Managing Your Recruiting Efforts in 30 Minutes Each Day

Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan with 4C Recruiting, and we are back with another session. And this session is regarding time, which is such a, such an important conversation for us to have. And the reason why is because you have so little of it. So having been in your shoes, what I know is that if I ask you to do any more than 30 minutes to an hour of recruiting per day, You're just simply not going to do it. That's in my experience what takes place is that we say we just don't have the time. Okay, so what we want to do is we want to create something that is sustainable for you. Sustainable means, can I do it in 30 minutes per day? And you can. So I'm encouraging you to really take— slow down in this space and make sure that you're creating the appropriate boundaries, setting the correct expectations. For the people around you. Look, I've worn the 12 to 15 hats that you wear in a day. And what I know is this, at a season in my career, what I would have said was, this is just the way the business is. Okay, this is just the way that it is. And it's, and it's always going to be this way. So I'm going to deal with it, right? My door is always going to be a rotating door. I'm always going to be the guy who's putting out all the fires. I'm always going to be the go-to person. And hey, that's not a bad thing because that's called job security. And it was a, um, it was a very, um, it was a, it was a mindset that did not allow me to enjoy success on the highest stage. So it was a deficient mindset. Okay? So if you're going to choose between good and great or average and great, this is going to be a time and a place where you're going to make that decision. Okay, so big, big things here need to take place in order for you to accomplish your goals. So how do we manage this in 30 minutes a day? Sustainability is critical. Sustainability is at the heart of this. If this was the P90X version of recruiting and you spent 90 minutes a day or 2 hours a day, and this was a grind every single day for you to actually accomplish what was necessary in the recruiting space, you just wouldn't do it long-term. And the reason why is because there's so many other things you're responsible for. Okay? So always challenge what you're doing with sustainability. Okay? It's, it's real easy to get excited about something and to get sucked into it. And then for this to take over and then for you to eventually push away from it and say, that didn't work for me because I can't sustain that. Okay, so 30 minutes a day, 30 minutes to an hour max, and you can sustain that. You can carve out an extra 30 minutes per day. This is going to be critical to making this a daily rut, to making this daily behavior. The older I get, What I realized is this, that fable that we were told, the little fairy tale we were told when we were kids about the tortoise and the hare and the tortoise winning the race, that's actually truth. Okay? Long-term sustainable behaviors always win over short-term dynamic energy. Okay? So long-term sustainability is what we're after here. Give me 30 minutes a day for the rest of your career and you will win. Okay, you don't have to go out and recruit thousands to win in the space of recruiting. Go out and recruit 100 and you'll end up on the largest stage of success in this business. Okay, so long-term sustainability is what we're after. You need to understand the return on investment. This is one place where if you will invest your time and that you will do it long-term, That the rewards are enormous. In fact, there's nothing else— I challenge you on this— there's nothing else that if you invested tit for tat, time for time, in any other place in your business that you would win more financially, from a leadership standpoint, from a legacy standpoint. You just can't win. On the, on, on the same stage of success, putting your time in any other place more so than you can if you do it in the area of recruiting. So when you break this down and say, what's 30 minutes a day worth to me over the course of a year? Yeah. I can go back to a time and a place where companies were offering me incredible numbers, um, to go build teams for them. In terms of dollars and cents. And on the flip side of that, what I can tell you is this, from a legacy standpoint, the older we get, the more, more likely it is that our meaning and our fulfillment comes from helping more people. Well, the only way to help more people and to leave a larger leadership legacy is by going and growing your branch or your branches, your brand. Okay, go grow your umbrella. And now You get to have a larger impact by doing that. Okay. Where you think small-minded and where you invest no time or little time into recruiting, your impact as a leader is going to be minimized. Okay. So this is such a great place to invest your time. Okay. We protect what's a priority. That's what's, what's true about anything in life. We always protect what's a priority. So I always bump up against that. If I'm not protecting it, then it's not a priority. Okay, if I'm not protecting time with my family, then what am I saying? It's not a priority. If I'm not protecting time to take care of my health, what am I saying? It's not a priority. So we protect our time with time blocking. You can do this. Okay, you're probably gonna have to set some expectations with your team. You're probably gonna have to set some expectations with others around you outside of the team. But if you will protect this and hit your rhythm with this where you're doing it on a daily basis, then what you're saying is that is a priority and then you will win. Okay, so it's really important. We're going to— I'm going to show you how to track your recruiting behaviors. Why is this important? Well, because it's really easy to get pulled into this space of recruiting and to make our 30 minutes suddenly 2 hours and to say we're going to win the largest— on the largest stage of success. But that's just not sustainable for most people. Okay, unless you're a non-producing, you know, regional type manager who can really delegate and that has an assistant and can delegate a lot of the stuff underneath their leadership, a couple hours a day probably is out of the question from a recruiting standpoint. Now, if you can do that, I applaud you because you, you're going to win in a big way. Why we want to track our recruiting behaviors is this: there's a rhythm To our recruiting. So where we actually slow down and write down the things that we're doing, what we're doing is we're saying that we believe that the metrics are important, and they are. And where you track your numbers over a long, long, longer window of time, you become a pro. And professionals write down their score. And the reason why is because they're always looking for opportunities to improve. Okay, so we are— we're going to keep score as we go through this. I'm going to show you how to do it. So we're going to track those recruiting behaviors because we want to win. Ultimately, we want to win. That allows you to have a better conversation with yourself, a better conversation with other people as to what you're doing and why you're winning or why you're not winning. Okay, so we're going to track our recruiting behaviors. All right, protect what's a priority. That's, that's, um, that's important for us to just come to that agreement that if we don't protect it, we're saying it's not important. If we do protect it, we're saying it's important. So We're going to start by protecting the environment. Now, if you spend any time around me, you know, I've got a story about this. Look, I've had the revolving door. I've been the firefighter. I know what it's like. There was a season where I said recruiting is going to be really important to me. Okay. And so let me share my screen. Okay. So there was a season where recruiting became a very important what I call large rock. I was putting it in my jar first every single day, but the frustration was I still had the revolving door, my phone going off, my email going off, um, you know, my door opening. Uh, I just, you know, I was the firefighter, you know what I'm talking about? So I had to get creative in this space. I'm gonna show you how I got creative. So there's really 3 areas I got creative. The first one was the environment. So what I tried was just putting a sign on the door saying Richard's in a meeting. Nobody honored that. I started putting a table beside my door with a sitting area and an hourglass, and nobody honored that with the sign. So I eventually created something that was actually a physical barrier than entering my door. So when I went in my recruiting time, I would put up my whiteboard easel in front of my door with a note on it. Richard's in, in meeting, or Richard's recruiting, or Richard's not available until, or Richard's Going to be available at, you know, those were messages I would leave on that board. And if someone needed to leave me a note, they could leave me a note on the board. Okay. Putting that physical barrier up in front of my door became such a key piece to me being able to protect my time. People stopped coming into my office. People stopped calling me. People would go out to my, my door in the office that I was in and see if I was available. Um, and so that was an important component, putting it on my calendar and allowing the, my audience outside of my immediate branch to see that I wasn't available, that I was protecting that time, having a conversation with my spouse to say, hey, this is my recruiting time, I won't be available. So I really protected this where, um, I was minimizing my phone going off. I was minimizing the number of emails that I was going to get. And people were not coming into my office. So we want to protect the environment. Okay, now that may mean that you have to get out of your office, and that's okay. If you need to go to home office to do this, you need to go to a coffee shop to do it, go to a library to do it, whatever. I don't know if a library would let you do that or not, but I'm saying get creative with this. If your vehicle is a protected environment, then go to your vehicle, but you've got to protect this space. That's your recruiting space. This timeline, that's your recruiting timeline. Okay, so we protect our office. Next, we protect our computer. Now here's what I did. The computer that has Outlook on it is just not a good place to spend your recruiting efforts. That little dingy window in the bottom right corner that says you've got new email that goes off nonstop with really great titles because other people are vying for your attention, that's a place where other people drop their agendas. Not— it's not your agenda, it's other people's agendas. That's where you see that the— your, your manager, your leader wants you to have a report to them in 30 minutes, right? It's where you see that one of your loan officers has a deal blowing up. It's where, you know, the processor has a question about an important file, you know, and on and on and on and on. So you have to leave that environment. It is not going to fall apart in 30 to 60 minutes. It just isn't. In fact, what you're going to do by pulling yourself away from that Is you're going to create more efficiencies around you. People are going to know they have to figure this out on their own, and they become more efficient because of that. Okay? So what I found was this. I had a large L-shaped desk. On one corner I had dual monitors, and on the other corner I had dual monitors. One was my recruiting machine, one was my general computer. And when I recruited, I spun away And my back was to the computer that had Outlook on it. I couldn't see it. And so I would use all— I would use this other computer as my recruiting spot. Okay. So that was a way for me to add an additional layer of protection. I'm not going to be in my Outlook. I'm not going to be looking at my calendar. I'm not going to be taking any phone calls or any meetings unless they're recruiting related when I'm, when I'm protecting this time. The other thing is this. I'm going to protect my phone. So if you've got an office phone, time to put it on silent. You know, my— I'm going to use my cell phone as the tool that I'm going to make calls from. And so I'm going to, you know, I'm going to turn my office phone off. I'm going to put my current phone on either silent or vibrate so that it's not ringing, not, not making any sounds. And now I can really focus on what I've got to get done. I don't have all the distractions. Okay. So we're going to then protect our time. How do we do this? We do this through time blocking. Like there's a genius concept. Put this on your calendar and then honor it. I mean, honor this. When people bump up against this time spot, it's just not available. Okay. You're not available. When you begin to have this mindset, people are going to see that's important to you and they're going to start honoring, they're going to start respecting it. Have a conversation with your team. Don't you think that I had to have a conversation with my team about the whiteboard easel being in front of my door? I did. I had a conversation with my team about that. Have a conversation with your team of, I'd appreciate it if you'd check my calendar before you come into my office. I'd appreciate if you'd check my calendar before you just pick up the phone and call me. I'm making recruiting a priority for me, and so I need you to understand that the health of my branches are completely dependent upon this. Who else do we need to have a conversation with? Maybe your manager, maybe, you know, your spouse. I mean, those were conversations that I had as well. That I'm not— put this on the calendar, I'm not going to be available. If it's 911, you call me. But honey, if it's a question about the kids' schooling or can I pick up some groceries on the way home, like, I'm really reducing the noise around this time spot. I'd appreciate if you would actually message me, call me outside of that timeline. Okay? Now, create accountability. Such a critical component to this. Okay? Look, here's what I know. The times in my life where I have said, I'm going to do this, But I didn't tell anybody else, just internalize this. Me, even if I wrote it down, the likelihood of that being accomplished was minimal. Okay. Now where I got really good at creating accountability, it was almost foolproof, almost 100% of the time, whatever I said I was going to do, I would do. I think perfect example, in 2007, I said I was going to do a half Ironman. A half Ironman triathlon. I reached out to my brother-in-law and said, would you do it with me? He said yes. We set a training plan out and we trained together almost every day of the week. We did our open water swims, um, 6 days a week together. And I knew that he was going to be there at 5:30 in the morning when it was barely any light out and it was cold and I didn't want to get in the water. I didn't want to swim, but I knew he was going to be there. And that level of accountability. Is what got me out of bed in the morning, got me to my car, had me drive to the— to do open water swims. Okay. That's one simple example. What I would encourage you to do is to create a lot of accountability. How do we do this? We do this with other leaders. You've got other branch managers. Tell them what you're doing. Tell them you're time blocking. Ask them to ask you about this. Um, you know, engage them in this, have them come alongside you and time block as well. Now you've got a level of accountability there where you know someone's going to say, hey, are you doing this? Are you protecting your time? Are you making your phone calls? Are you doing your follow-up? Are you doing the things that you told me you were going to do? Create accountability with your team. Give your team permission to say, hey, how'd your 30 minutes go as you were recruiting today? Ask your team to hold you accountable in this space. Give them permission to do this. How about asking your spouse? If you've got a spouse, ask your spouse to hold you accountable. Honey, ask me how my calls are going. Ask me if I'm protecting my time. Give other people permission. Now, here's a really cool idea around this. If you win and you've got an accountability partner, let them win as well. You want to find someone who's going to be, you know, all over you in the space of accountability. Give them an opportunity to win with you. As an example, honey, if I spend 5 hours a week recruiting and I protect my 1 hour and you help me do that, you hold me accountable to doing that, we'll do this together, or you will get this as part of this. Okay? Think about this. This with your team. You hold me accountable and we accomplish these goals. Here's something fun that we'll go do, whatever that looks like. Go bowling together, go do something together, a fun event as a team, and do it on a monthly basis because somebody's holding you accountable in this space. Bring them into this, give them a situation, let them play a game where they can win. Okay, so we begin the week with time blocking. We do this— look, do this on a Sunday night. Okay, before the week starts, make sure it's on your calendar. Look, once you put it on your calendar, don't deviate from it. Let's create a rhythm. Okay, rhythm. When you— where you have rhythm in your life, you're successful. When you're getting up at that time of the morning every single day and you're not hitting the snooze button, you know this, you're more successful. Or you go to the gym at a regular time throughout the week. You're just more likely, you're more inclined to do this, where you make a commitment to something to do it moving forward ongoing, maybe spending that golden hour of the day reading for an hour or listening to a podcast or doing your devotions or whatever it is that you do, where you do those things consistently, you be— you grow, you become more successful. It is a muscle that where you use it, it gets stronger. That's what rhythm is. It is a muscle. That gets stronger. Okay, so we're going to create rhythm to our week because the more entrenched we become in our rhythm, the more awkward it gets for us to not have that rhythm. And we like rhythm. Our mind likes to figure things out. So we're going to figure this out for our mind and we're going to stick to it. Mondays and Tuesdays, I found great days for, for identifying talent. Wednesdays and Thursdays are great times for making phone contact. Friday, a great day to follow up, and there's specific reasons around that. Mondays and Tuesdays are typically the days that loans enter the pipeline, and a lot of loan officers are making sure that those things are getting started correctly. Wednesdays and Thursdays, we're free from that. We're more available. Loan officers are on the hunt. They're looking for opportunities to make contact with real estate agents, with builders, and so naturally they're more inclined to answer their phone. Because they're, they're, they're not as busy. And so you're gonna have more success making contact with them on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Friday, I found it's a great day for follow-up. And so Friday afternoons, that's always been my time for follow-up. I just find that people are very likely to answer their phone. They're excited about going into the weekend. There's a different level of engagement in that conversation when I'm doing follow-up. Someone that I've already engaged with is going to get— if I'm doing follow-up, they're going to get calls from me on Friday. Start each morning setting up your LinkedIn strategy, right? You've gone through the LinkedIn Jumpstart, right? Tell me that you have. You haven't? Do that. Do that right now. Such a critical component to, um, to being successful in the space of mortgage recruiting. We're going to start each morning by, by using Duck Soup, turning Duck Soup on, letting Duck Soup go do its thing. Look, I, I used it this morning. It's a little after 10 o'clock when I'm recording this. 153 messages went out as a jab to people who are in my spot, in my zone. So if you don't understand what a jab is and you don't understand what Duck Soup is, it's because you didn't listen. You didn't watch the LinkedIn Jumpstart training. Watch that now or go back to that if you need to. Now we're going to set this up. This takes 2 minutes. Look, tops. I'm exaggerating. It actually takes about 15 to 30 seconds. Okay. Start your morning by setting up your LinkedIn strategy and activating Duck Soup. We talked about the connections with Duck Soup and the jab, jab, jab messaging that we're going to do there. Then have specific days you meet outside of the office. The rhythm of that means you're going to protect it. Okay. So maybe every week or every other week on a Thursday or Friday afternoon, those are your days where you meet outside of the office. This is an important piece because as you begin to set consistent appointments, being all over your schedule means that you're not protecting it. If you interject a meeting consistently in front of the times that you should be recruiting, then you're not, you're not, you're not, you know, doing this ongoing behavior and it interrupts your rhythms. Where you interrupt your rhythm, you're highly unlikely To continue in the space of recruiting. So have specific days that you meet outside. And then when you're talking with the candidates, pretty easy— candidate, it's pretty easy to make a statement like, I'm available next Tuesday after 10:00 AM. What's your schedule like? And the reason why you would say that is because you know that that's the day that you meet outside the office with recruits. Okay. Pre-write thank you cards. Why do we time block? Well, this is a great way to time block. I can take a Saturday. Okay. Cards, notes are an important piece to your recruiting behaviors. It's the— I can sit down and in a 30-minute time slot, time slot, instead of trying to handwrite one note periodically, I can handwrite a bunch of notes and just leave this, this, this space available for the name so that after I have a good phone conversation, Oh, with someone? All I gotta do is fill in their name and drop it in the mail. I'm ready to go. So time blocking allows me to take tasks like pre-writing thank you cards or pre-writing notes and accomplish a bunch of them immediately. And what happens because of that is that that is now consistent behavior. Okay, let's talk about tactics for those days, right? Do I need to explain what those days are? We all have those days. Those days being, you know, everything broke loose today, nothing went right, and I just don't have time to recruit. Okay, that's going to happen. So what are we going to do? Because we want to recruit even on those days. And here's how we're— here's how we're going to do it. We're going to use a tool called SlyDial. And if you're not familiar with SlyDial, it is a smartphone app Download it on your smartphone. It allows you to get backdoor voicemail guaranteed. It tricks the phone PBX and it just flashes up your number on the caller ID. It doesn't ring. So they're going to see that they've missed your call and then you're going to get to voicemail. And now that's a really great way— you had a bad day, something happened, and, and you just didn't protect the 30 minutes that you said you were going to protect around recruiting. On your way home, bump over to SlideDial, make 3 or 4 phone calls. It'll take you 30 to 60 seconds to make those calls and to the people that are already in your pipeline, just to follow up, just to say, hey, it's Richard. You crossed my mind. I was headed home. I wanted to leave you a voice message and just let you know I was rooting for you, that March was going to be a really big month for you. No need to call me back. I just want to let you know you're on my brain. Very simple tactic. It's a passive voicemail. Passive voicemails are phenomenal for pursuing what we call the cold candidates. These are people that have really pushed you away and said, no, no, no, I'm so happy, nothing you can do to move me. I'm still going to stay in front of them. Passive voicemail is a great way to stay at the top of their mind and to continue to build relationship with them. Okay? So I like to do that very passively. I'm not going to call to action. I'm not going to say, Hey, call me back when you get a second. A lot of times I'm not even going to say, let's get together for another cup of coffee or let's do lunch. I'm simply going to say, you were on my mind and I wanted to let you know it. Okay? That's a great tactic for that. So we're only going to leave passive voicemails for established relationships. We're never going to slide dial for someone that we don't already— we haven't already at least spoken with. Okay? So I call that spam voicemail. We're not going to do that. We will not spam voicemail. And look, voicemail, you know this because you've, you've watched some of my trainings. Voicemail has a 0.4% response rate. 4 out of 1,000 are going to return your call. And in our research, those 4 out of 1,000 that return your call are not the ones that you're after. Okay? There was a 0% return on the tests that we've done with this, with thousands of voicemails being left. Okay, text messaging. It's quick, it's easy. You can create a single message, you can cut and paste it. One of the ideas around this is that, that you could use— set on your calendar for the 20th of every month a reminder and ask your team for the best story of the month. What's the best thing that's happened to you, a real estate agent or a borrower, this month? Okay, I can take that story and now I can cut and paste that as my Story of the month, and I can send that to a lot of, a lot of, as a follow-up piece to recruits. If that email, I push that out around the 20th of the month, I've got something back so that I can actually send out my story of the month at month end. And that's just a behavior, and it's something that's easy, very little time required to do it. Mail a note, right? We already talked about this. You know, mailing a note only takes a few seconds. And it's because handwritten notes are just not something that gets received today. I would encourage you to do this. And the reason why we do this is because we understand that it's going to differentiate us. Okay. Use a home address for this where you can. I highly recommend that if you've engaged a recruit at any level, it's very simple to ask for a home address. Have something tangible that you're going to send them. It could be anything. It could be a Yeti cup with a nice quote on it. It could be a nice planner. It could be a book. I love the book concept. That's something that I have done thousands of times. The book is the best business card, and it gives me a very valid reason to say, hey, I've got one of my favorite books I'd love to send to you. What's your home address? Now I've got your home address. And I can mail you a note periodically. Okay. You can use LinkedIn for a quick shout out. That's easy, right? You've got your top recruits list. And, uh, so as a minimum, should have about 30 people there. How hard is it to jump over to LinkedIn and just say, hey, you, you crossed my brain. I can do 5, 10 of those in just seconds. Okay. So, so these are the tactics that we're going to use for those days. Okay, the recruiting scorecard. Now there's a copy of this, um, below this video, uh, and so download that. This is what we're going to use to track. Um, we're going to measure the things that we're doing. Okay. So Peter Drucker said in The Effective Executive, what we measure, we improve. That's why we're going to measure this. The other reason why is because Another great statement is, what is measured expands. Okay, so we begin to measure this, recruiting is going to be— our recruiting brain is going to expand. We're going to get better at it. We're going to understand what we need to be doing today. We're not going to go at this randomly. We're going to go at this with a plan, with a system, right? With a formula, a formula for success. So we're going to measure this because we're going to improve it. Now, here's what we do. Let me pull this across so you can see this. Okay, there is a— this is the larger version of this. So we'll go back to the presentation just in just a moment. But we're going to write down the specific behaviors, the specific actions that we're going to take. So as an example, if I'm going to make 15 calls per week, then I'm going to write down identify 15 recruits to call. I got to identify and do my research, right? If you've watched the phone scripting training, what we do is we vet through Zillow, through Yelp, through LinkedIn, through Facebook, through NMLS, through just a good old-fashioned Google search, and we're going to get information on them before we call them. So I need to research that out, right? So behavior, action, research out 15. If I do that in rhythm with my week, then I'm probably going to do 8 of those on Monday, 7 of those on Tuesday, and then I'm going to call 8 of those on Wednesday and 7 of those on Thursday. And that's a really nice rhythm for one behavior of identifying talent and the second behavior of calling talent. Now I'd write those metrics down and every single week I would start with a goal and then I would, I would measure out what I achieved and I would have a net score. Okay, so I'm going to create behaviors over here on the far left. I'm going to create a goal for each one of those categories. Hey, duck soup is one of those. I want to measure, am I turning that duck— am I turning the tool on every single day? Jabbing. I'm going to do that every single week. Am I jabbing every single week to my top candidates and beyond that? I'm going to have a goal in each one of those categories. Did I achieve it? What was my net score? And, you know, zero's a win, minus is a loss, plus is, is, is amazing. Okay. So you've got to copy that document on this page. We want to establish goals for each specific recruiting behavior. Now here's what we're going to do. We're going to measure this for 13 weeks. Why do we measure this for 13 weeks? At the end of 13 weeks, you've got one quarter of time. Okay. When the 14th week comes on, we're going to drop a week off. So there's a larger scorecard that simply measures the net score. Was it zero? Was it minus? Was it plus? The reason why we do this is that we want to build a sustainable recruiting model for success. That means that we understand we sustain our behaviors, that we incrementally— we follow this trend line all the way up. We don't have these peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys. Okay, you could take this recruiting scorecard and turn it into a measurement for your loan officers who need to recruit real estate agents because it's the same mindset, right? Why do Loan officers hit spikes and then valleys. Well, because they did all the right behaviors to get to the peak and they stopped doing them to get to the valley. And they did them all to get to the peak and they stopped doing them to get to the valley. The same mindset works for us in recruiting. 13 weeks, and then we're gonna drop 1 week off and add 1 week on, and that's gonna float through forever and ever. Why? Because when we have 1 week that's out of balance, we get to identify it immediately. We're looking at 13 weeks and suddenly we have a -20 that pops on. We go, whoa, what's going on there? Right now I need to lean into this, this area of recruiting because last week I did not protect what was a priority. That's why we measure this for 13 weeks. Now we add 1 each week after we get to 13 and we remove the first week that was— that's on the scorecard. And we continue to do that. Go on and on. Now. Identify immediate actions not in sync with your long-term goals. That's, that's pretty self-explanatory, right? Where we're not doing the behaviors, we know we're not going to achieve the long-term goals in recruiting. So we're going to identify those immediately, and then we're going to make— we're going to take corrective action. Okay, so the power of having assistants. If you have an assistant, then bless you, because they are going to bless you. You're going to be empowered to get so much more done in the space of recruiting. If you don't, don't lose me here. Have heart. I'm going to give you a couple of creative strategies on how you can get— how you can maximize some of this even without an assistant. Okay, if you got an assistant, assistant can do all the research, right? We just talked about calling 15 candidates a week. They can research Zillow, they can research Yelp, they can taking notes of what they saw and what was important, right? Um, go through the 3 levels of mentorship in this, right? You do it and let them watch you do it. Then they can do it while you watch them do it, and then they can do it. So make sure that they understand how to do this. Don't just say, hey, go do this. Show them, because this information that they're researching out is critical to your success in engaging in a conversation. Okay, so make sure you follow that methodology. I'm going to do it. I'm going to show you how to do it. You watch me, and then you're going to do it, and I'm going to watch you. And then when that— when you pass that second phase, now you do it. It's all on your own. You can have an assistant do the research for you. You can have an assistant dial for an appointment. Okay, there's a lot of power in this. Look, there's so much power in this that what I would encourage you to do is if you don't have an assistant, What you can do is you can actually partner with another manager, partner with another branch manager and say, I'll make phone calls for you if you'll make phone calls for me and set appointments for me. And here's why. When somebody calls on your behalf and they say, as an example, Richard Milligan has done a bunch of research on you, sees some similarities in your core values and who you are and who he is. He asked me to reach out to you because he would love to meet with you face to face. What's your schedule like next week to meet with Richard? That's a different conversation than if I'm calling. Okay, that says it's a status thing for me to have an assistant, and I cared. It's as though I cared more because I had my assistant reach out to you than if I did this. It's a great way to get appointments and to get additional information that you may not get where you're the one doing the calling. Okay. So an assistant can dial for the appointment. Assistant can set up your daily LinkedIn activity. That's a no-brainer. Managing the system, which includes mailing out your thank you notes, mailing out books, setting up and managing activities. These are all things that they can do. Okay. So if you've got an assistant, maximize your assistant because that ultimately allows you to move To a single lane. What great entrepreneurs do, what great business owners do, what great leaders do is that they continuously fire themselves from responsibilities and figure out how they can delegate those. And the closer they can get to their one thing, the closer that they can get to that, the more successful they become. Now, you may not be able to do that. But you can probably hire a virtual assistant to do a lot of this. And I've hired a virtual assistant to do a lot of this for me in the past. And if you've not ever used a virtual assistant and, you know, overseas for $100 to $125 a week, you can have a virtual assistant that would do a lot of these tasks for you that gets you closer to that place of that one thing. And the one thing for you is when you become a visionary, When you can present your vision with clarity and articulate the stories around that and really call people into your vision, the closer you can get to doing that all day, the more successful you're going to be and the more you're going to win. Okay? So with that said, that's the end of this presentation. We're going to keep it to 30 minutes a day. If you want to push, we're going to max it out to an hour. But beyond that, we're going to keep it at that. We're going to make this a standard. And then we're going to make sure we're time blocking as we go through this. We're going to honor the time blocking. We're going to create accountability around that. And then if we've got the opportunity to bring someone in to fire ourselves from them, some of the menial tasks that are necessary, some of the smaller tasks that are actually $7 to $10 an hour tasks, we're going to fire ourselves from that or let somebody else take those over. And we're going to do it with the mindset of we're going to actually do it, let them watch us do it. They're going to do it while we watch them do it, and then eventually they will do that because we want them to do this right. Such a critical piece to your overall success for the long— for as long as you're in this business. Okay, so with that said, that's the end of this one, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.