Twinkies Back from the Dead
Wed, May 15, 2013
“Life is like a Twinkie, we all want the fluffy golden outside but it's the cream filling that really matters.” -- Tom Brady
“I'm not going to die glamorously. I'll probably be eating a Twinkie, take a bite, and fall over.” -- Billy Corgan
Six months ago we all heard the uproar about Hostess, makers of the famous Twinkie, going the way of the dodo. “Weighed down by management turmoil, rising labor costs and Americans' changing tastes, the company is making its second trip through Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring. Hostess shut down its three dozen plants late last week after it said the strike by the bakers union hurt its ability to maintain normal production. The union says the company's demise was the result of years of mismanagement, however, and that workers have already given steep concessions over the years.” [The Associated Press – Nov 20/12] Since then, Twinkies have come back from the dead. A Save the Twinkies facebook page was launched (www.facebook.com/SaveTheTwinkie ), as was a White House petition appealing President Obama to nationalize the "Twinkie industry" in order to save the popular junk food from possible extinction. Sheesh. Well, for Twinkies, the brief national nightmare recently ended. “Hostess Brands, the now bankrupt owner of the cream-filled confections, agreed on Tuesday to sell the snacks — along with Ho Hos, Sno Balls and Dolly Madison Zingers — to two investment firms with a shared history of corporate turnarounds. As recently as Tuesday, sellers on eBay were seeking to fetch as much as $250,000 for two boxes of Twinkies. The sale will mean that Twinkies, born more than 83 years ago in an Illinois industrial kitchen, will live on, having survived wars, recessions and the South Beach and Dukan diets. The new owners will be Apollo Global Management and Metropoulos & Company, which owns Pabst Blue Ribbon and Vlasic pickles. C. Dean Metropoulos, the food industry veteran who leads the firm that bears his name, is expected to become the chief executive of the snack business.” [dealbook.nytimes.com -- Mar 12, 2013] Okay, Twinkies aside, this kind of plucked-from-the-flames, yanked-from-the-jaws-of-death fairy tale ending is rare. Twinkies are one thing. You and your career are another. There are always agents who will put blame for the fragility of their businesses on the havoc the last few years has wrought, but if they were honest in their appraisal, they’d have to admit that while the recession may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, the beginning of the end started long before financial indicators started to play nasty. Like Hostess, they’d have to fess up to the fact that their demise was the result of years of mismanagement. You’ve all probably heard the boiling frog story about what would happen if a frog were slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually.It’s tough to look at your business from the thousand foot level because most agents are too busy trudging through each day with an ant’s eye view. You get up and tackle your to do list each day, chase all the problems, put out all the fires and your business is still there when you slump home after dark. And then you do it all over again the next morning and it doesn't look so different from the day before, and tomorrow looks much like yesterday. Except one day you wake up and it’s just not working anymore and you can’t figure out why.“The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually”
The “why” is the boiling frog and Hostess’s years of mismanagement. That’s the funny thing about change … it has to start somewhere. And it’s often uncomfortable. And it takes hard work. It’s not enough to raise your hand and hope someone can hand you a magic pill that will make it all better overnight. It was frustrating for me in my own business to hear my agents complain that “the leads are no good”. I was able to prove to them that there was nothing wrong with the leads, the problem was with their follow up. Once I was able to get them properly using my follow up system, and delivering the Universal Call Back script to the letter, the leads “magically” improved for them.“Except one day you wake up and it’s just not working anymore and you can’t figure out why.”
You've heard me say that before, but it’s the same with my system. There are always some agents who quit my program, complaining that the system just isn’t working for them. That’s pretty tough to justify in the face of the huge success it gives to agents who actually push themselves out of their comfort zone and commit to implementing the tools we give them. A real estate coach can only do so much for you. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. In January of 2010, Tim and Rosangela Johnson of Florida wrote us an email with the subject line “It’s all Doom and Gloom”. They weren’t giving up, but they were very close to doing so. And it wasn’t just my system they were thinking of quitting, they were on the verge of leaving the business altogether. Fast forward to last Fall, and Tim and Rosangela just got back from an extended European vacation with all their family … one of many vacations they’ve been able to guiltlessly indulge in without it affecting their business. In a recent email Tim told us that their “Real Estate business paid us (profit!) $30k last month. Title and Loss Mit another $20k. So we are making 60-70% MORE on every deal than if we just had a regular real estate business. Best of all we have great people in position at these companies which allows them to run (somewhat) without us. Allowing us to take lots of vacations, including 3 weeks in Europe with our entire family!!” Elsewhere in his email, Tim confesses “I’m not saying this was easy. Far from it!” Some of their plans took longer to implement and pay out than they thought; other things didn’t work out as planned, but they stuck with it and the pay out for them has been huge. I reached that doom and gloom point in my own career just like Tim and Rosangela did and, like them, I decided I wasn’t going to get boiled alive. It took some work and, as Tim also points out, a “leap of faith” to keep going, but the commonality you’ll find amongst those who go on to enjoy success is that failure is not an option. It is not too late to turn around the years of mismanagement in your business. My Quantum Leap system is a blueprint for your success; a step by step instruction manual that will show you how to jump out of that pot of boiling water and on to fame and fortune. But you have to follow the instructions; otherwise you might find yourself going the way of the Twinkie … and it’s unlikely some corporate giant is going to come along and make it all better for you. 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“the leads 'magically' improved for them.”