Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - #97: Escaping The Drift in 2024: Achieving Your Resolutions

Starting point is 00:00:00 Now, I call these objectives. I don't call them goals. And here's why. Because I think the word goal has gotten a really crappy reputation. Because everybody's got a goal and it's garbage. Like, for example, you look at football, right? Pro football. At the beginning of the year, that coach walks out behind that podium before the first preseason game and they say, Coach, what are the goals for the year this year? What are your goals? And the coach says, well, you know, our goals is as it always is. Our goal is to win the Superbowl. That coach, I promise you already knows his quarterback sucks. He doesn't have a defensive line and their best free agent is going to hold out for half the season. He already knows that he knows that what just came out of his mouth as far as the goal, It's his job to say that, but it's not real. So I think that

Starting point is 00:00:47 is kind of how goals have gotten this tainted kind of reputation. And now escaping the drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again, back again for a very special New Year's episode of Escaping the Drift. And you know what? It doesn't matter when you're listening to this thing. There's a reason it's coming out the day after New Year's episode of Escaping the Drift. And you know what? It doesn't matter when you're listening to this thing. There's a reason it's coming out the day after New Year's, but it doesn't, again, matter when you're listening to this

Starting point is 00:01:31 because today's guest is going to change you. Today's guest, I guarantee, has the power to change your life. This is probably the most important guest for you that I've ever had on the program. And the guest that we have today, in case you're wondering, without further ado, that guest is you. You're the guest. Little bit of background.

Starting point is 00:01:55 I had another episode in the can this week, ready to go, and we'll be hearing that at another date. But over this weekend, with it being New Year's and hearing everybody talk about resolutions and all of those things, I had this overwhelming sense of responsibility to come on here and do what I can to help you achieve everything you're trying to get to. How many times have you been that person that's made that New Year's resolution, made a plan, set yourself out on a course, and you've come up short. Well, I'm, my friends, am somebody that is very, very good at getting where I want to be,

Starting point is 00:02:35 which is why I had this show. If this is the first time you're listening in and you're like, who the hell is this John Gafford guy? I'll tell you why you want to listen today. So I'm a guy that's developed, built several seven-figure businesses. And I know in the age and day of internet gurus, that number gets thrown around a lot. I'm not talking about coaching programs. I'm not talking about crypto. I'm not talking about Forex. I'm talking about brick and mortar companies with hundreds of employees. We have built these companies from the ground up. We

Starting point is 00:03:05 bootstrapped them up. We have sold some of them, but we've had a lot of success over the years. And what I'm going to share with you today is the exact plan and system that I utilize to run every single one of those businesses from their inception, all the way to the day-to-day maintenance of keeping them up and running. And I want to walk through that process with you because if you don't have a good plan and you don't understand what you should be doing as far as getting to your goals, then how are you going to get there? Every good goal, every good thing that you're going to do has got to have a plan. So today, we're going to make an investment in you. And before you go any further, when you listen to this, I want you to stop. I want you to grab a piece of paper because it's all you're going to need for today is a piece of paper and a pen.

Starting point is 00:03:59 If you don't have one right now, that's fine. You can listen through it if you're in your car. Great. Come back to this and walk through these steps again. But again, I'm going to walk you through my exact process of how I build a plan that's executable, that gets me where I want to be. And there is no reason why you can't replicate the same system. So let's start out with our piece of paper. We have it. Hopefully you've come back now. You've paused me and you've unpaused me and you got your piece of paper out and you've got a level of

Starting point is 00:04:29 excitement that's going. Because the first thing I got to tell you is as we go into the new year, and I'm going to put this in the context of real estate agents, because that is a big core of our business. We have a very large brokerage here in Las Vegas, and a big core of our business is real estate agents. And when real estate agents come in and sit down to interview with our company, most of which are experienced because at my company, we don't hire brand new agents, but most of which are experienced, all of which are experienced. And I get the same exact experience from all of them. And it's one of two things. They either come in with a hopeful expectation of what they can change about themselves, what they can add to their business

Starting point is 00:05:14 to take it to the next level. And then I come in and then you get the other people that want to blame the previous brokerage they were at for their own shortfalls, for their own shortcomings, for all of their failures. One of the things that I'm most famous for on The Apprentice was my one quip line that I said to Brian McDowell as we stood on the patio of Trump Tower, which is where I told him he needed to stop pointing the finger and start pulling the thumb. Meaning stop pointing at other people and start yoking that thumb back in your own direction. Because I firmly believe that in most cases, your problems begin and can end with you. And if you're not ready to take a radical amount of personal responsibility about your life, then everything I'm about to tell you is complete bullshit. It's just not going to work for you. So let's get that part of it out of the way. If you're sitting there with your paper and you're sitting there with your pen,

Starting point is 00:06:08 the only other thing I need you to bring today is an unlimited well of hope and determination to achieve whatever it is you want to do. Now, keep in mind this plan and what we're going to do can be for anything. It works exactly the same. I'm not going to keep it in the context of one business or another. We're not going to write a real estate plan today. We're not going to write a mortgage sales plan today. We're not going to write a mastermind plan today. This can be for anything you want to do because the process is exactly the same. And for each and every one of my businesses, for each and everything that I do, I tack it this exact same way. So if you're asking me at the end

Starting point is 00:06:50 of the day, do I have seven or eight different plans floating around at any given time? The answer is yes, I do have seven or eight plans floating around. But where they all start is with the same place. And the same thing. And the first thing you want to write on the top of your piece of paper is this word. And that word is vision. Now, what is your vision? The vision. Now, keep in mind, the first thing I want to say about it is this is for you. You are not writing something that you think is going to sound good to other people. You're not writing something you think you're going to be able to say what your vision is and impress anyone. The only person on the planet this has got to move at an emotional level is you. Now, so many people at the beginning of anything say they have a goal. What's your goal? And this is true, again, back to real estate agents. A lot of times they will come in and

Starting point is 00:07:43 I'll ask them, what's your goal? Where do you want to get? What do you want to do? And they say things like, I want to make $250,000 a year. My next question after they say that is very simple. I say, why? Why that number? Now, two answers you'll get out of this. People that can answer that by saying, this is exactly why I figured out I need $250,000. I want to put $45,000 away into my child's college fund. I want to buy a new house. I've already budgeted out. It's going to cost me $87,000 to do that. I want to pay off my credit card bills, which currently sit at $24,352. But they can justify every penny of that $250, those people will have a much higher probability of getting to that goal than the people that say, well, I don't know, I just picked

Starting point is 00:08:32 the number. But I'm going to take it one step further. You can't just pick a number. You can't just have things attached to it. You've got to attach the emotions that will come with the success of those things. Now, let's look at it this way. If you say to me, because it's the first and there's a lot of you listening that probably went to a very crowded gym this morning. Thank God I have one in my house. So it was exactly as busy as it always is. But a lot of you guys probably took off and went to a very, very busy gym. And if you ask those people in there, what's the goal? You're going to have people to say,

Starting point is 00:09:06 my goal is to lose 25 pounds. That's my goal. 25 pounds, that's what I want to lose. And that's all well and great. But the people that just kind of throw a number out, probably not going to get there. You ask me why I want to lose weight. You ask me why I want to be in good shape,

Starting point is 00:09:24 why I take all of the supplements that my wife hands me. The answer is very simple because I want to be around to walk my daughter down the aisle. I want to see my grandkids. Me and my wife had kids later on in life. We didn't have kids when we were very young. We had our kids later. So I fully plan to be around when I'm very old and I plan to be active hanging out with my grandkids because the emotion that I can connect to that idea and that goal is much more motivating than just a hollow number. It's much, much more. So when we're doing this vision statement, we're going to start it with right now. What we're going to do is we are going to pick a specific time in the future, a specific time, pick a date. I don't care what it

Starting point is 00:10:11 is. One year, two year, 10 years, five years, whatever it may be, pick a date in the future that is measurable. Because again, goals that are not measurable are hope and dreams. This is a vision statement. This is where we're headed. This is where we're going. Pick a date in the future. And on that date, I want you to describe your life in whatever facet that you're trying to accomplish. If it's your health, describe that facet. If it's financial, because this is a business plan, describe that. If it's building your company, describe that company. Describe exactly what it is to be there. You know, last night I watched Dave Chappelle, his new special on Netflix, which is awesome, by the way.

Starting point is 00:10:51 But I watched his new special and it's called The Dreamer. And at one point at the end of it, if you haven't watched it, I don't want to spoil the whole thing, but really his message through the whole thing was the person with the biggest dream wins. The person that has the biggest dream will always come out on top. So be an amazing dreamer. That's what this vision statement is all about.

Starting point is 00:11:12 That's what this is about. It's about having that unique vision into the future. So let's pick a date in the future and let's, in as much detail as we can, describe what our life is and describe how we feel in that moment. Now, the two biggest mistakes that people make when they make this vision statement, and again, this is for you. Because when you're sitting there on a random Tuesday morning and you don't want to get up and work, or you've gone to your job all day and you're coming home to start your second job, which is your company you're trying to build or your side gig or whatever it all day and you're coming home to start your second job, which is your

Starting point is 00:11:45 company you're trying to build or your side gig or whatever it is, and you don't feel like doing it, this is the statement that you should be able to read that motivates you to make that one more call, to put in that one more hour of effort, to get up and not watch Maury Povich and figure out who the father is. That's the statement that gets it done. But the two biggest mistakes that people make in that vision statement are they don't put a specific time and they don't write it in the present tense. Your mind does not know the difference between reality and what you tell it over and over and over again. But this is what the law of attraction is built on. And I firmly believe that if you tell yourself this story enough times, you will figure out a way to make that story come true if it's based in reality.

Starting point is 00:12:33 So pick a time in the future, write out your vision statement, describe your life, describe what it is, and use it in the present tense. On December 31st, 2025. I am, we are, this is whatever you want it to be, but it needs to be in the present tense. That's your vision statement. Now let's move on to the second thing, which is your mission statement. Now, what is a mission statement? A mission statement for lack of a better phrase is the who, why, what, when, and where of whatever it is you're doing. What is the mission statement of what you're trying to accomplish? Who do you do it for? What is it? When do you do it? How do you do it? Why do you do it? This is the most important. Now, again, just because it's easy to do, I'm going to equivocate this back to real estate.

Starting point is 00:13:26 How many times have you met a real estate person at a party and you said, what do you do? And this is the answer. Hmm, I'm selling real estate. How's the market? You know, it's pretty good. Boom, fail. That's the conversation that so many people have, right? Because they don't have a mission statement. This is what you tell to other people as to what your business or what your plan or what you're doing is about. When you ask, somebody asks you, man, you've been in the gym. Like if it's, if your plan here is about weight loss and somebody says, man, I've been seeing you in the gym grinding every day, what's going on? Like, this is my mission statement. I'm committed to myself or whatever, the who I want, what I'm aware of, what you're doing. For real estate, back to that conversation.

Starting point is 00:14:09 Now, if you met me at a party when I was doing a lot of investing for high net worth clients, but my mission statement changes based on what I'm doing at the time. But let's just take a time when I was dealing with a lot of luxury clients. It would be, I help high network people achieve leveled up status through the acquisition of luxury real estate. I do it here in Las Vegas. Well, that seems a lot better than I said in real estate. If you work with a lot of investors, what do you do? I help people achieve financial freedom through the acquisition of real estate here in Las Vegas to show them returns of 13 to 15%. Well, how do you do that? Instead of how's the market, you're going to get follow-up questions like, how do you do that? Because what you just said is going to pique interest in other people. It's designed to

Starting point is 00:14:56 be that elevator statement. You can give other people. The vision statement is for you. This is what's for everybody else. This is what you're telling everybody else. If you don't know what to say, Google a couple of companies' mission statements. I like Harley Davidson's is a good example. I don't remember it off the top of my head and I'm spitballing right now. So I don't know what it is, but look it up. But an easy way to start is to write just like high school journalism. That used to be a class back in the day, kids. Write who, why, what, when, and where, and answer those questions about this project. Answer those questions about this plan. Answer those questions about whatever it is you're planning to do here. And that becomes your mission statement. Now below that, so we've got something for you. We've got something for

Starting point is 00:15:41 everybody else. And below that is going to come our first step. Now I call these objectives. I don't call them goals. And here's why. Because I think the word goal has gotten a really crappy reputation because everybody's got a goal and it's garbage. Like for example, you look at this, you look at football, right? Pro football. At the beginning of the year, that coach walks out behind that podium before the first preseason game and they say, coach, what are the goals for the year this year? What are your goals? And the coach says, well, you know, our goals is as it always is, our goal is to win the Super Bowl. That coach, I promise you, already knows his quarterback sucks.

Starting point is 00:16:19 He doesn't have a defensive line and their best free agent is going to hold out for half the season. He already knows that. He knows that what just came out of his mouth as far as the goal, it's his job to say that, but it's not real. So I think that is kind of how goals have gotten this tainted kind of reputation. So I call them objectives because you know what objective is? An objective is something like fucking seal team six has an objective and they're going to achieve that. There's no sense of failure. There's no, we're not going to achieve our objective. That's what we're going to do. And you've got to be as passionate about your objectives as they are. You've got to be laying awake at night because

Starting point is 00:17:02 you're not hitting your objectives. It's got to bother you to your core that you are willing to work to 1159.59 of the last possible day you have given yourself to reach that objective. Now, these objectives, again, based on whatever you're trying to do, can be pounds of a weight loss goal, can be dollars earned in a business, can be widgets sold in a business, can be services rendered in a business, can be anything. It's up to you, whatever you're trying to do, but you need to figure out the best objective that works for you. Now, the easiest one to do, obviously, is money. It's easy to figure out money. But like I said before, if you don't have a firm understanding of exactly why,

Starting point is 00:17:53 of exactly what that money is going to do if you earn it, you will not hit that objective. You will come up short because there's no why behind what it is. And I strongly recommend that you chase that why about five times. So why do I want to do this? Why do I, well, why is that important to me? Well, why is that important to me? Why is that important to me? And I think what you're going to find is when you get down to your core, most people, most people do what they do for status or love. That's pretty much what boils most people down. One of those two things. And there's nothing wrong with either one of those things. But you need to understand what's making you tick, what's driving you to hit those goals. So let's assume for today's exercise that we have set a goal of $100,000. I'm just picking a nice, easy number.

Starting point is 00:18:47 We're just going to put it up there for a hundred grand. So now what we need to do is within our business, within our plan, within our marketing, within whatever it is, within our diet, whatever, whatever we're doing here, I want to figure out three strategies that we can utilize to get to that goal. Three things. Now I know that like, for example, Gary Keller, and I think it's a great book, wrote a book called the one thing where essentially stating you should focus on one thing at a time until you master it and move to the next. I don't do it that way. There's nothing wrong with that thought, but if I did it that way, I, I mean, I would be not nearly where I am today just because I just, time is working against all of us. And for me, I want to work as efficiently as I can. And sometimes that does mean having more than one thing on your plate. But the way that I

Starting point is 00:19:39 see it is though, I will put a cap on it. When I'm doing a plan like that, and I'm building strategies for what's going to get me to what I want, I never pick more than three. And I'm going to tell you why. Because again, kind of similar to what they said in the book, you just can't focus on more than that. That's all you can really focus on is three things at a time. Now, within those three things that we're going to pick are strategies that we're writing below. Now we have our vision at the top, then our mission statement, then our objectives, then below that we're writing our first strategy. So we're having our first strategy. The first strategy that you choose better be tried and true. I mean, this is something that you absolutely know for a fact is going to work. Now, if you've never personally done it, this is a good time to find mentors, to reach out, build mastermind groups, get associated

Starting point is 00:20:33 with people that have done this because their insight here is almost mandatory. You know, I'll say the reason a lot of people fail is because they go out and try to reinvent the wheel. It's just what they try to do. They just decide that themselves, oh, I'm just going to go out and figure it out on my own. I'm just going to do this. Well, good peer groups, good mentors, all of those things, that is a time machine that can compress time for you in a way that nothing else can. Shared knowledge is invaluable, especially in this situation. So when you're doing that first strategy, when you're writing it out, it needs to be something that is tried and true. Now, before I

Starting point is 00:21:18 talk too much more about the strategies, I do want to mention one thing that is going to become pivotal to the success of this plan. And that one thing that's going to become pivotal for you is tracking everything. If you are not somebody that likes to track, if you are not somebody that is accurate, you need to figure that out. There are lots of apps you can utilize where you can count things. There are lots of, like MyFitnessPal for working out where you can track every rep, you can utilize, where you can count things. There are lots of, like my fitness pal for working out, where you can track every rep, you can track every macro, every calorie, everything. You can track all those things. You've got to track the data because the answer to all of your questions later will always be in the math. That phrase must come out of my mouth 50 times, probably a month when

Starting point is 00:22:01 we're talking about business stuff with my partners is I always say, well, the truth's in the math. The math will tell us. The math will always tell us what to do because we crunch and look at the data and then go from there and figure it out. It's just, it's the smart way to do things. So as you're looking at that first strategy, the first thing you want to do is you want to know, does this work? Is this tried and true? Now I'm going to give you an example from real estate, just because it's the easiest one for me to do, which is this internet leads. So my team, my real estate team generates a tremendous amount of internet leads. And I know the math of those internet leads intimately. I know how many of

Starting point is 00:22:40 them we have to generate to generate one deal. I know what the average sales price on those deals is. I know what our conversion rates are across the board. I know my cost per lead. I know my CPT. I know everything about generating leads from the internet into a funnel, into our drip system, into the conversion rates of the agents. So it's very simple for me to do this. So my first strategy, if I was doing real estate, like my first strategy for me, for

Starting point is 00:23:08 my team would be my internet leads would be my very first strategy. Cause I know that that works. Now here's a little, here's a, here's a tip, a key, a little, a little, a little winter bump for you. When I do this, when I'm doing these strategies, the first one being tried and true, I always make sure that when I reverse engineer my activities, because you have strategy at the top, you write what it is. So in this case, I'd write internet leads. And then below that, I have a bunch of lines to say action steps and action steps are as many as you need, but I know how to

Starting point is 00:23:48 reverse engineer that goal or I'm sorry, that strategy to hit my objective. So for example, let's say just with internet leads, my goal is to make a100,000 this quarter. Let's say that. Now I know that my internet leads in Vegas right now are producing a transaction of about $549,000 is the number that of what we're getting by the time you blend it all together, what we're generating is about 549. That's the number. 549,000. I also know that our average commission, based on the commission rates that what we have earned through the MLS and everything else, is about 2.89% is what our average commission is, which gives me 15,866 a deal. I split that revenue with my agent that does the deal 50-50. So that's going to give me, let's see, 2.7%, 16,846 divided by two. That's going to give me 8,423 deals to go, right? So if I get that, if my goal is to make a hundred thousand dollars this quarter,

Starting point is 00:25:07 and I know that every time we sell one, I can average out making eight, eight, $8,423. I'm going to take a hundred thousand dollars and I'm going to divide it by eight, eight, uh, eight, four 30 divided by eight, four 30. That's going to give me 11.86 homes have got to get sold this quarter for me to make a hundred thousand dollars. Cause I'm going to round up, call it 12. So 12 houses have got to get sold. Now you're, some of you are probably listening to this thinking, wait a second. The objective was a hundred thousand dollars. We're going to do three strategies. Why isn't he shooting for $33,000? Because again, for me, when I do this, my objectives get achieved. So I am going to plan for every single one of my strategies to independently hit that number. Independently,

Starting point is 00:26:00 I'm going to hit that number, regardless if the other two strategies completely fail, one of these standalone should hit my objective. So what I'm going to do now is I need to completely reverse engineer this. So I've got to 12 houses we need to sell for me to make the money I want to make. Now I know that right now I'm averaging 70.81 leads per transaction. So I got to get 12 leads, 12 houses times 70.81 leads is 849 leads I need to generate this month. Now for my end of it, for what I do with my team, obviously we bring them in and coach them and train them. But for my end of it, I've got to worry about the lead gen on the front end. That's my front end. I worry about the AdWords. I work with my AdWords people and make sure that that is going well. 849 leads is not hard to hit, by the way. It's not difficult. So what I'm going to do is under my action steps

Starting point is 00:26:57 is I'm going to do this. I'm going to put, and again, the important part of this is definitive time structure here. It's definitive. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to say on Mondays, I will review my AdWords to ensure that I am on track to hit. If you figure this was eight 49, we're going to divide that by 12 weeks. That's only 70 leads a week, which is nothing. It's ridiculous. On Mondays, I'm going to hit this. I'm going to review my AdWords to make sure that I'm tracking at least 70 leads

Starting point is 00:27:34 a week. Then on Tuesdays, I'm going to write, I will track our agents to make sure that they are on track to hit the 70.81 leads per deal. Anyone that is not hitting that will get coached and counseled and leads will be turned off and redirected towards the agents that are. Because again, you've got to make sure that the people that are hitting the ball are doing it well. On Wednesdays, I'll write script coaching and counseling to coach the phone, to coach the scripts. And on Thursdays, I'll write one-on-ones with the agents. Now, if I follow that plan and I know that my math is there and I hold my agents accountable and I hit the lead source that I need to hit, I hit the number of leads that I'm going to hit because I know the math of it, I know that at the end of that quarter, I will have earned $100,000.

Starting point is 00:28:30 Now, what I would also say is, for me, just leveling up one more, I would probably throw the lead cost also on that is what I would probably do and subtract it from the top. So if I had $849, 849 leads, I got to generate my cost on those right now is probably about 16 bucks. So now I'm at 13,595 for the month. I'd probably throw one more house on there just to cover the cost of the leads or two more houses to cover the cost of leads, which would change the numbers completely, but move them up and around just because I'd want to net that $100,000 objective as would be my net, not my gross. Because I like to think in money that I can keep, not money that I can spend. So again, no matter what you're doing, let's say that we're doing weight loss. Let's pick that.

Starting point is 00:29:22 Let's just pick weight loss. If I'm going on weight loss, I get with a trainer. I find out what they need to do. I, my first thing that's going to affect your weight more than anything else, in my opinion, and the opinion of trainers that I've said is your diet. Cause that's where they say 90% of you've heard trainers say 90% of its diet and like 10% of it's the gym. Well, I'm going to figure out for me what I need to eat macro wise, as far as how much protein, how much carbs, how much fat I'm going to figure out what my total caloric intake needs to be. And then I'm going to list those action steps on Monday. I do this on Tuesday, I do this on Wednesday, I do this. And I just check everything. The reason that you're giving yourself days of the week to do this, there's a reason that you're doing this is because this plan will not succeed unless it turns into action. And how do you turn it

Starting point is 00:30:16 into action? I'm going to tell you about that in just a minute. But before I do that, I got to tell you, I got to tell you about something that we did that I found that worked out for a lot of our people, my company, and something you should look into. If you are a self-employed person and a lot of realtors, brokers, mortgage people, and if you're a self-employed person and you're in money, if you got a PPP loan back in the day, there is a new round of money that's out there for you. It's called the SERC. It's not SERT credit. It is not ERC. It is not PPP. It is what I think is the last little bit of your tax dollars that you paid that you can get back through a credit from the COVID time through legislation. So if that is something, so I'm

Starting point is 00:30:59 describing you, if you are somebody that's self-employed, you filed for PPP, you didn't, whatever it might've been, and you were self-employed back during COVID, check out ERTMoney.com. That's ERT, or I'm sorry, ETDMoney.com for escaping the drift. ETDMoney.com. ETDMoney.com. And our partners over there will walk you through how to get that credit for yourself. But it's something you should check out if you are looking to try to get some of your tax dollars back from COVID. This is, I think, the last program that these guys have found. Again, not ERC, not PPP. So check it out. Go to etdmoney.com. Now, let's get back to talking about how to make this actionable. I'm going to tell you a story. A long time ago, I was in the insurance business and our business was

Starting point is 00:31:48 selling Medicare supplements to senior citizens in Florida. It's what we did. And the hook for this was this was before they had done Medicare reform when literally all seniors got was Medicare part A and part B, which covered their doctors and part of their hospitalization. And then you could buy what was called a Medicare supplement, which would fill in the gaps or Medigap policy. But none of this covered medications. This was prior to Medicare Part D. I'm sorry. Yes, Medicare Part D. Now, in case you didn't know, medications are very expensive for old people, especially. I mean, very, very expensive. And the U.S. government for years did nothing to kind of regulate the drug prices that came out of Big Pharma. And you always kind of wondered why.

Starting point is 00:32:34 Well, I'll tell you why. Because the government had a deal a long time ago with Big Pharma that stated as long as you give medicine away to senior citizens that meet certain income requirements, well, then we won't mess with you about your drug prices. And that seemed to be a pretty good, you know, backroom handshake deal. The only problem is they didn't bother to tell any seniors about it. So when we kind of figured out how this worked, we became experts at giving away free medicine to seniors. So we'd walk into their house and you'd have an older person on a fixed income that was paying $140 a month for their Medicare supplement because they bought it at a certain age. And now they were a little older,

Starting point is 00:33:16 it was going to be more expensive to buy the same plan, but they were spending $600 a month on medicine. We could walk in and sell them a $150 plan, which is a little bit more expensive, but I could make their medicine bill go to zero. And needless to say, in Florida, around the turn of the millennia, 2000s, this was a very good business and it was booming and it was doing very, very well. We very quickly expanded into other markets across Florida from North Florida into Central Florida. And my top sales guy in Tampa, the guy was just crushing down there. He was doing great. We were buying all his leads and all of a sudden the leads weren't getting worked. Things were falling through the cracks. I found out the guy was just screwing off. He was kind

Starting point is 00:33:59 of going to play golf. He was doing some different things. And I was like, man, as the president of this company, I don't have a choice. Even though this is my best guy, I got to fire this guy. I got to get rid of him. And the problem with that scenario was I was the sales guy. I was the president. I was the marketing director. And I was the sales guy. It was like me and my sister incorporated. So how do you fire yourself? You can't. But I had to make a decision. I realized I needed some middle management in my life. I needed a manager to tell me when and where I needed to be. And a lot of people are thinking, well, you know, gosh, I'm just trying to do this little side project, or I'm trying to do what I'm trying to do with this plan. How am I going to, how am I going to

Starting point is 00:34:38 go hire somebody? You already have middle management. It's in your phone. It is the calendar in your phone. I made an agreement with myself. And again, if you want to have a New Year's resolution, you want to have a resolution this year, don't plan on losing weight. Don't say you're going to make more money. Don't say you're going to spend more time with your kids. Say that if it goes into your calendar, you will absolutely commit to doing it. Make your calendar, your middle manager that tells you where and when you need to be. And if something goes into that calendar, it is a non-negotiable. If you do that,

Starting point is 00:35:16 and now you start to schedule your workouts, schedule your time with your family, schedule the time that you prospect or work on that new business. You start scheduling all those things, watch the magic happen. Because when I got middle management in my life and started adding all of these things into my calendar and people call and say, hey, do you want to go play golf? And I'd look at my calendar and say, I got to make calls from 11 to three. Can't do it. Can't do it today. Calendar says I have to do it. When I made that commitment, everything changed for me. So the reason back to your action plan, back to your action, the action steps under your strategy, is you want to be able to transfer those things directly from where they are into your calendar in your phone. If it says Monday morning, I wake up and I do this and put

Starting point is 00:36:06 it in at 9 a.m., put it at 10 a.m. And now when you're adding new strategies and new action steps, just make sure they don't overlap during the day. But the goal is at the end of this, for whatever you're working on or forever, how many of these plans you may have, when you wake up on Monday morning, you don't think to yourself, hmm, what should I do today? You already know what you have to do because it is in your calendar. It is there. And I mean, if I'm somebody that, like I gave a real generic example, let's drill it down a little harder for something else. Let's say a strategy, we'll pick another one. We'll say, let's say your business uses direct

Starting point is 00:36:45 mail, whatever it may be, your wholesaler, your realtor, whatever, but you use direct mail. Let's say that. Well, my action steps are going to look something like this. I'm going to say by the third of every month, I have secured my new list. Whoever I'm securing it from, I type out if I'm pulling it out of PropStream or I'm getting it from a title rep or I'm getting it from a mail house or whatever I'm doing, I have secured this list by this date. I've designed my piece by the fifth of the month. It is done. It is submitted to the printer. It has gone out to mail no later than the seventh. On 7th, I take those leads. I run them on the 8th. I wake up, I skip trace all of them. I start loading them into my call

Starting point is 00:37:31 center. And then I make calls on Wednesdays, on Fridays. On Wednesdays, I'll make them from 9 to 1. On Fridays, I'll make them from 3 to 6, just because I want to mix up the time. Because as I'm tracking things, I want to see what time is better and what day is better to make calls on. But when I'm done with that, I can load all of that into my phone. I know exactly what my plan is. I know what my due dates are. I know when this stuff has to get done. And then I just follow the plan and I track this stuff. So again, first strategy, tried and true. Second strategy should be pretty good. You should have a really good feeling about this one and know somebody that's done it and is doing it at a high level. And you've picked their brain, not just on how to do it, but the math of it. You need to understand,

Starting point is 00:38:15 okay, if I'm sending mailers to get one deal, how many do I need to send out? You need to send out 10,000. Okay, well, how much do I want to make? How much is it going to cost? How do I budget for this? How do I do that? You need to lay all those steps out, lay it all out, put it in your phone. Now, the third strategy, the third strategy is you can take a flyer because, and you need to take a flyer because I'll tell you this. One of the reasons that I see people fail in business and one of the most common reasons that I'll see people fail is quite frankly, they get bored because monotony becomes the enemy of enthusiasm. Repetition becomes the enemy of enthusiasm. Doing the same shit every day,

Starting point is 00:38:58 people just get burned out on it. They crave for something new. They crave for that new idea. They crave for that something, anything, which is why I laugh because, you know, realtors have the worst shiny object syndrome in the history of everybody. You want to make a gazillion dollars? Here's a free tip. Design something to sell to realtors

Starting point is 00:39:15 because they just buy everything. And it's because of this, because what makes successful agents good at what they do, a lot of it is monotonous and they just get bored. So here's your, here's your chance to onboard yourself. Here's your chance to get excited about something. Pick something new you've wanted to do. Pick something new that excites you, that makes you happy, that gets you going. Now we'll say this, it's got to be quantitative. It's gotta be, you've gotta be able to measure it. So many things, and I'll be honest with you,

Starting point is 00:39:44 there's a lot of stuff that I've done over the last couple of years that you can't quantify and you just can't. Like for example, this podcast you're listening to right now, right now, I have no way to measure the impact it has on my business. Now I do it because I understand when people come to the studio and I spend an hour with them having a conversation, I create a relationship with them. And that capital to me is, is, is worth everything. The capital that I get with other people is worth everything to me, which is really why I do this. But I'm going to give a better example back before you could just pay 10 bucks to do it or whatever it was, dude, all of us

Starting point is 00:40:25 paid a, if you saw a blue check mark next to our name, a lot of us paid a shit ton of money to get that done. And I mean, a lot of money have all these articles written to go through this process to get that done. And every time the guy that was doing it, I asked him, well, what am I going to get out of this? He's always like, well, you can't really quantify it, but he was right. Back in the day when you were, you know, Instagram became the new business card. You'd share your Instagram with somebody and they'd see that check mark. And she's like,

Starting point is 00:40:50 okay, this dude's a player. That's just how it was. So that stuff is fine. Like if you want to take a flyer, if you want to do some of that stuff, that's whatever. Manage to their own. I'm not going to judge you. I'm sitting here on a podcast. I can't quantify it, what it does. I have no idea. But this also would not be on my business plan, right? Now my podcast does have a business plan that's different, but this would not be on like a marketing. I would not use this as marketing for my real estate company because I have no way to quantify if it's successful. So anytime I'm going to take a flyer, it needs to be something that you can measure. For example, if you're going to put social media, which so many people do now, is one of their strategies.

Starting point is 00:41:32 Oh, social media is one of my strategies. You better, I mean better, have a system involved in your social media that includes call to actions to landing pages where you can measure the traffic that you're driving from point A to point B. Because if you don't have a way to measure what this is actually doing, it's just like this podcast. It's just like the check mark on Instagram. It doesn't belong on a business plan because a business plan is about execution, tracking

Starting point is 00:42:01 data, and seeing what's successful. And that brings me to my last point, my last and final point. There is a reason that this business page is only one page long. There is a reason that we did not spend, or you didn't spend two weeks filling out everything that you would need to get a massive loan from a bank. There's a reason it's not 60 pages. That's not what this is for. You're not going to walk in a bank

Starting point is 00:42:27 and get funding with this piece of paper. This is for you. This is for your execution. But the reason it's one page is I don't want you to fall so in love with your plan that when it's failing, you don't pivot. Because what separates winners from losers in just about any aspect of business, the people that win big and the people that fail are their ability to understand when something

Starting point is 00:42:53 they're not doing is not working and they pivot. So if you're tracking the data and you're running this and you're seeing all this, and all of a sudden you're like, man, this just isn't really working for me anymore. Like this isn't getting me where I want to go anymore. This source is drying up. I'm not seeing as much activity from this as I once did. And you pivot to something else. You'll never have a problem. I'll finish with one story years and years and years ago when the financial crisis hit back in 2006 and seven, I was one of the first guys in Las Vegas, which was ground zero for that thing, for the foreclosure crisis. I was one of the first guys in town that learned how to do short sales, which means selling a house for less than what was owed to the bank and getting them to agree to a deficiency. That

Starting point is 00:43:35 then led to me listing a lot of properties directly for the banks, their foreclosures, they would take back called REO properties. I saw that start to dwindle. And then I pivoted from that away from the REOs into working directly with the hedge funds, Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, and purchasing large sums of assets for them. When that started to dry up and I saw them start to slow down, I pivoted out of that business into luxury and really forced into luxury. So the, the, the name of the game here is you gotta, you've always gotta watch what you're doing because not everything you're doing that's really successful right now will not, will stay successful. Things change, markets change, appetites change, everything changes. And as long as you are constantly measuring and

Starting point is 00:44:25 have your finger on the pulse of what your business is, you'll be able to catch that next wave, whatever it is in whatever you're doing. But I know guys still to this day in Vegas that are like, oh man, REO is going to come back around. It's like, dude, that was 20, almost 20 years ago. And you're still hanging out, waiting for that to come back. Like if it does great, I'll jump on that wave again, but I ain't waiting around for it. I've already pivoted to the next thing. And the reason I'm able to do that is because I'm never married to my business plan. I'm honest with myself. The truth lies in the math. I let the math tell me what's working, not my gut. The answer is always in the data. So do your plan.

Starting point is 00:45:09 Put it somewhere where you can see it every single day. Read that vision statement every single day. Let it get you fired up for the day. Every day, read that vision statement. And then that, using all of these steps, should get you where you want to go this year. Thanks for tuning in, guys. We will be back with guests next time. I hope you loved this episode, man. I loved giving you this information today and we will see you guys next time. What's up everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of escaping the drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.

Starting point is 00:45:46 Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review. Give us a share. Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.

Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - #97: Escaping The Drift in 2024: Achieving Your Resolutions

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