Friday's Thoughts June 19

Friday thoughts . . .
Have you ever concentrated on what you want your work life and work environment to look and feel like? Last week at our RE/MAX Broker Owner Retreat I had the opportunity to listen to a speaker who totally held my attention for almost two hours. I was mesmerized. This speaker spoke about the company culture I had dreamt about. His name was Cameron Herold, probably best know for his COO roles in Student Painters, 1-800 Got Junk & Boyd Auto Body and Glass. It felt to me as if the speaker was answering just my questions about what’s next and no one else was in the room. It was as if he saw my vision for our company and was helping me by filling in the details. He asked all the key questions. I could hardly type fast enough to take the notes I wanted to keep. In the movie The Secret, the message is have clear intention and the mechanism will show up. It begins with building a Painted Picture of what your world will look like three years from now. It is important to need to get your “future life” video out of your mind so that everyone can see it. Lean out three years into your business life and then come back and tell everyone else what you see. Design your future and then reverse engineer it. Build today through reverse engineering the future. Execute the plan to create the painted picture. When we figure out what it looks like in the future – we build a foundation. We then build through the people and we know strategically why we are doing something.
Our painted picture will layout the culture in our company and the people who will be involved and how. Our painted picture will attract people to our culture and will repel the people who are not in alignment. If you are looking for a work life, balanced culture, then that is the type of person who you will attract. The Painted Picture doesn’t tell how, it tells what. When we read it over and over the picture will come together. When the picture comes together magic happens! Then we will have an insanely great real estate company and change our worlds. The how will figure itself out. I have always known that the best way to accomplish this is to do it through alignment with everyone involved. ie everyone has seen the Sound of Music and if I asked you to recreate a picnic like the one on top of the mountain in the Sound of Music you could. If you hadn’t seen it you couldn’t do it the same as the movie. When everyone has the same vision, everyone gets involved & you build together - easily. Conceive Believe Achieve


My goal is to build a successful company with a strong work-life balanced culture. So as we add people into our company, we want to look for others who have a worklife balanced culture. The person’s worklife passion must be there. Each person is a piece of the puzzle. Some will fit and some will not. I want to be in business with people who are a match with our cultural balance and values, not necessarily a super top producer who’s value structure is not a match. You can’t keep the wrong people in your organization. We won’t attract great people who are in alignment with our culture if we allow it to be hit and miss.

Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, said success is like the fly wheel effect. Mass x velocity is what makes a business move forward. You keep pushing and then eventually it moves faster with less effort. Here is the success formula to get fly wheel going:
Focus x faith x effort = results At the end of week how focussed were we ? Did we spend our time looking at our email or facebook or did we move our Top 5 goals ? Was it 50% or 80% of the week? How much faith did you have in your business? How much faith did you have in what you are building? How much faith did you have in you? How much effort did everyone put in? Was it 100%? Can you get to 98% focus in each category? He also says: “Get the right people on the bus, in the right seats on the bus.” Have an open environment – get people out of offices. It can still be productive and fun. If you need private quiet time, put your Bose head phones on. The younger generation would prefer to work in an open environment, instead of the sterile office environment. The new generation was taught to question things and to have fun.

I’ve included in the attachments some examples and notes. One is an example of a Painted Picture and all the information for you to create your own Painted Picture. Let me know your vision of what our company will look like and what your business will look like in three years. Let’s get our vision out there for what we want to do and how it will look.


Here’s a tiny example of what is in my vision: People’s photos, hobbies etc. will always be first before titles. We care about their lives. People don’t fail, systems do. We have a no blame environment. We have built our company so cool that the agents and staff are all hitting their dreams.

That’s it for this Friday Thought. Next week I’m going to set up a tour of the 1-800 Got Junk corporate office downtown – if you’d like to see what a #2 Work Place in all of Canada looks like – join me. I will keep everyone posted as to which Friday that will be. If you want to build a great business, team or company – it is always simpliest to model a great one. I am so excited about the opportunities ahead of us! I look forward to reading your Painted Pictures.
By next week our management team and our staff will have our Painted Pictures built.

You are the very BEST!


Deb