6 Aha’s from Masterminding with Gary

In the Six Personal Perspectives, Gary Keller teaches real estate agents to “Make being learning based the foundation of your action plan.” Keller regularly convenes Keller Williams’ top agents to mastermind about opportunities to grow their businesses. In May 2018, Keller spent a day with 100 of the company’s most successful agents. The next day, he met with a smaller group of the leading expansion agents. Chris Suarez, who teaches the KW MAPS Coaching program Build Your Business to Expand and leads Xperience Real Estate, had the privilege of attending both sessions, as well as to participate in KW Labs with the company’s technology leaders. Here are a few of his aha’s from an intensively learning-based week: 

1) You don’t always have to have incredible growth in your business.

This may sound surprising coming from Gary Keller, who has achieved phenomenal growth throughout more than three decades as a business leader. It’s more important, Gary says, to constantly challenge your business to grow. Often we assume, expect, and demand that our business grows. And yet we also need to be prepared for years when it may not. Challenging your business will reveal your business. You’ll discover your strengths, weaknesses, and fallback behaviors. The biggest challenge of not growing is falling into the trap of believing that what you’re doing isn’t right. As long as you are challenging your business, you will reveal your business and be able to instill action plans. Gives yourself permission to grow in phases and commit to learning more about your business every day. 

2) You need to create habits and emotional connections.

Like all great business leaders, Gary spends a lot of time thinking about and learning from the most successful business models. Amazon, for example, has achieved tremendous scale and influence by building habits. They’ve taken the approach that generating an emotional connection is less important than building an “addiction” to their products and services.To succeed in real estate, however, you have to do both. In our teams, we need to be able to create habit and emotional connection, Gary says. People who are not in real estate tend to forget that. As agents and teams, we need to focus on building habits (e.g., consistency with follow-up, phone calls, emails, campaigns) while also building connection through those activities, campaigns, and personal interactions.  

3) The #1 mistake agents make is not realizing how important Operations are.

Keller Williams is a systems, models, and tools organization. And its most successful teams are the organizations with the most robust Operations. The minute you think you’ve got Operations down, just leave, because the industry is constantly changing and your Operations must change to keep ahead of those changes.  

4) Good is the enemy of great.

It’s really hard to part company with people who are good in their roles. And yet good will hold your organization back. The trick to helping people is to coach them up, not give them solutions. Parents are notorious for providing the solution (e.g., helping with projects or completing tasks.) We’re tricked into helping people or doing activities ourselves instead of coaching people up. Ask yourself: Am I that parent?  

5) Build your fortune on cake, not icing.

As agents, we have to build our business on cake, not icing. And ultimately that cake is lead generation. Think of the icing as the deal online that just shows up or the people who say “Come list me!” Not surprisingly, a lot of us enjoy the icing. Our fortunes are built on cake..  

6) Be aware of the environment you’re building.

Many Keller Williams agents have created incredible environments. When you open that door, a lot of people are going to want to walk through that door. Be vigilant about the environment you’re building so you can attract the talent that will take you to the next level.