How to plan your way to victory, no matter what life throws at you EP 69
53:33 Share

From the art of the deal to keeping it real. Live from the Simply Vegas studios, it's The Power Move with Jon Gafford. Back again, back again, post-Halloween. Everybody get Halloween, man. Everybody showed up. Still here today. Welcome to The Power Move. My name is Jon Gafford. I am your host to the left of me.

Colt the Bulgarian mongoose. What's going on? Good. It's November. It's made it. It is. And with us also always on the couch is the counselor Chris Connell. How are you, counselor? Good. I didn't eat a single piece of Halloween candy this year. How did you pull that off?

You know, since I have my own office, I have my own building. I don't bring in candy. I don't supply it. I have no kids in my neighborhood, like none, literally zero. I live in a small neighborhood that's like a small community. And I didn't go to my old office. My old office had it in the bowl. I'd walk by and take one. It's terrible, terrible policy. But your kid went out. You don't rate her candy? No, but she got it last night.

Oh, you just haven't been around yet. I haven't been around yet. I've eaten zero pieces of Halloween candy. Thus far. Thus far. I might sleep a little. I had Snickers with my coffee today. It was quite delightful. Pretty nice. Cole, what's your top five Halloween candies? What do you got? Ooh. Ready for this one? Uh-oh. We debated this this morning. Some answers were surprising in my household. Breezes? Yeah. Number one. Breezes. Breezes. Number one. That's number five for me. That's five for you? Yeah, yeah. That's number five. It's in the top five. It's two for me. My number one's going to shock you. Yeah.

Black licorice. It's a good one, but it'll shock you. So number five, I'd go Reese's. Number four, Twix. Okay. So number three, Skittles. Even though you can't tell the difference between the colors. Number two, Snickers. And number one, whatchamacallits.

I do love a watch. Can you get a watch of a colored candy? We can't eat though. Yes, we just got it last night. My kid did. Thanks to whoever. And a full thing of Oreos. Somebody gave out a full thing that you buy at the store. I'm going to go. You know what? I'm going to go for Halloween candy. I'm going to go. The Reese's are in there. Yep. The Snickers is in. Uh-huh.

I'm gonna go off script get the kit for kick number one for me is kick at so is kick at solid the kick at Twix I mean those wrong And then I'm gonna here's the one I thought here's here's the left plate The only time I ever eat them is during Halloween. It's only time you ever see him. I

The hundred grand. So I love, I literally was just about to say a hundred grand. That is one of the most, I love a hundred grand. Underrated candy. They don't make it. You don't see it that much. Except for Halloween. Here's the real question. That's all everybody in this whole debate right now. And just took the easy road. Let's say five favorite Halloween candies. And only one of them can be quote unquote chocolate bars. What are the other four? Those other pilots. I got my, I got my number one there. Nerds.

Okay. I'll go right number one to Nerds. Pretty fancy. I love the little box of Nerds. That's cool. I like the Airheads. Chuckaburras, Nerds. Airheads, yeah. I like a banana. I like that penicillin taste. Jolly Rancher. Little Jolly Rancher is good. The Blow Pop is always solid. Stick It. What about those? Do you remember those houses that would give out the yellow suckers? Oh, yeah. Just the straight yellow suckers. Just the straight yellows.

Who's making orange and yellow suckers? No, no. You know what I thought today? Those are sugar-free, too. Yeah. Like, that's who that person is. You know what I did see on Twitter? Somebody's like, this is the most impressive run ever. The wafers, the candy wafers.

They've been around for 175 years. Do you know what I'm talking about? They are. I'll show you. Keep talking. I'll show you. But anyway, that's a good little left turn there. Yeah, it was. Five chocolate bars, too easy. Yeah, it was. But today on the podcast, what is what we're going to talk about today? We're going to talk about planning to win. Planning to win is what we're going to talk about today. Because I got to tell you right now, if you are in the real estate industry, if you're

And there's some fear and doubt running through the industry right now. Smelling blood in the water? Yeah. I mean, even the best people are worried. I'm talking to some top people in the industry that are calling me. What are you doing? What's going on with you? What are you doing? And some of our top producers are worried. And I had a conversation with somebody today.

And they said, I said, you know, what are you doing? Because I'm worried about what's going on. You know, I'm starting to look at all my expenses. When I go to the restaurant, I'm looking at the bill. I'm just making sure I'm not used to doing that.

And I said, well, that doesn't make you fearful. It makes you smart. You know, because here's the thing in times of great prosperity and business, top line profits or top line sales mask, a lot of problems up and down your financial statement. They just, they just ask them. So when things are good, you, uh, you know, you tend to just, everything's good run with it. And, you know, we found some problems in some of our businesses that are just, uh, you know, for example,

We had to let our IT company go from one of our businesses yesterday. And when we let them go, I told the person that was letting them go to tell them exactly this. You have been the absolute benefactor of our complete carelessness. So before you even try to justify anything about what you've charged us over the last year, understand that we are highly aware you are the benefactor of our carelessness. Yeah.

And so like, don't even try to renegotiate. What a skating. What a amazing. It was. That's a great one. It was. What do you say for, how do you recover? You can't, you can't, you can't. We paid $52,000 to an it company to set up emails and laptops. That's batshit crazy. Whoops. That shit. But like you said, I've worked, but you wouldn't top my sales are good. Not to cut you off. It's, you know, you just don't,

That's what I was going to say. I worked for a company and they would be like, we know what we're doing. We're number one. And I'm not going to say who it was or what it was. It was for a sporting event, right? They had the number one person in that sport in a hall of fame or top three of every greatness. It's like, no, no, you've just been around because of this person. You are throwing

Throwing money out left and right doing stupid marketing stupid stuff But you don't realize that when you're in great times when you got Tom Brady all of a sudden everybody looks like a genius Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So today what I want to talk about is if you're in a place where you're a little worried about what's going on the economy You're a little scared there You know this is the time to start really planning to be successful in the long run because without a good plan, you know one of my favorite quotes is

If you don't know where you're headed or if you have no destination to a ship with no destination, no wind is favorable. Seneca. There you go. That's what I was trying to get out of my mouth. No port. No port. No port is favorable. Yeah. If you do not know to which port you sail, no wind is favorable. That's right. Jesus. We got there. We got there. Eventually. It took a minute. If you're taking notes. Seneca's rolling in his dusty bony grave. Sorry about that. If you're taking notes, sorry. Speaking of taking notes, not to change subject, but...

I, that I, I must've watched that meme with the guy taking notes with the typewriter about three. Oh, that was lovely. The best is when he gets to the end of the line, it does the ding. Ding. I mean, for those, you know, we're talking about, there's, I guess a professor didn't allow laptops in a big, big, big auditorium by classroom. So some guy brought like a 1950s typewriter and was typing his nose. Ching. I think I'm the last class to have to take typewriting in school.

Yeah. No, they all take typing. Are you kidding me? No. Typewriter. Oh, typewriter. I had a typewriter. I'm from Saskatchewan. I'm older than you. We were on a word processor cold. Yeah. I had to take it. Remember those games? The early computer game? Oh, yeah. Oregon Trail. Amazing. Oregon Trail was on that same thing. But you would have typing games. And it would be like, if you get the gift to do this before time runs out. Oh, yeah.

And you get moved up. Right. It's just how to make math games and typing games fun. I'm still a four-finger picker. Shout out to Canada. Are you? Yeah, that is a talent that I wish I had. Are you serious? Yeah, dude. I seriously got a multi-finger pick. Really? No, but that's still typing. You're still doing this. Yeah, but it's... A hunting pick is this. No, but it's multi... I mean, I still look at the keys when I type. It's multi... The only thing I do bad is I don't do shift with the opposite finger. I'm not a typer. That's my thing.

I wish I was a typer, but I'm not a typer. So again, if you're somebody that is looking to plan a win, I want to talk about some things that just stories and things that we've had and things that will make it successful or things that can hopefully make you successful as you go forward as you do this. So the first thing that I would say is if you're running any type of a business or if you're in real estate, especially it's you incorporated, you're it.

You're it. The first thing you need to understand is cash flow in times of downturn is more important than profitability.

Let me say that again. Cashflow is more important than profitability. For example, yesterday, somebody, you know, one of our businesses, you know, all of our businesses depend on cashflow because cashflow is how you pay people. It's how you pay your rent. You've got to have money moving in and out of your business to make it go. And somebody offered us a deal yesterday, one of our purveyors, because I guess they were feeling the crunch too. And they said, hey, look, we'll give you a discounted rate if you prepay for the next six months.

I said back to them, I really appreciate that offer, but it makes more sense for me to pay you over time than it does to part with a large amount of cash right now. Yeah, obviously that depends on your situation. Yeah. But yeah, no, it's good. Liquidity has a benefit that's hard to...

quantify from an economics point of view, right? Because in economics, um, one of the things that shocks people the most is that successful startups oftentimes fail because of cash liquidity. Money. Yeah. Even though they're profitable, even though you'll look at them and go over time, this is going to be an absolute home run. They do this thing where if you have a net 90 pay period, but you got to pay suppliers in 30, you're going to have liquidity issues and creditors can force you into like solvency or, you know, um, um,

Receivership. Well, you look at real estate, right? Real estate is not a right now, if you close a deal today, you're going to get paid for that in 45 days. You need to plan accordingly and understand what you really have. You know, looking today at our business,

I look at how many deals, I don't care how many deals we closed. I care how many deals we're going to close because I'm not budgeting for what I did last month. I'm budgeting for the money that I have coming in, coming forward. And I think a lot of people are slow to pivot and slow to make changes and slow to make adjustments to their time because they're going off what they did last month.

It doesn't matter what you did last month. It matters what's coming down the pike. It's like when you drive somewhere, you look out the front windshield, not the rear view. Although, knowing what you did last summer, John may haunt you later. I see what you did there. Hang on a second. Hang on, hang on.

There it is. There it is. Dad, get out of here. Do you think that's just because people haven't been through a downturn like a lot of residential agents? It is. They haven't seen, you know, the market hasn't moved like this since 2000,

We haven't really gone through this. It's been kind of screaming in the right direction ever since. I'm 42. Think about it. It started in 07, right? Yeah. So 25 years ago, I would be 27. I was in law school. Yeah. I was coming into law school. I moved from a different country, so I didn't necessarily feel a pinch in the same way because it was still different Canada than it was here. Yeah. But when the bottom fell out, I got the benefit of being in a different country.

Yeah. So, I mean, you can always talk about that too, the different markets sometimes have different things. Do you guys feel like this is coming quicker or just because of social media and because of the ability to talk? No, no, no. I think, well, first of all, let me clarify. I think a lot of things, I think downturns are...

I think we need downturns. Oh, 100%. All markets are cyclical. Everything's cyclical. And right now, we need a downturn because there's a lot of people, especially in the real estate space, that do what we do that shouldn't be doing what we do. Well, not even to get political, but you shouldn't have had the 12 years. And this goes over different...

um, part of the administration. So you shouldn't have unfettered growth for that long. That's actually unhealthy. You need to deflate bubbles before they burst. And the problem is they go and it's political suicide to not do quantitative easing, increase rates,

I hate to sound like something that nobody wants to hear, but I like increased rates. It does slow down things because it gets untenable and it blows up, right? It gets way too over its own scheme. Historically, for the last 150, 200 years, nine years. Every nine years. So when it's way past that, it's time to bring it back. When money's free...

and inflation's gonna kill everything, it's the responsible choice to make. So again, it's not a promotional thing. - Did you just imply that people wanna be responsible? - People don't wanna be responsible. That's why it's political suicide, right, to ever go, oh no, we need to do this. But it does make sense, and I'm actually, I'm not cheering for people to be going through hard times, but it's like,

If you wanna lose weight, you gotta cut eating foods. You know what I mean? - Yeah, no, no, no. - There's trade offs. - There's a question, but there's also advantages. For example, you look at that, that built those treasury bonds I sent you guys on Friday, which took me two and a half hours to get bought. - So zero sum. I tried for just a minute and then it just kept crashing.

And so I said to myself, how much do I bill an hour? Yeah. No, I was actually. You ruined my day when you said that. So effectively. Yeah, but it's not. You can't look at it that way because you're sitting around doing nothing, right? I was watching football. Exactly. And it became a mission to get that done. But yeah, the treasury was offering bonds at 9.65%.

I went on there with 9.62, not to be pedantic. Whatever, 6.2, 6.5. I'm just saying. Trust me. I've been telling that lie for a million years, 6.5, 6.2. It's all the same. It's all the same. There's even treasuries for like 5%, 6% out there right now, which is interesting. So I watched a guy that he goes, why would I buy this building that

4% where I can do this. And he's like, well, you know, he tried to fight and finally said, we're just taking international buyers at this time. So it'll be interesting to see where these, uh,

These fall right in the next year. Who knows? Like it could be great. It could be bad. It could be average, right? No one knows right now. I mean, look at how low cap rates are. Yeah, which they should be, right? Two and three and these things are just nuts. So it's bad. You know, it is ridiculous when you think about these deals where they're saying, well, I'm going to park this 3% money somewhere. Mm-hmm.

And I'm going to park my 1% that I can borrow it in a 3% construction dealers arbitrage. I mean, I mean it is arbitrage, but not now. The value of those bonds just drastically decreases when you buy them that low and you can't. No, yeah, no, that's true. So let's talk about how to, how to plan to win. Look, we can talk about what is, but we got to talk about how to win through what we're doing. So again, it's a good time to go through and look at what you're doing and rip it down and start over if you need to. Um,

Nothing is off the table. Nothing should be overlooked. Every line item on, if you're running a business or if you incorporated whatever it is, every line item on that panel has got to be within question. And you've got to really ask yourself this. For example, I'll give you a great example. So I've got about 100 of our agents that I'm coaching in this private group right now. And I'm seeing the success they're having, things that are being successful.

And it's amazing some of the basic stuff that comes out of those conversations that I'm hearing through the success stories. And one of our team leaders grabbed me today and was asking me about what I'm doing and how this is going, this and that. And I told him, I said, look, you need to reduce your lead flow to your agents, to your team members.

And he was like, what? And I said, you know, conventional wisdom when things get tougher, not a lot of people are buying is to increase your lead flow because you're trying to get more people in the net and then find the ones that are.

But what we found is by decreasing the lead flow a little bit, people are getting called more. They're getting worked more. They're getting the story as to why their situation is positive to purchase instead of just, oh, 'cause I'm getting all these leads coming in, I'm just gonna hop to the next one and try to just pan for gold.

right? Just hit the first one. Now you're actually over. Yeah. Now they're actually having to craft these relationships and craft these situations that are turning into more deals. So I'm actually spending less money in leads than I was three months ago. And I'm getting better results because my agents are working them harder. Quality over quantity. Yeah. It's just a different, it's a different mindset. And yeah,

It's amazing that just getting back to those basics and looking at that because when I looked at the P&L I didn't cut because I wanted to save money I cut because I wanted the more focus on what was happening Because focus is a huge thing which is there when you um, I

you know when times get leaner you start using the whole cow you know what I mean you start making you start making soup out of the bone so yes you do like you know there's a lot of value there that often gets scrapped over not every meal has to be a filet yeah what do you think the best part of the cow the flame is right what do you mean it's not even close it's flaming up people love the tongue tongue is delicious

I don't know how much this falls into it, but it's something that I benefited from personally very much so. In times of going into recession, I was thankfully in law school and got my MBA.

So you have a lot of people out there, right, that are in sales, that are chasing this stuff because they've never really worked on their own skill set. Yeah. Right? They jump out. They have all this time now, whether you like it or not. So what do you do? How do you make, you know, how do you make, you know, omelets out of broken eggs? What you do is you try to self-improve in some way too. Yeah. And I'm also going to say that you look at it in...

This is a time when, you know, like, look, especially in real estate, man, any moron could have done our job and had some moniker of success over the last three years. You know, it's just throw a rock and hit somebody who wants to buy it with 2% money and there you go. But now it takes skill. And if what you are doing is not working, you need to find someone to model.

You know, back in the day, some of the best businesses that I've had, if you're planning to win or you're planning to do something else, if you're planning to open a new business into this, you're planning to do something different, find something to model that works. Burger King did not come up with Burger King. They copied McDonald's and changed the name. That's what they did. They saw that that works. Let's copy that and get it done. Now, you know, for me,

You know, you look at the insurance company we own back in the day. You know, we did not decide we want to open an insurance company and then figure out how to make it work. My sister went and did a consulting job on a big insurance company in Dallas. She was just consulting them and saw their business model and saw that, you know, this is before Medicare Part D and before, you know, seniors had to get drug coverage and old people had to pay a million dollars for drugs. She saw that these people were experts in getting seniors free medicine.

if they bought their insurance as a service. So that was a model that at that time was very successful. Nobody was doing it in Florida. We ripped their model completely off, brought it to Florida, just did it. So I saw how this business worked and just stole it.

Yeah. It's effectively what we do. Like, this ain't the time to be trying to reinvent the wheel. You need to be using tried and true techniques in whatever business you're in. Lamborghini used to work for Ferrari. Yeah, exactly right. There you go. That's what you've got to be careful on who you allow to be on your...

your marketing list on your social media. Cause people will steal stuff from you. Yeah. But do you really care? Honestly, I do. Because really guess what? I was doing a marketing thing and all of a sudden, bam,

a year later, I see the same doing it. I'm like, fuck, are they on my list? Cause they moved the thing. And not that, not that it's like a big thing, but like you will see stuff like that. Go ahead and bite my shit. I'll bite your shit. There are, there are companies, there are companies out there. And I, and I've actually, I used to get so angry by it, man. I used to get so irritated. I think I posted a thing one time of the dude that, uh,

the McDowell's thing, you know, when it was from coming to America, when he's sitting there with the McDonald's thing. And I actually made like simply Vegas on the manual. He was looking at like, like, like, no, no, no. They're simply Vegas. We're simply Vegas. You know, it was like, just the blatant rip off of so much of the stuff that we did, because I do like to think that I'm a little bit of a trailblazer in our industry with things that our company has done. And,

And it used to bother me so much when people would rip us off. And then I kind of came to the conclusion, which is this. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. It's a great form of flattering. And it's,

you know, number one and number two is you can steal my stuff. You can steal a lot of the things that we do, but you're never going to be us because you can't steal that. And at the end of the day with our companies, the secret sauce on what makes them great. Right. And this is not, that's not an ego play. Don't listen to that and be like, Oh my God, that guy's such an egotistical prick. No, no,

whatever you do, like you are your own secret sauce to whatever you do. And nobody can take that from you. Yep. So there you go. That's kind of that thought. So you can't be mad. And like, even though like, Oh, you can't be mad, but you can also be, I don't know. I,

I looked at a little differently. Believe me. No, if you're marketing to the same people, people understand who's original and who's not. People are going to know who's, they know. I get that. They know. I get that. Yeah. Yeah. If you're, if you're just taking off the crib sheet and writing the essay on. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Let me ask you, let me ask you this. When you talk about now is a good time also to rework your business plan. It's a good time. Um,

Now always is a good time to- - Always, well, I was gonna get to that. No, I do mine quarterly. - I mean your classes with your people yearly, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, everybody on my team, we do quarterly business plans. And the reason being is if you don't do a business plan, I'm gonna give you some advice with that.

which is we do a one page business plan. And the reason you want to do one page business plan. Now, somebody, if you're trying to get funding, they're going to say like, you need like a 32 page business plan with an executive summary and projections and all this. And I'm talking about that. I'm talking about your operational business plan that incorporates your marketing. Right. Right. That's what I'm talking about.

And have it be one page, man. Ours are so simple and so easy. This is what a good business plan essentially is. And I can tell you in less than three minutes what makes a good business plan, in my opinion. And you can welcome down whatever you want. Number one, it's got a vision on it, which says where I want to be. It's defined by an exact point in the future, a snapshot of your life or your company's life in the future, and has a date on it. By this date, this is happening. So you know where you're trying to get to. Mm-hmm.

Below that is the mission statement of your business. It's the who, I, what, when, and where that you do what you do. Below that are the financial goals that accompany that vision. How am I going to pay for that vision? What does that translate to, to money? And then I pick three strategies, no more than three, that are going to get me to those financial goals. Each one of those strategies should stand on its own and equal that amount of money. Because now if you technically work all of them hard enough, you should be 3x your goal, which makes it's going to be impossible to miss your goal.

All right. Now, underneath those strategies, you have an action plan, which are actionable steps. Each step that goes through that should be translatable to a daily calendar of events. So when you wake up in the morning on Tuesday, you know exactly what you're doing today. Very good. Exactly what you're doing. That's a very good breakdown. And that's it. That's it. For real estate business, right? Yeah, for real estate. Like you said, like we have a company, we have a separate company. It's a, it's a,

device. Call it widget. We'll call it a widget. Okay. It's a widget business. I should give it a shout out anyway, but anyway, it's a widget business and it has a thing. And that business plan has all these things because you have, who are your competitors? What are the numbers? What are the marketing demographics? Who are the major suppliers of this widget? Who does the, so that whole thing is a, is a, is a full program.

Right. And that doesn't need to be updated all the time. Because it doesn't change. Because it doesn't really change. But the operational, like we're going to go social. Like, for example, sell your widget. I'm going to sell it through social channels. I want to go radio direct. I want to go media. Those would be your three strategies to acquire new customers. Right.

and understanding the value of a customer that you have, and what's the lifetime value of that customer. How do you translate that? Is it more expensive to get a new customer, or do I make more money if I can rehash and sell additional things to this customer? All of those things. But at the end of the day, the operational, the day-to-day marketing side of things especially, should really just be as simple as that. And the reason you want it as simple as that is because if it ain't working...

You need to change it. And these people do these business plans. They fall so in love with their own plans, man. They fall so in love with, well, I spent so long on this and it's 32 pages and it's got graphics on it and I don't want to mess. No dude. One page in pen or in pencil even, because if it's not working, you need to change it and find a new one. You need to change it. Like you always say, you know, you're sitting here saying, you know, budget and everything. Also, you tell people,

put more money into things that are working in times like this too, right? I think a lot of people, you know, I've talked to multiple different partners on stuff and everybody's like, oh, we need to scale back on this. Pull back our marketing budget. No, no, no. We are not pulling back. So I...

with what you're saying about how you're pulling back on leads, you're not pulling back on leads. You're pulling back on the amount because you want better focus on stuff. Because I want high, because it takes more follow-up now and I don't want my agents distracted off the follow-up. It's not about pulling my foot off the marketing pedal. It's about, it's about, I'm,

i'm decreasing the spend to buy focus that's what i'm doing do you know what an interesting thing about this is i'm going to tie it into global affairs okay china has a population problem they have a very serious population problem not the way maybe you think i'm saying their population is estimated to be by 2050 something like 600 million and it's 1.4 billion right now yeah and they can't they don't have a replacement workforce

There are all these people that are aging out and they're very old because they were the boom generation, but they're much older. They don't have a replacement workforce generation because in order to have a mature workforce, a 35-year-old, a 40-year-old in your workforce, you had to have them 40 years ago when they had a one-child policy. Best time to plant a tree? 40 years ago. Is that your best time? Today. But it's too late. When you have population decline like that, you don't have replacement workforces. You have all these huge problems. Yeah.

Anyway, it was this brilliant guy. I can't remember his name. He had this whole breakdown on it. It was really intelligent. But that's the best time to have spent marketing dollars was last year. Yeah. Oh, for sure. You know what I'm saying? So when people hit these times, they pull back. What they don't realize is they're creating a deficit for themselves in five years. But this is also the best time to – Keep going.

Well, I was going to say this is also best time to, if you want to adapt your business, right? You go after where maybe somebody had that foothold four years ago. They start pulling back. I mean, you know, Eric Gordon's a perfect example. That guy's doing nothing but million-dollar deals. And it was because everybody pulled their focus off of it, you know, during the last crash. And he said, we're going all in. You know, so I think there's...

There are so many times to pounce on stuff in bad. This is one wealth is created. Well, when you're looking at, when you're looking at your individual P and L for your business, I asked myself, is this offensive money or defensive money? And offensive money is money that is spent to create revenue. So it's marketing dollars, it's incentives, it's bonuses, it's things that drive the engine, drive the sales. And then you have defensive money, which are things that service the sale services. What happens?

If you have a reduction in sales because of outside forces, the first money you cut is defensive money.

Always cut defense first, because the thing is, you can always go pick up defense later when the sales come back. You can pick it back up. Sometimes you need to realign what people are doing in that aspect. Like, for example, for example, you know, I have people that manage this podcast that manage, you know, video that manage my social media to do those things for me.

I have since now, I've reallocated that work now to somebody else on my team because their workflow has gone down. So rather than continue to outsource and pay these other people, whatever I'm paying them a month, I can just move that workload over internally to keep someone moving. Get the scalpel out. On me. Which again, which is why I love the outsource model. I love hiring people from Upwork and those things because when you don't need them, you just cut them and you don't have to worry about-

Yeah, there's no emotional ties to them. And they know the gig. They're freelancing from the other side of the world. When you need them, they're flexible. They can expand with you. You can pause them. They'll come right back. They don't care. There's no insurance. There's none of that stuff, which is great. It's a great way to scale and expand your business. You know, it's also a good time. I think this is a good time when things constrict like this. It's a good time to really take a look at your goals.

analyze your thermostat. I mean, by that is if you are someone that believes that you are capable of reaching a certain level of success, if this is, if this is your ceiling and this is where you can go and then outside forces now cut you down to here. Yep. Well, you got a problem. So my advice is raise your thermostat because now if you really start to believe you can reach here, even through a downturn,

in the market chops. You're going to be able to maintain where you were. And what I mean by that is like, think about your house, man. Think about like, what's your thermostat in your house set at? What are you set at? I would like it to be like 54. My wife has it set at like 99. Oh God. But where, where is it? Where is it actually? She says 75. I'm incredulous. Oh God. 75. I would die. Where's your sculpt? Uh,

69 to 71. 69 to 71. She says 72 to 75, depending on the time. And it drives me nuts because I'm just like. Yeah, we're nighttime. We're 71 if we're in the room, 77 if we're gone. That's where we're at with it. But see, that's my comfort level. Everybody has a comfort level they get comfort with. If you want to survive and thrive during times of downturn, you want to know why people get rich during. People do not get rich in boom times. They get rich in recessions. They get rich in construction because the smart, nimble people take advantage of the situation. Right.

So if you're somebody that is comfortable at a certain income level, you need to start thinking bigger. So ask yourself, like for example, if you're in real estate, if you did 25 deals last year, ask yourself,

what would it really take for me to do a hundred right now? How can I get to a hundred deals and start asking yourself those questions and you will see your possibilities open up because it will open up the creative side of you or better yet, it will begin a quest for information and knowledge and you will find someone that's already doing it and model what they're doing. You can model that. But I think adjusting that thermostat and setting your goals bigger and higher is

is something that I think is important. Yep. Yeah, no, and again, to go back to that self-improvement thing I was pointing out, you know, there's a lot of people that,

you know, are just spinning their wheels. Sometimes you're in sales. What's your competitive advantage, right? Well take some night classes, take an accounting class, take a marketing class, take a finance class, like go enroll in CSN. It's noncommittal or, or whatever your, your community colleges. There's a lot of people out there that don't need to go to a university with academics and do whatever. Go enroll. I swear to God, everybody who goes to school, you know, ends up being appreciative of that process for me.

if I had to start right now, this would be a perfect time to go pursue a goal, right? Even if it's just part-time, even if it's just one night a week, two nights a week, take a night class. Well, you got to find, you got to find your wins where you can. Yeah. And again, if you go and you take an economics class and all of a sudden you start understanding things formally like supply and demand, you are going to be more valuable on whatever team you end up doing, whatever you're doing. I believe that building skill set or my ability, right? And you can do it online. I'm going to throw it out there. I mean, dude,

the wealth of human knowledge is on YouTube. - I was just going to say, if you go, one thing every sales person should do, go YouTube probably, I'm sure it's on there, I haven't looked, but FBI profiling, right? And watch how they profile people. Watch negotiation tactics. Like I just, I watched a finance, a finance,

a finance class his book from his boss's book ucla the other day like an economic finance class from ucla i'm like cool i'll sit there for two hours and watch that like like you said that's all on i have to go spend 200 but i still need to press back because there are things that come up where you can say oh i'm college educated right i have some of that it's not the be-all end-all in this industry but if you do that slowly so let's say you take a couple night classes

over the next period of a while, you may walk away with an associate's degree and then maybe you go, okay, I can finish my bachelor's. This was the time to do it. This is the time to pursue some of those things maybe that are not going to help you sort of move forward in your business, but they will because you'll be developing lateral skills and

expertise so that then one day let's say an mba will differentiate you let's say you want to go get a commercial and you want to have an mba and you want to get your ccim or whatever ccim is a good time to start right now but i think i think here's here's the real point of that which is this and this is the sacrifice you got to make like if colt if i was to tell you if i was your doctor and you came in and i said colton oh man it's not looking good

Not looking good, buddy. Not looking good. If you keep eating this pretzel bread and drinking Old Fashions, I'm going to give you... Does he even want to live? Yeah, I'm going to give you three months if you stay on the Old Fashions and pretzel bread. Right? I'm going to give you three months. Man, we had great pretzels. Does Colt...

Stop with the pretzel bread and stop the old fashions. I think what says you? Absolutely. Absolutely. Here's the thing, right? This literally happened to me today. I sat around for four hours to find out if I had cancer or not, right? And so I get skin cancer. I've had bad skin cancer. My grandpa died from it. I love the sun.

I love laying out at the pool. I love that stuff. But you guys see me when I'm in Cabo, I'm in the hoodie. I'm a Univar bomber. And that's it, right? Like if you want something bad enough, like if you look at this as life and death or whatever, you will go do it. I mean, if you're like, hey, go cold call. The point I was trying to make is this, is...

The recession is your financial doctor and it just served up some really shitty news. And you better change your diet.

And what your diet is not necessarily, I'm going to talk about goes in your mouth. I'm talking about what goes in your head, what goes in your ears. If you are sitting at home watching the Kardashians, I don't feel bad for you. If you're broke, you need, if you have downtime to watch nonsense, you need to reinvest that into anything that is going to help your skillset to get better. Couldn't agree more. If it's like you watch that, what is the 600 pound life people or whatever? And you're like,

I don't know why I weigh 600 pounds. Cause I eat five buckets of chicken today. No shit. You're 600 pounds. If you're sitting at home watching junk TV and you're broke, no shit. Yep. So this, the recession, Dr. Recession just gave you some bad news. Time to change the diet. One of my buddies played college football. He was doing all these things. Very successful guy. And somebody was asking him, how can you get straight A's in college and play football and do whatever? And

And his thing was, how much time are you on Facebook a day? Yeah. You can be in shape by probably cutting out one, you know, half of the amount of time people, if you look at your screen time. Oh, it's insane. It's insane. It's really horrifying, but it is what it is. So if you really want it, right. And, and improving your fitness is actually one of those things that's going to help you in all these things as well. Yep. Right.

Like we've all, we've said it like no one wants to say it, but you get paid off of how you look. And not only that, you feel better about your self confidence. It, it all, it's a snowball. It's, it's like real estate. People are like, God, things are going good now. Well, yeah, now you have confidence. Your things are rolling. Now you go out and go get stuff. Right. Same thing with looking good. If you look good, you feel good. John's always preach that like get out of the office. If you look like crap, everybody, everybody, everybody wants to eat. Nobody wants to make the sausage. That's kind of how it goes.

But you know I was saying this morning and again, you know with stuff like that, right? The language that how you talk to yourself is so important and the words that you use when you talk to yourself is so important and Like if you get up and you say I have to you know study my sales stuff I have to go to the gym. I have to get on the treadmill. I have to do this Yeah, that sucks because you know what you also have to do die and pay taxes. I

Yeah. Maybe, maybe look at it as you get to, I get to do this. If you have leads to call, man, be happy. You do not banging doors, like trying to come up with anybody. You have a database of people. You get to call, you get to work that your legs work. You can go work out. You get to do all of these things. You ever hurt yourself? Yeah. You ever been sick? Yeah.

What's the number one thing you promise you won't do ever again? Drink. Drink. Which we did make that for you. November's got a whole new meaning for me. When you have the flu and you feel like shit and you're in bed all of a sudden, you think about, you feel guilty about all the times that you felt good.

That's me. Every time I get injured, and I get injured a lot. I play basketball. I do jujitsu. There's always injuries, right? I'm injured in like three spots now, but I'm hurt, I should say. Injured is when you literally can't. Hurt is another thing. I'm constantly hurt, okay? So whenever I feel good, I go, I got to go use this body to go do a bunch of stuff because there'll be a time when I can't.

So that to me is one of those I get to. That's the conversation we had last week, which was time is ticking. Time is always ticking. It is. I told you about I dated a girl. Her dad had MS. Did I tell you this story? I'm like, oh, sorry. I had to park freaking down in a different parking lot. I was like, what?

Aren't you lucky you got to walk that far? Yeah. I tell my wife this almost every day sometimes. Sorry? I'm really sorry. It comes up all the time because I'm in a different profession. As an attorney, it's different because I'm paid to handle people's

problems as a broker, John, you've had to go through a lot of that too. And as a commercial agent, you have to constantly deal with people's problems. But I say to her, I have no personal problem. I have very, very few personal problems. Stuff comes up with parenting and life, but none of them are mine. All my problems are my clients and I take them on. So I feel the, the, the pressure of it and the stress of, you know, trying to do a good job.

But I oftentimes will sit there and look back and be thankful for how many problems I don't personally have. I just have them all professionally. So let's say you're going through these hard times. You're having a professional difficulty. The rest of your life is... It's pretty good. Well, it's funny how the bleed over happens so quickly, how it goes over quick. And here's a great exercise that, for example, I was kind of...

I got a little bit of a funk on a Saturday, right? For going to Hofbrauhaus for, uh, for the, for the October fest thing. I was just kind of in a funk and I don't want to go. And she's like, what's going on? I'm like, I'm just, I'm having a lot of non-useful thoughts. That's what I said to her, because that was something that I heard that I really liked, which was when you have negative thoughts, creep in your head, you know, fear, uncertainty, doubt, whatever they are. As

Ask yourself is this thought useful to me now if it's a useful thought that is genuinely Protecting you in some way or causing you to take action you stress positive. It is useful. That is good But so often I don't remember which which philosopher was it said that we we suffer more in our own minds than in reality Sure, I think it was Epictetus. I said that

But I was doing that when things start to maybe go not the way you want, you start to suffer more in your own mind. You go from, man, my business is down to why didn't anybody invite me to a Halloween party this year? Like we didn't like, like, like, am I an asshole? Like, why don't we get invited? Like, like literally we were just talking about that and how funny and your mind can kind of go places like, man, I, I

I don't know. I don't remember the last time I was invited to be in somebody's wedding. It's been like, since I was like 20 years, like I know people that were like 20 weddings. Why was I never invited to be in a bunch of weddings? Am I an asshole? Like what? Like just useless. That is a great. I know. I know. I agree. Superbowl. I agree. But the point is you start thinking these, these thoughts and take it to place because things can domino. And,

And it's funny, like in this thought process, I'll share what it was. I'm thinking about that. And then I'm thinking, man, I haven't been invited to speak anywhere in a while. Like nobody's invited me to go speak anywhere in this time. Like now it's gone in literally within 24 hours of almost all of those things. We got invited to like fucking four parties. I got invited to do a speaking gig. All of these nonsense, useless thoughts that were causing me to suffer more in my mind than in reality were proved to be completely unfounded. So,

If you're playing, you know, right now, man, to play in a way, don't let, don't let the reality of a tough situation, which in some cases people work in tough situations right now. Don't let the reality, a real tough situation bleed into a bunch of nonsense. Cause then you're going to spiral the wrong way. And that's the opposite of what you said, where you just kind of need a win, man. Focus on your wins. And you are not, there's no one that's not going to be affected negatively by

in this. By the economy. It's the problem is, is people continue that thought process instead of saying, all right, this is hurting over here, but I see opportunity over here, right? And that's what, like, God, I had lunch a couple weeks ago with a guy and I'm like, dude, I just rushed for lunch. It was just nothing but negativity. Oh,

oh, there's no money, no this, no that. And so I do that. I don't know. Are we laughing? What did I say? Did I say a funny joke? No. I just, I felt the need for some inappropriate laughter. That's perfect. Good time. I've got no money. My life is over. I mean, I don't know what I'm going to do. I mean, I'm just going to go ahead and just...

Oh, this is terrible. My wife left me and my dog died. You got to get away from people like that. You got to find people that's got dad jokes. I hate you guys all. I hate you all. You really think the flay is the best part of the cow, huh?

As the plate, I derailed the podcast for once. Nice job. See how it feels now when this happens? It's wonderful. I love it. Let's talk about the best bad joke ever. But honestly, I think like everybody's going to be affected negatively. You know,

You know, and so many people will sit there and just harp on it. I feel like that's all I've heard for the last month and a half is how things are so, so bad. It's like, cool, like, great. Let's find an opportunity to make money. To quote Jim Cramer, though, bulls make money, bears make money. Dude, God, fuck.

Jim, no, there's an opportunity. That guy does. No, but well, hold on. So, so Jim Kramer, Kramer Berkowitz was a very successful head coach trainer. He is a Harvard trained lawyer that just traded. Like he's really smart. You understand there's now a fund that does nothing but go against money trades. Oh,

Again, I don't follow him. Whatever he says to buy, they go short. Yeah, he used to be. He used to be. But he's old. But anyway, aside from that. He's the nickelback. He's not old. He's like John's age. No, he's the nickelback. He's in his 70s. He's the nickelback of financial advisors. Yeah, no, but at the end of the day, what I'm saying is,

There's always an opportunity to make money in your industry. Now, again, as a lawyer, I'm a bit spoiled because when the world goes to shit, I can start taking up divorces. I can do bankruptcies. I can do insolvencies. I can do probates. I can do all this stuff. Yeah, which we talked about earlier, buying stocks, man. I buy the vice stocks when times get hard.

but again no but maybe it's time for you know something in your business buy the uh cigarette figure out how to become an export and foreclosures figure out how to how to start whatever no because we're not the wave of foreclosures people think is coming is not coming believe me let me be the first one to tell you that ain't happening i wish it would happen in general in general there's not for terrible people but yeah that's not 2008 ain't coming back but

but whatever those skill sets are around, those are just four instances. No, no, no, no. It's back to basics, man. It's back to basics is what it is. You know, that's what, it's so funny, man. I've been preaching, uh,

You know, in my coaching group, because I coach them every day and really got them back to basics of tracking the interactions they have with their sphere and having it as a methodical interactive, staying in front of them, staying top of mind. So when somebody does say, I need to buy a house, I say, oh, you call my buddy. They're just staying top of mind is so key to what we do. And you have to work it methodically. And it's so, it's the simplest thing to do. It is the easiest thing to do. But yet people just don't do it.

And they all want like a magic bullet. So we laid that out and we're talking about that. Like I do a lot of like, like there's the, there's the can videos that we shoot in here that are, that are like the coaching stuff. But then I also drop in on my groups like live and stuff. We have zooms, but I post a lot from my treadmill, like just the daily motivational stuff I post from my treadmill. And the other day I was on the treadmill. I said, are these videos of me on the treadmill getting monotonous? Are they, are they seeming monotonous now? Cause you see me always here. It should be monotonous because I,

The magic is in the monotony. That is the magic. 95% of the work is done behind the scenes. The magic is in the monotony. And don't let the monotony be the enemy of enthusiasm, which so many people are. You've got to fall in love with that process. You've got to enjoy reaching out to your clients. You've got to enjoy staying in front of them. You've got to enjoy those relationships. If you're someone that does not do that...

You're probably going to have a tough time. Well, and I think that a lot of people, especially in our industry, they don't treat it like a nine to five job, right? Or if you treat it like, Hey, at this time, you, if you went to a corporate job, your days are pretty much the same. Yeah. And you need to treat that lead generation, contacting sphere of influences, making new, you know, you've got to continuously treat it like a job. Or if you're out there one day doing this or golf and whatever, it's,

All of a sudden, the cover sheets in your TPS reports aren't matching. We all worked in corporate America for some time until, you know, look, if you're an entrepreneur, I call myself chronically unemployable. I'm just not built to work for anybody else. That's not how I can do it. But I think all entrepreneurs have that. Because you just see the saddest stuff happening. What's the saddest thing you ever saw in corporate America? Me? Yeah, it just made you sad. What was it? Just people sitting there being a slave to a job, right? Yeah.

I saw a guy get killed once at a thing. I just was baiting you. No, everything's positive with me and happy guys. You don't want to know mine. So that was it. Well, you don't want to know. Cause I was an EMT once. I think, I think I want to wrap this up today. We're talking about, about goals and, and especially, um,

Goal setting, especially in real estate, is hard. And I'm just going to talk to real estate people here. Because real estate people, if you're listening to this, this is for you, right? When you set goals, you need to set goals in real estate based on openings, not on closings. And the reason that I say to do that, even though you only get paid when the deal closes, you need to set them on openings, not closes. And the reason I say to do that is,

Real estate is a long sale. It's a slow moving ship. If you're in another industry, you sell something that's slow moving, do it the same way. Because if you're like, I'm going to do 50,000 this quarter or 100,000 this quarter. Well, if there's 30 days left in the quarter and you know that it takes 45 days to close a sale, you're going to give up on your goal right there. You're setting yourself up for failure. I can't do it. I missed it, so I can't hit it. That's it. But if your goal is to open a deal,

You can work that till 1159 of the last day. So make sure your goals are not set up to hurt you. Yeah. It's good. Set yourself up to win psychologically, emotionally. Understand how to play the game. Understand yourself. Understand how you work too, right? Yeah. Understand like this is why I was saying hire a personal trainer. Yeah.

I like enrolling in college because part of it is being held accountable. And like I said, people are so afraid of stuff. Take a night class, hire a trainer, join a group, join a jogging group. Be accountable to others sometimes too.

All you have to do is find another human being that does the same thing you do to be accountable to. But that's what I'm saying. That's it. But again, for some people. You don't have to pay anybody. You just got to find somebody to just. Yeah. But a lot of these things are free. I was saying like groups, there's whatever. Find a jogging partner that you hold each other accountable. I started going into jujitsu now half hour early.

Cause another guy in the gym, he wants to drill and do extra stuff and work on it. And that's kind of my favorite stuff when it's just, you just go roll now. So I'm going to get an extra half hour in every jujitsu session with somebody else that's like-minded who's like a similar size. So we can like, you know, you can't be doing necessarily stuff with guys who are five and five.

Yeah. I got to find a guy who's 6'3". You know, 6'2". Colton, I'm one of them for guys to do stuff with. I've been wanting to. Chris keeps looking at me and I'm smiling. I've got so many comments I want to throw out. But anyway, bunch of children. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Bunch of children. But no, find somebody who's like-minded and it's a free thing. So you go in and there's just a million things you can do, but find out what it takes to hold yourself accountable. Just blindly commit to it and see if it works.

Like you said, you got to know yourself. Yep. You got to know what motivates you. Me personally, I need another thing. I will kind of lay through the alarm on the gym days where my trainer, you know, no trainer today. I find myself, those are the days when I'm like, oh, you know, I'll make up for it later. Yeah. Then later comes around. It's like, you know, whatever Friday, you know, I'll write it off. You don't, if I hold myself accountable and there's someone there to meet me and I set myself up that I have to do it, then, then that to me is, is, is functioning. You know, it's, you know, it's funny, man, that, that,

You know that it's your accountability meter is really kicked in when something bothers you. And I'll give you an example. So there's, you know, I'm doing my, I do my, I lift four days a week and, and there was one exercise that I was doing and I had a conference call. So I was, I did most of my work and I got it all done except for one little exercise on the back, right? It was just a stupid little thing that I had to just do on the, on the, on the bench. And I was, uh,

This is a bench. And I never got back to it. I just forgot. And I hadn't thought about it until about two hours ago. Like my gains. No, I was sitting at my desk and I was like, this is like three weeks ago. And it just popped in my head. I was like, oh my God, I never did that exercise after that day. And I marked that I did it.

So I'm like, I liar, but I can't wait to get home just to do that one little stupid exercise just because I said that I did it. Yeah. And it bothers me. That might mean a lot to you. There's a lot of people that don't really give a shit what they say they're going to do. They don't really care if they don't do it. Me, I do. That's part of my motivation is I do what I say I'm going to do. Well, because repetition becomes habit. Habit becomes accountable. Because lifestyle becomes permanent. Show me habits. I'll show you a future. So,

Anyway, guys, let's wrap it up there. But another solid week. I'm glad you're using your workout machine because that took me forever to put together. You know what? I got drunk putting that shit together. I'm shocked that hasn't fallen. What were we drinking? Sangria. Sangria. It's like how many blocks, sangria. Those things are serious. Yeah, we put sangria. Yeah, I put together my, I got a Smith rack in my gym at my house. Yeah, so did mine. Yeah, Smith rack and then we have, but the other stuff, most of it was just delivered. No joke. Put together. Yeah, no, we put it together. It was not easy. It took all day. Anyway.

Anyway, it's done. All right, guys. We'll hope you liked today. If you did, if you're watching us on YouTube, give us a like, give us a subscribe, give us a four-star review, whatever. Podcast thing, Mac star, whatever it is you listen to every little bit helps. And yeah, man, if you're going to keep moving, you might as well move forward. See you next time, guys.

Hey, it's John Gafford. If you want to catch up more and see what we're doing, you can always go to thejohngafford.com where we'll share any links that we have things we talked about on the show, as well as links to the YouTube where you can watch us live. And if you want to catch up with me on Instagram, you can always follow me at thejohngafford. I'm here. Give me a shout.