How to Fail Fast and Build Massive Momentum

What's up Business Freedom Podcast listeners? Today's episode is how to fail fast and build massive momentum. And so I'm going to keep this one to mainly business in every way you possibly can imagine. I have failed in every aspect of business in two businesses now that you could possibly fail. And I I want to cover three things that my intention here is to really serve those of you that are struggling with a fear of failure. And yeah, and so this is not an easy topic to talk about. A lot of the stuff I see out there with others that are kind of touting and this is not abashing anything that anyone else is doing. It's just to to say that very few folks out there are going to share from a position of how they failed as a way to make your journey easier. It's typically like, look at me, I'm number one. This thing is all about me. Do this, it works. There's never an issue with anything. And so the goal of this podcast is to share, you know, how I view failure and how I work through failure and some of the ways that I've failed. So hopefully you can maybe shift your mindset around failure and maybe avoid some of these mistakes. So we're going to do three points, as I typically do. The first one is how do you view failure? I'll use an example of let's say in hiring. This is the area, you know, if you're looking to build a real estate business or real estate team that is a legitimate contender for providing the best real estate services in your entire market in the, in the whole country. Let's just say your goal is to build the best provider of buyer and seller real estate services. You're going to have to bring people into your world and you're going to fail consistently. And I'll give the example of we had a member, Cody Riddle, who did a case study recently. You can check it out on the website. Real Estate B School Cody Riddle. She told a story about hiring. She's on her seventh administrative hire and her mindset around that hire was that each one is going to get me closer to having an operator that can really build this thing. And she tells a story of how each one of those hires built out her operating manual or her operating procedures for her business a little bit at a time. So she never viewed it as a failure because she was always working on something, systemizing the entire business through the contribution of each one of these administrative hires. And so it's just a good example of how I've always been good and our members that are most successful are always really good at failing fast. So the thing you need to take pride in is the fact that you can fail fast and you don't get overly down about it. And I'll talk about that on my point. Number two, in areas of business that you know you need to be successful to build some leverage and some sustainability, you have to view the outcome, keep your eye on the prize. So the prize is having. In Cody's case it was having a rock solid administrator that can grow her business from a backstage perspective. And on her seventh hire, she now finally has that person in place. And the business went from 250 to 300,000 or so GCI went for. She first started with real estate B school. Last year she did 1.2 million of GCI. And I think she has two agents, her husband, so it's a husband, wife team, her and Bill. I think there's only two agents and herself and this main operator. And so it doesn't have to be this complicated business. She fell out of love with real estate. Now she's back full on love affair with real estate. And so think about how you view failure. Do you view it as failing fast as a means to an end or do you sort of fail once and you're like, I knew that hiring an administrative person like my clients could never, you know, contact somebody else for help on a transaction. Like are you sort of this self fulfilling prophecy like it's doom and gloom and you knew that going in. So you're not going to get back up on the horse. That's number one, how to view failure. Number two I just touched on is how do you get back up after you fail? There is a really good book Steven Pressfield called Turning Pro. In the book, I'm not sure it's worth reading. It's a really easy read if you do read it. I don't think there's an audible version. I think I actually downloaded an audio. It was a convoluted like anyway, I don't think it's unaudible. It may be at this point. So how do you get back up? So interning pro Steven Pressfield says like a professional is more interested in the activities that lead to a result than the result itself. So amateurs get all caught up in a loss or a win or you know, if you look at. I know that. I know a lot of you don't like Tom Brady. I'm not a football fan. I don't watch any sports whatsoever. The cool thing about Tom Brady. I watched his Facebook series Tom versus Time. It was like this miniseries. Six part miniseries are like 10 to 12 minute episodes. And I got the feeling from watching that that it doesn't matter if he won the super bowl or if he lost his super bowl. He's going to get back to doing the things that got him there in the first place. The routines, the activities that got him to the point where he was at the Super Bowl. Those are things he's just going to get back to doing. And so a pro shows up day in and day out and they don't get impacted emotionally by the roller coaster. And in real estate, just straight up real estate sales, there are highs and lows. A deal can fall apart. You know, you can, you can, you know, have no closings in a month. You can have five closings in a month. The pro just keeps doing the things you know. If, if your time blocked for three hours of new business development and you set an appointment in your first 20 minutes, the Pro just, they've committed to the whole time block. So they're going to see the whole time block through the amateur's like, great, I set an appointment now I'm going to go do nothing productive for the next 2 hours and 40 minutes. So how do you get back up after you fail? And this links to number one, how do you view failure? You have to be able to fail fast in business if you're going to build anything that has any meaning whatsoever or any staying power, any sustainability whatsoever. Number three is how do you avoid making the same mistakes? This is where we talk about systems. And so recruiting is probably the easiest example. And it's easily the area of business that I failed the most in. And I continue to fail in the area of people, albeit a whole lot less. You know, if I started out and I had never recruited anyone before, which was the case when I got into real estate. My first hire, you know, was in 2008, early that was an administrative assistant. My first buyer agent hire was in 2009. I probably hired 100 people, you know, in the last 12 years, maybe more. And there's only 13, 14 people on our team. So you could see that the delta there is, there's way more failure. Way more people are going to come into your world and leave your world. You know, you're not going to just everyone's magically going to stay for a variety of reasons. Some of them are mish, some are personal reasons. So to avoid the same mistakes is that every time you make a mistake, let's say in the area of bringing people onto your team, you've got to be building the system to avoid the mistake the next time. So let's say you bring an administrator on and the second day you're like, holy cow. This administrator is. This is. This has happened to me. This administrator is so slow on the computer. Like in the interview, I asked them like, hey, are you great on the computer? And they said, yeah, I'm great on the computer. Didn't come up in their references. I probably didn't even do references in the early days. That's another sort of thing to add to the system. So day two, you're looking at them and they're typing, looking at their fingers, which I do, but they shouldn't do. They're slower with their mouse and it's just painful. And you're like, holy cow, made a mistake. The system. The step in the system for the next hire is that you're going to come in and you're going to spend two hours and I'm just going to watch you work. I'm going to tell you to do stuff or make it a working interview. So now. And we do the same thing in sales where, you know, you hope most of the time we hire for potential in sales on a real estate team, you just hope they're going to be able to get on the phone and be able to handle rejection and learn a script and handle themselves okay on the phone. We used to just hope that was the case and they would tell us they can do it, we would hire them and then they can't do it. And 30, 45, 60 days later, it's like this painful ending where it could have been avoided. Now, seven days before their working interview, we send them a script, a video training and a script, and they come in and they spend three hours on the phones and then they go out to lunch with our team members and we do a team interview after that. And for a variety of reasons, all of those steps were worked into our system because of painful mistakes that were made early on in my days of bringing people onto our team. So you've got to ask yourself, how do I avoid the same mistake? Like, if I'm going to go through the. I don't say pain. If I'm going to go through, you know, the. It's hard to build a business. If I'm going to go through the effort of doing this, I want to make sure that I'm getting better at it all the time. And that's where viewing this thing as A short game versus a long game. Short game is like I'm going to hire an administrator and that administrator is going to be with me forever. The long game is that I need to hire an administrator to serve my needs right now that may or may not be with me forever. I'm going to have that administrator help me build some systems that will be with me for a longer period of time and I'm going to learn from every mistake that I make. So it's this short view of business versus a long term view of business, and that's my final thought for you is how are you looking at your business? You know, are you looking at it from like failure's painful, you know, it's hard for me to get back up and do it again. And I keep making the same mistakes because I'm not building systems. That's just a short term view of business or of anything. You know, if you're not using the experience to create a system so that your experience in the future is better or stronger or more effective, that system is more effective, then you're just not spending time in the business builder part of your week. You're not working on your business enough. You're probably just constantly working in the business. You're drowning in transactions, you're trying to manage your team, hold them accountable. You know, you're just not setting this thing up for a long term, sustainable, systems driven, profitable approach to building a team. So my hope is that this really served you in the area of people, in the area of overspending, in the area of leadership and failing as a leader and you know, making mistakes as a leader in managing people. I didn't know how to manage people. I failed miserably in that A learning there is, you know, you have to have crystal clear expectations when someone comes into your world. And now part of our system is that we have an expectations process where we clearly go through the job profile so they know exactly what they're going to be doing and exactly how they're going to be measured and exactly the consequences if they don't perform. That didn't exist in the early days. It was all potential like they said they wanted to do it. We hoped they would. We didn't look at their patterns and just a major learning around all of that. So think to yourself here. Where are you in this sort of the journey of viewing failure as a good thing or a bad thing? I just know when I'm failing there's good stuff that's going to happen. I'm like okay, well, I failed with that approach. You know, let's fix it and let's move on. And not everything is instantly repairable in business. There's a period of time where you need to make sure that the fix is going to move your business in the right direction. We're seeing some of that in real estate B school, where we are constantly looking for ways to make the journey to true business ownership. I'm talking systems driven, totally sustainable, not dependent on the owner. We're looking to make that journey as direct as possible. We want the path to business ownership to be as easy as possible, you know, so the systems are swipeable and deployable and to deliver that training, that coaching to our members. We do try different things to make, to see if it would be a better way to get someone there. And sometimes we mess up. We quickly correct, we have a constant dialogue with our members and then we get back on a path that is going to get the results that our clients are looking for. But we went through this late 2018, we shifted the way that we were going to deliver our coaching services and our members just. It was not received. I think part of it was, it was a bit of a change. It was something that I sort of heard somewhere and came up with a failure in leadership. It was my idea and it was a horrible idea. I thought it was going to be great and it wasn't great. Our members weren't having it and they weren't getting the results. And so it took us a good six months to recover from that, you know, and now our members are, they're living in their 90 day world. They get their mid quarter checkups, they get business strategic game plan calls once a quarter. They get unlimited unstuck calls in the quarter. We've got capacity for that. We do our weekly training, we do have implementation office hours. The cadence we're running now with our members is something that I don't see. I've never seen in my journey in business coaching when I've been the one getting coached. And so I think what we have now is on point and of course that self serving. I know there's someone out there listening to the podcast that is at the point in their journey where they need the help. They need to be able to see the path and to come along someone who's done it before, that has the systems already built, that has the structure and the cadence to sort of put them into this operating system that they can run their business and grow their business in. If that's you, we have nothing to sell you, so there's no worry. It's just a conversation. A short application and a conversation about where your business is, where you want it to go, and what's holding you back. And even if you qualify for Real Estate B school, you can't pay us to start. You've got to confirm fit through our pilot program, which is a 30 day process that we take all new members through. And at the end of the 30 days, you confirm if this is the world you're going to build your business in. So go to rebspilotprogram.com to fill out a short application if I am speaking right in your soul right now. Or you can go to Real Estate B school just to check out some of our free resources. But we will see you over there. Do not fear failure. Failure is your friend.