Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The benefits of being an Intero agent

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Just recently I went to a seminar – a Mike Ferry Seminar.  I don’t usually attend seminars, it’s just not my thing.

Gino encouraged me to go and I thought – it can’t hurt.

My first day of the seminar the room was full of people, something like 4200 attendees. And wouldn’t you know it Gino had arranged for Intero to have front row seats reserved with our names on them.

So where everyone else had to stand in very long lines to get whatever seat was left in the room. We had the front row. Nice!!

Everywhere I went, people would say “Are you with that group that sits up front? You sure are lucky.”

We had bracelets to let us into the class every day.  I put mine on loose because it was a nuisance. On the second day, I lost it.

I thought, no problem they will just give me another and marched right up to customer service. They said “Sorry we just can’t help you, the cost for an additional bracelet will be $250.”  I turned around and just figured it’s time go home. Oh well.

I texted Gino and he came out of the seminar and went directly to Matt Ferry. Matt turned around to customer service and said “this is one of Gino’s people – you can give her another bracelet.”

So I was able to get in and attend the rest of the awesome seminar.

Thank you Gino – I am glad to be one of your “People.”


Monday Mojo: We all have the same 24 hours

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Have you ever noticed when you really need someone you can depend on…someone who you know will come through no matter what, it is the busiest person. The person who on the surface seems like there is no way in the world they can handle one more thing. You know why? Because the idle ones have too many excuses, too many substitutes, too many shortcuts. Almost everything in life is that way. Unfortunately most of us will never know our true capacity for achievement because we never challenge ourselves to perform at our best every day.

This is most obvious when we are presented with an opportunity that really interests us. No matter how busy we are, when there is something we want to do, something we like to do, somehow we will find the time to pursue it…right? On the other hand, those things that we don’t like or those things we don’t want to do are easily postponed and eventually forgotten. Successful people are not procrastinators. The most successful and effective people have a sense of urgency. They just grab a hold of it and get it done! They set deadlines and force themselves to establish priorities by what is most important and not by what they like to do the most. Deadlines – that is the magic word. Unfortunately, way too many people never set a deadline to accomplish those things that are most important. They put it on the proverbial “list”. You know “the list” I am talking about. The one you write stuff down on that you never have any intention on doing. Because those things we don’t put on “the list”, we usually just dive in and get done – usually before the deadline…right?

Remember, we are NOT naturally wound to do all the things we need to do to be successful in life – personally, professionally, health, etc.  Because usually those things required being successful at any area in life, involve doing something we don’t naturally like to do – at least not in the beginning. Otherwise everyone one would be getting everything they want in life…right?  Here are a few examples -

  • Exercise versus Watching TV
  • Saving Money versus Spending Money
  • Salad versus Cheeseburger and fries
  • Showing up first and leaving last versus Showing up last and leaving first
  • Getting up early versus waiting until the absolute last minute like the rest of the world
  • Making that tough phone call versus blowing it off until…never

Here is the interesting thing though – if you make a commitment to do what is required to be successful, you will eventually become addicted to the success and then the pain of doing what is required will actually become something you thrive on.  I think it takes 90 days to make this happen.  At 90 days, it has been my experience that is the point when you go from feeling good that you accomplished it to the point that you feel like crap if you don’t.  That is the key and that is when you know you have changed that area of your life.  It’s at that point when if you don’t do it, it would be like not brushing your teeth or taking a shower…that just would not happen.  At least I hope!

When you see other people that have what you want it is not that they are more gifted, it is that they are more disciplined and accountable to doing those things required to be successful.  So, here is what we all need to do, if there is something we need to get done, even if it does not require a deadline, SET ONE! You will be amazed at how much you can accomplish in a short amount of time if that is all the time you have. Remember, work/life expands to meet the time allotted. We all have the same 24 hours in a day.

JUST DO IT!

Have a Powerful week!


Have You Landed On An iPad?

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Love it or hate it, the iPad, Apple’s latest shiny technogadget, has taken the world not just by storm, but by virtual F5 tornado.

For most of the folks snatching them off shelves like they were loaves of bread in Russia, circa-1980, they’re just awesome, hyper-beautiful, super-slick … toys. But for REALTORS? The iPad holds a wealth of creative new ideas and opportunities to provide new services for customers and clients.

For starters, the iPad’s display is absolutely gorgeous. Really. It’s second-to-none. Imagine taking your clients on showing appointments and presenting them with splashy, hi-res, full-color photos on it. If you’re out and about and they suddenly decide that there are other properties they’d like to see, you can show them right on the iPad. No more carting around that heavy, cumbersome laptop. With it, you’ve also got a terrific way to take notes as you go with them from house-to-house, or with which to give a listing presentation the likes of which they’ve never seen.

And it’s a pretty cool tool outside of client interaction, too!

Some of the great tools that are available to enhance your business are:

  1. Evernote. We’ve talked about this fantastic app before, but the version that’s available for the iPad is fantastic. The app itself is free, and basic memberships to Evernote are free, with upgrade options that, at their most expensive, are a minimal $45 annually.
  2. iWork. Apple’s answer to MSOffice, iWork is a suite of tools — Pages, Keynote, and Numbers — that is incredibly easy, incredibly intuitive. Pages (iWork’s word processor) is a breeze to use, and the iPad version is really slick. Keynote simply blows PowerPoint out of the water in terms of the quality of presentation it produces. Numbers, which is similar to Excel, doesn’t have quite the juice as its Microsoft counterpart, but it’s still off to a pretty good start.
  3. Things. Hands-down, this is the best organizational software out there. It’s a little pricey in terms of apps (most people are still used to paying $1 for things from the AppStore) at $19.99, but it’s worth every penny. If you’re a Mac user, this is a must-have.

There are tons of new apps being added each and every day, so be sure to check back for your favorites.

The iPad isn’t for everyone, but for us? For REALTORS? The iPad’s going to provide a very happy landing.


Monday Mojo: Clear Your Runway

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Could you imagine a jet taking off on a runway full of junk? There is no way in the world you would ever step foot on a jet attempting to do that, yet that is the way most of us run our lives everyday. Like a jet trying to take off on a runway full of garbage, our runway to success is the environment we live and work in every day.

Everyday you go to work look at your workspace, your inbox, your voicemail, and your brain as your runway. Would you take off using those things as your runway – no way! If your desk if full of crap, if your inbox has hundreds or thousands of messages you have not dealt with, if you have crap running through your mind, you are destine for disaster.

Here is the easiest and most difficult thing we all need to do to achieve success both personally and professionally – clean up our runways. That’s it.

  • Make sure your desk is spotless when you go home every night. You can throw away 80% to 90% of the crap on your desk – think about it, you haven’t touched it in weeks or months. If you do end up needing it later, just Google it or ask the pack-rat in the desk next to you for it.
  • Make sure your inbox is empty every day when you go home. Either reply, delete, or save it in a subfolder. Deal with it and get it out of your inbox. Quit the procrastination!
  • Get it out of your head and write it down on a list. Our brains are made for creating ideas, not storing them.

The same things apply at home. Here we talked about our work runways, but we also have our personal/home runways. Make sure the strip is clean or you will crash there as well.

Clean it up so you can build speed, take off and achieve your dreams!


Cool Apps: Don’t Be Blue, Get BatchBook!

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Each and every day, it seems that there’s a new social media channel on which we need to keep tabs. Whether it’s making professional connections on LinkedIn, managing our personal Facebook profiles, our “fan” pages, Twitter feeds, FourSquare checkins, not to mention email, and the things we use to make sure we’re meeting the needs of our clients, there’s an endless stream of, well…streams to monitor.

How can we do it without sacrificing our work ethic or our commitment to providing the highest quality work to our customers and clients?

BatchBook may just be your answer.

BatchBook, developed by the big thinkers over at BatchBlue Software, features contact management, social media monitoring, email forwarding, communications tracking, to-do lists, the ability to create lists, reports, and Web forms, and integrates seamlessly with Google Contacts, Freshbooks, MailChimp, Shoeboxed, and Zendesk. These features, combined with some of BatchBook’s unique offerings, might make it the most powerful social monitoring/CRM tool around.

First and foremost, BatchBook is a contact management powerhouse. It makes it possible for you to track your business, personal, and social media contacts and share them, if you like, with team members or coworkers. You can create a database from the ground up, or import your contacts from any of several different existing systems. BatchBook has a great feature, which they call “SuperTagging”, which you can use to create custom fields that’ll let you monitor the information that’s important to you, not just those that conform to the software.

Its social media monitoring helps keep the lines between personal and business contacts on social media channels clear. For each of your contacts, you can see their most recent tweets, blog posts, as well as their LinkedIn profile.

Another cool feature is the ability to track communications. If you want to know the last time one of your team members contacted a client, you can see it in BatchBook, whether it was an email or phone call, you’ll have a complete record of all of your communications with your clients. And with BatchBox, your emails can get forwarded directly to BatchBook and attach them to your contact, so you’ll know exactly where you stand at all times.

BatchBook gives you the ability to collect information about your clients and other business-specific information. Not only does it do that, but it gives you an easy-to-use system with customer support that’s second-to-none.

Got the contact management blues? Get BatchBook.


Monday Mojo: Finding Your Meaning and Purpose in Life

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Last Wednesday I had the privilege of attending the 17th Annual Silicon Valley Prayer Breakfast in Palo Alto.  The theme was “Finding Meaning and Purpose in Life”.  There were two incredibly powerful speakers.  I walked out humbled and inspired. I walked out determined to find my meaning and purpose in life.

First was Tim Borland – in 2007 he ran 63 Marathons in 63 days.  Why you ask?  Tim’s life mission is to advocate for children in need by using his gift in endurance running.  Click on the link below and watch this video – this is Tim’s meaning. This is his purpose:

Tim’s four keys to finding meaning and purpose in life:

  1. Focus on the needs of others before ourselves.
  2. Develop an accurate view and understanding of fear.  He said fear of failure is a dream crusher.
  3. Be willing to risk it all.
  4. Pray for a God inspired vision.

Second was Joe Ehrmann. He played football for the Colts for 13 year and was named Colts’ Man of the Year.  In the same year Ehrmann played in the Pro Bowl he watched his brother Billy loose his fight with cancer.  This experience caused Ehrmann to rethink and reorder his priorities in life. Ehrmann spearheaded the construction of a Ronald McDonald House in Baltimore in memory of Billy. In the off-season, Ehrmann attended classes at Dallas Theological Seminary and, following his football career, he graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, specializing in urban ministry. He was ordained in 1985. Parade Magazine name Joe the “Most Important Coach in America” due to his tireless efforts to change the culture of sports.  Joe and his wife Paula co-founded Building Men and Women for Others to help every man, woman and child reach his or her potential.  He was also the recipient of the National Fatherhood Initiative’s Man of the Year Award.

This is his meaning. This is his purpose:

As a Pastor for more than 25 years of his life he has been with many people as their life on earth ends.  He said – all people care about at the end of their life is who did I love and who loved me, and did I make a difference.  Nothing else matters – not money, not fame, not power – nothing else.

Two ordinary men doing extraordinary things.  So, what is your meaning and purpose in life? If you don’t know – find it!


Monday Mojo: Short Term Pain for Long Term Gain

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“I’m not a morning person” I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that over the years.

So often people talk about how they just can’t squeeze in the most important activities in their life because “I’m not a morning person”.  When we are young and with little or no responsibility except for ourselves…or retired and our kids are out of the house, it is easier to slip in those important activities after that first cup of Joe in the morning, at lunch, in the afternoon, in the early evening.  For me, that is not an option…and my guess is for most of your reading this that is not an option either.  We have kids, house, lunches to make, work, kids homework, little league, dinner to make, grocery shopping, wash…the list goes on and on.

Trust me, when my alarm goes off in the morning at 4:45, I am not all fired up to jump out of bed and “hit it”.   Candidly, many mornings I am telling myself “you have got to be kidding me…it feels like I just closed my eyes”.  But I know the short term pain and discipline of putting my feet on the floor and getting started with my day is easier than the long term pain of regret, disappointment and not accomplishing my goals.

Let’s face it…for many of us we have tried for years and years to squeeze in those most important activities sometime during the day, but then life gets in the way and the most important activities end up taking second fiddle to the chaos.  I am not saying you have to wake up at 4:45, but if you really want to get those most important activities done, unless you are an anomaly, you probably need to do it first thing of the day before the chaos begins, while most of the rest of the world is still sleeping.

Remember, we are our biggest asset and if we don’t make a commitment to take care of our body, mind and soul no one else will.  You can’t delegate it, you can’t run down to the store and buy it…you have to have the discipline to JUST DO IT!!!!!

We had our Intero Achievement Awards a couple of weeks ago and before I got up to give my talk this video on “The Creation of Monday Morning MOJO” was played.  I thought you would get a kick out of it.

“I am a morning person.”

mojo


Thursday Thoughts On Leadership: How Leaders Create Something Out of Nothing

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In his book “The Score Takes Care of Itself”, Bill Walsh asks the question, “Should desperation be the primary determinant for seeking new direction, innovative solutions?” He asks this because when he found himself as the quarterbacks coach of the Cleveland Browns, in charge of an offense with no ability to run the ball and a backup quarterback with a weak arm, he had to think of something. He couldn’t change the calendar. They had to play on Sunday. They couldn’t move up the player draft and restock players. He had to face the challenge each week of figuring out how to move the ball on offense with limited options. His answer…creating a short precision pass-oriented offense that would take advantage of the entire field and five receivers, led by a quarterback, Virgil Carter, who, while not able to throw hard or very far, was extremely accurate. He created something out of nothing. The West Coast Offense.

In fact, it wasn’t really created from nothing. He was forced by circumstance to re-evaluate the situation he faced and all the assets available to him and find a solution to his problem. As he put it, “… it was created out of existing assets that only needed to be ‘seen’ and then capitalized on in new ways.” In his book, Walsh outlines four main concepts that can be used to model your own progression in any endeavor:

  1. Success doesn’t care which road you take to get to its doorstep. Walsh did not let it bother him that many traditionalists looked down at his new style. In a manly game like football, you had to run the ball. As one executive sneered, “It’s not real NFL football”, but in football as in life, we only remember the result and after a while, those naysayers had to figure out how this new offense was beating them and in fact how to copy it.
  2. Be bold. Remove fear from the unknown – that is, change – from your mind. Try new things, even if it is just a new wrinkle on the old. One of the secrets of Walsh’s offense was that he simply moved the point of attack from behind the line of scrimmage, where the defense was concentrated, to down the filed where there was only one or two defenders at most.
  3. Desperation should not drive innovation. Don’t wait until you run out of options to try new innovations. Although he installed his offense only after losing his starting quarterback. In hindsight, the team would have been better off starting the back-up and running the new offense from the start as that system ultimately proved more successful than the traditional offense they ran before the change.
  4. Be obsessive in looking for the upside in the downside. It would be a mistake to think that Walsh thought of his new offense after their starting quarterback was hurt. In fact, it was born by watching Virgil Carter in practice and on film before he knew he had to turn the offense over to him. He new that Carter did not possess a strong enough arm to make the throws the current offense called for. Because Carter was smart, agile and accurate, Walsh started to design plays that took advantage of those skills. Of course, once he became the starter, he had to change all the plays. But because he had already started to look for the upside in his backup quarterbacks limitations, he was ready.

Cool Apps: Rediscover GOOGLE Apps!

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Yes, yes. I know. Google Apps, the search juggernaut’s super-smart, everything-rolled-into-one-for-a-nifty-little-price business solution, isn’t exactly new.

Not exactly, anyway.

For while Google Apps has been around for a few years, an announcement last week merits your attention – in fact, it merits a good long look!

Google has completely upped its game by expanding Google Apps’ capabilities exponentially. They’ve done this by launching the Google Apps Marketplace.

If you’re at all familiar with the iPhone App Store – the collection of some 200,000 small applications that run on your phone – this news will seem familiar to you.

What this new Marketplace has done is to offer products and services that integrate fully with Google Apps. From accounting and finance tools, like Freshbooks, to image editing, like Aviary, as well as payroll tools, CRM, expense reports, and analytics tools for your websites. For the most part, these tools include single sign-on (so you don’t have to log in again and again and again), as well as Google’s universal navigation.

And you can count on the number of apps in the Marketplace to continue growing as programmers vie to make their latest creations available to the millions of Google Apps users.

In effect, what Google has done is make it possible to run your entire office from any location. Where you are doesn’t really matter.

In order to use the Marketplace, of course, you have to be a Google Apps user. If you’re not, take it out for a spin; you won’t regret it. If you’re already using Google Apps, then good on ya’. Step into the Marketplace and give it a try.

“New” doesn’t always mean “best” … sometimes we just have to look at something seasoned in a new way to find something that’ll change everything.


Cool Apps: What’s The Buzz About?

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GoogleBuzzlogoDid you hear? On February 9th, Google launched its newest web-based gem: Google BUZZ.

Meant to draw on social features similar to those in Facebook and Twitter, BUZZ shares short messages (though longer than 140 characters), pictures, online videos, and feeds from RSS feeds and the like.

Accessible through Google’s popular Gmail service, BUZZ will simply look like a new part of the inbox. Once configured, feeds from users’ Twitter feeds, Picasa albums, and so on and so forth, will be delivered to your (and your followers’) BUZZ bins. In short, BUZZ is much like a “lite” version of its WAVE application, launched late last year.

It’s possible that BUZZ can be used for business; messages can be linked to geographic locations, so companies that engage that way might find it useful.

But do we really need it? Do our customers want another social site? Do they want to keep track of things on Facebook *and* Twitter *and* on BUZZ? That remains to be seen. And there’s a pretty big hiccup in its potential: you must be a Gmail subscriber to use BUZZ. It’s not very likely that most people will abandon their email service just to use something whose use isn’t yet well-defined.

BUZZ is certainly interesting enough. The social integration make it much like FriendFeed (which was purchased by Facebook in 2009). Multiple profiles can be linked and followed by BUZZ users, and much like in WAVE, users can comment on individual posts, making them more “conversation-like”. But is that really enough?

Some have decreed that BUZZ will “kill” Facebook. That seems to be a bit of a stretch, as Facebook has well over 400 million users (a number that seems to be growing exponentially).

What’s your opinion? Have you checked out BUZZ? Has Google addressed a solution to a problem that didn’t really exist?