Start With A Win - How to Lead with Transparency and Cultivate Confidence with Dave Liniger - Part 1

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Dave Liniger started RE/MAX in 1973, and it has become the largest real estate company in the world with a record year in 2021. He also runs a private equity company, Area15 Ventures, focused on emerging franchisors and high-growth businesses.Dave’s experience in business and leadership is extensive and diverse—from four tours in Vietnam to owning and running a NASCAR team to building dozens of companies over the years. So he understands what it takes to start and grow a successful business. He believes that may leaders are arrogant, believing that they were the ones to create the success. But the truth is that it’s nonsense. Success isn’t about “me,” it’s about “we.” It wasn’t just Dave who made RE/MAX happen, it was the many people around him and in the company who made it was it is today.Dave shares about the mistakes he’s also made along the way and how he overcame them. You can make mistakes, but don’t let mistakes make you. And he believes that a leader has to be transparent to his or her team. If you make a mistake, you should own up to it and commit to not doing it again. “We’re human beings, and we make mistakes. Just don’t make the same mistake over and over again.”Dave provides insight on the importance of creating the right environment in a company. He shares that one of the major functions of a great leader is to create an environment where the individuals on the team can collectively succeed better than they can by themselves—and to achieve their personal goals as well as team goals. And it’s more than just being a good motivator. He believes that motivation is superficial and doesn’t work in the long-term. Instead, create an environment of self-motivation where people can achieve what they want to achieve. Because not everyone has the same goals. The conversation shifts to cultivating confidence and courage in the people you lead. Courage comes from experience, and experience comes from confidence—or vice-versa. Dave shares stories of how he learned to cultivate that confidence in the leaders around him, and part of that came by being an encourager. Part of the job of leading is encouraging and praising others. You lead by example, but also by heaping praise on your people. If your employees know they have someone who cares for them personally, they pick up on that.“I wish I could buy people for what they think they’re worth, and work with them for a while, and then sell them for what I know they’re worth,” said Dave.Adam and Dave round out this part of the conversation by talking about the difference between a family environment and a team environment in a company. RE/MAX was built as a team, with people relying on each other and their leaders to contribute and make the team better. But Dave shares that you can have team accomplishments with family values. A team that’s accountable to each other but also there for each other when it’s needed most.Episode Links:http://www.daveliniger.comhttps://www.area15ventures.comOrder your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.startwithawin.com/bookConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. And coming to you from on the road, we've got the Brand Viva Studios and Start With a Win podcast. Secret location today, we have in the studio here, off camera, producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? Hey, I'm doing so good over here. Awesome. And I'm really honored to be part of this show. I've been podcasting

for several years now and had you once before on the podcast, but this is always truly an honor to sit down and talk about amazing leadership concepts and business and things like that with our guest today, the co-founder of Remax, coming up on 50 years of running the company, Mr. Dave Linegar. How are you doing, my friend? I'm good. Awesome. So Dave, we're here at your new private equity fund office called Area 15 Ventures, and you grow leaders here more than anything else and grow businesses along with that. So I want to dive into leadership today. Okay.

All right. So just a little flyover about Dave Linegar. So in 1973, Dave and Gail Linegar started Remax, the largest real estate company in the world. Nobody sells more real estate than Remax. In fact, congratulations on the 2021 numbers, over 2 million transaction sides done. So huge congratulations to you guys. Great team. Yes, yes. And I was honored to be part of that team for 18 plus years and left as the CEO recently. But I've been working with you on leadership and business for a couple decades now. So mind if we kind of peel the onion on this and dig into it a little bit? Go for it. All right. So Dave, um, you've had a lot of different leadership roles in your life. Uh, you were, you were in, um, did four tours in Vietnam and the military and,

uh, led a lot of men in, uh, in very difficult situations. You ran a owned and ran a NASCAR team, uh, for what, like 11 years, um, you know, driving professional. This is not like the local tracks where you started. You were driving the big tracks with the big boys where we turn on NASCAR on Sundays and see that. And you've built dozens and dozens of companies. The most well-known is Remax. You must have learned a lot of leadership lessons during those times, probably had a lot of successes and a lot of failures. So I just want to start with what does leadership mean to you? I mean, that's a word that everybody throws around. What is leadership in the mind of Dave Linegar? A lot of leaders are arrogant and every other word out of their mouth is, I, I, I, I, I, I did this, I did this, I did this. It's absolute nonsense. You look at the success of Remax, it's we. One individual,

two individuals did not make this company happen. It was dozens of regional owners and then hundreds of broker owners and tens of thousands of sales associates. This building, this unbelievable empire we have was a team effort on the part of everybody. So it was part of everybody, but not everybody was a leader when they came into this. I mean, you don't go to the store and pull a leader off the shelf and say, I think I'll have one of these today and bring them into my business. Where does leading a company come from and what does leading a company mean? How do you start that venture when you get into business? Well, all of your life is an adventure

and all of your life can be a learning experience. Some people will go to college and they get book learning and then they can try to implement it in person. Other people don't necessarily have that advantage, but somewhere along the line, they figure it out, usually after making a lot of mistakes. And when we started Remax, I made so many mistakes. It was, it was pathetic.

Um, but I did some things right too. Oh yeah, I absolutely, you did. Um, and those stories are truly amazing. And, but there's a, the interesting thing is, and I'd like for you to dig a little deeper into this, you made mistakes, but you didn't let the mistakes make you. I mean, maybe you did, but you learned from them. I mean, that seems to be one of those things that the ego prevents. A lot of people, when they make a mistake, they either hide from it or they make excuses about it, something like that. I've never known you to be a person like that you

you own your mistakes what what does that mean to leadership well um i think leader has to be uh transparent uh to the team and if you make a mistake, you're better off to face up to it and say, I'm sorry, and I'm going to learn from it and not do it again. I'll give you a perfect example. I've always felt that I was a man of my word. And in a regional owner meeting, we were debating something. This is 30 some years ago. And I said, well, I'll get to that. I'll handle that by the next meeting. And one of the regional owners looked at me and says, Dave, you know, you keep making promises and you keep breaking them.

And I said, no, I don't. And he said, well, what about this, this and this and this? And it dawned on me that, oh, yeah, I had said we were going to do this at the last meeting 60 days before. And I was so busy, I forgot it. And so I learned from that. And I said, the problem is we don't keep minutes of these meetings. And so from now on, we'll keep minutes. And at the end of each meeting, we'll have a list of action items. And then those action items will be, you know, typed up the next day. And it is our commitment that they will be completed or in process by the next time we meet again. And that totally changed the meetings. It was an accountability lesson,

if you will. And it was just like, I didn't mean to not do it. It was just so busy and so hectic. I didn't get around to it. And I noticed that, you know, when you make a mistake, when you have some sort of a stumble in business or life or whatever, you pick yourself up and you move on quickly. You know, you have a lot of people in society who dwell on those and continue to hammer on them and say, well, it was me. I've never known you to be a victim in life. And you've fallen victim, if you will, or you've had challenges like everybody does. But when there's a mistake, when there's a problem or something like that, you take and you learn from it. And then you move

on very, very quickly. Is that something that is uncommon? I mean, it seems like a lot of people stick with their problems. The difference between a pessimist and an optimist, I guess, and pessimists are just too hard on themselves. We're human beings. We make mistakes. It's okay. Just don't make the same one over and over and over again.

And move on with your life. We got goals out there. We got places to go. There's things that REMAX hasn't even thought of yet that will be implemented in the next five years that will help all of us. So we just move forward. I love it. And that reminds me of a story I heard.

Coach K, who just retired as the coach of Duke basketball, most winning coach in men's basketball history, had a saying, and that was next play, where people would come to the bench after a mistake or a bad play, and he would look at them and say, next play, and they would move on and put that. They would learn from it, of course, and they went back and reviewed it, but they moved on to the next one and put their effort into that. And he created this amazing leadership environment around that, just like you do. So I want to move on to that term environment. I hear you use that term a lot. What is environment and leadership? What do those have to do with each other? Well, let's talk about environment.

I think one of the major functions of a great leader is to create an environment where the individuals on the team can collectively succeed better than by themselves and also achieve their personal goals in addition to the team goals. When we first started Remax, my goal was I wanted every single agent to be in the 100% club. I wanted to make $100,000 a year. And in 1973, that was a lot of money. Over the years, I discovered we had agents that make a million dollars a year, and we have agents that make $60,000 a year and are happy. And so I kept thinking, why can't I motivate the $60,000 people to work harder? And the money's there. And I talked with enough of them. And many of them said, you know, 20 years ago, I made more money.

But I'm now in my 60s, and I want to slow down a little bit. I'm very happy making $60,000. I love REMAX. But it's not your right to tell me I should be making $60,000. I love RE-MAX, but it's not your right to tell me I should be making $100,000. If I'm happy in achieving my personal goal and I'm very satisfied, I'm still a team member. I'm still a full-time person. I'm experienced. And so it's up to us to set our own goals, not for you to push us someplace we don't want to be. That's a good point. Well, you mentioned the word motivation too. And you have a good way of teaching the lesson about, I mean, can we as a leader go in and motivate somebody? Because you see people rah, rah, stuff like that all the time, but does that really work?

It's superficial and it really does not work in the long term. For example, if I pull a pistol out and put it up to your head and say, stand up, damn it. If you don't stand up, you're an idiot. But the minute the police take me away, you never have to think about me again. And so what you want to do is create an environment where people who are self-motivated can achieve what they want to achieve. Self-motivated. I like that. Okay.

And I don't want to talk about this, achieve what they want to achieve, because I've noticed something and over the decades that you've mentored and coached and led me and helped develop me, you've always found a way to get people to figure out that they can achieve more than they want to achieve. How do you sprinkle that magic leadership dust on people and get them to realize that, okay, if I'm making $100,000 a year as a real estate agent, well, wait a second,

I can make $200,000 a year as a real estate agent. We put these barriers in our heads, but you seem to find a way to help people get over those. Explain that to me. I wish I could buy people for what they think they're worth and work with them for a while and sell them for what I know they're worth. Because most people aren't that self-confident. And you have to understand, I mean, you have a military background, police background. One of your attributes is personal courage. I have a military background and a little bit of a police background, and that takes courage. But you have to understand, courage comes from experience.

And experience comes from confidence or vice versa and so uh there's an old saying in the military when uh confidence and courage walks out fatigue has set in and that's because tired people underfed people people under stress it's hard to continue to be courageous. It's easy to sit in this room with no problems today and be courageous in our mind. The truth of the matter is, is people just don't have the confidence in themselves. And so if you have somebody that cares for you and really personally cares for you, not for your work result, you pick up on it. There's confidence when somebody else has confidence in you. When somebody else believes in you and pushes you a little bit along the way, it works.

People grow into it. So let me ask you this. You're a big fan of, I guess, for lack of a better term, recognizing people. It's like you're feeding their confidence level with that or their courage level with that. Explain that to me. And I feel it myself. My love language is a compliment. And you can look at me and go, hey, Adam, go do this. I'm like, I don't

know. And then you say something and you're like, I can go do this. I mean, explain that to me as a leader, because that's one of your superpowers is helping people find more that way. Tone at the top. It comes down. I had I had a woman officer, not very good at public speaking yet, and her job was simply to introduce me to about several hundred REMAX agents as if I needed an introduction, but let them take maybe steps before you can run. And she absolutely blew it. And she was just, she was humiliated. She ran off and ran to the women's room and stayed there.

And finally, the speech was over. I said, hey, let's go get a drink. And she says, I'm so embarrassed. And I said, look, you're learning. And what'd you learn today? And she says, I should have been better prepared. I should have had a script or a note card, et cetera. And I said, great. And practice, rehearse it, rehearse it, rehearse it. And then the day came that she was going to be promoted to a regional director several years later. And she had to make a speech that night, a big awards banquet. And I looked at her and I said, I have to tell you something.

All of my officers are so proud of your accomplishments. You're talented. You're charismatic. You're just confidence can be. And this is your day. You've been working on this for years knock it out of the park she smiled stood up got the standing ovation and it was perfect wow so she built her confidence level up over many many many attempts. That's fascinating. You just kind of give them a little bit of a tailwind and get moving with that. You talk about the appreciation aspect and something about Dale Carnegie.

Explain that to us. Dale Carnegie said how to win friends and influence people. That's over 100 years ago, by the way. And he said, there's two things people can't give themselves, personal attention and appreciation. No matter how wealthy you are, you can buy a nice car, but that isn't it. That isn't another human being saying, I appreciate you.

I love you. You're my best friend. Those things are what makes the human psyche saying, I appreciate you. I love you. You're my best friend. Those things are what makes the human psyche say, I'm worthwhile. He believes in me. Huh. So why is that? Why do we lack that so much in leadership? Because you don't see, you know, all leaders want to be stoic and they want to sit in the corner of the room and not be, you know, enthusiastic and interactive and things like that. Why don't we see more of that? Is there a particular reason why leaders don't demonstrate that trait more? Or maybe I'm missing it. I don't know.

I think maybe they don't know it's part of the job. Nobody sat down and said, you're leading. You lead through example, but you also lead by heaping praise on people. Obviously, the usual statement, criticize in private, praise in public. Some people are awkward getting the praise in public, and they just don't feel good about it. 99% of the people love it. Well, and you've shown that. You built Remax around major conventions and award ceremonies. And we have, I mean, just some spectacular, huge stages where people walk across and get their, have their moment and, and receive this award in this date, and I said I'm going to get the next hire one the next year, and the next hire one the next year, and it stair-stepped their success.

It's fascinating what you've done with so many of them. We have the best agents in the world, and it's easy to work with them. Now, they're entrepreneur, they're independent, and they'll tell you their mind. When we first started Remax, I was making all these mistakes. And we had a lot of financial difficulty, and it was very difficult time in our career, I guess. I would sit down with the agents and say, what did you like best about the company you just came here from? What were the best things you liked? And they would tell me, and I'd say, what did you dislike the most? And they would tell me. And then I'd say, what do you like best about working with Remix? And they would voice it. And what do you dislike the most? And they would voice it. And then I

would say, how do you feel about me as a leader? What suggestions would you make to me to be a better leader than what I am now? Because for the first five years in the company's history, I was the youngest employee in the company. And so I was hiring people that were 20 years older than me and selling franchises to people 20 years older than me. And so they had a lot of wisdom. And by golly, if you ask them and you're sincere and you're paying attention, you better have a thick skin because they're going to tell you. But that's how you learn. And then check that box off okay i'm not gonna make that mistake again like failing to take notes and having an action plan interesting i want to talk about something you just said here you were the youngest in the company yet you were the leader of the company

it traditionally in society it's always been the elder that has been a leader in an organization or somebody who you know just because they've been there for a long time, kind of climbs the ladder that way. But that's not the case anymore. I mean, there, you know, you see a lot of boomers, Gen X, whatever, that are led by millennials or even Gen Z are coming into some leadership positions on occasion here. So, I mean, what are your thoughts on being a leader versus just having the job thinking you're a leader or, you know, is it dependent upon age and what are the variables in that? You know, experience certainly plays a part in building your confidence and experience will teach you the do's and don'ts. In my case, I had had three years experience

selling real estate and I was very good at it. And so my feeling was as the leader of the company, my job was to recruit, retain, and train. And I did not have a college background to speak of. And when I hired my first employee, Gail Main, 10 years later, we'd become romantically involved. But at first, she had a marketing and a management degree. And I said, let's divide the work here. I want you to hire and fire the secretary's bookkeepers. I want you to find and fire the secretaries, bookkeepers. I want you to find your office space, buy the furniture, set up the systems, the telephones, the answering services, whatever it is. And so you're in charge of administration and managing what we've built. I would do the three things of recruiting, retaining, and training.

And that's what my skill level was. Well, obviously, in a 49-year period of time, I had to become a manager and not just those three positions. Awesome. Moving from leading in the position to leading an organization, you have an interesting perspective on, and I hear this question a lot, and maybe you can shed some light on how to look at this, but I've heard a lot of people say, we're a family or we're a team. Is this a binary situation where you're one or the other? Give mean, give me your perspective on family versus team here. One of our biggest competitors does an annual family reunion. They call everybody part of the family. And if you make one sale in 12 months, that's good. You're part of the family

and we're proud of you. It's sort of a, an uncle around the Christmas table. He has a little bit too much to drink. He tells a couple of off color stories that shouldn't have been told in front of the children. But everybody says, well, you know, that's, we're family and that's, that's what we have. A team on the other hand, especially if you look at a, let's say a sports team. The team depends on the leader. And if it's football, generally the leader of one of the most important leaders will be your quarterback. And if you've got a great quarterback and he's got a good arm and he can make the plays, everybody's winning and everybody's happy. What people don't understand, when they hear the salaries of some of these football players,

they say, oh my God, he's making $3 million a year. No, he makes a base and he can get up to $3 million depending on number of throws, interceptions, catches, fumbles, yards gained, or whatever it might be in their contract.

If the quarterback ages, and they all do, they start to miss a step. They can't throw as far. They start letting the team down. When you're letting the quarterback ages, and they all do, they start to miss a step. They can't throw as far. They start letting the team down. When you're letting the team down, that means they don't make their bonus money. It means they don't have a winning spirit. It means the camaraderie starts to go bad.

And so it's the hard thing for the owner to do, but you have to replace an old, tiring quarterback. And so that's the game. That's being a team. You can have team accomplishments with family values. So for instance, if one of the player's wife comes down with breast cancer, all the other player's wives are into it and they're trying to help and they're going to do some cooking and they're going to help with the driving and all that stuff because the husband's off playing a game someplace. And so those are family values. Most people have them. But with a team, it's up to the leader. You have to lead the team with strength. So team performance with family values.

Correct. I like that. I haven't heard that before today. I mean, it's really a cool way of looking at it because, you know, we're a values-led organization, a REMAX, yet we have super high-performing agents. So just the perspective, team performance, family values. Thank you for sharing that. All right, we're going to pause the conversation right there. This has just been amazing.

It's been gold, but we've to pause the conversation right there. This has just been amazing. It's been gold. But we've reached the end of our episode. So make sure that you subscribe so you get notified next week when part two comes out of our interview with Dave Linegar. We'll see you next time.