Start With A Win - What’s Next?

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

In this episode of Start With A Win, Adam Contos and Producer Mark dive into the subject of change and how to decide what’s next when life presents you with new opportunities. Adam is in the midst of his own season of change after making the decision to leave his role as CEO of RE/MAX.Whether change happened to you or you’ve made the decision, change is an opportunity. But that doesn’t mean you should jump at every single opportunity that comes your way. Adam shares his own process for avoiding “shiny object syndrome” and how to decide on the best opportunity for you.Start by writing down your “what’s next” list. Write down all of the opportunities that are available to you and begin to make a pro/con list. Then, on a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about each opportunity? Pretty soon, you’ll be able to start crossing off opportunities that aren’t right for you in this season! Once you get down to a handful of them, rank them from most important to least important, which will help you to see whether or not your “what’s next” will take you beyond what you’ve already accomplished.  What’s next also doesn’t have to be a massive, wholesale change in your life. Maybe is small pivots you can make in your life or in your business that could have big results. If you’re a real estate agent, that might look like finally deciding to go after a $1 million listing instead of another $200,000 listing (do those even exist anymore??).Adam wraps up the discussion by sharing three questions to ask yourself when you’re thinking about what’s next:What do you have?: What are you good at or what can you bring with you to the next opportunity?What do you want?: What are you trying to get out of this change you’re about to make?What do you need to get?: What are the skills, knowledge or resources you need to be successful?Episode Links:Order 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! Welcome to you from Brand Viva Media Studios. It's Adam Conto, Start With a Win, with producer Mark here. How you doing, buddy? I'm so good. Awesome. Hey, we're in your neck of the woods here. Yeah, we are.

We're at Brand Viva Media headquarters. That's it? Yeah, yeah. So this is now the new Start With a Win studios. Yeah, that. So this is now the new Start With a Win studios. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you'll be coming here when we do these solo casts and even remote, unless you're in Arizona or traveling the world doing business deals, you know, whatever it might be.

Yeah, sure. But everybody, we've gone so many years with Brand Viva Media doing the podcast here, as well as a lot of our other media assets. And that's so important for growing a business and growing a personal brand, things of that nature. So for all of our listeners, if you have not gone to brandvivamedia.com, that's brand viva, V-I-V-A, media, like it sounds,.com, go check it out and leave Mark a message. Say hi. Check him out on social media, things like that. Because ultimately, this is the future of business. This is how business is done is people need to see you and understand you in order to build that trust and

confidence in your organization. So all my business friends out there, check them out. They, you guys have helped set up a lot of podcasts like this in our space, too. Yeah, we do a lot of podcasting, personal brand development, stuff like that, and video production, all sorts of stuff. So usually, I always say, we create the content you use for marketing. Ooh, that's catchy. Catchy. I love it. So speaking of business, we're going to talk about business today, OK?

Because obviously, I'm going through a transition in life. The transition. The big transition. So March 31st was my last day as CEO at the amazing company, Remax. So I guess you could say theoretically retired after 18 or 19 years there. But not done. I've got so much stuff going on. We're continuing the podcast sponsored by Remax and Brand Viva Media. So super happy about that. And thanks to you and Remax for the sponsorship. But the question that makes me think about this, and I want to

talk about this today, because a lot of us have this question in life, is what's next? Yeah. It's interesting because I think about your career and I think about where you've come from and what you've done. And so what would you say? There's maybe like three or four areas of your life that have, have been that moment of like, what's next? I mean, you were a successful sheriff and SWAT team, you know, commander. Is that the right term? I don't know. Sounds good. Yeah. That's what the title was. Yeah. And so, so you kind of were there and then it's like, okay, what's next? And then I know you talked about doing some internet businesses and things like that. And

you started doing some training stuff. Right. And so then it was like, that brought you to the next thing, you know, and then you were at Remax and you kind of just jumped in entry level and kind of worked your way up. And I'm sure you had the question, what's next? And then you kind of got to the CEO level. It's kind of like, okay, now what's next? So I mean, I think it'd be interesting for our listeners to kind of hear maybe some of your thoughts and your processes in each one of those phases of your life. Oh, totally. And I want to make this about the listeners. I don't want to make this about my career. This is about that thought process and that problem solving process of determining for

everybody out there what's next. And to be clear, this doesn't mean, oh, I think I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing right now and just cast all concerns to the wind and just wildly go out and change things. If that's you, then great. Be you. But the reality is we can make, and my what's next is not a massive change. Yeah, it sounds like it, but it's pivots. It's small little pivots that have gotten me where I'm at, gotten me to where I'm at, as well as have my future planning in mind, if you will. But I have these questions I ask myself. I ask myself every day when I think, all right, I'm going to make a change,

which, what do you think of when you make change? You think, what's next? And that's what we need to consider here for all of our listeners, for everybody out there. When you ask yourself, what's next? some of these ideas, how do you generate those? How do you put forth a plan, things of that nature? And I want to help you with that today. Yeah, I think that's awesome. Cool. So the first question you have to consider is why are you asking yourself this? Why are you asking yourself what's next. Is it because change happened to you or is it because you want change to happen? So, and by the way, change is good. Change is good. If you lose your job, it's an opportunity. If you see another thing you can do in life, it's an opportunity. Now that doesn't mean you should go chasing squirrels because the, or rabbits or whatever it is, because what is it?

The dog that chases two rabbits catches none. Yeah, the fox that chases two rabbits goes hungry. That's it, yeah. All these little proverbs. The Aesop's fables. Exactly. Yeah, stop doing too much stuff and focus on something and get really good at it.

And realistically and vulnerably, that's one of the challenges that I have is I have a lot of opportunities presented to me right now. I mean, there's a ton of stuff in front of me right now. I'm getting phone calls every day going, Adam, can you come do this? I had two this morning, and it's like not even mid-morning here yet. People are like, I got this great opportunity for you. Of course you do. Yeah. Of course you do. And what that is, is it's validation that you've delivered a lot of value to other people and they want to come back and help you. But then the trick is not to get stuck into that shiny object syndrome, right? Totally. Where it's just like you're hopping from thing

to thing. Because obviously, if you don't put energy and time into something, then it's not going to grow, and it's not going to achieve what you want it to achieve. Exactly. So the reality of that is write down all those opportunities or the what's nexts, if you will. The what's next list. Yes, maybe on sticky notes.

Each little item is a different one, and put them all on the table in front of you, and then take and write the pros on the table in front of you. And then take and write the pros and cons on each one of them. You know, pros are this, cons are this. You know, what's the potential upside, and what is the ramp-up time it takes? And then on a scale of 1 to 10, how excited about it are you?

And start pulling those things apart. Start ripping them off the table and throwing them away, going, nope, nope, nope. And you'll get down to a handful of them, and then rank them, most important to least important. Rank them and figure out, okay, what's next? And what you'll find is that what's next might be something fun and cool. And you look at it and go, but does that truly catapult me past what I've done so far? Because what you've done so far generally is really, really fantastic. So it'd be like, Mark, you've got this amazing media business that I've kind of been along the ride with you for, you know, geez, what, almost a decade, I guess, to see this whole progress here. And it'd be like if you sat down and you said, Adam, all right, I think I might start selling cars.

You're like, what? Or I'm going to go into the insurance business. Why? But if you don't have a compelling reason for it, and it doesn't check all those boxes for, this gets me super excited. And I know it's going to be something that has a high probability of success.

And I'm in it to win it. I'm going all in. I'm willing to cut my ties and go do that, burn my boats on the shore, and march inland and make this thing work. Don't do it. Don't dabble in your what's next. Because then you become a dabbler. And again, you're going to be the starving dog. Nobody likes a dabbler.

Nobody likes a dabbler, do they? So, you know, and obviously, again, back to that question of is this forced change or is this voluntary change? Did somebody come in and pull the carpet out from under you, or did your job or your career come to an end? And are you doing this of somebody else's will? And you're like, okay, time to step up and make the most of it. Or are you doing it of your own?

So think about those things. And then it's not necessary to make a complete wholesale change in your life, by the way. So I left a career of two decades. CEO of a public company. I mean, leaving at the way. So I left a career of two decades, CEO of a public company. I mean, leaving at the top, we had a record year in 2021, record revenue, record profits, record earnings per share. And people are like, why the heck did you leave? And that's a wholesale change. I have to totally revamp my career right now. But I'm OK with that. I'm like, well, when you leave, you leave at the top. And I've got a lot of great things going on.

And I have reasons behind it, personal reasons behind it, things like that, that are all fantastic. And I love the company. They're a sponsor. Sponsor of the show. Yeah. And I love all the people. I talk to people. I think I talk.

That's where all my friends are. Yeah. Talk to them all the time. And I'm like, all right, we'll still be doing stuff together. So it's not a wholesale change, but it's a career change. But can you make small changes? I mean, it's little change. Have you made small changes in your business before, Mark?

Oh, yeah. I mean, and even just to test things out. It's like, all right, I want to start offering X, Y, and Z. Let me kind of put it out there and see if there's a market for that or an interest in that. And so kind of testing it out and being able to essentially fail without like hurting yourself too much, you know? Yeah, totally. I mean, if you can mitigate the losses, do. It'd be like, okay, let's say you're in the real estate space. A lot of our listeners

are real estate agents or brokers of offices. What would be a small pivot that could have big results or even medium-sized results that you can scale up that you could embark upon, but you're not giving up your bread and butter, the real estate business. Well, maybe you get into home staging. Or maybe you start or hire a media company like what you have here to go out and do that work. And then you sublease that out to people or you subcontract that out to people. And you make a profit off of that. Who knows what it is? But you're good at what you've got.

And it's working really well. And you don't want to give it up, and you can add something. That's a small pivot. Yeah. And that's a small what's next, but you're mitigating your losses because you've still got the big thing going. Well, and it's interesting because I feel like where you're at, right, you could have probably said, all right, I'm going to go get another CEO job. Once you got that title, there's other big companies that are interested in having another CEO maybe replace a current one or someone come in with fresh ideas. So you could have done that. But as a CEO, you coach executives, you do a lot of these things, you look at businesses and see how they can grow. And so you kind of pivoted

from what you were doing into something else, but of your own accord and your, you know, kind of like your own thing. True. And that's a great point, Mark, because when you look at it, business framework is business framework. There's, you know, and I talked about running a media company versus running car sales or something like that, you know, ultimately what you have to do is you have to get people's attention by getting them interested in delivering value to them and give them so much value that they want to do a transaction of some sort with you. They want to do business with you and then you do the business and then you start scaling it from there. So, you know, take cars out and put anything else in. And business is business is business, okay? It's meeting people.

It's building relationships with them. And it's because of that reciprocity of value, it's doing transactions. And then how do you scale it from there? You tap into their network. You tap into their interests and their marketing and backing. And realistically, if your customers are just transactional, meaning they could give two shakes about you and they're like, I just want the deal done, and they move on, you're not going to get a lot of repeat and referral business out of them. Maybe, maybe not, based on the experience

you give them. But realistically, the best customers are the ones that are sent to you instead of the ones that you have to go find. So how can you scale those particular aspects? So I want to jump into a couple of questions here, because we've talked about kind of looking at the sticky notes of where we're at, what's next, things of that nature. But I have a question about three things that you should consider if you've got a what should I do next. Three things. And you've narrowed it down on those sticky notes.

But ultimately, what do you have that you can implement in the next? So write down what do you have. And it might be I'm really good at marketing. I'm good at social media. I have a huge network of people that I've done business with in the past. So you have a built-in customer list, something like that. I'm great at video. Or maybe you've got nothing, and you just want to start from scratch.

Well, you have a blank slate, then, is what you have. And you have the opportunity to go out and do it. Or maybe you've screwed it up, and people are like, oh, they don't like me. OK, now you have lessons lessons is what you have. So what do you have that you can contribute to your what's next? The second question you have to ask is, what do you want? What are you trying to get out of this? Is it you're just chasing the shiny thing or you're burnt out

and you want to recharge or refresh? And what's next might not be the answer. It might be go on a vacation and go meditate someplace or read a book or hire somebody to do some of the monotony that you have. But don't just throw the baby out with the bathwater here and say, I'm done with the bathwater, so the baby goes too. I mean, you can't throw away your business simply because you're sick of part of it. Bring somebody in to deal with it and enjoy the part that you enjoy. So what do you want from your business?

What makes you happy? What takes up time? What makes you happy? What takes up time? What makes you money? What takes up money? And what impacts your personal life positively or negatively out of that? So do a little reflection here. This one's big. This is a really big one.

What do you want? And where's your heart? Think about that for a second. I mean, because ultimately we all, we don't deserve anything because we deserve what we tolerate. So if we tolerate misery, we deserve unhappiness maybe. But if we tolerate hard work and the pain of getting things done, we deserve the results of that. So what do you want to tolerate versus what do you want to receive? Does that line up there? Yeah, 100%. I feel like – I think that's going to be a hard thing for people to figure out,

but I think it's there. It's hard, but write it down. What do I tolerate? What do I want the result to be? Are you tolerating something that's giving you the wrong result? Right, which I think is the case for a lot of people. I mean, because I feel like sometimes we get locked in that trap of just doing things for money.

Totally. Doing things because, you know, well. And that's one thing, you know, we've had to do over the years is, you know, I've over the past 14 years, I've, you know, been able to understand what kind of clients that I like and what kind of clients I don't like. And red flags, you know, show up when we're having interviews and things like that to say, we might not be a good fit. But there was a time where I was taking work because I just needed the money, but then I was miserable. And a lot of times when we take work just because we want the money, we take the first available work instead of saying, I'm not going to take the first available work. I'm going to take the best available work.

So I'm going to turn some down because you only have capacity for so much work. We have so many minutes in the day. Everybody has the same number of minutes. It's what do you take that fills those minutes and what is the scale of that? So if you're a real estate agent, like a lot of you are out there, and you go, I need another listing. Are you going to get a listing in a $200,000 house? Are you going to go get a listing in a million-dollar house? Because it's a listing.

And yeah, there's some other variables to it. But trust me, you can handle those other variables. Just change where your marketing approach is and go after those. And maybe you get told no 10 times to get one in the million-dollar house, whereas you get told no five times in the $200,000 house. You're still ahead. Yeah. So you're getting told no twice as many times, but your business is 5X.

So what do you want to do? And business begets business. So once you start playing in that million-dollar listing range, you're going to have more million-dollar listings. Yeah. As opposed to, oh, my gosh, I've got to go find more $200,000 listings to make a million-dollar listing. Come on.

So I don't know where there's a $200,000 listing anymore in the U.S. Well, you know, you're buying a small apartment or a condo. Yeah, now it's a million-dollar listing. Yeah, say no to all those million-dollar listings. Go for the $2 million listing. But anyhow, and then my third question, what do you need to get in order to accomplish this goal? So if it's going from a smaller listing to a larger listing, What do you need to get in order to accomplish this goal?

So if it's going from a smaller listing to a larger listing, what do you need to get? Maybe it's an appearance of sophistication. Maybe it's a change in your attitude. Maybe it's just taking a look at your marketing materials and saying, our average listing is $250,000. And the person with the million-dollar house isn't going to look at you and go, oh, your average listing is $250,000. And the person with the million-dollar house isn't going to look at you and go, oh, your average listing is $250,000. Here's my million-dollar listing. No, it's we sell awesome houses or something like that.

And you set your standards. Put them somewhere big. So what do you need to get? Where are you going to up your standards in order to get that? Kind of an interesting question,'t it yeah yeah i mean if you're if you take stock of where you're at it's kind of like the whole idea of like just for the job you want right you know and it's you know we have have some, you know, people that intern here from time to time and, you know, they'll show up and flip flops and swim trunks. And I'm like, hey, you know what? This is not acceptable.

Right. Yeah. you know start who do you have to become to get the things that that you you know want and how does your business have to be perceived in order for it to grow to where it needs to be you know that's a that's a great question who do you have to become because success is not something you can go chase or go find it's something that you become. And if you become that success, the success will follow you instead of you chasing it. Yeah. Yeah.

I always loved the fake it until you become it. That's true. Yeah. Instead of fake it until you make it. Yeah. Well, it's true. Fake it until you become it because that's what you are now. Yeah. And nobody ever went into the gym already a bodybuilder.

Nobody ever got their real estate license already a realtor. Nobody ever went to the office already a CEO or a vice president or a executive or whatever, you got to make it. You got to get there. And here's the thing. You can always raise the bar a little bit higher than where it's at. Always. You just need to sit down and go, what do you want to do? And then make a plan to get there. So that's the last part of this in wrapping this up, Mark, is what do you want to do and make a plan to get there? I'm going to do X, Y, Z in order to get this. And I'm going to do it by this date. What is this called? This is called a goal. I'm not a fan of goals. I'm a fan of processes. So, okay, I'm going to do X, Y, Z. This is what X looks like. This is what Y looks

like. This is what Z looks like. Pull out your calendar and put it in there and take the actions necessary to achieve those particular milestones to achieve the particular item that going back to the beginning of this is next. Simply put, what's next? What do I need to do to get there? And then if you're overwhelming yourself with it, go back and listen to this again and break it down into those steps. What do you have? What do you want? What do you need to get? Put down your steps, put them in your calendar and boom there you go and boom there you go boom that's good for some uh for some rollout music isn't it oh yeah okay boom boom uh yeah this is this has been great you know i the thing i love about this podcast is that

uh whenever i'm here with you, I'm always getting inspired or like writing stuff down and thinking like, Oh yeah, this is really great stuff. So I hope that as you're listening to this, that it has offered you an idea or some inspiration to, to figure out what's next and, uh, kind of the steps that you need to take to get there. Um, Hey, if you're ready to create personal business success, call this guy. Head over to startwithawin.com and you'll find more great content there, ways to get in touch, and just all the stuff you need to help you take things to the next level. We want to thank our sponsors today. REMAX. Thanks for sponsoring.

Start with a win. Nobody in the world sells more real estate than REMAX. That's right. That's true. Check them out at REMAX.com if you're a buyer or seller, or if you're an agent thinking about finding a great company, great office, number one real estate brand in the world. Check it out. That's right. And until next time, remember, start with a win.