'm enjoying, but I'm always reading. And when I thought about this topic and I thought about, okay, when it comes to accountability, what are the books that I've read? And I know there's many, many great books out there on accountability, but the books that I read that had the most impact on accountability for me were Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount, which is a book that I read as a company many times, too. And if I was running a sales organization right now, I would read that book with them right now. Extreme ownership really helped me say, hey, whatever happens in my business, it's up to me. I'm going to take ownership of it, good, bad, or indifferent. If it's not where I want it to be, it's first and foremost because of me. Can't hurt Me just expanded my mindset on, like, what's possible. A lot of can't hurt me is in the physical realm, like with your physical body. But I think that also translates over to the business realm. So whatever you think is possible right now, you know, there's a 10x version of that that's available to you if you'll tap into it, and then it's not Your ship was kind of a combination of extreme ownership and just process and system orientation that allowed this guy to take one of the worst ships in the entire Navy fleet and turn it into one of the best. And I just really enjoyed that book and, like, some of the leadership decisions that he made and how he transposed those decisions to his team, his people on the ship. So I just really love all of those books, and they. They really impacted me greatly. So in conclusion, I want you guys to think about these three things. Accountability changes everything in your business. And if your business needs change, I promise you it starts with accountability. And you've got to make a commitment today to be the champion winning coach. This analogy is what really helped me get behind accountability, because there was a time earlier on in my career where I was scared of accountability. I wanted to be the cool team. I wanted to be the team that everybody wanted to be a part of. And I thought I had to friend my people into being part of that. But what I realized when I came across this analogy of a coach and a player is that there are no great players that are uncoached. Every great player of any sport has a coach many times more than one coach. And I want to be a coach because if I think of a Michael Jordan or a Kobe Bryant, for example, imagine their career without any coaches, like, they still probably would have been really good, but they never would have been the greats that they they were or are. And I want to be that for my people. I want to take an agent who's hungry, who's talented, who has a drive to succeed, but I want to take them to a level that they are incapable of getting to on their own. If I can do that, if I can be that type of a coach, then I've fulfilled my role. And the cool thing is, number three, is that you're going to reap financial rewards for doing that. But more importantly, you're going to know that you did a job well done by your people, and you're going to have a sense of fulfillment and pride that comes from being a real leader to them and influencing them to achieve higher levels of success than they could ever achieve on their own or ever imagine. Some of the greatest things that ever happened to me in real estate were less about the money that it created for me and more about, like, the pride and ownership that I felt in knowing that when I first met this person, they were here. And when. When this person and our time together ended, they were there. And. And I just hope that you all are experiencing that or get to experience that at a higher level moving forward. So I've been talking at you, but I've been seeing that the chat's been coming up. What questions you have and you know, what can I do to further serve you in our time together?

I definitely have questions for you, so go to. Yeah, as long as, yeah, you can do it in a regular chat. So I've got a bunch of questions, but let's, let's fire through some questions here. So Sohail asked how fast do you fire? There, there may be. How do you hire? It's probably the prerequisite. Prerequisite for that. But how fast do you fire? Maybe describe your hiring process a little bit.

Yeah. So how fast do I fire? You want me to start with the hiring? So when it, when it comes to hiring, here, here's. We've done it every which way, right? We've hired too fast, we've hired too slow when it's worked really well. Before we opened our independent real estate company, we did entree leadership with Dave Ramsey and we pulled several really important nuggets out of that. One of those nuggets was dinner with your spouse. So when we look at problems, hiring problems, you know, we're like, man, that person didn't work out and it looked like they checked all the boxes. It was because, you know, the other person in their household, the other significant factor of that person was somebody that we didn't have any awareness of and we didn't realize they lived with crazy. So I think it's important if you're going to grow a great organization, you're going to do so with great people who put in great effort. And it's impossible for that person to put in great effort with you without bringing in the rest of their family into that scenario. So if you're going to have a top producing agent, they're going to have to work 247 sometimes and other times they're going to, you know, there's this idea of balance is often misguided and so you've got to get buy in from their significant other, from their spouse, from the other person. And one of the ways I like to do this is set correct expectations upfront. So we kind of run the, the hiring the person through the natural hiring channels. But then we would have dinner with them and their spouse. When I think of some of the greatest people that we worked with, it was we had a relationship with both them and their spouse and we could call on that and we could bring that up in conversation. So you have to have a hiring process. And for me that looked like okay, we have the ad, we have a response to the ad. Depending on the role and whether or not that role requires them to be more detailed, we might have them jump through some hoops in order to show that they can follow details and that they can follow instructions. Then we would dispersonality profile them. I never hire anybody without disking them and I know disc isn't the end all be all but I'm a simple guy and I like simple things. And for me I needed to know who I was talking to. And I'm probably not going to hire, you know, somebody who's a DI or a very C laden position like you know, an office administrator or something like that. And I probably am not going to do well in my accountability structure with a CS type person in a role that's a very salesforce person oriented role. So assuming you've hired them correctly, now you're talking about firing them sometime down the road in the future. The first thing that I would do before you fire somebody is I would really be honest with yourself about what is it about them that makes you want to fire them. And, and a lot of times if we're taking extreme ownership it's because we haven't trained them properly, we haven't put in the time or effort with them, we haven't held them accountable, we haven't set the boundaries correctly like we talked about here today. But there is a clarifying statement when it comes to how fast you fire somebody. And I also learned this from Dave Ramsey and he said if you wouldn't enthusiastically rehire that person again today, then every day that goes by is a waste of your and their time. You should fire them tomorrow. So once you understand that like hey, you've set the boundaries, you've tried to hold them accountable and they're not making progress, that's when it's time to just let them go and move on. And that can be painful. But when you look at business and business growth and what holds people back more often than not, it's because they have average people in the seats and, and they're not achieving greatness because of that. They're holding them back.

Awesome. And Richie, along the same lines, you know, I, I lose a decent amount of agents I bring on. They're not driven to work as hard as, as hard for my team as they are for themselves. I'm an advocate of making calls and most agents willing to join my team, they'd rather do social media or easier lead gen instead of making calls. Do you coach and help them for months or get rid of them once you see they're not meeting the expectations?

And this is the, this is the epidemic in our industry right now. And it's like, look, I would rather lose everybody and start over again and have an, and have a culture of accountability in my organization than have a culture of mediocrity where they're doing whatever they want to do, whatever they feel like doing, because your business has got, your days are numbered in that business. And I think this is, this is really the epidemic and why I'm so passionate about this presentation in this day and age right now is because we're going to have to make some hard decisions as leaders and it's probably going to look like you showing them what it looks like first. See, if you're running an organization right now and you haven't been selling and you haven't been doing this, probably now what it's going to take is you to reset the bar on what it looks like to make calls and get in touch with prospects and move them through the sales pipeline, the sales funnel. And they're not going to want to do it. They want to do social media, they want to do video. They're looking for the easy button. Like, that's just the day we live in. But if you can demonstrate true, proven results in a scalable fashion through an accountability model and you can get a couple people on board, it will only take a couple and you'll have to lead them and then they'll follow and all of a sudden your organization will start to get results and you'll weed those people out. So if you have none of that going on right now, it might be a longer Runway that you have to operate on to get it there, but once you get it there, the minute that you get that going, you have to get rid of all the rotten apples that aren't doing it.

Yeah. And a lot of it, all of John's talk is it's all for your personal responsibility and accountability as well. And I just don't know a single person, myself included, that has achieved anything worth having that didn't come with doing a bunch of things you don't want to do until you get momentum to not do them and, and massive accountability. You know, I just, I, I literally, you know, I, I can't, I, I can't think of a single example unless you're just given a pile of gold by your family. You know, if that's your plan then? Get out of real estate. Don't even deal with the next two years. So, yeah, suffer more. So. So keep posting questions. Let's. John, I've got a question. So you. You put up some of your books, so I won't ask you that again. But tell me about a failure, a failure point in your journey, you know, and a lesson you learned from it.

Yeah. When. When I look back on my entire real estate journey, I think the thing I did that was the most damaging to myself and my business was I kept changing things. So, like, I didn't have a solid foundation, I didn't have clarity around this concept that we need to go a mile deep, not a mile wide. And I just kept changing things and I was sort of like, new up and coming. I sort of had a little bit of extra money at hand, and I was going to these different coaching things, and I changed my Legion platform and then I'd change it again, and I would. I would change my structure, and then I would change the structure again. And it was just a lot of change without being clear about why I was making those changes. And that was very detrimental to my business and to relationships with people in my business at that time. So that's. That's my biggest failure as a leader. Now everything I do, I try to find the simple strategy to success in anything that I do, whether that's my marriage, my health, my business. Like I'm looking for, what is the three to five things that I can focus on that are going to have to drive all of the impact of what I'm going to do? And I mean, we were literally talking about this exact thing when it came to investments. Today on the chairlift going up the mountain, I'm like, hey, I know there's a million different things that I could be doing and diversified in, but what are the two or three things that I can do to where once I make the clarity, have the clarity and make the decision to do those things, I have the mental freedom to not have to think about that anymore for. And if we could apply that to our real estate business, it's like, hey, what are the. What are the two to three to five things that you need to focus on in your business? And then you can bring that to every area so you can have that for your general business, which is like, you know, what we would call, like a vision traction organizer. You can have that for your rocks per quarter. You can have that for your marketing department, for your sales department, for your operations department. But it's never more complicated than that. And we allow the world to give us all this, you know, garbage and complicate things and think, oh, we need this new thing, we need that new thing. And it's like, no, we don't.

Yeah. And that's a really good example. So in the area of personal finance, so, John, you narrowed it down to two or three and then instantly you're worth a hundred million. Right. Just because.

Or just the worksheet rich, baby.

Spreadsheet rich, right. So just like anything, right? Then you've got to like have the discipline. Like recently, you know, AJ was telling me, like, you really got to do this. I'm like, it's not my time to do that. Right now I'm focused on these three things. I've got a clear three to five year plan for these three wealth pillars. And then I'm going to add that fourth one. Right. So that fourth one works. Right? He's done it and it works. But it's the discipline to stay on the plan that you started. Because all havoc is unleashed when you're constantly like, all right, I'm going to do YouTube, I'm going to commit forever. It's going to be the best thing ever. And then you're like three weeks in and you have it. You shot one video, right? It's like three weeks ago. You committed to it, you know, or a Facebook Live challenge or, you know, whatever, sitting down, sitting still for three hours a day and doing new business development.

So, so good YouTube one, though. Because if you don't have clarity about what expectations in YouTube are and you don't realize that that's a two year consistent effort to get any results, then you're going to give up after three months or a year and you're going to say, this isn't working. But it's having the clarity upfront from people that have already done the thing to know and get that clarity before you decide if that's going to be one of your things.

Yeah, so, so good. How about one of your. Maybe think back to like when you were sort of still in deals and you were kind of throwing bodies into the mix, maybe kind of failing forward. Was there a personal, a personal daily success habit that you could attribute to your success in, in that time frame?

Yeah, I mean, when I go back to throws of production, it was, it was really operating out of my database. Like when I did sales at a high level and I was running a team, it gets very chaotic very quick. You can, you can feel overwhelmed that's, that's how it worked for me. It was like I felt overwhelmed. And once I felt overwhelmed, I felt paralyzed. And what would get me out of that was having the ability to turn off. I needed to have downtime mentally in order to be able to produce at a high level. When I focused on doing that thing and really operating out of a database. So again, very in line with what we're talking about here today. I was personally accountable. I took ownership of my own faults, weaknesses, you know, lack of strategy. And I said, I need a database that will tell me what to do and I will do everything that that database tells me to do before I go home at the end of the day. And if I can stay accountable to that and I can follow that plan, then I can go home at night and know that I'm not missing anything and my brain won't be constantly spinning and I can be present with my wife and get joy from my children and go to the gym in the morning and repeat it all over again. But things were, things were not growing and very chaotic. And then I made the full commitment that, okay, this is the best practice. I'm going to set the next task, the next to do when I'm having the conversation with that person. And then I'm always just going to follow my day to day activity of what my database is telling me to do.

Yeah, awesome. And this, this question may, may be a similar answer, but I'll ask it anyway. So for an agent that is, regardless of where they are in their journey and years in business, but they're, they're looking at this, you know, whatever you want to call it, shift or transition or economic whatever, you know, if, if what, what advice specifically would you give someone that it wants to just like, just crush it over the next two to three years, whether it's personal advice or mindset or, you know, whatever. What comes to your mind when I ask that question?

Yeah, I mean, what comes to my mind is just be encouraged like, like follow people that are providing the plan and the way forward who have already been through it, and then be encouraged and take massive action. If you're trying to do what everybody else is doing, you're going to fail. If you try to be incrementally better than the average, you're going to still feel like you're failing. Take massive action, leave everybody in the dust and what will happen is everybody else who's, you know, scrolling aimlessly on social media changing their strategy every day, week or month, you'll blow past Those people. And every season has a beginning and an end. And when we come out of this season and it starts to grow easily again, you'll be in a position to reap those rewards and change your family's history.

Awesome. The best.

Going back to that though, Lars. Like that was my story. That's what happened for me. I found something that worked and I was like a dog on a bone and I was doing short sales and foreclosures and working with everybody. Like all the stuff I didn't want to do, like short sales were horrible. But I found a way through that and it made me so strong during the last recession that when we came out of that, it's like what every blessing business wise in my life has resulted from that period of time.

Awesome. And guys, we've got John. I'm going to take John for every bit of the next 11 minutes. I have an infinite amount of questions because I know how he built his business and it wasn't, I did what you told me to do and it wasn't real. Like there isn't anyone that I know that is, is free from stress and financial freedom and, and that has built a complicated business that is all like, you know, all this sexy, glitzy stuff. It's just doing the basics and, and even to drive that point home.

I.

I forget when this was. If you were on like Production Mastermind Call and I'm like, you still use that? He's like, it was the way you collect your data. I'm like, that was from like 12 KDNA, baby. Yeah. And, and he's like, why would I change it if you know? And I'm just like, I don't know. But it literally works. It just tracks the, the numbers of those seven numbers you've been tracking for everyone in your world for 10 years.

One of the, one of the objections I'll get to that, to that system, if you will, is like, well, what if they lie? It's like you just assume they are going to lie, but it's your lot. Your numbers are either going to promote or expose you. And once we know that, it's like, oh, they'll lie on the contact attempts for a couple weeks, but then what happens? Then I just go to the next thing and I'm like, man, you have a lot of contact attempts and no new contacts. When are you calling this amount of people, this amount of time? Like your numbers don't add up against 10 plus years of data. You look like an anomaly. So let's talk about that and it exposes them. And then they're like, oh, man, if I lie about this, it just goes to the next thing in the system. And that's how you know you're tracking the right things, because you're not tracking different things that are all, you know, good things to track but don't correlate to the sales cycle. It's like, oh, you lied about new contacts, or you did make the new contacts, but you aren't setting any appointments. Great, there's the hole in your boat. What are you saying? And then we work on that thing and they can't hide. It's like you shine a light in every dark corner of your business and you're willing to go there. And what will happen is they will leave. And that's good because it will provide a structure for the rest of the organization where they will thrive.

And I think it's like, once a quarter, I would. I would just go through the core values with the team. And the first two eliminates 98 of the population. It's we hustle and work hard and we embrace accountability and discipline. And if you have interview questions like, you know, hey, Ed, tell me three examples how you hustle and work hard on. On a regular basis. And Ed's like, oh, man, I watch a lot of Netflix. And I think it to himself like, oh, crap. Like, real examples, you know? You know what I mean? So this is not rocket science. And then embrace accountability and discipline. How many people in the general real estate agent in our community embrace accountability and discipline? And you could. I asked a guy like, all right, so give me an example of how you embrace accountability and discipline. He took out his wallet and he had his weekly. Like, he had some folded up piece of paper. No idea I was going to ask that question. And then he had also another piece of paper with his goals written on it. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is. And he was like captain of his football team, like, whatever. Like, you know, he worked three jobs in college and like, there are clues, right? There are patterns. And it's not like this potential. We tend to. We tend to see the potential in people.

Past performance is often an indicator of future performance.

They're not going to change. They're not going to change coming into your world. Awesome. Awesome. I've got you for eight more minutes. So I'm going to ask, when I say this, what does it mean to you? Success is 80% mindset. What does that mean to you, man?

Nothing in your world is going to happen until you believe it. Can happen. So I, when I started coaching with you, this was a pivotal, pivotal moment in my career. I said, I love doing production and I'm going to be less happy when I don't do production because I feel validated as a person because I'm good at it. And you told me, you said, john, that's just between your ears. When you get out of production profitably, you're gonna like it even more, I promise you. I didn't believe you, but I had enough, I had enough desire to have a business that would serve me and my family at another level. That I said, okay, I'm gonna try him out and when I find out that he's wrong about this, then he'll be wrong about other things and I can go back to doing it my way. And man, I tell you, like, there was no greater feeling than doing deals that I had no involvement in and, and I felt so much better because of it. But that was a mindset shift that I had to be willing to change. And sometimes we, we aren't willing. There's somebody that's watching this right now that thinks that they're not ready to have an accountability structure like we talked about in their business. But I promise you, all the things and the reasons why you think you don't want to have that have to do with your beliefs, your identity, your art. So like businesses and art form, right? Like how we run our businesses and create our businesses. My business and large businesses were founded on the exact same principles. But my business and his business, if you walked into either one, looked and felt completely different, that was the art and the, in the identity that we each brought to our businesses. My encouragement to you is make your art about the way you love and care for your people. Don't make it about things that shouldn't change. Make your business run on fundamentals, on a strong foundation and then make the top of the house look any way you want, but have the foundation at its core. Stop changing all of the foundational components of your business and asking yourself why you're not growing or scaling and you can't retain people.

Yeah, and you know, people will, will ask us like, and they'll almost see it as unachievable. But my first full year in real estate was 2008. I sold 44 homes with part time turned full time assistant, no other team members. And then a handful of years later, we did 453 transactions with 10 producing agents. Guys, I'm, I'm not lying when I tell you they literally did the same things that I did in 2008, and it was just like sitting down with the first guy, Chris Goodwin, and saying, hey, listen, this is what I'm doing. You've been in real estate for 18 months. You've sold two homes. This is what I'm doing. You do the same thing, and I think it's going to work. And he's like. He was super young. He's like, okay, I've got nothing to lose. He sold 27 homes in his first 12 months with me, and then he got on a three to four home a month. And I think his top year was 80 homes. And he was with my team for like, seven, eight years. And it was literally no different. Same script, same time blocks, same trackers, paper trackers, where you put your numbers into it. So it's just. I think we overcomplicate it. The key is that John was willing to do the things himself personally, and then just, you know, replicate it out. That that's this whole thing. If you can't do the thing personally, you've got no shot. Any. Any comment on that, John?

Yeah, too many people are exiting, exiting early out of the key roles that are business. Like, you know, you might be on a growth curve where you're ramping up production and you feel like you need to have this big team and all this complexity because you got a couple extra dollars to rub together and make it happen. But, like, what if you went one more year and you went from selling 20 houses to selling 50 houses? Now you reset the barometer for what's possible. Your people are never going to do more than you did. And if they do, they're one foot out the door and they're going to be gone. Like, you're going to set the bar in your business with what you've done along in your career. And I see this happen all the time in real estate businesses. People are just getting their foot off the gas, they're getting out too early, and. And they're wondering why it doesn't last.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, that just brought up another question. When. When did we first start working together?

Was like, 2014.

14. Okay, so you were.

You. Probably. November of 2014.

Yeah. So you were probably one of the first, like, 20 in the. And that was the. That was the year we did 453 transactions. And I worked, like, 40 days in.

The business that year in my market.

Yeah. What was I going to ask you? I had one more question that I want to ask you. Is there any. All right, let's let's end with this one. So if you had to, other than maybe joining EXP a little earlier, is there anything you would do differently in the journey if you had to do it all over again? What are like maybe one or two things where you might have done differently?

Yeah, I probably grew too slow because I had a fear of losing if I took a chance, like, I would just be more bold and more courageous. And I think I could have made the decisions that I ultimately made. Like we talked about earlier in this talk today, I waited a year to coach with you, and I knew it was the right move for me, but I didn't have the courage to do it. I didn't want to change. I didn't want to have that comfortableness with people on my team. You know, I just wanted everything to kind of stay the way it is. But the problem with staying the way it is is it doesn't ever stay that way. You're either growing or dying. So, like, I would have been a little bit, like, if I look at who I am today and how I think today versus how I thought 10, 20 years ago, like, I was just more scared. Like, I was still, you know, running from that. That initial hardship of, like, not not being able to pay my bills and not being able to be successful. And a lot of times they say that initial success is what keeps us from our ultimate success. But, like, looking back is just all between my head. Like, I would have taken. Taken calculated risk sooner. I would have made changes more seldomly so I could have remained more consistent and I would have focused on, you know, what, what. What are the things that really drive the business and not what's a shiny squirrel to me?

Yeah. Awesome, awesome, awesome, brother. I appreciate you. And the best is yet to come. So it's an exciting time and we'll talk soon. Be good, brother. Enjoy this.

Bye, guys.

Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that conversation around accountability. And like John said, it's more mindset than anything else. If you know you're at the point in your journey where you want to align yourself with folks that can teach you how to grow, but do it in a way where you're going to have more freedom. Just grab a business growth assessment. There's no obligation whatsoever. You just get on a call with our business growth specialist, and they'll take you through a process to figure out exactly where you want to be in the future, where you are now, and what's holding you back in terms of achieving those growth goals that you set for yourself. So go to rebsgrowthassessment. Com, that's rebsgrowthassessment.com and we'll see you over there.