The Next Mark Zuckerberg?
Fri, Apr 26, 2013
“Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.” – Richard Branson
“You can’t ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs
A six-year-old, gap-toothed entrepreneur impressed the crowds at Seattle Startup Weekend last summer with his business pitch: GapTooth Stickers. The youngest person to ever present at the Seattle startup event, Ashwin Gowland, explained that his stickers could be placed on anything from clothing to fruit to toys and dissolve off the products with water. “One day Mommy went to an event and put a name tag on. But when she came home she forgot to take it off and then threw it in the wash. But the sticker never came off and ruined her favourite shirt,” said Ashwin during his one-minute pitch. The boy’s business idea elicited cheers from the crowd and earned him the conference’s “Most Likely to be the Next Zuckerberg” award.” [thestar.com – May 23/12] As I’m sure you’re familiar, Mark Zuckerberg was 19 years old back in 2004 when he brought his social networking idea to reality inside his Harvard dorm room. He founded Facebook when he was 21, and has since become one of the world’s 30 richest people.Too busy crossing things off lists
What riches lie in the ordinary things and interactions you encounter every day? It’s likely that the true wealth of your business (and, thus, your life) is sitting right under your nose but that you’re too busy crossing things off lists to notice it. If I had to single out one thing that impedes most agents’ success, that would be it … the fact that instead of really looking around and up and over the tasks they perform day in and day out, they plow through their to-do list with their head down and their mind closed. What extraordinary opportunities are you missing?What extraordinary opportunities are you missing?
Have you ever spent hours trying (and failing) to find something you’ve lost only to suddenly come upon it when you go looking for something else? Why do you think that is? Well, the reason this happens is that your mind is locked when you think you know the answer. When you look for a lost item, you often find yourself searching in a closed loop in places you’re “sure” the item will be found. It’s only when you stop thinking so literally about the problem and open your mind that you’re able to really “see” what’s around you.Your mind is locked when you think you know the answer
The same thing happens with your business. Chances are you’re living in a kind of Groundhog Day pattern where you wake up each morning and run through a series of routines and then go to bed and repeat it the next day. Epiphanies are rare in this kind of rote existence. One of our members, Danielle Sampson, is a great example of how forcing yourself to look at your business with new eyes can shower you with richness. “We took your advice from the last conference on tapping into new demographics to market,” Danielle wrote to her real estate coach Todd Walters (Todd heads our Platinum group of high income earners). “We came back, found all the wedding show info happening in our city and we launched a ‘Newlywed campaign’. This past weekend we attended our first wedding show with over 1,000 brides who came through the door. We set up a newlywed booth with handouts, signage and a $200 wedding basket we used to collect and generate our leads. ‘Say I DO to Home Ownership’ was the theme we came up with to use. Our booth was a huge success. We couldn’t keep up with the demand and answering questions to anxious brides!102 Leads an Hour … Wow!
“On the ballot we qualified the brides and asked for their wedding date. For the past 48 hours our ISA’s have been calling the leads non-stop booking appointments and qualifying them, then we have been entering them into our database and are setting reminders for their wedding date. We’re going to send them a wedding card with a wedding offer on the day they get married. We also teamed up with a local mortgage company we work with regularly to split our costs and had an ‘Oxygen lounge’ in the booth to get prospects into a chair for 5 -10 minutes and educate them on buying a home to create the relationship which was a big hit at the show. The wedding show went over greater than expected for us. Here are our results from just 4 hours: Total leads generated: 409; Total leads qualified who said YES to buying in the next 6 months: 163; Total Appointments booked for this week so far since we started calling yesterday afternoon: 9; Total cost for marketing/signage and materials $1600.00 which we split with a mortgage company so it only cost us $800!” I think you’ll have to admit that this is an excellent, highly entrepreneurial, and highly profitable idea, so it won’t surprise you that Danielle’s team was named the #1 Sales Team Worldwide for Realty Executives in 2012. What other “102 leads per hour” ideas might you be missing in your own marketplace? As the saying goes, “you are who you hang out with.” Come hang out with us in Anaheim this June and I promise you’ll come back with the stuff to enable you to be the next Zuckerberg or Gowland or Sampson … and life will be good. P.S. You can test drive my ideas and systems absolutely free by signing up for Free Weekly Training which includes live weekly webinars, a monthly newsletter and priority invitations to free half day training events. This Free Weekly training will expose you to inexpensive and highly effective methods of lead generation (with no cold calling) -- what I call “Reverse Prospecting”, where qualified prospects actually hunt you down rather than the other way around, and then how to follow these leads through to maximum GCI via proprietary lead conversion and prospect presentation systems. This is the easiest way for you to find out with no risk or obligation what my system is all about and how it can help you profitably grow your real estate business and vastly improve your quality of life. JOIN MY FREE WEEKLY TRAINING PROGRAM HERE