Start With A Win - 10 Levers Of Success Part 1

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

On this episode of the Start with a Win podcast, Adam talks about some of the business levers for success based on his experience and the experiences of others. Considering these things can set you up for more wins and keep you on track to reach your goals.Mindset – Your mind is your ultimate weapon, and it is up to you if you are going to cultivate seeds of limitations or seeds of abundance. You can choose to take responsibility for your circumstances or blame your environment when things don’t go your way, but you will find that things go better for you when you give unconditionally of yourself for the benefit of others, which can’t stem from a mindset of blaming everyone but yourself. Producer Mark lives by the motto “Don’t worry. Be present. Expect.” Perhaps you will find this helpful in shaping your own mindset.Emotions – What you convey to your clients or those you are in relationship with is what you will receive back from them. You can choose to give unconditional love or unnecessary frustration depending on what you want to encounter.Time – What you do with your time is ultimately a matter of choice management based in your emotional maturity. Take a look at your typical day in 30-minute segments and determine if each segment was productive or not productive. Reflect on this exercise and plan out ways that you want to change that balance.Relationships – You can view each relationship you have as a bank account. Making value deposits over time will result in a higher balance. Building relationships doesn’t have to be limited to close friends or acquaintances either – you can easily pay into the relationship bank of everyone you meet by smiling or giving them a compliment.How You Show Up – This is all about value delivery and your efforts to become who you say you want to be. So much can be learned from how other people see you, especially if you think you are making improvements that are not translating to how people perceive you.Be sure to tune in next week for the last 5 business levers for success!Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

What's up, buddy? Hey, Adam. How you doing, man? I am wonderful. I love it. Hey, have you ever wondered what causes businesses to be successful? You know, I have thought about that. Like, why are some, they say that over five or 90% of all businesses fail.

Yeah, it is a very, very high number. But there are some levers that business leaders can pull in their business in order to be successful. Well, let's talk about that. All right, let's do it. Atop of the 12th floor of the Remax World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. All right. I like these intros where we kind of roll into them before we play music. Yeah, I do too. I was going to say we were doing our start with a wind dance. Yeah, and we lost track of time.

At the Brokerona conference, your wife was like, don't do that. Kelly was like, uh-uh, no dancing. Please stop him from dancing. But I had fancy socks on, so she was cool with that. Yeah, that's OK. Yeah, and we were in front of all these people. Yeah, there's all that. See, we can just be here in the studio doing the dance to ourselves.

Kayla's judging us, though. Yeah. She's got her phone up here. She's streaming it live to the internet. There you go. So hey, Mark. Yeah. We're talking about some of these levers in business that people can pull in order to make a massive difference.

Okay. So, you ready to dive into this? Yeah, let's get into it. Okay. So, first one, mindset. Huge. Oh, massive. We've had Todd Herman, the alter ego effect on the show. We've had some serious mindset people on here. Oh, massive. We've had Todd Herman, the alter ego effect on the show. We've had some serious mindset people on here. Oh, yeah.

What's his name? Captain Muscles? John Cheplak. Yeah, John Cheplak. Yeah, my coach. He's a mindset coach. He's awesome. That's really what he is.

It's interesting because the mind above all else is the ultimate weapon of man on the battlefield and in business. That is so true. You know, people have this limited mindset all the time. When you think from a position of abundance, it's amazing what happens. And we talked about this with John, fear versus love. You really only have, you have two emotions, fear and love. If you operate with a mindset of fear, an emotion of fear, really what happens? Fear response, fight, flight, or freeze. And that really limits your business capabilities. If you operate from a

position of love, of giving, because really love is unconditional giving, okay? It's unconditional giving with complete effort to please the other. So you're giving unconditionally into your business. And then there's another mindset thought. This is a, it's like 1940s, 1950s psychology concept called locus of control. So there are two concepts in locus of control. There's internal and external locus of control. And when you look at the mindset of people, if they have an external locus of control in their mind, they're being the victims of their circumstances around them. They're blaming where they're at and what they're doing and everything around them instead of taking control of that internally,

the internal locus of control, when they take control of that and they say, I'm going to accomplish this regardless. So mindset, man. Mindset's huge. Yeah. My three keys to success in life and business is don't worry, be present, and expect. Mindset.

It's all about that mindset. That's it. Yeah. Everything you hear from this point on and what I'm talking about comes back to this topic. Okay? All right. So everything centers around mindset

because if you don't have that, you've got nothing. Yeah. Maybe you get lucky and succeed at stuff, but you're miserable because your mindset is horrible. But mindset is the foundation. It's the foundation for your beliefs, your courage, and your ego. How am I going to treat others around me? How am I going to treat myself? What is my ego going to demonstrate? That mindset is where people's strengths emit from, as well as your weaknesses and your downturns.

That's so good. Super important. This is where everything below is stored, your learnings, your memory, your interpretations, things like that. So mindset, very first thing. Got it. We started deep, deep mindset. Mindset.

The second lever in business, and this is huge. This is huge because this will turn off customers more than anything. Emotions. Really not enough time is spent on this two-way street of emotion with customers, with employees. Emotion is super valuable because when you deploy emotion and caring towards other people, they deploy it back. So true. You deploy anger, guess what you get in return? Anger. Frustration.

Yeah. It comes back. And people will come in to you, regardless of where your business is, the environment, and they will deploy emotions. You need to control your emotions And understand how How do you deal with those things that they have Thrown at you and how can you help them How do you harness their emotions

Maximize The situation for a positive outcome And deploy emotions Back to them Second one is emotions So we got mindset and emotions so far So we haven't really We haven't gone into like make a better product. Yeah, none of that has happened yet.

You haven't said anything about widgets. I'm not going to. Wait, what? What? Let's move on to the next one here because this one's important too, okay? So I'm going to say time in your business, it's not time, it's choice management. Because you can always run out of time. You can always have more stuff show up than you theoretically have time for.

So really what you're doing is you're making a choice as to what you're going to do with your time. So unless you're in a business where you have to sit there and watch the clock for something to happen, you get to decide how you leverage that time through your choice management. Now, choice management is basically a function of emotional maturity. Okay? Back to emotions. What you do with that time and how you leverage that creates those efficiencies. So mastering your time and your schedule is imperative. Yeah. You've got to have the discipline to do that.

Take the choice management. Of all the complaints I hear, I'm too busy is the top one. Which is lame if you listen to our episode on top bad excuses. Yeah. I mean, I'm too busy. That's one of them. Huge excuse. You know what it means? I mean, instead of saying I'm too busy, people should walk around and go, I made bad choices.

Yeah. I'm sorry. If you go, I'm too busy. Yeah, you're right. You are. I'm not going to argue with you. Yeah. It's just you made bad choices. Yeah. This fall, my kids got back into school. So I have the luxury of probably like a lot of agents that you get to choose your schedule and kind of plan your days out. And so during the summer, I lived a pretty laid back life and was able to do a lot of stuff with the family and things like that. But then as soon as school started, I sat down and I kind of rebuilt my schedule, like to say, all right, now it's back to routines in a very more strict manner and whatnot. And every hour of my day is planned. Are you looking at my notes right now? No, why? Because that's what I'm about to say.

Look at that. So the best way to overcome this is a time audit. And we hate the two words, time and audit, because they have these negative connotations. But ultimately, what we're doing is we're looking for opportunities in our time. So if we sit down and I actually have, I created a time audit form a long time ago, and it blocks out every half hour of the day from the time you open your eyes to the time you close your eyes. And what are you doing with that time? Is it productive or is it non-productive? Productive meaning that it attacks one of the goals that you have to accomplish. So if my goal is to reach as many

of my customers as possible during the day and connect with them via value, do these things that I'm doing do that? Do they accomplish that? So I might be creating content. Is that productive? That's productive because that content I'm creating is what I can reach them with. I'm delivering that content. Obviously, that's productive, things like that. Right now, productive because we are recording content in order to reach our customers and deliver that value. So ultimately, it boils down to the choice management that you can see with your eyes and you can hold yourself accountable to by taking a time audit and looking at, not just looking forward and saying, here's what I want to do, but looking back and going, did I do it? How do you manage your choices with that time? All right. So next

one, fourth lever in business relationships. It's a huge lever. Oh, it's massive. If you don't have this one, everything else fails. Right. But I mean, all of these are incredibly imperative because if you don't have time, you can't manage your relationships, right? Right. If you can't control your emotions, can't manage your relationships. So really, you have to think of relationships like a bank account. There's compounding interest in a bank account. There's compounding interest in a relationship. How can you invest in that relationship regularly instead of going into making one giant deposit? Because that giant deposit is not going to compound the interest

as well as many small deposits over time. Yeah. You need to make a lot of small deposits in those relationships. In fact, we know that it is well over a dozen value deposits in a relationship before that relationship starts paying dividends. Interesting. Yeah.

So think of it like a bank account. It's about trying to over deposit the other side of the relationship. You want to deposit more value than they are because then there's always that return of them trying to deposit value back into the relationship. Right. It's called reciprocity. I love when someone is just depositing without, like, they're just depositing because, right? Not necessarily thinking, oh, I want to get something back or I'm trying to receive something.

It's just that I want to deposit something because I'm a good person and I want to give back or whatever that is. So it boils down to that whole concept of the emotion of love, giving unconditionally. And this is just kind of doing that over and over and over again. And that's what creates these relationships, that value. So deposit in those relationships every direction you possibly can. I don't care who it's with. It's the guy standing on the street corner holding the sign saying, I'm out of a job and I need a dollar to go over here to McDonald's and get a burger. Deposit in that. Wave to the guy, sorry I don't have a buck today, but I wish you the best. Even if you don't do what they ask, give them some sort of gratitude. Deposit in relationships.

Well, and I think what people don't think about a lot is that when you start to deposit and give, it really fills you up. It totally does. It makes you feel better. It makes you feel more positive. It makes you feel more accomplished when you're giving. And it builds momentum.

Yeah. You can go and have the most uncomfortable conversations with people and give the most awkward seeming compliments, but are received incredibly well when you're on, when you have momentum going in that, when you're not being the introvert and going, oh, it feels weird for me to walk up to the clerk at Starbucks and go, hey, that's a really, you know, that's a pretty watch you're wearing. Or I love the store you guys have here.

And they're like, whoa, I like the store too. Or you guys always make the best coffee. I mean, what's the last time somebody walked up to the Starbucks person and said, you guys make the best coffee? Because they want to go up and they, you know, order their latte and they beep their phone on the thing. Give the person a compliment for crying out loud. Yeah. Say, thanks for what you guys do. Watch them smile. Bam. Deposit a smile on that account.

Or, hey, you know, I love the aprons you guys have. Those are so cool. You know, I need a Starbucks apron. Whatever it might be. I don't know. It just, compliments. Yeah. You know, it's, say something nice to somebody. And another way of working on those relationships, asking. Asking versus telling. If you're talking to your customers, ask questions. Care about their challenges and concerns. Ask. Asking actually is a deposit in a relationship. Yeah, totally. 100%. Fifth lever, how do you show up? Care about how you show up. What you have convinced yourself that you are

and how to become that. Hmm. Go into that a little bit more. I mean, this is where we have our beliefs in ourself and our strengths and how we want others to view us. And I'm not saying on a self-conscious level. I'm saying on a value delivery level.

If you show up and you go, I'm here to help. I'm here because of you. I love sitting down and having these conversations on the podcast because it's fun. I mean, I love sitting here with my team, with producer Mark, with social media manager Kayla, who, you know, does the broadcast and things like that. Lexi, wherever you're at. It's fun to be with my team. And they notice how you show up. And our customers notice how we show up as well.

And the people that were, you know, because really you're partners in your business with your customer. Yeah. That's how you got to look at it. You know, you got to, you have to balance that. You can't abandon those relationships and just be there.

You got to show up and be present. And that might mean, you know, don't have your iPhone around or whatever. You know, be present with people while they're there, but show up. All right, we're going to stop it right there. Levers 1 through 5. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Make sure to tune in next week as we wrap this up with levers 6 through 10.

If you haven't already, please go on to iTunes and subscribe and leave a comment. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. As always, I hope you have a fantastic day and remember, start with a win.