Start With A Win - Interview With Verl Workman

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Verl Workman stopped by the RE/MAX World Headquarters while he was in Denver for the National Speakers Association conference to talk with Adam on this episode of the Start with a Win podcast. One of seven children, Verl learned at an early age the importance of hard work and determination in earning every single thing. Since that time, he has lived with a mindset of abundance, not entertaining any limiting beliefs, and he has committed his life to helping others learn to do the same. When his business was rocked by innovation early in his career, he found himself in real estate school in an attempt to successfully relaunch himself as an entrepreneur. He found that he really loved the sales process, but he realized that real estate agents often put too much stock in their own identity within their business and they overextend themselves. Verl developed a system that shows agencies and brokerages how to set up a team structure with skilled people helping the client each step of the way and then bringing the agent in at the very end for the most important aspects of the transaction. However, rather than focusing on the transaction, Verl likes to focus on the transformation that can occur through this type of business and people development. Verl is a big advocate of the concept of leverage which encourages people to move toward problems and do more with less. A great way to work towards leverage is to have coaches around you who are outside of your work space and can give you objective feedback. It has been said that people give 25% of their capacity during the course of daily life, and it is the role of the coach to bring out the other 75%.Links:Workman Success Systems: https://workmansuccess.com/ “Who Moved by Cheese”: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-My-Cheese-Mazing-ebook/dp/B004CR6AM4 “Scaling Up”: https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Up-Companies-Rockefeller-Habits/dp/0986019526 “One Minute Entrepreneur”: https://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Entrepreneur-Sustaining-Successful/dp/0385526024 “Greatest Salesman in the World”: https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Salesman-World-Og-Mandino/dp/055327757X “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Fable/dp/0787960756 Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

And live from the 12th floor of Remax World Headquarters, Adam Contos here, CEO of Remax. Start with a win. Welcome to the podcast, everybody. Mark, how are you? I am doing awesome. Producer Mark, you redid our studio last night. Yeah, I did. We got a new video set up here. If you haven't had an opportunity to get online and check us out, hop onto Facebook hop onto Facebook or you can go to startwithwin.com and the live stream is there as well. So, you know, we'll probably start posting more frequently when those will be up, but you can always go onto YouTube or even go to our

Facebook page and watch the show from there as well. So. Right on. Hey, we've got some pretty cool things to go through today, don't we? Yeah, we have a lot of cool things. But first, before we go through those cool things or talk with a cool person, I want to thank everybody. We've been getting a lot of great reviews online. People have been going to iTunes and subscribing to the show and giving a five-star rating and leaving really nice comments. Sounds like a call to action for everybody listening today. Yeah, I think if you haven't gone online and you haven't given us a five-star review and commented on the podcast,

you should probably go do that. And I think we're still taking Twitter names and Instagram handles. So if you put that in there, you maybe you might get something special. Whoa. Yeah. And I think Kayla's over there giving us as many reviews as she possibly can in this hour, right? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Just one. That's right. Hey, so tell our audience who we're going to be talking to. So we have from Workman Success Systems, we have

Verl Workman from Salt Lake City on the show today. I hear he is an amazing coach. I have known Verl for many, many, many years. And I mean, the guy is just, is awesome. It's a little awkward the way I'm talking about him because he's right here looking at me. But I tell you, he's a great friend, great friend of our industry, great friend of people looking to better themselves, both personally and in their business. So let's kick the show off, Mark. All right. Sounds good. Here we go. Atop of the 12th floor of the Remax World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos.

And top of the 12th floor, Remax World Headquarters. Adam Contos, CEO of Remax here with producer Mark. We've been talking a little bit, haven't we? Yeah, we have. We were doing the chat, the pre-show chat. Pre-show chatty. Yeah, that's right. So with us here in the studio today from Salt Lake City, Verl Workman. How are you, Verl? I'm doing great. Good morning. Awesome. Good morning. So Verl, you just flew in and gosh darn, your arms are tired, right?

That's right. Where'd you come from? Salt Lake City. Actually, I was in Denver for the last three or four days. What are we doing here? So there's a big National Speakers Association convention where all the speakers get together and they share best practices and how do you elevate your game and get better at it. Is it hard to get a word in edgewise?

You know, there's a lot of, it really is. You ask anybody any question, it's like, so what do you speak about? And it's a 45-minute conversation. So no elevator speech? It's like, let's go talk. Yeah. It's a deep dive. Everyone wants to give you a deep dive, but it's awesome. There's just amazing people there. And that organization is incredible because it brings out the best in so many people because it takes so much to get up on stage and be able to perform and deliver content, message, value at that level, and be judged on it. You're not just being listened to, but they're actually judging you when you're talking, aren't they?

Absolutely. Even though I think that it's like speaking at church. I'd rather be in front of 5,000 people that I don't know than talking to the few people that are in your neighborhood. When your peers are there, it's a very different level of pressure. And so you have all these great speakers that have all these accolades and written all these amazing books that are standing up talking, and then you're next and you're sharing your thoughts or topic or whatever you want to talk about. It's pretty, it's, it's an intimidating audience, amazing people though. Wow. That's incredible. And really what it's about is delivering a message that really absorbs into people's hearts and minds, right? It really is. And everybody has a story. And I think that the

unique thing about that is that it doesn't matter where you come from or who you are. Everybody has challenges. Everybody fights through adversity. And everybody has a way to communicate their victories. And the speakers have a way of doing it in a way that is engaging and helps other people learn from their mistakes or their challenges. Speaking of stories, let's dig into your story.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. So just to give you a little bit of background. So I came from the satellite dish hot tub sales industry. I was selling satellite dishes and hot tubs when the book, Who Moved My Cheese came out. You remember that? Yeah. And I wasn't paying attention to my cheese and they were selling these big 10 foot satellite dishes. And all of a sudden they changed and started selling 18 inch dishes. And my margins went from $1,000 a sale to $68 that was paid out to me over 12 months on programming. And I remember thinking that my nut to crack was about 70 grand a month in retail, and it was physically impossible for me to make up the difference.

Wow. And so during that time, it was probably the lowest time of my life as I was trying to figure out. I was 28 years old, and I'd been in business for eight years. I was a young entrepreneur and I couldn't figure it out. I didn't know what to do with it. So we ended up closing our stores and during my going out of business sale, I met a guy that bought seven $10,000 home theaters from me for one of each of his married kids.

And he ended up being a production home builder. And as we developed a relationship after that, it just, you know, one thing turned to another and he invited me to come out and sell houses. And I was like, I don't want to be a realtor. I don't have big hair or a big car. So how am I going to do that? And he said, well, what's it going to take? And so he ended up putting me through real estate school. I went out, sold houses and the rest is kind of history. I had very early on success. I came from a background of, I love sales to coming into

real estate where there wasn't a lot of sales training. They taught you how to not get sued in school. I remember thinking when I went to real estate school, my wife, my wife's little sister moved in with us at the same time and she started hair school the same time I started real estate school. So 10 days later, I had my license. A year and a half later, 2000 hours, she graduated and she could cut my hair. Oh, wow. Think about the difference in what we do and the responsibility we have as realtors and the such little amount of training that really goes into our licensing process. So I was out selling the house. I didn't know what I was doing, but we had a lot of early on success. So that's kind of how I started in the business. Wow. So you didn't have big hair, big car. So what made the difference for you?

So I think I was hungry, first of all. I mean, I went from making what I thought was a lot of money at the time to making nothing and going on straight commission and going sitting in a model home trying to sell a house. So I was hungry. And I was hungry. I think hungry is a big, important factor, a motivator for people. You've got to need it. And then the second thing was, is that I believed if somebody got out of their car and came into the model home that they probably wanted a house, and so I just decided I'd ask everybody, and so you like the house, you like the color, you want to get it, and they'd say yes, and I'd say okay. I remember my first day I sold a house in my first quarter. I think it was 37 homes in the

first quarter in real estate within six months. I was a sales manager, and I was training their other salespeople how to do it. I just believed that there was a process for sales, and if you take people through it, it worked. Let's unpack this just a little bit more, because you didn't have any limiting beliefs in what you're doing here. You just described a mindset of abundance, of everyone's an opportunity to make a sale, instead of, geez, I wonder if these people would be interested. Right. Take us through a little bit of where did that come from? Because a lot of people look at what the obstacles are in achieving something versus what is the opportunity in full success look like here? I think it comes from very early on in my life. You know, at 11 years old, like I

grew up in a family in Salt Lake City and my dad was a high school history teacher and a former Marine. I learned as a kid, there's no such thing as an ex-Marine. That's right. So a former Marine, he was tough as nails. But when I was 11, he was disabled. He had a brain aneurysm. And so my mom with seven kids raised us and we didn't have any money. He was a school teacher to begin with and then no longer had that income. And so I just learned to scrap.

I learned that if I wanted anything, I had to get up and go get it. So whether it was delivering newspapers or flipping pizzas or selling candy out of my wagon, I just, if I wanted anything, I knew that it wasn't going to be given to me. And so we had to go get it. So I think the mentality comes from believing that if you want something and you really feel like it's important to you, that you'll do what it takes to get it. And that for me, that was just work. So you just, I learned how to work early on and, and I still do. I just, I love the game of work. I love that. So it's, it's, it's not the result. It's the, it's the process or it's the chase, not the catch. So you, you love the continuous aspect of I'm going after it. I'm going after it. I'm going after it. It's what gets me up in the morning. It's how I start my day with a win. I mean, it's really what,

what drives me is I love the game. So you worked that, learning about sales success, really the human interaction and what causes somebody to end up conducting a transaction, if you will, with somebody else. And then you developed a company called Workman Success Systems. Tell us about that. Yeah. So Workman Success System was born out of, after 15 years in this industry, helping agents with technology and incorporate technology, we decided to start a new company. And my daughter, Breanne, and I, which is really cool, I get to work with three of my married children in my business, she and I sat down and we kind of mapped out where we believed the industry was going from the view

of brokers and agents. And we realized that good agents got busier and busier because they were good at it, but they did it at the expense of their relationships, their family, their friends, their fun, their fitness. And so they made good money financially, but the other parts of their life suffered and that they needed to create some leverage. And so we decided to create a coaching program that was specifically focused on helping people create leverage in their business and in their life. And there is pushback on that, but it really comes down to teams. You know, people that are the most successful don't do anything by themselves. If you look at this room, you have this great team in here. You've got somebody doing Facebook live. You've

got somebody else producing it. We've got people that are involved in every aspect of it. And without the team, it's very difficult to be successful. And yet so many realtors believe that it's all about them. And so our mission is to change the perception is that the real estate agent is not the important person in the transaction, the client is. And if you provide a really high level of support at every part of the transaction, the client has a better experience and you have a better life because you've created expertise in each area of the transaction. So that was the brainchild for Workman's success system is how do we help people really do teams right? So you just, I mean, you basically just wrote a book. This is like a success masterclass here

in a couple minutes. It was amazing. I got a couple things out of this that really touched me. One of which is you pierced the ego here. You didn't talk about an ego at all. And so many people in independent business have an ego of, I can do it myself. Don't tell me how to do it. I don't need help, things like that. It seems like that was the first step. And you don't have that about you. Your ego is not blocking any relationships or any forward progress in your life. How do you see that slow people down in this business? Because it seems like you got through that really quickly. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think it's experience. It's understanding that, you know, I had just a personal experience.

I had back surgery back in December and I wanted to get the best doctor in the country to do my, I wanted Tiger Woods doctor. You know, if I'm going to back December and I wanted to get the best doctor in the country to do my back. I wanted Tiger Woods doctor. You know, if I'm going to back surgery, I want that guy. Well, you can't get into him, right? And so I call my relationships and I try and figure out how to get into this guy. And I got the wife of the doctor on the phone and she got me in to see him. Well, I go down there to see him and I meet with the nurse and the physician's assistant and I never get to meet with the doctor ever.

And so I said, when do I get to talk to the doctor? And the PA says, oh, right before you go into surgery. And I thought about that for a second. And then right before I go counting backwards from a hundred, the anesthesiologist says, hang on, the doctor wants to say hello. And I go 99, 98 and I'm out. And, you know, I had a great, you know, having backstreet is no fun, but you think about that. I wanted the best surgeon and a real estate agent is like that

surgeon, right? And, but we think we have to do all the marketing. We have to put our signs in. We have to make all our prospecting calls. We have to do all the transaction processing, but the reality is where we need the agent is, isn't that very most important part of the transaction. And that's the negotiation. And that's the making sure that this thing closes and building that relationship with the client. So that for me kind of changed the whole ego piece of it in the real estate world is understanding that it's not about you. It's about making sure you give the best part of the surgery where I need that surgeon. With real estate agents, I hear two things, Adam, and you maybe hear this when you go on the road as well. Everybody says that, well, these clients, they love me and they really want me. And the second thing I always hear

is, but our market is different. Yeah, I hear both of those. And I want to continue to unpack this because this is gold. I mean, for people listening right now, people watching, what Verl's talking about here is really one of the biggest, I don't want to say flaws of human nature, but it kind of is, is you're trying to be all things to all people. And the whole jack of all trades, master of none philosophy, because what we're seeing with the complexity of business, long before technology, things like that, business was probably a handful of things that you had to execute on. Now there are dozens between all the digital marketing, the social marketing, videos, virtual tours, 3D, all this crazy stuff going on. Oh, I'm a real estate agent. I just got a drone. All right, stop. Things like that. So what you have to do is take a step back and say, what am I absolutely

the very, very, very best at? And the whole concept of, but the people love me. I think the people love the fact that you're there helping them and overseeing the process, but I think you're right. They don't want you to do everything. Is that safe to say? Oh, absolutely. They actually don't really think about you as an agent. They think about themselves. They think about their family, the schools their kids are going to go to. They care about them. And so if you can give them what they need, how it's delivered doesn't matter to them because they got what they needed. I love that. It's not about you. I love that. And as soon as you can take yourself out of the transaction and you become the CEO of your real estate company, all of a sudden, it allows you to live life completely different. It's amazing to see the transformation in people's

lives when they get it. Yeah. It's that concept of, you know, what are the three most important things to every human being? Me, myself, and I. Right. And it's not, you know, the person standing across from them. It's the person that's in their skin and in their heart and in their mind. And, you know, when you start wrapping a family into it, that me, myself, and I includes my family. That's a great way of looking at that. And we see that not just in an individual agent,

in a team. That's one of the, I think one of the hardest parts for a top producing agent to go to is to become that team leader and disconnect. Because they almost have to kind of disconnect with being the top producing agent overnight and be the facilitator of the production of that team. Is that safe to say? Absolutely. Their role goes from being transactional to their, I like to say the team leader's job is to do? Absolutely. Their role goes from being transactional to their, I like to say the team leader's job is to do two things. It's business development and people development. And so their focus is on creating other people that do it like they do it, that helped them create that top producer status. So their business development, making it rain,

and then really pouring and developing into their people so their people can get, create amazing client experiences. And that's how the teams grow. So they're going, we'll coin a term here. They're going from transactional to transformational. That's beautiful. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to totally use that.

All right, all right. Hashtag transactional to transformational. That's the same thing I see in offices as well, in brokerages. Totally. Because brokerages, really a team and a brokerage are relatively similar when it comes to somebody who has to take a step back and guide these processes, be transformational, recruit great

talent, and develop that talent, and get these people to perform better than they ever thought they could be. Is that right? Yeah. And brokers run so many challenges because many of them are in production. So they're doing real estate. And they're being a CEO of a business. They're trying to recruit, retain their agents, and help them develop.

And they don't do any of it well because they put so much pressure on themselves. But when they understand that they can build teams for the brokerage side and they can build teams for their real estate side, it allows them to create true leverage. And leverage is when you see problems and you move towards those problems and it creates a kind of a fulcrum point that allows you to do more with less. I love that word, leverage. That's the key. Yeah, that's... Leverage wins, doesn't it? It totally does.

That's awesome. What's one piece of advice you would tell agents and brokers? Just when you meet them, they walk you through kind of the generalities of, here's what I do. Obviously, they talk about, I do this many deals, which we get this mindset of limitation a lot of times by people going, all right, I do this much a year. OK, you just put a lid on your business by saying that instead of, here's my opportunity, I'm going and growing my business beyond whatever. What's one piece of advice you would tell to agents or brokers? So it doesn't matter where you are or what level

of business you are. I think that everybody needs coaches in their lives. Whether it's me as a coach or whether it's a fitness coach or whether it's a nutritional coach, we need coaches. So who are the people that are looking at you that don't have an agenda that just want to help you grow? And to me, that's what coaching is. It's like, I don't have any skin in the game. I just want to help you just knock it out of the park. And I see things differently because I'm not in the game. And so I would say that find someone who resonates with you, that is aligned with your core values and get involved with them. Get them and hire them and have them coach you because that will help you bust through barriers and remove a lot of those limiting beliefs that people have. So everybody's next level, they can't see it clearly, but we can.

That's right. I always look at endorsement for coaching here. I'm a firm believer in coaching. I actually coach a couple of guys not in our space. I have coaches myself. I've had coaches for years. And I look at a coach as somebody who doesn't cost you money. A coach makes you money. Oh, absolutely. It's probably one of the best investments you can make in your business, if not the best. So it forces growth, it forces development, it forces you to get to this point where you're giving that other 75%. Because we all know that most people give 25% of their full capacity. That's just a reality. Everybody listening to this, here's the hard truth of human nature, people give 25% of their capacity. And it's up to the coach to squeeze that other 75% out and show them how to continuously

repetitively increase that other 75% to fill the bucket fuller and fuller and get a bigger bucket and continue to fill it. So true. So true. What are some of the biggest challenges that you faced in your growth of your business? Well, that's a great question. So some of the biggest challenges are being willing to let go of things. It's when you're good at something and you know you can just handle it. And I don't know how many times you've had this self-talk is it's just easier to do it myself. It is let somebody else do it all the time. But if you don't let it go and you don't teach someone to do it, then you can't have any kind of growth or scale in your business. So that's one of the

big ones. Another one is the not knowing is the fear of the unknown, you know, and limiting beliefs. I used to think that if I made more than my dad as a teacher, that that would be a good living. And so if I made $50,000 a year, my limiting belief was that was success. We meet so many people who just, they want to, they want to be platinum. You know, if I want, if I can just get to $250,000, but when we take him to where they're making two or $3 million a year, it completely changes what they believe is possible. So breaking through limiting beliefs is a big one. It's our beliefs are based on our experiences that we've had in life up to this point. And so we have to try and create new experiences or put ourselves in rooms where we're not the biggest producer so that we can, we can realize what's possible. That's part of why I

love going to this NSA meeting is because I'm in a room, I mean, John Maxwell spoke. We had Vern Harnish was one of the speakers that did Scaling Up, which you and I both have read. Great book. I went to the baseball game last night with Don Hudson, one of the legends of professional speaking, who wrote The One Minute Entrepreneur and The One Minute Negotiator. And just sitting and talking to people who changed my belief in what's possible. I sat with a guy yesterday at lunch that said, you know, I don't understand why you charge what you charge to speak because you're a $30,000 keynoter. And like in my mindset, it doesn't exist. But when he sat down and broke down the things that, that he said would make a difference for me, I thought, you know what, that's what I

need is I need someone who believes more in me than I believe in myself. So those have been some of my challenges. It's just the beliefs based on my experiences on what's possible. It's incredible. There's a magnetism in society and we put ourselves somewhere and we magnetize ourselves to that set point. You go find those people that are above and beyond where you're at and they start drawing you towards them. It's the whole power of association that Jim Rohn talks about. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Are you spending time with the five people that you used to be? And they're keeping you what you used to be. I love that. Or do you go spend time with five people that are what you want to be? Right.

And that is completely agree with you. And it's uncomfortable. It is. It's scary. I mean, gosh, I got to go work out with four-time Mr. Universe last week and I was scared to death. And I'm like, hey, I know my way around the gym, but you go in there with this guy and you're like, oh my gosh, it's incredible. It's like going out and playing golf with a professional golfer and you just, you feel like you're this big. So how was that workout with Mr. Universe? What was the big takeaway from that? Oh my God. It was, it was, I can do so much better than I do. It's, you know, it's always another level, isn't there? There are way more

levels that you just, you haven't even begun to see. So why limit yourself? Why stop there? Verl, we've got a couple of questions that we kind of wrap these things up with that I would love to ask you here. First of all, do you have a favorite book? I have a couple. Okay. One of my favorite books is Ogmandino's Greatest Salesman in the World. Oh, yeah. And it's woven in all of our training and all of our coaching and everything we do.

I love the 10 scrolls that he teaches. I have on a thing behind my desk when I'm on video or doing any kind of a coaching call, you can see the 10 scrolls behind me. Cool. So I love Ogmandino. The other one that I refer to all the time is Patrick Lencioni's book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And so our goal is, because we do so much of team building, is to help people eliminate those dysfunctions. So we start

knowing what they are, and then we put systems process and training in place to eliminate those dysfunctions through the process. So those are my two go-tos. They're on my desk all the time. I give them out constantly. Great books. Great books. How about a favorite quote? Favorite quote from my dad, who I'm sure was quoting somebody else, said that that which you persist in doing becomes easier to do. Not that the nature of the thing has changed, but your power to do has increased.

And from just a young boy, before my dad got sick, I remember him giving me that because I wanted to quit baseball. And he's like, son, I'm not going to have a quitter as a son. If you can imagine my former Marine father raising his one eyebrow and poking his finger in my chest because I was batting last and I was new and I just got on the team. I was like, I hate baseball. He's like, we'll go out in the backyard and I'll throw pitches to you and we'll catch, but we don't quit. Quitting is not an option. So I learned that if you persist in something, that your ability to do it gets better. And so if it challenges you, just keep working at it and keep chipping away at it until it becomes your strength instead of your weakness.

I love that quote. Earl, thank you so much for being with us here today. In closing, do you have one final tip that you'd like to give our listeners? Don't let your limiting beliefs hold you back. I think that look for someone who believes more in you than you believe in yourself. Surround yourself with amazing people and just go for it because there's so much opportunity out there. I love it.

I love it. Verl, thank you so much. I know our audience got a lot out of this. Where can people follow you and find more about what you do? Yeah, workmansuccesssystems.com is the best place to find out all about what we do and how we help people. And we'd love to hear you do. Yeah. Workman success systems.com is the best place to find all about what we do and how we help people. And we'd love to hear from you. Awesome.

Thank you so much. And thanks for joining us on start with a win. Thanks for having me. I wanted to give our listeners who stood past the music a little treat. Oh, yeah. It's that secret time. This is a secret bonus time. That's right.

You're at the gym or washing dishes or driving in your car and you haven't switched the track yet. You have a good quote for us? You got something? I know you always have something on your phone or something like that. Yeah. I loved what Verl talked about today. He talked about persistency, things like that. One of my favorite quotes of all time that I keep going back to is the Aristotle quote, Yeah, I loved what Verl talked about today. He talked about persistency, things like that.

One of my favorite quotes of all time that I keep going back to is the Aristotle quote, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. Nice. I love that. I love that too. All right, guys, thanks so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next week.

See you, everybody.