Foreign. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Several years ago, I sat down and I started thinking about every coaching session I had ever done, every successful agent, team leader CEO broker, owner, manager, tech company, mortgage company Finance business Fintech company All these extraordinary men and women that have opened themselves up to me to reveal how their business is working, where it's failing, where they needed help and I remember sitting in Laguna Beach California the servants and hotel sitting down thinking about if I were to write another book, what would the book be on and the concept I came up that day was a book called plays That Work Now don't be shocked and no, I'm not trying to sell you a book right now. It's actually sitting a big stack of paper I wrote out about 400 Pages My intent was to have it be about 125 pages, but when I got into the weeds of it I Recognized there are so many plays we can run to be successful in business.

just like there are so many plays you can run to be unsuccessful in business and you can put life in business you know together inside those two phrases. So I want you to think about it like this if you've never. if you've never heard this concept before, or maybe you've heard me talk about it from the stage or maybe in a different podcast. but I'd love you to listen a little more intently as we start this year 2023..

So I remember watching uh, my son play football and you know he was. He's a good athlete, right? I have two sons, one was a tennis player. That's another example. My older son playing football.

uh, you know, he started his freshman year, played all three ways and had really never played football before. Never a little flag here and there, but nothing like high school football you know, pads the whole nine yards. and and I remember watching this this very, let's just call it Liberal Arts High School Full of a bunch of kids where everybody could be on every team. it was like kind of one of those schools and of course you know, sort of.

The you know the bigger kids were the ones that were going to stand out. but at the end of the day, the team was small, right? there was like maybe 11 kids out of like 36. uh, that actually had some connection to the game. could play the game.

And they were in a league that was pretty competitive with like sometimes 50 and 60 kids on the team. so they can rotate kids in and out. where in many cases, as one of the coaches once said to me, it's not safe to put out some of these kids I don't care, You know how big or small they are. they're just going to get pummeled by other people and he's like and as a dad, I just can't do it right.

That by the way was a play that worked. and I remember sitting down with the coaches and they're like, look, we know this. We're going to identify at least in the first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, and all the way down to the fourth quarter. Last two minutes, we're going to identify two or three plays that we believe that if we practice it hard enough and we run it enough, we can run that play and we can do well until the defense stops us.

and I Thought: you know we all know that and yet, why don't we apply it to business? Why don't we take that same example, you know Kobe Bryant on the post right in the later days of his career Shaquille O'Neal inside anywhere near the basket Kareem from the free throw line anywhere and sorry Laker Laker Laker example but you know what I mean like Kareem with that Skyhook was so extraordinary. It was a play that they could run over and over and over and over. And of course it made him one of the greatest scores of all time, right? You know? LeBron will probably pass him eventually. But here's the point.

They didn't go out there and say we're down by one. There's seven seconds to go. Let's run a new play. No, they're like, let's go to the play We know we have the highest probability of success on magic.

Get Kareem to the ball in the post Kareem hit the sky hook. That's a play that works. Now think about your business for a moment. This is just going to be a short podcast.

I Just want you to think for Imagine think for a minute. Think about the things you do in your business at work. Do you have a documented list: a plays that work for your evening routine, your morning person routine, your morning business routine, your appointment setting routine, your email marketing, your open houses, the plays that you that work for taking out buyers or a buyer consultation or a you know, a buyer agreement getting signed by a representation Do the same thing for a listing appointment. Do you have the same thing for an afternoon where you have nothing in your schedule? In an environment like this where the greatest asset you have and I have is our time.

Can you afford to run plays that don't work? Can you afford to always be trying something new every single time and not cementing once and for all I know when I do X as many days as a row as I can I produce why? It's predictable. It's scalable. It's dare I say automatic if you take the time to document those not. If when you take the time to say when I do these things for my past clients I get referrals When I do these things for my sphere I generate more referrals and direct transactions when I do these things at conferences Like with: Tom Ferry I generate more agent agent referrals when I do this before an open house when I do this at an open house and when I do this after an open house.

Oh boy, is it wildly successful when I do Direct Mail around listings and sales that look like this and include this and have a QR code I Get this response when I just haphazardly say I'm too busy just send anything out though I Know you say you'll never do that, but you won't put intention behind it. It's the little details of the plays that make them work. It's not just get it into Kareem and let them do the sky hook, it's get him into the you know the he wants to be. He wants the ball high on his right side so he can do one pump, fake left and then go up.

It was the details I Don't know if you guys did you guys ever see um Kobe Bryant's detail show right? So you know so many of you know you, you may know I I Had the I Was blessed to walk into the gym one day and Kobe was there and it was just he and his trainer big Raj and me and my guy. Rich Shout out to Richard Farley Jr Richard's Jim you know 4 45 in the morning this is you know, long after his career kind of before the you know Oscars Oscar I should say in the books and everything else and and we were chatting about one day you know this vision of the show, details and how he was going to get all these other incredible athletes. the Wayne Gretzkies of the World um I'm not Tom Brady but his alter ego I would say or the other guy helped me out here guys Peyton Manning Thank you because they wanted to break down the smallest details of what causes these athletes I think Mia Ham was you know on the the road map by the way for soccer like What were these things that this gal these guys did at such an extraordinary level over and over and over and over and over that in many cases were Unstoppable and they would just do them over and over and over and over and over. And they would win.

And they would win. And they would win. And they would win. And they would win.

Why is it that you're constantly trying to reinvent the wheel? Why is it that most people maybe you are simply unwilling to document? Here's my place at work. Like you know, when you when you join a you know a high school team or a college team or a you know a pro team. Certainly they hand you the Playbook and they say study this Playbook if you're at the Summit Last year I gave you 15 playbooks for 15 extraordinarily effective plays at work for various different lead. Generations You know sources, We give you a listing presentation from one of the best listing agents on the planet.

This is what she says. this is how she says and this is what she shows people. And yet I know the 6 000 people inside the room and the you know, fifteen twenty thousand people that are watching on broadcast around the world I Know they saw it all I know they heard it all I know they had access to it all and yet many of them still run plays that work now and then or worse they make up as they go now. I'm just asking you as a committed Pro Whether you're a real estate agent, title rep, mortgage, you're a friend, you own a dry cleaning business, you own a juice bar, and somebody said Hey Listen this.

Tom Fairy Guy. There are plays that work and there are plays that don't And if you don't take the time in 2023 to document the stuff that you do that you know works as boring as it is, as boring as it is I'm asking you to document it and then fall in love with the mundane. Run the play that works until it doesn't then tweak it, not create different things over and over again that don't work right. Always be testing of course, but not when it comes to the essentials, right.

the foundational principles of your business. you can test on top of that, but you don't want to be testing all the time with the foundational principles that make you a fortune. Fall in love with the mundane, fall in love with the boring run plays at work, and you will have a great year constantly. Making up on the Fly 2023 is going to be rough.

So on one hand I want you to make up a list of everything that works. On the other hand, I want you to make up a list of all the things you've tried, all the things you've attempted, and flat out the stuff that you know absolutely doesn't work. I'll give an example. when I was running my dad's company many, many moons ago, he was wanting to launch a new service and it was like going to be a monthly reoccurring interviews with top agents.

Imagine that, like you know, audio cassettes, that kind of thing and you know we tested sort of the model. We knew the concept was right, we knew we had an addressable Market that looked good. So I had this stupid idea that I would mail every single person in our database a letter with a sign up form and we you know we didn't hand address it, we didn't hand stamp it, we labeled it and then you know ran it through the postage machine which is like the worst Direct Mail ever. We had his logo on it so automatically some people are going to go.

That's where Mike Ferry is trying to sell me something and they threw it in the trash. others maybe looked at it I'm like right? We had a letter that didn't have a bold, exciting promise headline of a problem we were going to solve as an example. There was no test testimonials. there was no validation.

It was just like Hey We're doing this. We think it's going to be great If you want to listen to what top readers you have to say, you know, grab the form below and send us a fax like send us a fax. We didn't say call because they could have called. We just said send us a fax I mailed that 125 000 of them.

Take a stab at how many orders were faxed in. What's the old line survey says and zero? That's a play that doesn't work Knowing what I know now I would have tested Maybe 500 pieces to see if I got a response, then tweaked it and tweaked it and then tested it again, tweets it and tweets it. test it again, tweeted and tweaked it. and then once I figured out the play that works then I would have mailed it to ten thousand.

Maybe fifty thousand maybe. Uh, you know, all the entire list. We learn a lot from our mistakes, but only if you document them. Otherwise, we have a tendency to repeat them over and over again.

So my lesson for you for the day and just a quick short message: What are the plays that you're running in your business that work and what are the plays that you're running that are wasting your time, wasting your resources, wasting your opportunities, not getting new clients and not getting you get paid? Do more in the first and do less of the other ones. Make sense. Thanks for listening. And by the way, if you know someone that should hear this, send it to them.

Send it to him. Send it with love. All right. Thanks so much! I'll see you next week.