Start With A Win - 10 Levers Of Success Part 2

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

If you tuned into the previous episode of the Start with a Win podcast, you have been equipped with the first five Business Levers of Success. And if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, go back and do it!Adam continues by sharing the final five Business Levers of Success on this episode, plus listeners who are patient and perceptive will receive Adam’s #1 piece of advice for CEOs and executives.6. Saying the right thing – Creating copy is an art form meant to bring people along on the journey of your business. If you are not familiar with copy writing, do some research and review the resources below to understand how saying the right thing can be so impactful in your business.7. Learning and growing – When you stop learning, you start dying. The wisest people in the world soak up everything around them and take notes to be able to reflect back on what they have learned so they can apply it in their everyday lives. They view learning as a way of extracting and delivering value.8. Improvement – Small hinges swing big doors, and as Adam has previously discussed on the podcast, there is great power in the aggregation of marginal gain. Improvement doesn’t happen overnight, but small habitual changes can lead to huge improvements.9. The power of associations – Push yourself to associate with people much smarter than you, from your business relationships to personal mentors or coaches to mastermind groups. Frequently evaluate your circles to determine if you have people around you who hold you accountable for your goals.10. Clarity – Confusion is contagious, and you as a leader are confused about the direction of your organization or even just a certain project, your employees will feel lost, unmotivated, and perhaps even lose confidence in you. On the other hand, clarity and focus are the keys to future success.Links:“Atomic Habits” by James Clear: https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299 “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081298160X “Habit Stacking” by Steve Scott: https://www.amazon.com/Habit-Stacking-Changes-Improve-Happiness-ebook/dp/B06XP2B5QC “How to Write Copy that Sells” by Ray Edwards: https://www.amazon.com/Write-Copy-Sells-Step-Step/dp/161448502X Ray Edwards’ podcast: https://rayedwards.com/podcast-archives/ “Copy Chief Radio” podcast: https://copychief.com/podcast-all/ Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

At top of the 12th floor of the Remax World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. All right, so last episode we ended on the five. We have 10 levers for business. We covered mindset. Mindset. We covered emotions. We covered time and choice management.

We covered relationships. And we covered and choice management. We covered relationships. And we covered how do you show up? That was a great episode. All right. So let's talk about the second five. Six through 10, second half. We've changed direction on the field here. That's right. Okay. Coming out for the win. This next one, I love this because I'm a huge fan of how we say what we say and the psychological impact that that has. And that is saying the right thing. You have to copyright correctly. So there's authoring, there's throwing words on paper, and then there's creating copy. And it's interesting because creating copy is an art form. It helps people understand the way you come across in speaking, in videos. Scripts are

built around copywriting. Yeah. Well, and too, it's a way that you can tell a story and really connect with people. Absolutely. Absolutely. And there are different techniques to that, like the problem agitation solution technique, where you come out and you talk about challenges, you make them even worse. You give a little bit of an anecdotal story on those things, and you solve those. But ultimately, what it boils down to is saying the right thing so people can take that journey with you on how your business delivers value, how you built your business, what you're doing with them, things like that. You got to say the right things. And that's hard if you don't know what you're doing, because a things like that. You got to say the right things. And that's hard

if you don't know what you're doing, because a lot of people just go say things. Yeah. But it's about delivering value with that through proper copywriting. Yeah. One of my favorite books, I don't know if you've read this one, but it's called How to Write Copy That Sells by Ray Edwards. Ray Edwards is a great guy. He also has a podcast, Ray Edwards Podcast. I've listened to a lot of his learnings over the years. Yeah.

So if you're curious about writing copy or even curious, what does copy mean? Wow. Go get that book. It's good. Or check out his podcast. There's also another one, Kevin Rogers, Copy Chief Radio. Okay. There's another one.

Yeah. And they're buddies in the business, I think. Yeah. So Kevin is a former comedian who took some comedy techniques and turned those into copywriting. But Ray has a formula called PASTOR, P-A-S-T-O-R, that he talks about. We're not going to dig deep into that. Maybe we have a guest on or something like that down the road that talks about copy. Totally. But go check out his stuff. So saying the right thing or copywriting correctly.

Super important. So lever number seven. This is one of my absolute favorites, Mark. So this is about learning and growing. So learning and growing. One of my favorites as well. There's always a question. How do you pick what you learn

and how do you extract value from it? And then how do you deliver that value back to the marketplace, thus making yourself valuable. But ultimately, what happens in life overall is people stop learning. And as soon as they stop learning, they start dying. As soon as you decide,

I'm not going to learn anything else in life, the majority of people don't read another book after college. That's crazy. I don't understand that. I mean, I've read like, you know, three or four of them in the past couple months. Yeah. I just, I love it.

And you have to, you know, you heard the term be a sponge and soak up everything around you. And really, ultimately, business leaders have dedicated themselves to a lifestyle of learning and growing. But here's the key to this. The key is not to be an overeducated underachiever. Because as soon as you start

overeducating yourself and you do nothing with it, it does the opposite to you. You just get addicted to learning, but addicted to not doing as well. Right. Not executing. Exactly. So if you learn something, do something with it. And if you learn something, you go, oh, that was a pretty good book. You know what? You don't have to read 52 books a year or one a week. Go read a book 52 times and see how much you get out of that. Yeah. Learning and growing. I can't stress how big of a lever that is in business, especially if you're trying to give value to people, because you're always looking for something else that you can take and really articulate the value of your business with. And there are so many people that have so many of these different concepts that are in their

learning processes, in their books, in their podcasts, in their blogs, things like that, that you can take something from. But here's the key. The key is to take notes on what you learned and go back and revisit it. Now, I mean, you know me, I have the notes section on my phone. And you go, hey, what do we want to talk about? And I go, hang on, let me look. And I'm scrolling through this massive amount of information that I've learned. And I go, oh, let's talk about this. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, when you're always learning too, as a leader, right? It's, you know, I know for me, I'm not trying to be an expert in all these things, but I want to know enough about a lot of different things so that I can, one, communicate to the expert what I want

and understand how to deliver that. And then know enough about something so that I can, you know, know if I'm on the right path or not. Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. So learning, incredibly, incredibly important. Here's the next one. And I love this one. Improvement. Small hinges swing big doors. That's true. That is deep. It's really deep. But ultimately, what you're looking for is you're looking for these little bitty changes that you can implement anywhere. People who go through life and don't look for opportunities to improve miss these opportunities to massively change. Think about this in your business. If you looked for 1% improvement in the different things that you did, you would find some improvement that you can make.

You don't have to make 1% improvement all the time, but you have to make improvement. It's called Kaizen. There are several books about Kaizen. Atomic Habits. Oh, look at that. Bam, James Clear, Atomic Habits. We talk about that because it's just a great book.

Yeah, and there are some others. The Power of Habit. Charles Duhigg has written a lot about that stuff. Habit stacking. Habit stacking. Wow. It's all about improvement. It's little bitty things. And ultimately, you go back to the British cycling team, Sir Brailsworth, and how he made, he called it aggregation of marginal gain. And he made these little changes on the British cycling team when they were in the Olympics. They hadn't won anything for like a decade.

I'm sorry, not a decade, a century. They hadn't won anything for like a century. 10 decades. 10 decades. Yeah, decade times 10. And he went in and he changed little things like the angle of the seat, changed the pillows that these guys slept on, how they washed their hands.

Yeah, they paint the inside of their van a different color so that they could see dirt. And it's just weird, all the little things, but they made massive changes. And these guys won gold medals in the Tour de France and all this other stuff over and over and over again because of Sir Brailsworth's efforts to change little tiny things. So it's all about small improvements. How can you make small improvements? Because really small improvements add up exponentially in your business and with the interaction that you have with your customers. Yeah. The ninth one. The ninth lever. The ninth lever, the power of associations. The power of associations. Yes. So in a room of eight super smart people, your goal is to be the ninth. Okay. So, and we've

heard it several different ways, you know, never be the smartest person in a room, play better golf with better golfers. Your parents always say, be careful who you hang out with because that's what you'll become. Things like that. Well, it's true. We are herd animals, and we will run as fast as the slowest member of the herd. Yeah. Some total of the five people you hang out with. Jim Rohn said that. Yeah. Zig Ziglar was all over this one too. So true. This ultimately is one of the most overlooked success principles in society because people go and they kind of reduce the associations

that they are with a lot of times because they do it by, say, all right, I'm tired. I'm going to go hang out at the bar. And, I mean, do you want to be really good at hanging out at the bar? Yeah. Or do you want to go be really good at your business, your life, your family, things like that by upping your game. Go find people that are way better than you are that you want to be as good as. And we also kind of limit ourselves

to our potential by hanging out with people that are just like us. So you can't get way better than yourself if you hang out with everybody that's just like you. Right. Yeah. If you think you're the smartest person in the room, there's a problem. It is a problem, yeah. If you're like, yeah, I'm the smartest person here, it's like, okay, either you're not, or you need to start hanging around some smarter people. Exactly.

And I mean, the reality is you have to make a conscious effort to do this. Because we do stay in a zone in life, but you have to go seek out mastermind groups. You have to go seek out mentorsmind groups. You have to go seek out mentors, coaches, things like that. And that's where you will get better. The hardest component of this lever is your past relationships. It really is. Because those are a drag on your future relationships. Or they may be a boost for your future relationships if you hit a hard time.

And really, I'm not saying don't be friends with your friends. I'm just saying be aware of who your friends are and what they do to help you. And then the 10th lever. The 10th lever. The 10th. That sounds like a movie title. Do you want to say that like it's something?

The 10th lever. All right, there we go. I love that. This summer, only one lever will survive. Oh, my gosh. This is the end of the day. Do you remember our last podcast we ever did when we were talking? It's getting punchy here.

Okay. So I love this one because we lose track of ourselves on a regular basis in business. It's late in the day. We've had a lot of stress attacking us. We've had a lot of people delivering problems to us. Sometimes we just don't understand how to get out of that funk. We don't understand how to create this lever in our life, but we have to look for it. We have to consciously say, okay, where am I at? Where am I going? And this lever is called clarity. And our employees need this just as much as we do.

Because people get confused through fear-mongering, through rhetoric. In our space in real estate, there are a lot of these people we so affectionately term them disruptors. I think they're more distractors than disruptors because they take our eye away from the focus that we're supposed to have, the clarity that we're supposed to have. And this is important because the confused mind always says no. The confused mind always says no. And if you don't have clarity in your business, in your life, in your relationships, you say no. And when you say no, you close doors. You create stagnation.

You create lack of implementation. When you confuse, you lose. When you confuse, you do lose. And when you confuse your customers, because confusion is contagious. If you're confused, you can't provide clarity for your customers. So clarity is something that you have to always take a step back and look for. That clarity, that focus, that future effort towards success. Otherwise, the confused mind says no, and that's when you lose.

The past two episodes, we've gone through some major deep dives into these success levers of business. When you list them all out, they have a massive impact on your business. Ten levers that really help your business, help you, help your relationships, help your impact on society. So let me run through those real quick. Ready, Mark? Yeah. Number one, mindset. Number two, emotions. Number three, time and choice management. Number four, relationships. Number five, how do you show up? Number six, saying the right thing. Number seven, learning and growing. Number eight, improvement,

small hinges swinging big doors. Number nine, the power of associations. And number 10, creating clarity, being clear, having clarity. So if you write down those 10 things, keep track of those things, and look to those each day, you're going to accomplish way more than you thought you could just by pulling the 10 levers of business success. Don't forget to go on iTunes and subscribe, write a review, or rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. You can follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember to start with a win.

Adam. You still there, Mark? Yeah, I'm still here. I wonder who else is still here. Probably our social media manager, Kayla. They're probably wondering, okay, why is there time left on this podcast? That's right. And they haven't finished yet.

They're doing the dishes. They're at the gym, and they couldn't switch the podcast. Yeah, well, I have a present for them. I have a gift. The 11th lever. The 11th lever. So what would this lever be? I've heard this tip a few times from some of the people that I do masterminds with,

coaching, mentoring, things like that. And I think this is so powerful, but so few people know this. And that is the number one piece of advice you would give a CEO or an executive. We go through so many things in our day, in our life, and we end up distributing some of those stresses out to other people where we shouldn't be. So this is the tip, okay? Yeah. Ready for this? Ready. Number one tip for executives and CEOs, manage your emotions. That's a good tip. It's weird because when you get frustrated, you get upset, you get angry, whatever. What's the first thing you do? You unload on somebody. That's a good tip. It's weird because when you get frustrated, you get upset, you get angry, whatever. What's the first thing you do? You unload on somebody. That's right. Or

you didn't make a bad decision. Totally. Because you weren't. Yeah, you're making a completely emotional decision, which is fine. You can make emotional decisions, but don't make them based on bad emotions. Don't make them on emotions that you shouldn't be making decisions on because you're upset, you're frustrated, you're mad at somebody who has really nothing to do with this decision, or maybe they do, but you can't make a decision out of spite

or out of anger. You have to make it out of clarity, out of vision, out of growth, out of kindness, things like that. Does that make sense? Love it.

All right, you guys, go crush it. Bye.