Start With A Win - Ways to Improve Any Business with Tom Ferry

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

Settle in for this episode of Start With A Win and get ready to drink from the fire hose of Tom Ferry’s insights on real estate, reaching goals, and overcoming fear. Tom’s leadership experience started when he was six years old and his parents divorced. At that moment, he knew he needed to step up and lead in the best way he could. This mindset continued throughout elementary, middle, and high school where he was continually leading his peers into adventures, mischief, and revelry. When he was about 18, he started to steer his focus in a more productive direction, being mentored by the writings of business leaders and coaches who helped him realize that challenges lead to opportunities that lead to experiences.Instead of going to college, he chose to focus on his personal and professional development, joining his father’s company and delving into the new world of performance measurement and management. They realized that measuring performance and then sharing about that performance exponentially increased the likelihood of success and goal achievement, so they started focusing their efforts on this concept. In conjunction with performance measurement and accountability, Tom talks about the ways to attract more clients, increase your average sales price or commission, expand your business, and bring a new product or service to the market that solves a problem. One practical recommendation that he has for real estate agents today is to over-service your clients. This might look like having three assistants that handle different parts of the transaction with clients so you can focus on relationships and making the experience better for your clients. Links:“The Slight Edge” book: https://www.amazon.com/Slight-Edge-Turning-Disciplines-Happiness/dp/1626340463Connect with Tom:https://www.tomferry.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/coach-tom-ferry/id1076436648 Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. And top of the 12th floor, REMAax World Headquarters here in Denver, Colorado. Adam Kanto, CEO of Remax. Let's start with the win in studio today. Producer Mark, how are you doing? Producer Mark in the house. I am so good. Thank you, Adam. I love it. You're kind of hiding over there behind all this electronics. I know. You know, I'm the master of the ceremonies here, so. DJ Mark. We have a very special guest, longtime friend, amazing person in our industry, and really

somebody who contributes so much to the success of so many. We have founder and CEO of Ferry International, great friend of ours, Tom Ferry. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing great, Adam. Good to see you, man. Thanks for having me on the show. Hey, nice to see you. You had a really cool coffee cup or teacup or something in your hand here a second ago.

What is it? Wake up, kick ass, repeat. I love that. Come on, man. It's all about the swag. It's all about keeping it real. All in. All in. Disruptors, take that. I'm coming off. That's right. I got some good stuff in my head and my heart and there's nobody going to stop me. Isn't that right? Exactly, man. That's what it's all about. So Tom, let me go through a couple of things here. I'm going to sing a few accolades of yours. You're a very humble human being, but you've done so much. I'm honored to know this guy. I've known Tom for well over a decade. And Tom is the number one ranked real estate educator by Swanepoel Power 200, bestselling author, life by design and mindset model and

marketing. He's got his own podcast, Tom Ferry Show. He's had over 30,000 hours of coaching experience helping people be better and personally himself gaining so much insight into this. Tom, it's so cool. You're a highly sought after, renowned, big stage speaker and educator. First of all, thank you for being on Start With A Win today. We're honored to have you here, but also thanks for being my friend. Yeah, man. I mean, I was thinking more about times when we broken bread or hung out or worked out in the gym in the morning at somebody else's conference where we just seem to connect. So thank you, man. And I want to say like, it goes without saying, dude, I've watched you just go from, you know, Hey, I'm going to come in. I'm going to work a region to now, you know, being CEO of this huge empire.

And I just want to say to you, congratulations, dude, it's been, it's been quite a journey and I know you're nowhere near being done, uh, but you're on fire brother and congrats on this podcast and just getting the word out. I think it's so important for us and everyone that's watching needs to be thinking the same thing How are you scaling trust? Right adam is in trust by getting you know His his voice his face into your ears into your minds every single day Looking to do like jeff olsen said in the book the slight edge, you know Do that one little thing every day that by

doing it doesn't change your life. But by doing it every single day over and over and over again for years makes you an extraordinary human being. So God bless you, bro. Thanks, my brother. This is kind of a big hug it out session here on the podcast. Every time we get together, we just have so much fun. And you're right. I mean, walking down the street and going, hey, that's Tom sitting over on the patio of that restaurant. Hey, come here, man. Sit down and have a drink or whatever. I love you for it. It's so cool. And I love your story too. I want to rewind here a little bit in Tom Ferry's life because there's so much that built you into being the amazing human that you are. And I want to share a little bit of that with our audience because so many people know who Tom, I mean, tens of millions know who Tom Ferry is, but let's go back to your childhood and help

us understand how did you get to where you're at? Tell us the story of Tom. Wow. Okay. So first of all, I took the trash out this morning and I got my wife a coffee. Right on. Real human right there. He would remind everybody like, don't say too many of those things. It might go to his head. I was asked recently in a podcast, when did I first realize that I would be a leader or a CEO? And it was when my dad called my mom and said, hey, we're getting a divorce. And I was six years old.

And my mom basically turned to me and she said, your dad's leaving us. And I said, how can I help? Wow. I remember the day as clear as looking at my iPhone or your screen. I knew that day that I needed to step up. I needed to do more. I needed to be of service. And I didn't have mentors back then.

I was six, right? So I made every mistake along the way. And I called my mom once a week and just apologized because I had a mohawk and purple hair. And I was kicked out of four high schools. I was leading at them. I was just leading people down the wrong path, right and I was kicked out of four high schools. I was leading Adam. I was just leading people down the wrong path. I was like, let's go. Hey, Adam Contos has a giant liquor deal at his house. Let's go to his house and throw a party. I was doing that as a teenager. And then I woke up around probably 18, got exposed to people like Brian Tracy,

Mike Vance, who became a dear friend and mentor before he passed, Gunther Klaus, Earl Nightingale, my dad, so many extraordinary people. And all of that, over a decade, completely changes your life. So it's been a fun ride and a fun journey. And I have zero regrets. I'll tell you that. I always get asked that question. I have no regrets because if I would have done anything different, I wouldn't be here on this podcast with you. Amen, my friend. The challenge that creates the opportunities, that creates the experiences, that creates

the reflection and things of that nature. I mean, we're all humans, right? We all face these same challenges. They're just a little bit different flavor, a little different perspective. Some may be bigger than others, but ultimately, we're humans. Those are challenges. There's nothing that we haven't been through that killed us yet, right? For sure. For sure. And I will tell you, you run a big business. I run certainly a smaller business in scope and size, but we both are blessed with having great teams. The reality is business is hard, right? But here's the thing. It's also super rewarding. I don't know anything in life

that isn't real. It's hard to be in a great relationship. It's also hard to be in a bad relationship. Everything is hard. So I just tell people, choose your heart. That's right. It's hard to be out of shape and laying on the couch, and it's hard to be in the gym. It's hard to be looking in the mirror and crying because you're lacking the fortitude to get through a challenge and it's hard to go attack that challenge. But you're right. And I hadn't thought of it that way, but choose your heart. I love that, man. All right, we're done. Key takeaways. Okay. See you, Tom. No. That's ultimately and functionally the biggest thing that an entrepreneur faces, right? It's choice management and it's overcoming the beast of fear to attack

something. So how did you realize that? What caused you to go, I want to go help people overcome this beast of burden that we all carry on our shoulders known as fear and overwhelm? What caused that? I think it was not going to college and spending my time instead on personal professional development. And then when I joined my dad's company, it was like doing two and a half million dollars a year in revenue. It was a speak anywhere that someone would hire you and sell books and tapes in the back of the room. And in 1991, when we basically sort of fell into, is one way to describe it, discovered, might be a better way in his legacy, that the recognition of when you measure performance, performance improves. And when you measure performance and you share your results with someone else, the rate of improvement accelerates, like Pearson's law.

Discovering that and falling into this world of coaching back in 1991, I knew then. We do a lot of seminars. We do a lot of events. There's something to that immersion training of a three- or four-day marketing edge or sales edge or operations edge or summit or whatever it may be, like any, whatever flavor you go to, there's something to that. And yet when the seminar ends, what I knew early on was if someone didn't call and say, so Adam, what, how much, by when, and what's the consequences if you don't, what's the unintended consequences if you do, if someone didn't walk you through that process and hold you accountable, most people just get their standards. They don't get their ambitions. The way you go from, I always make $100,000 a year, but my ambition is $500,000, you need leverage. You need accountability. You need a mentor, a mastermind, a coach,

whatever you want to call it. Someone that's going to hold you accountable because, again, whatever you measure improves. Whatever you measure and then report back to somebody else, the rate of improvement always accelerates. Weight loss, weight gain, not drinking anymore, selling more houses, it's all the same. It seems like we draw this line in our lives, this imaginary line. And on this side of it, let's call the line accountability, right? And this side of it, we have comfort. The other side of it, we have discomfort. Is that really the difference? You know, I mean, I like, I mean, I appreciate that perspective. And obviously I give, I give this a lot of thought and, and I, you know, ponder it and discuss it with a lot of people. Let me dig deeper then. How do we find the processes to get us across that line? Because everybody wants to cross that line. And that's what your business does, is you help people across that line. And once they get past that line, they look back, they're like, I'm okay being

over here. And I'm going that way because that's where it even greater is. What do you give them as a coach to push ahead? So I think the first thing is the recognition that any business can be improved by doing six different things. So one is, do you need to attract more clients? So where a lot of my contemporaries went down this road of this myopic, only do it this way and everything else is bad. When I was coaching 16 of the top 100 agents in the world on Steve Murray's original list of the top 100 before it became the Wall Street Journal and everything else, when I was coaching those 16 people, several of them REMAX agents, none of them, Adam, did one thing. They all did six, seven, eight things, right? And they did each one of them as well as they could based upon their market in terms of lead generation. And that's why they were sustainable. And that's

why they grew the way they did, right? This myopic thinking that is, I think, in many cases, hurt our industry of only do one, like only do open houses, only work your referrals, only go online, only do this. To me, it's just stupid, right? So number one, to grow any business is attracting more clients. Number two is, how do I increase my average sales price or increase my average commission? So either, can you sell more expensive homes or can you stop discounting and learn what to say to negotiate better to get a little bit more? That's another way you grow a business. Then you start getting the more advanced stuff where you say, how can I get each of my clients

to do more transactions with me? How can I increase the frequency of whether it's referrals and or spreading the word, if you will? Then should I... Right now, okay. I think one of the hottest things going for smart agents, all these teams, Adam, that you and I both work with, and we want to hire brand new agents. The failure rate is tremendous. I'm telling them all, look at the median age of the real estate professionals in your town. Give me a couple 60, 65, 70 that are phenomenal with clients, that are phenomenal at negotiations. But what they lack is the automation, the organization, the process to run a business. Fold them into your team.

Work their database with them more effectively. Let them go sell 16, 18 homes a year where they used to do five or six because they didn't market effectively. They didn't do all the things that we know you got to do in business. I think that's going to be the next great revolution of teams. They're not going to hire as many new agents. They're going to hire all these rockstar six to seven transaction a year agents that could do double that if they had a partner who understood how to build a business. Then it's expanding territories, adding new products and services, which look what you guys have done with Moto Mortgage. That's a typical strategy of growth. Add a new product

or service, go after a new market. When Dave Leninger said, hey, maybe we should sell Michael Posler or the Posler family and the Schneider family. Let's sell them in Europe. It's the same concept. Business is easy. What happens is, in our industry, most people don't really study business. They study each other. I'm not going to say that's a total mistake, but you got to be very careful with like, Hey, I'm going to go follow, you know, such and such, because she does a lot. Do you ask, does she have a net? Like what's her profit? Do you ask her if she has any time off you with me? Like, did she fall into this or was it strategic? You know what I mean? Like we're not slowing down enough to ask. And I think that's

what a great coach does slows down and says, what the heck are you thinking? I love that. You with me? I know it was a the heck are you thinking? I love that. You with me? I know it was a long answer. I apologize. Oh, I love that. Great coach does. I mean, you're, you're absolutely right because we judge based upon one result that we all see. And we just jumped to this conclusion. We're like, Oh, okay. They must be really good because they did this many or that much. And they're, they're hurting inside. They're stretched so thin that they're about to break. And I love this because you get the rest of it good and they can scale. Yeah. I know you're a fan of reading books and so am I. So you'd ask me, what books should they read? I would start with these immediately.

The thing I respect about... We have so many Remax clients that we work with, and brokers, and owners, and agents, and team leaders, and showing agents, and buyers, the whole nine yards. You guys have created a culture of education, a culture of constant, never-ending improvement. The thing that I want to... If this was my last podcast, what I would tell people is, spend a little less time studying the industry and spend a lot more time studying other businesses,

how they're doing it, and bringing that back into your business. But I would layer up even before then and say, I think real estate is losing its humanity right now. I think it's become so transactionally focused that we're forgetting that Tom and Kathy Ferry are buying their first house and they're 27 years old and they have no idea what they're doing and they're nervous out of their mind. That we have become so fixated on the transactional buyer that we're not paying attention to the research buyer who really needs more nurturing and more thoughtfulness and more consultative approach, more empathy, better negotiation skills, and a little less like kabam, close. I agree 100% with you, Tom. What do you think the consumer thinks about that approach that we're falling into? I mean, we kind of get so mired in our

own feelings and our own judgment in this space. Yes. And it's like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. We just keep hitting ourselves harder. And somebody's sitting out there going, why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer? Care about me. What do they think?

What are they seeing? Look, I mean, I'm probably not the best one to talk about the consumer data. I turn to others and I synthesize a lot of the consumer data. And then I take that back to my clients and say, this is what the experts are talking about. Let's navigate this together. We know that there's a percentage of consumers that want to push a button and have magic happen. We know that the iBuyer phenomenon, the Easy Knocks of the world, the movability products, all of that is just strategy number five. Bring a new product or service to the market that solves a problem.

Every business should be doing that. So I don't look at that as a disruption. I do say to myself, that's going to be a percentage of the people that are buying and selling. But the other four gazillion transactions happening around the world are a first-time seller who doesn't know what they're world are a first-time seller who doesn't know what they're doing, a first-time buyer who doesn't know what they're doing, and I think they need a whole lot more empathy. It doesn't mean, Adam, we can't do a lot of them. I think the new model, I've not said this yet, I think the new model for teams is

one great agent, one great junior showing agent, and three assistants. Okay, that's fair. And do 75 or 80 transactions a year with tremendous humanity and empathy and profitability and over-service with a great listing coordinator, a great escrow or transaction manager, a great marketing coordinator, everybody's licensed. Everybody can show the house. You don't need... I almost said the P word, piss off. A few agents... I have a big business. I'm constantly asking myself, how can I bring humanity back to all this? How can I make every single client feel special? And I know I fail at it. I think that's why I want to talk about it with everybody. I want to be open about it. Like, how do we have the experience for every client be better, more thoughtful?

I agree with you. This is a direction I think that the success in our marketplace is going to achieve because time has proven this is how marketplaces achieve greater levels of success, is greater levels of humanitarianism, greater levels of fulfillment, greater levels of kindness. People want to be cared about before you care about their transaction. Yes. You're so right. The entrepreneurial mind, the entrepreneurial space is one of savage, of how do I go after

things? Kill everyone, take over the world. Exactly. Yeah. I get it. Yeah. I mean, we become ruthless. However, kindness wins.

Ruthless does not win. Kindness wins. You need to be relentless in your processes and your habits. Of course. Kindness is where it comes from. And here's the one thing I love about this. Nobody can argue with kindness, period. I mean, that's end of day.

If you deploy love over fear, boom, there's the win. Humanity and kindness and all this conversation. And again, I want to be clear, I am ruthless in my fear. Boom. There's the win. Humanity and kindness and all this conversation. And again, I want to be clear. I am ruthless in my business. Sure. And there is a way to... Davos just happened a couple of weeks ago. And the number one thing they were talking about in Davos is,

how do we bring back warmth and generosity and humanity and kindness into a global look at business and finance in the world? Right. Right. So look, if they're finally talking about it, it's official. It may have jumped the shark. The rest of us need to pay attention. There you go.

There you go. So, Tom, I mean, there's so much gold in this. I want to change channels here real quick because there are some things that I want to make sure that we get to for our listeners on Start With A Win. You and I are – I mean, we're so close in our mindsets. We're two trains on the same track here, man. I always look for a few of these key points in business leaders, in super achievers, which you are one of them. And God love you, man, for all that you do for our business and for everybody around the world. Quick questions for you. First of all, give me a favorite quote.

What drives you when you're looking for something to inspire you? What quote comes to mind for you? Emerson. Emerson. Do the thing, have the power. Do not the thing, have not the power. Too many people think they should be given power and then they might do the work. It's not how the universe works, man. It's cause and effect. Emerson is like, if I were to get a tattoo and I don't have one, it would literally say, do the thing, have the power. I love that. Thank you. Who inspires Tom Ferry? My children. I have an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old, my dad, my clients are nearly 200 coaches, are nearly 200 full-time employees here. I find inspiration everywhere. I'm inspired talking with

you all the time. So I look for inspiration. So when you look for things, you see it. And I can find inspiration in nature and staring at the ocean and how windy it was this morning and sitting outside and enjoying. I know I'm saying cold to you in Southern California and I shouldn't be, but you know, when it's like 45 degrees outside here, it's like, you know, the whole world shuts down. Like I can find inspiration in a cool breeze and wind. So I just, I'm probably the wrong guy to ask that because I can find it everywhere. I love it. Perspective, right? Perspective. And final question, one that gets me to hit my feet on the floor every morning. What gets your feet on the floor, Tom? What causes Tom Ferry to start with a win?

I think we're all living longer and I want to be in the best physical and mental shape of my life. So it's getting up, it's doing my exercise, it's doing my gratitudes, it's doing my meditation, it's bringing my wife coffee. When you start with that many wins in the morning, everything kind of flies. So I know there's nothing new in that, but I want to remind everybody, being successful is not about finding the shiny new thing.

It's about doing the stuff that works. I love that, doing the stuff that works. Tom Ferry, CEO of Ferry International, my friend, my brother. Thank you so much for being on Start With A Win today. Thanks for all you do. Thank you, brother. I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question and potentially be on our next episode, give us a call and leave us a message at 888-581-4430. Don't forget to go on to iTunes and subscribe,

write a review and rate the show. For more great content, follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember, start with a win.