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Cool Apps: Your Email Needs a Personal Assistant

By John Thompson | February 3rd, 2012 0 Comments

Email. It’s hard to believe that at one point it was considered a real breakthrough in human productivity – a real advancement. Sure, it makes so much possible for so many people. But the reality is that it has become a major time suck for many of us. Ever let your inbox go for three days? It’s almost impossible to catch back up.

With all its utility, email can come back to bite you. Getting buried often means forgetting to follow up. Reading emails on your mobile while waiting in line for your morning latte often means reading and forgetting to reply when you have time later.

Don’t let this happen to you. Bring back the magic of email and check out a new app called Contactually.

Contactually is like a personal assistant who handles your email follow ups. It automatically prompts you to take action with the people in your network according to groups and time schedules that it and you set up. It even syncs with all the contact info in your CRM.

The service connects directly with your email program, and sends you daily messages saying that you need to follow up with these specific people today. When you first set up the service, it notes who you contact, how frequently you email them and how quickly you respond to people. Then Contactually puts them into buckets based on commonalities. (You can also organize the buckets yourself.)

Basically, you get a reminder email when Contactually sees that you haven’t reached out to an important contact in awhile. This can be tremendously useful in your prospecting efforts. Most people only buy and/or sell a house once every seven or so years, and regular check-ins can be easy to let slip. Contactually does the thinking for you and gives a nudge when the right amount of time has passed.

Contactually works with Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Google Apps right now. The company expects to support POP3 and Microsoft Exchange in the future. You can get a free trial at https://www.contactually.com/.

Don’t Jump the Gun

By Gino Blefari | February 2nd, 2012 0 Comments

“You may not find what you were looking for, but you find something else equally important.” – Robert Noyce

Last week we discussed the overview of Chapter 3 from the book Great by Choice. This week I would like to move onto Chapter 4: Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs.

Imagine yourself at sea with an enemy ship approaching. You have two choices on how to attack; 1) Fire one giant cannonball in the general direction of the enemy ship and hope it hits (using up all of your gunpowder in the process) , or 2) fire a few bullets to align your target first, and then follow up with a cannonball for a perfect shot. Although the first option may seem enticing, the second allows you to adjust accordingly for a more accurate and successful blast.

Before Amgen made their success in Erythropoietin (EPO), they fired lots of bullets (an empirical test aimed at learning what works and that meets three criteria: low cost, low risk, and low distraction) to figure out what would work. Once they saw some promise in EPO, they added more gunpowder (more specific testing) and eventually shot a cannonball to execute it. EPO became the first super-blockbuster bioengineered product in history. If Amgen had not tested multiple avenues prior to launching, they would not be the name we know today. Amgen could have easily fired a cannonball with the first idea they had resulting in time and money blown to pieces.

The challenge is not getting ahead of oneself. Problems arise when companies start firing cannonballs to soon. PSA launched a cannonball called “Fly-Drive-Sleep” which sounds like a great concept, and it could have been if PSA had fired a series of bullets in a few areas by buying one hotel and partnering with a local rental car company. Instead, they bought and leased 25 hotels and bought a rental company. The program went too big too fast generating losses for years to come. The problem was there was no test; no way to work out the kinks and try other models. PSA had one shot to win it all or lose it and they lost it.

Of course even 10Xers make mistakes firing cannonballs before they’re ready for it. The difference is instead of trying to recover by firing another cannonball which can make things worse; they take it as a learning opportunity and start over, only firing another cannonball when it has been calibrated. A calibrated cannonball has confirmation based on actual experience. The other option would be an uncalibrated cannonball which would mean placing a big bet without empirical validation.

What is the point of all of this? Well, no one can predict the future. If we knew which bullets would stick, we would just execute those. This is why firing multiple bullets is so important. It gives more validation of an idea allowing us to move forward with a more educated and formulated concept ultimately resulting in more success.

I have experienced this process first hand through the development of our insurance partner, Cause Insurance, a full service, “cause driven” insurance brokerage firm with a philanthropic focus. They provide the best insurance at competitive pricing while giving up to 20% of their commissions earned to the charity of the clients’ choice. Just think, if all 2,000 Intero agents were set up with Cause Insurance they would not only be likely to save money and get better insurance coverage, they could potentially raise up to $200,000 for The Intero Foundation just this year and every year after that on renewal. Of course, Cause Insurance couldn’t just pop up and be successful; they have fired many bullets, realigned, and shot again. These bullets will continue to be shot until they are ready to shoot a calibrated cannonball with the firm evidence of success.

The following are the key points found at the end of Chapter 4 to help you better understand the effectiveness and importance of firing bullets, then cannonballs:

A “Fire bullet, then cannonballs” approach better explains the success of 10X companies than big-leap innovations and predictive genius.
A bullet is a low-cost, low-risk, and low-distraction test or experiment. 10Xers use bullets to empirically validate what will actually work. Based on that empirical validation, they then concentrate their resources to fire a cannonball, enabling large returns from concentrated bets.
Our 10X cases fired a significant number of bullets that never hit anything. They didn’t know ahead of time which bullets would hit or be successful.
10Xers periodically made the mistake of firing an uncalibrated cannonball, but they tended to self-correct quickly. The comparison cases were more likely to try to fix their mistakes by firing yet another uncalibrated cannonball, compounding their problems.
The idea is not to choose between bullets or cannonballs but to fire bullets first, then fire cannonballs.

Which of the following behaviors do you most need to increase?

Firing enough bullets
Resisting the temptation to fire uncalibrated cannonballs
Committing, by converting bullets into cannonballs once you have empirical validation

Reference: Great by Choice by Jim Collins

Thoughts on Leadership: Stop Fighting Change

By Gino Blefari | September 22nd, 2011 0 Comments

Successful leadership requires many skills, but one of the most important is learning how to deal with change. Change is a funny thing. We all know it is inevitable, but we often resist it. Great leaders, however, look at change and embrace it. They understand that change, though scary and stressful, creates opportunities. Change can offer a challenge to be more creative, flexible and strategic.

When thinking about change, I often turn to Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. Mike Ferry originally introduced me to his inspiring leadership traits. Welch is one of the most well known “big businessmen” of his generation and offers a lot of insight into how successful leaders deal with change. Welch is also interesting to me because when he first joined GE in 1960, he worked as a junior engineer in my hometown of Pittsfield, Mass., making $10,500 a year.

Many may not know this, but Welch was almost fired from GE because he once blew the roof off the factory. Then after a year of hard work, he was not happy with the $1,000 raise he was offered. He felt unappreciated and dissatisfied with GE’s strict bureaucracy after learning that everyone in his department received the same $1,000 raise. He almost quit GE at the time, but was talked out of it by a higher-level supervisor.

Welch went on to be named vice president of GE in 1972. He moved his way up the ranks and eventually was named CEO in 1981. As CEO, he took apart a lot of the earlier management team put together by his predecessor, creating real change from day one.

I model my leadership style after Welch because he focused on the principle, “Embrace change; don’t fear it.” Why fear something you know will happen again and again? That’s no way to live, and definitely no way to run a business.

Change keeps everyone alert and on their toes. It’s the reality of business. Welch was able to turn a struggling, slow-moving corporate giant into a dynamic and growing company. The goal may be the same, never-ending growth but he said that the tools and methods were constantly changing. He encouraged his colleagues to never stop thinking about the need for change. Only through “massive change” could G.E. win, something Welch firmly believed in.

The leaders of many organizations refuse to see the handwriting on the wall and just hope that things will get better. Yet, wishful thinking is no substitute for a strategic plan. Lasting leaders not only come up with real solutions and partnerships, but they also constantly motivate and inspire team members to get past their fears of change and rise to the challenge.

Change isn’t easy. We all seek stability and predictability. But today more than ever change keeps hitting us in the face just when we think we can afford to get comfortable. So stop fighting change. It is no use and complaining isn’t a practical option.

Ask yourself: How are YOU leading your team as well as yourself and facing the constant changes in the “maze” of your life?

The following are each great books written by Welch that I recommend all leaders read for inspiration and insight: “Straight from the Gut,” “Winning, Jack Welch and the GE Way,” “Jack Welch and the 4 E’s of Leadership,” “29 Leadership Secrets,” and “Jack Welch Speaks: Wit and Wisdom from the World’s Greatest Business Leader.”

Thoughts on Leadership: How to Build Trust in Your Leadership

By Gino Blefari | September 15th, 2011 0 Comments

If people don’t trust you, why would they ever follow you? The first critical job of any leader is to inspire trust. People simply won’t recognize you as their leader unless they trust you. And that trust has to run across intellect, ethics and morals.

Trust is confidence born of two dimensions: character and competence. Character includes your integrity, motive and intent with people. Competence includes your capabilities, skills, results and track record. Both dimensions are vital.

Leadership and trust go hand-in-hand. Whether you are a minister or a corporate CEO, you have to work to build that trust. It’s not just implied. How do you do that? The following are 13 common behaviors of trusted leaders around the world that build and maintain trust from others.

Talk straight
Demonstrate respect
Create transparency
Right wrongs
Show loyalty
Deliver results
Get better
Confront reality
Clarify expectation
Practice accountability
Listen first
Keep commitments
Extend trust

When you adopt these ways of behaving, it’s like making deposits into a “trust account” of another party. Remember that the 13 behaviors always need to be balanced by each other and that any behavior pushed to the extreme can become a weakness.

Depending on your roles and responsibilities, you may have more or less influence on others. However, you can always have extraordinary influence on your starting points:

Self-Trust - the confidence you have in yourself and in your ability to set and achieve goals, to keep commitments, to walk your talk, and also with your ability to inspire trust in others.

Relationship Trust – how to establish and increase the trust accounts we have with others.

The job of a leader is to go first, to extend trust first. Not a blind trust without expectations and accountability, but rather a “smart trust” with clear expectations and strong accountability built into the process. The best leaders always lead with a decided tendency to trust, as opposed to a tendency not to trust. As Craig Weatherup, former CEO of PepsiCo said, “Trust cannot become a performance multiplier unless the leader is prepared to go first.”

The best leaders recognize that trust impacts us 24/7, 365 days a year. It supports and affects the quality of every relationship, every communication, every work project, every business venture, and every effort in which we are engaged. It changes the quality of every present moment and alters the course and outcome of every future moment of our lives – both personally and professionally. I am convinced that in every situation, nothing is as fast as the speed of trust.

Thoughts on Leadership: What’s the Most Critical Quality of Today’s Leader? Creativity

By Gino Blefari | September 8th, 2011 0 Comments

If you’ve ever thought that creativity wasn’t necessary in the realm of leadership, think again. Creativity is critical to leadership success. It is a lifeline that renews, restores and inspires. Creativity can be used to build teams, enrich people and solve problems.

In fact, corporations need creative leaders to thrive. They need visionaries who act less as commanders and more as coaches, less as managers and more as facilitators, and who foster self-respect instead of just demanding it from others.

Creativity is what enables successful leaders to meet new challenges, and to recognize and pursue new opportunities through bold innovations.

Creative leadership that drives innovation and growth in this economy requires eight key qualities of a leader:

The leader must have a vision for the organization.
The leader must have the passion to transform that vision into action.
The leader must be able to travel into an unexplored path.
The leader must know how to manage both success and failure.
The leader must have the courage to make decisions.
The leader should have nobility in management.
Every action of the leader should be transparent.
The leader must work with integrity and succeed with integrity.

Leaders drive change and lead people in the pursuit of a vision. This means that often times, you’ll face the challenge of venturing into the unknown and the unfamiliar. This requires adjustment and the ability to respond to unexpected situations.

You could argue that creativity is actually the most important quality a leader needs to succeed in business today – outweighing even integrity and global thinking. According to a study done in 2010, about 60% of CEOs polled cited creativity as the most important leadership quality, compared with 52% for integrity and 35% for global thinking. Creative leaders are also 81% more likely to rate innovation as a crucial capability.

Whether you view yourself as a creative person or not, it is a skill that can be learned.

Creativity and innovation are not mysterious forces over which leaders have no control. Progressive leadership can and does create a climate that encourages creativity and innovation.

If you want to become a more confident and successful leader and improve your leadership skills and results, including your creativity, now is the time to take advantage.

Thoughts on Leadership: The Importance of Planning Ahead

By Gino Blefari | August 11th, 2011 0 Comments

Have you ever been in this situation? You rush out the door because you’re late for a morning meeting. You didn’t bother to take your time and realize whether you had all the materials you needed for the meeting. Halfway to your meeting it hits you that you forgot something so you drive back to your house to get it. You’re now even later than you were to begin with. If you’d taken just a few minutes to look around and check before running out the door, you could’ve saved yourself some time and trouble.

As Rick Pitino wrote in his motivational self-help book Success is a Choice, “What you should be doing is arriving at work a half hour early and getting all of your social conversations out of the way, getting your newspaper read, and getting your coffee poured, so that when the workday starts you are ready.” And if you do have to go back home for something you forgot, you’d actually be on time because you already planned to be on time.

There’s a great leadership lesson here – the importance of planning ahead. In his book, Start With Why, Simon Sinek also discusses a story that shows the importance and benefits of planning ahead for success from the very beginning:

A group of American car executives visited a Japanese automobile assembly line. They watched the cars go through the assembly line, which all seemed routine, but were confused by the process at the end of the line when the doors were put on the hinges of the cars. The Japanese process seemed to be missing a critical part. In the United States, a worker was hired to tap the edges of the car door with a rubber mallet to make sure that they fit perfectly. The Japanese assembly line, however, had no such worker or machine to ensure that the door fit.

Puzzled, the American executives asked the nearest Japanese worker how they made sure that the doors fit perfectly. The man replied, “We make sure it fits when we design it.” Not only was the Japanese process more efficient, but Japanese car doors last longer and are more structurally sound in accidents compared to American doors. Why? It’s simple: the Japanese engineered the outcome they wanted from the beginning of the process.

Many leaders make the mistake of structuring their organization how the Americans’ structure their car assembly line. They forget to base all their actions, from the beginning, on the original intention. Instead, they tend to focus on the short term. When something goes wrong, they provide their followers with several short-term tactics that would not be necessary if they had simply had the final goal in mind during the whole process.

If the American automakers had designed doors to fit from the very beginning, they wouldn’t need to worry about having a mallet or an extra employee and step in the assembly line to tap the door into place.

We can learn a very valuable lesson from the Japanese assembly line – one that applies not only to business, but also to life in general. We need to realize the importance of our long-term goals and keep them in mind with everything that we do. If we stop taking shortcuts and making short-term solutions, we will actually save ourselves time, stress and in some cases, (such as the assembly line) money!

Thoughts on Leadership: Billy Beane’s Leadership Lessons

By Gino Blefari | August 4th, 2011 0 Comments

With the movie coming out next month, I re-read Michael Lewis’ book “Moneyball,” (my second go round) – a remarkable depiction of Billy Beane’s unique leadership of the Oakland A’s.

Beane was a natural. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, he excelled at every sport he tried. Stanford University attempted to recruit him on a joint baseball-football scholarship, but Beane rejected the offer fearing a football injury would threaten his baseball career. Beane signed with the New York Mets. It was 1980.

As a major league player, Beane struggled. Over his ten year career as a player, he never achieved the promise that seemed so attainable to him. In 1990, Beane was recruited by the A’s general manager Sandy Alderson and became an advance talent scout.

His job, find the kids that will one day make the A’s a winning team.

And this is where the story truly begins.

By 2002, and under Beane’s leadership, the Oakland A’s became one of the most winningest teams in baseball, finishing first in the American League’s Western Division. But this stat was dwarfed by one far more impressive – Beane did this with the lowest player payroll of any major league baseball team.

Beane wasn’t cheap. He was smart.

When Beane scouted, he didn’t look for the star recruit with the most home runs or highest batting average; instead, he wanted players with the highest on-base percentage. Players who did what it took to win day in and day out.

Beane taught us the importance of a balanced team. What makes a team successful is not necessarily having the star player, producer or agent, but having a group of people who are all capable of doing what it takes to win or succeed. Having a wide range of skills and talents on your team is critical. Does your team have all the skills it takes to succeed? If not, what can you do to change that? Training? Recruiting?

The second critical part of the team is that everyone is in sync. A team is the sum of its parts. If people on a team aren’t working for the same goal and aren’t willing to help each other out at their own expense, then the team isn’t functioning to its full capability. Think about when you played a team sport as a child. Your goal was to win and you did everything in your power to accomplish that. Most likely you weren’t concerned with making yourself look the best at the expense of your other teammates and it would never cross your mind to do something that benefited you at the expense of winning the game. A good team player makes sacrifices and it pays off.

So stop worrying about being #1 and start focusing on your goal and how you can most efficiently and effectively accomplish it. Success will follow!

Thoughts on Leadership: Passion, Martin Luther King Jr., and Leadership Success

By Gino Blefari | July 28th, 2011 0 Comments

What is it about leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. that makes us remember and honor them for generations? What made him stand out from all the great orators of his day who shared his vision? What is it that tipped him from greatness to legends?

He, like other leaders share one thing in common: their amazing ability to inspire those around them.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at leaders whose inspiration and roots in the why of what they were trying to do led them to success. Like the Wright brothers and Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King Jr. was not alone in his quest at the time. There were others preaching about civil rights and spreading a similar message.

Simon Sinek discusses King’s leadership success in his book, “Start With Why.” In his book, he cites the reason leaders like King achieve phenomenal success tying back to a simple “golden rule” that he subscribed to that made him different than everyone else.

While most leaders or companies communicate from the perspective of what they do, people like Dr. King communicate around why they do it. They start with a belief. Everything they do and every way they act is built around it. Rather than selling a product they sell a belief which creates deeper, more meaningful connections with people.

Sinek even says that it’s not a person’s skill or opportunity that creates this type of success; it’s the combination of other characteristics that make up a great leader.

Great leaders:

Inspire people to act
Give people a sense of purpose or belonging
Are followed by people whom they have inspired, not swayed

A leader is nothing without followers. You can judge a great leader by how his or her people act. Great leaders inspire people to:

Have deep personal motivation to act
Be less likely to be swayed by incentives
Be willing to pay a premium or endure inconvenience, even personal suffering
Act for the good of the whole because they want to, not because they have to

I hope from this series you have learned that in order to be a great leader you do not need money or fame, the highest skills or best connections, you just need the right intentions and a lot of passion. If you find those things, people will follow you and truly be inspired to act.

Cool Apps: Never Miss a Crucial Follow-Up with FollowUp.cc

By John Thompson | July 22nd, 2011 2 Comments

Many times in real estate sales, your livelihood depends on the follow-up. How many times have you witnessed a deal that never would’ve closed had you not followed up like an obsessed maniac? That’s just the reality of working with transactions that involve so many hands, and so many signatures.

But why risk missing that crucial follow-up that keeps your transactions moving? Persistence is an extremely powerful tool that makes things happen amazingly for your clients. And now you can trigger those follow-ups with a simple Gmail plug-in called FollowUp.cc.

Sweet, how does it work?

Visit FollowUp.cc’s website and sign up for the plugin. Once it’s all hooked up (really, there’s no wizardry beyond providing your email address, password and agreeing to a few things), the plug-in allows you to add a specific email address to an email’s CC field to determine how long to wait to send a follow-up email to anyone who is copied on the email. How does that work? Well, if you want a follow-up on July 30, you’d create an address jul30@followup.cc. If you wanted a follow-up in one week, you’d create 1w@followup.cc. The app creator provides a complete list of examples here.

FollowUp.cc also integrates with Google calendars and Salesforce for even more follow-up madness.

What’s it cost?

You can sign up for the free option, which allows you to schedule 25 follow-up reminders per month. Paid versions range from $5 per month for 100 reminders to $15 per month for 1,000 reminders.

Don’t use Gmail? Unfortunately, this week’s Cool App only works for Gmail or Google Apps users. Sorry folks. I did write about an alternative app called Boomerang that offers similar functionality back in December. Boomerang works with Gmail or Outlook. Check out that Cool Apps article here.

Gino on success

Intero CEO Gino Blefari created the fastest growing company in the history of real estate. Now he's sharing the secrets behind his success.

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Pat: The issues go well beyond a licensed place of business. One area in particular isHomeowners insurance. Without...

john thompson: Thank Chris for the contact and the notification of what more FollowUp can do! We will get another...

Chris: Hi John, Chris here from FollowUp.cc. Our service is actually not a Gmail plugin at all, it literally works as...

Chris Moles: Great question. Thank you for posting. This statement is product of my personal interpretation of...

John Thompson: Thanks for connecting with us Chris! We’re more than happy to share the news about your app,...
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