A first-person leadership monologue emphasizing the importance of personal connection, empathy, and belief in team members alongside the practical need to understand company metrics and margins. The speaker confesses past shortcomings in connecting with employees, describes concrete behaviors for building rapport (awareness, sincerity, showing up, believing in people), and stresses that financial accountability (margins, ROI) is necessary to sustain impact.
So no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Law of connection. This one for me, monumental miss, like on all fronts, I have missed the law of connection. I am just head down and get shit done like 99.9% of the time. And just recently, I mean, I'm talking recently, within the last few months, I'm realizing that even though I have that one day in the office, my goal that day is to just be out and connecting and talking. And Chris in his meeting, I mean, you guys would sort of laugh because Chris doesn't come off as an insightful guy and his team. It took him a lot of courage to call that meeting with me. He called me out on this. He said, you know, you're in the office on Tuesdays, but even when you're talking, you're kind of just in stuff and you're busy and you're walking through the office and you're just not connecting. And so this is for all of you, do this now. And some of you are naturally better at this than me anyway. But for the hard charging, just entrepreneur types, this is an easy thing to miss because you're just like, how about you just get it done? You're like. But you know, you're like, can you get it done? And then, you know, and you just don't go there. And they really need you. People need you to come alongside them and really connect with them. And it's actually fun when you do it. I did it on Tuesday night. I didn't die. I did a whole hour of connecting with my team. So I made it through it. It was really good. All right, so how do you connect? First you got to have some sort of level of awareness about your, about yourself and working yourself. I covered it just being open and sincere people. If you share your truth, right, and you're just insecurities with your team and you know that you're just doing the best you can. I mean, they're just going to view you differently, you know, so just just be sincere about it. Just know your audience. I mean, just know what, what they're, what they're in and what they're going through. I still learn things about our agents that it kind of like, oh, that makes sense now how they're, they're showing up that way. You know, they're really bad financial situation or whatever. They're going through a divorce. We have people going through divorces and just really, really bad stuff. And just live the message. Practice what you preach. Go to where they are. You know, for me, even when I held one on ones with my team, it was always, you know, what have you done for the team? And you need to have. Have meetings like that. But I rarely did I go into, you know, where they were and what they were going through. I think that's way more important than just checking, you know, did you. How many hours did you log, how many connects, how many meaningful conversations? So you need both. Focus on them, not yourself. Same thing. Believe in them. I don't think I know that people don't have cheerleaders, you know, coaching all of you. I don't think there are a lot of people in your lives that are really like, you get home from work, and they're. I'm fortunate to have my wife, and she's a big cheerleader for me, but someone that really believes in them, you know, Chris is like. He sold two homes in, like, 18 months before he joined my team. He's on his third, so he wants to be a developer. That's his dream. I think I've talked to him into, like, not quitting real estate. At one point, he came in and he quit. And I'm like, dude, that's a really bad idea. And he went to, like, start his own thing in real estate. I'm like, dude, you want to be a builder? Like, just stay here, and then you can build homes. He's building his third or fourth home now, and, I mean, I've just supported him in that, and I've called him out in team meetings and just honored him for that. And there's no, you know, I just want people on my team to achieve what they want to achieve. And just having someone that believes in you, I don't think it happens enough in the world. And just give them hope, hope for a better future. All right. It's definitely not easy. I'm not good at it most of the time, but it does take a conscious awareness. There's an old saying, to lead yourself, use your head. To lead others, use your heart. Always touch a person's heart before asking for their hand in the exit phase. Let me speed this up here. The big thing here is. And this is something that I'll go through tomorrow, is really just a clear organizational strategy with accountabilities, roles and responsibilities, more leadership skills, there's more momentum. This is. It's all about, you're not that important. So you're getting out of production. You're realizing that the world doesn't revolve around you. Some of those are kind of tough to realize it's all about margins at the state of the company. People asked, they made comments about large is all about margins and all about numbers. And it is, because here's the thing, you can't impact lives unless your company's making money. Like, you'll go out of business if you don't monitor all that stuff. So I still, I'm the guy that is in there looking at, like, what's working, what's not working, where the margins are. Our buyer slot side is slow this year, but our listing side is kicking ass. So we've got 76% margin on the listing side. And even though our buyer side is sluggish, it's okay. We're still hitting our numbers. So we're hitting our gross margin numbers because, you know, and I'm able to kind of look at those things because I know my numbers. And it's all about ROI.
