So so walk us through, like you, just, did a um a breakout session at the january elite down in san diego. That was by the way. Thank you for that yeah it was. I was a little bit nervous going in because i'm not used to when i speak.

I need some crutches. I need a powerpoint, a new deck, yeah yeah. I need some notes. I had no podium, no nothing.

I was just right there in front of 200 people. These people just saying tell us what we need to do so i had to ad-lib a lot of it yeah, but i did center it around some pretty core things. So, let's talk about that, let's give them some of those core things. So all right, as at the onset, if you're a real estate agent selling real estate, then the things that you typically market, you know.

Maybe your website has idx search um and you sell houses and you live local and you love where you live. And you love your clients. Well, you know what that's great, but that's like, but everybody everybody is it's everybody. It wouldn't be great.

They said i don't live here. I hate my clients and i don't even like real estate, but you should work with me, but i sell a lot of houses. Somebody in the us would be like i like that. I like that, right, it's honest telling the truth: um, because a lot of realtors don't like their clients, and there is truth to that, but like in a world where listen.

If you go and look at brokerages in a marketplace and just hop from one brokerage site to another they're identical the only thing that's different is their color yeah. Many of them have a name, and the name is the name of some body. Usually the founder yeah um, it's bob's real estate or bills, real estate or susan's real estate company with one is red. One is blue and one is green, but like what everything else is exactly the same so like how do you separate out yeah? Well, this is going to be uh in on one hand, maybe a little mind-blowing only because it's just so obvious um as people.

We all have arms we'll have legs, we all have eyes and ears and noses, and we all like eat and do the same stuff. So what makes us uniquely different it's what we believe: it's, how we think it's our perspective on the world - and this is like a core secret to br to brand building is, if you could pry open a company and actually find out what their belief system is. Um, i call it the world view like what is your world view in a world view? Is basically it's a it's uh, it's a couple of components. It's the problem that you see in the world and the solution that you come up with to make it a better place for people say it again.

The problem, you see it's a problem, you see in the world and it's the solution that you come up with. That makes it a better world so give you an example: yeah give us an example, so think about rei. Rei's, a department store that sells department store stuff gear, but what makes them so special? Why do people love rei? Well, rei has a world view now. It may not be as explicit and it norm a world view normally isn't explicit in terms of a complete sentence, but once i tell you what it is you're going to see evidence of it everywhere.

So rei's world view is that the planet earth is hurting. We're hurting our planet and the reason why we're hurting our planet is because we don't spend enough time outdoors in it. So their belief is if we got to spend more time outdoors with gear that makes us enjoy the outdoors more. We will.

We will be better human beings and the planet will be better for it. So where do you see that world view well, look at their slogan, opt outside yeah, look at their act, actions on black friday, they close and send all their employees out. Now. Yes, it's a marketing gimmick, but it's a marketing gimmick based on their world view.

So it's authentic, bingo um, so you know apple, has a worldview. They believe that products should be designed to be flawless that products shouldn't need long lessons on how to use things. It should be, you know, like a two-year-old, should be able to pick up an ip, an ipad which many of our two-year-olds have and can figure out how to use it immediately intuitive. They should be super intuitive and elegantly designed, and so that's their worldview and as a result of that by using those products you're telling the world that you not only believe in elegance and beauty, you assign that brand vibe to yourself as well.

It's why so many people in real estate gravitated toward apple products, because they wanted to project what people's perception of apple was yep. So, like i mean we can go through many companies and most i'll probably know what their world views are. Um i mean the the most obvious are like companies like starbucks. Their world view is that you know they want to create that third place where you come and can just do it? Do your thing not just drink coffee, but really work.

Listen to music congregate. Have discussion - and they have been over the last 30 40 years, trying to build that third place for ourselves and they've succeeded, um and so on and on and on it. It starts with a and this is where brand starts it's. If you're going to be a realtor and just say, i'm going to get my license, because this is a way to make money you're going to be like everybody else, it's your world view yeah! That's your world view you are going to be stuck in with the masses, but if you could go through a thing, a process where you can conjure up and it's through a lot of questions.

But, like you know what problem, do you think? What is your skill set that you? What is your special superpower that you could bring to a transaction? That? Because of this thing, that you do, you can assuage people from the problem they're currently experiencing in real estate? Well, that's a world view and then you can take that and begin to build upon that and expand upon that um. And is this where language like uh, being able to say we're the only like we hear so much about like if you can have that only statement or if you could be the first as an example yeah, i i would argue it's more powerful, in my opinion, To be the or the only company who does x, we asked this one question: it's it's uh, first best only yeah. So what are you the first at? What were you the best at? What were you the only at, and sometimes we get an? I don't know. Yeah, because you know these things, these interviews, that we do they're not tests, yeah you're, not being graded.

In fact, the more you say you don't know the more you're you're willing to just put your trust in our hands: yeah, the better the work's going to be, because how could you know that yeah? Well, you might know what you were the first to market to. You might know what you're best at, but some people don't know what they're best at no they're busy doing what they do best, which is selling houses, selling houses. You know hiring agents and you know doing what they do, but that might not be what they're best at what they may be best at is crunching data yeah. They may just be bad.

Look when you look at like power teams. Um - and i know you specialize in that um and so you probably diagnosed and coached that within a team structure, there's one person, that's so good at one thing: that's all they should do. They shouldn't be saddled with doing something else, so the the fringe benefit of the work that we do. Is that not only do you get your brand story right, but you get to feel and figure out the structure of how you structure your company.

So you only do what you do best, so, let's assume that that the person listening so they're like okay, my worldview, the problem that i want to solve and how i solve it, always in a unique or elegant or different or faster or cheaper. Whatever you know, whatever is way right am i am i missing anything in that? No, no and then number two is: what are you the first at? What are you the best at or where? What are you the only company or individual to x, then once they once they take the time to to really hammer that out? What did they do then? So there's got to be a third question: if not 20 more well, there's a lot more. It's it's! Sometimes hours and hours and days depending on the size of the company, but you know we do them in little little bite-sized pieces. So when you come up with and part of the conversation around this world view like what is the problem in real estate? Yeah part of the reason tom why we go down that route is because real estate has been we're like the moon.

This industry is like the moon, it's being pelted with innovative craters from outside yeah um, and so why are they? Why are they so interesting to people? Why is compass so interesting to people? Why is i buyer so interesting? Why are they valuated so high? I mean brokers. Ask this all the time we've been doing this for 50 years and we you know blah blah blah. We don't we're not we go to steve murray and we get a one-to-one valuation and compass gets a 1 to a million. Why yeah it's the world view, because what these innovators all look at is there's a company you and i both know really well out of new york, my planet yeah.

So what did adrian do? What do these innovators? Do they look at a space and go there's a problem here and it could be simple. Like i buyer's problem was there are some houses and some people that just want to get their home don't want to deal with exactly zillow was like people just want to know what their neighbor's house is worth because we're you know we're we're yentas. We want to um peek in and gossip, so i think that if you want to enter into real estate and you're going to be a new fledging fledgling business, you should have a disruptor mentality and come up with a problem that you then are going to focus On solving because then you create your narrow path: yeah um, so we're not only trying to create a world view we're trying to create sort of a trajectory for your business. So um, i don't know if you've met my buddy jay abraham jay's been a mentor mine since, like 1991 he's the the king of direct response, all things direct response, marketing right.

He would say he didn't do all that great on the internet stuff. But you know, but when it came to running newspaper, ads television, ads print direct mail like 22 billion dollars in sales and then he stopped counting and that was like in 1990.. So he and i were chatting a couple nights ago about like nine different positioning strategies. Right, like we do the more for same, we do the more for less um uh.

You know out marketing your competition like he gave us he just rattles off, like you know, nine of these different things and we actually teach seven of them to our clients. It is the intent here to create that when you talk about, like you, know, sort of piercing through the noise creating that positioning statement that that you know cuts through the noise and as people say, i understand you, that's what i want yeah yeah. Why do you think most people resist that, like i have my hallucination um? I think, maybe because it's structure, yeah and a lot of a lot of why you get into real estate is because you don't like structure yeah. But real estate is quite a structured kind of a business for sure, but you as a realtor say you don't like structure to a you know to uh your you know, closing attorney exactly or or to a buyer, i'm not really into structure.

But there is a lot of some of the contracts and a lot of great agents understand, but they create their own structure yeah. But i think that this there's it's it's formulaic and there's a structure to it and my guess is like it's also a little bit outside of their knowledge base. Yeah like, if you didn't do like the problem with also the problem that i see in real estate, is like you become a realtor, and then you like, assign yourself the king of or the queen of all things yeah, so you're the that's! That's what i want to talk about it's yeah, but you can't be you need to be. You need to be great at one thing: you're, either unique or you're weak yeah right like that's, but i mean that's also.

That's jay abram he's like if you're, if you're unique, you're special you stand out. It's easy to refer you, but when you try and do everything right, then you're just another real estate agent and you're you're, just an average, because we all can't be everything. You know. Listen, what do you specialize in you know and what's your expertise in properties? What yeah i mean in the in the grand scheme of real estate and and i'm not kissing your ass - i've known you too long to do that, but you beat the out of me online.

The first time there was an early facebook. Somebody i mean, i'm totally savage. Do you remember, like somebody wrote that wasn't it on facebook? What was it online? It was a comment it might have been on inman. It was definitely on a blog.

It was on a blog of selling the old school text blog and somebody wrote uh a very nice article about me. It may have even been a paid sponsored ad. I have no idea at this point like i don't even remember, because, because it was nice, but it was kind of vanilla and you you went in there you're like all right fairy. We've never met before here's like 13 questions.

What about this? What about that? What about this - and i remember, reading that article and reading your questions and first of all, i had no idea who this guy was right. I mean i knew in minute. I knew you were part of in some way and i saw your very snarky cool photo from the side like that. You know original your original photo yeah and then i thought you know what he's just asking really good questions, and i married just sitting there, like my wife, was like steaming like thinking.

She wants to kill you, and i just took time to just carefully answer every one of your questions. I gave you an opportunity, yes to step behind rhetoric, yeah and and just nonsense, yeah language and actually say something meaningful and you rose to that occasion. Yeah um. I wasn't really trying to.

I know, sometimes those things listen being a new yorker, it's a source of pride for me, but i realize that i can sometimes come across a little bit too aggressive yeah, especially when you're sneaky little snarky. It wasn't really my attention, but, like the more i got exposed to real estate, the more i began realizing that so much of what's wrong with this industry is that there are a lot of people who make a living selling bad advice. Yeah to this industry who buys it because they had no exposure to any other, any other anything so uh. I did know you, but i saw what you said and it didn't feel like it had any weight to it.

So i challenged you and you totally rose to the occasion and all these years later i look at you now and i feel like i'm on the johnny carson show. You know with like the king of what it is you do. I was about to go. I'm ed mcmahon right now drinking my vodka and my coffee.

You don't need, but you know what you have a mentor and and i have a mentor and but you meet a lot of these real estate agents that just don't have those mentors and coaches and don't know how to give up a little bit to another expert. Yeah, and so you can't get better if you're not being challenged and held accountable for things, so you know on back on this thing yeah. I want to go back to this because i love these questions and then we kind of bounce, but i told you we were totally unprepared for this podcast, which is exactly the fun of it, but this makes it good so world view the problem right. I want to talk about the old, unique selling proposition right like well, when you start with so when you start with a world view, it gives you a context by which, okay, if i have this belief system, i'm not going to go around telling the world that This is my belief system, but if you have something you strongly believe in, if then everything that comes out of you following is based on your belief system.

It's going to be more authentic and real and true to you, yeah, so creating that world view or starting there creates this foundation or baseline by which you market. Okay. Now there's a difference between marketing and branding. Mm-Hmm um talk about that, so that what marketing is marketing is the vehicle you use to get people to buy something yeah branding is a vehicle.

You use to get people to believe in your marketing, so without branding then you're, just marketing and like by my thinkus. It's better use me because i'm number one use me because i love my community. That's just marketing yeah branding when you apply a layer of branding on it. So you showed me some material outside um and it was better than a lot.

But i still felt - and you said i want you to absorb and tell me what's wrong with it um there wasn't a lot wrong with it. It was i've seen it before yeah, but what would really make that work special is, if i saw within it, activity action activation like what is that agent doing to support what she's saying yeah. So how would you demonstrate that? Well, you know like in the fourth we're talking about like in a postcard or uh. Well, if you really love your community, yeah, well sure selling homes within the community, look, i can sell homes in your community and i have to love it.

So if you love your community, you go to, you have to go beyond just the selling of the home yeah. There needs to be other things that you do yeah um like. How do you demonstrate loving your community and that's so so people say she loves her community. She loves living here.

So people say boy, she must love living there yeah and it's not because they read it somewhere. No, it's because they see what she does i'll give you an example: that's branding, that's branding yeah, so we did a project for a client in houston, um. They have a construction company and they love their community um. But we still we started with the world view.

What's the problem? Well, what we isolated was that if you were looking to buy a home between a certain price point, there was nothing on the market. It was either cheap, fixer-uppers or high-end. There was nothing in that little middle range that was kind of customized to a life flow, so um they built a home flow or lifestyle, no life flow lifestyle, just you know like um: they weren't they don't build these cookie cutter homes they really like they get Inside their clients, life and try and then map out and build a full floor plan plan that is um and they do it within a price range. So i flew to houston and walked through their construction zones.

Um and i began listening to how they talk about their client, how they talk about their community and i started jotting down ideas like do you ever walk through new construction before it's finished, so you're in the studs are up yep or maybe there's a little bit Of sheetrock, so, like i said you know, would it be cool if, as people are walking through the home, there were little notes on the sheetrock just in spray paint or stenciled like in the master bedroom? There would just be a little stencil. That says this is where the magical happen or in the kids rooms there'll, be some cool little like opening line from the giving tree, or just something that like something that gets people to go wow. These people must really care about their clients yeah so that they don't have to say we really care about our clients. So it's unique for everyone, but where does that all come from? It comes from the world view like that's.

Where ideas are born once we know what you believe, what your, what the problem is, that you're going to resolve, we then create branded activations and experiences and ideas, aside from all the words and everything that make people feel that, so you don't have to say it. Yeah um, you know what's interesting. This is for for my long time, listeners. This is the difference.

When someone comes at me and says tom, i started doing mega open houses. It now represents 35 or 40 of my business right. I absolutely own my community because of how i do it and then someone else who was, at the same exact seminar, heard the same exact content because of a different worldview watson says: i tried that and it was horrible and it didn't work for me right and And clearly world view mindset, you know your psychology around the customer, this community, the way you think about your business, you know, are you a problem solver, or is this just about a transaction right, bringing humanity back to real estate? So a lot of what i like to say these days like bring humanity back totally well, okay, so on that note, yeah many of us have studied abraham maslow in high school, and maybe we've forgotten the pyramid chart that he created. But if we think about what's at the top of the pyramid which is self-actualization see, this is all tied to psychological, biological, science, human science.

So here's why world view really matters, and it is the endeavor of every human being to reach self-actualization a lot of us. Don't ever get there, some of us get there early in life. Some of us get there away later in life, but how do you get to that place where you really fully understand yourself, so that you can be comfortable in the world and feel like this? Life was a good life to lead. You have to go through stages.

The the important stage that i focus on is stage three, which is belonging the sense of belonging feeling like you belong um. It sits above the need for food, the need for shelter yeah, i mean that's all the first two pyramids, but then you get to where, like i need to belong to something to begin my real true journey through life. So where do we typically find belonging? Well? In the old days we found belonging in our families, we found a sense of belonging in our communities because they were tight-knit and we found them at our houses of worship yeah. We would go to sunday, church or sabbath synagogue and be with our people and feel this is where i belong.

My tribe, but what's happened in our society is um. We leave our parents uh, you and i were tweeting this morning, my son's in the netherlands getting ready to live there for what he's now thinking forever yeah. So we all move away. I move 3 000 miles away from my people.

Yeah um communities are not what they used to be. I don't know my neighbors. I live in a condo building. I don't even know the person next door to me and that's like unnatural, but that's just how it is, and even in sunday, church and saturday synagogue.

It's not the same as it used to be yeah, so where are people finding belonging they're, finding it in brands? Yeah people are finding commonality in their love of lady gaga or their love of the grateful dead or or or supreme or adidas or super 73 super 73. Then they do like he smiled at it's the church of super 73. Well, it's the church of yeah. So what this branding stuff is all about.

Yeah, if you emit a belief system that that's what attracts people to people is similar beliefs. Yeah like we might marry our opposites, but i don't but we're ha. We have commonalities that make us feel like we're. One yeah um, our friends, we all have a commonality and it's usually based on our belief, systems, um and so like.

I don't hang out with a bunch of guys that, like to mainline heroin yeah, it's not my that's my life. It's not your thing. That's not! My thing yeah so um, so i find belonging in people who like to do what i do yeah well. This is where brands can be very powerful, and this is where agents if they can figure out what their belief system is and radiate that belief, system out into the world you'll actually attract more people to you because of that than because of your sales volume yeah.

Because we all have sales volumes yeah, but we don't all have the same exact belief systems. Now i may have a similar belief system as you, but because i'm different than you and i work with an agency, i can figure out how to word it and activate it differently. So that's that's really like once you belong and feel a sense of belonging. Then you move up maslow's ladder to feeling self-esteem yeah.

You begin to feel good about yourself. Agents who are part of the tom ferry world feel good about themselves. I know because i work with people who i mean, i think, of the spikers top of my head. Yeah i mean these are people who are so confident and so secure in their mindset.

They don't suffer from the self-esteem issues that they can move from maryland to maui and still run a business and still run a business at both locations and stay happy and get married, yeah and so like. But i see those commonalities and i think, being part of like the town ferry world, the belonging to that yeah unleashed that for them yeah. So hence this is the science of branding. You have to build out that belief system.