Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | Leadership | E323

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31:07I know building trust and credibility is so important for team building and for people to follow you. What is your best advice for building trust and credibility with your team? The first thing you have to understand is loyalty is a two-way street. And loyalty starts at the top going down, not the down going up. It is your responsibility to be totally 100 % loyal to your employees. Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, gave a speech. I was sitting in the front row and he said, the customer is not always right. He said, if you have a drunk passenger who is harassing your flight attendants and being just a mess, throw them off your fucking airplane.

32:00He took the side of his employees and said, you're valued to me more than that customer is. The customer is not always right. My employees are doing their job. If they're right, we don't want that customer. Loyalty starts top down. If you're loyal to your employees, your vendors, your customers, the loyalty will be replayed. I knew that in your book, you also say you have to be fair and responsible to all your stakeholders, right? You can't just only focus on your customers. You've got to think if you've got shareholders, board members, employees, vendors, there's so many other people to care about.

32:41So I know there's a lot of priority balancing. How do you suggest we handle that? Oh, this is controversial. I think that everybody needs to be treated fair, but not equal. So if I have a good franchisee in Canyon City, Colorado, that has 15 agents, and that individual calls me and says, Dave, will you come to my Christmas party? Will you come to my New Year's grand opening? and I have to say no. I have 9 ,000 offices and I can't be there, but I can do a DVD or a hyperlink and say hi to everybody. If my biggest broker in California has 100 Remax offices and he says, can you fly out to my meeting with my agents?

33:37The answer is, hell yes. I'm sorry, I can't go to 15 agents. I can go to 2 ,000 agents. And so you have to start prioritizing the fact of everybody's valuable, but you have such limited personal time to care for the network. You have to run the business. You have to do all the things you have as an entrepreneur. And you still have to try to have friendships and personal relationships. And so fair, but not necessarily equal. Such good advice. You also highlight vulnerability as a leadership strength. So how do you suggest we be more vulnerable? It's easy. Just be who you are. If you make a mistake, admit it immediately.

34:32Don't be phony. Don't be false. Don't be superhero. Don't be Wonder Woman. Just say, hey, team, I screwed up. I made a mistake. I'm sincerely sorry I will not make the same mistake twice. And it's amazing. Your employees will be very forgiving. They don't want you to be God. They don't want you to be different than them. They want to know that you're a human being. I learned something from Howard Behar. So I interviewed Howard Behar years ago. He's the president of Starbucks, former president of Starbucks for many years. And he told me something that I'll never forget about leadership. He said, only the truth sounds like the truth.

35:13So he had a period of time where he had to lay off thousands of employees at once. And he was debating on what he should tell people. and his assistant told him, Howard, only the truth sounds like the truth. And he went into his team and he told them, we've got to lay people off because of X, Y, Z. He just told them the truth and everybody was really understanding. And I never forgot that lesson because I feel like as a leader, sometimes you just got to tell the truth and people usually will accept it and be kind about it and understand. People are incredibly kind. They like transparency. They like honesty.

35:52And the hardest thing in the world is laying people off because of the economy or whatever it might be. You're affecting their lives. You can't sugarcoat it. And I had to do layoffs twice in Remax's history. And I'm sorry. I'm a manly man. I cried both times. They knew that I hurt having to lay them off. So speaking of REMAX, let's talk about REMAX for a bit and some of the entrepreneurial things that you learned along the way. Can you tell us about how you first came up with the name of REMAX? Well, we sat around having shots of tequila, some salt and lime, and nobody wanted to call it Dave Leninger Real Estate.

36:40I thought that was pretty egotistical. And at the time, ESO had just changed the name to Exxon. They'd spent millions of dollars on this trademark, only to find out it was a foul language in a different country. But anyway, it was five letters and a couple slashes. And we sat around. We said, well, RE-MAX, that's real estate maximums. Maximum commission to the agent. Maximum service to the customer with no part-timers or beginners. maximum profit for the broker owner. And we came up with RE Max. And we looked at that and said, somebody's going to think there's a Mr. or Mrs. RE Max. We took the periods out through a slash and five Vietnam vets.

37:28So we had a red, white, and blue sign. A lot of market research went into this. Your balloon logo is one of the most recognizable logos in the world. So you, as an entrepreneur, we're really good at recognizing opportunity. Can you talk about how you disrupted the business model that was traditionally in real estate and how you disrupted it? In 1973, the traditional commission split between a real estate agent and the owner of the office was 50-50. The owner of the office used their 50 % to pay overhead, marketing, secretaries, rent, et cetera, and make a profit. The agent, they got their 50%, but they had to pay for their automobile.

38:14Nobody pays for retirement for real estate agents. Nobody pays for social security or insurance or whatever. And so in reality, real estate agent never did make 50-50. After paying their own personal expenses and stuff, they were more like, I don't know, 80-20 or 75-25. And so we looked at it and said, why not have an office like a group of doctors, lawyers, architects, or dentists that shares office space, pays their own personal expenses, and they're part of the office space, and keeps the majority for themselves? Cheaper than going into business for yourself. And the end result was, as we started the company, the split changed about 85-15.

39:01So very controversial. The industry hated it. They hated me. Today I'm an icon. But I outlived everybody because they were all in their 40s and 50s when they were trying to drive me out of business. And so as a model, we changed the entire real estate industry's commission splits. Yeah. And something else that you did differently is that your perspective of who the customer was changed. So originally the customer was the buyer, the seller. and now the customer was the agent. Can you tell us more about that? I decided that I was not in the real estate business. I was in the real estate agent business.

39:42And my job was to create an environment where real estate agents could be more successful than any place else in the world. They were in the real estate business. They handled the buyers and sellers. We stuck with that for 50 some years. It is the backbone of our company. Our average agent has twice the experience and three times the sales volume of other full-time realtors in the world, and it worked. Now, how can people outside of the real estate industry took what you did and leverage it for their industry? As we started to expand Remax from Colorado with an amazing success story after five years, and we went into various markets and we went to Atlanta and they said, well, we don't steal each other's agents down here.

40:35We're kind of genteel. And we went to Chicago and they said, you guys are cowboys. You wear cowboy clothes and blue jeans. We're sophisticated. We have coats and ties. Went to Quebec. They said, you don't even speak French. So everybody said, we're different, we're different, we're different. And as we went around the world, every country is different. We're in socialist countries, we're in communist countries, we're in democracies, we're in countries that 80 % of the countries we're in don't even have a multiple listening service or realtors, and everybody keeps saying we're different. And in every country we went to, we became incredibly successful.

41:22And the thing that's fascinating about the success was, I couldn't figure out why, with all the differences. And it finally came down to human beings have some common, commonalities, if you will, what human beings want. We want to raise our children to our moral standards and our religious beliefs, not somebody else's. We want to make more money so that we can provide elder care or child care or provide for our children. We want to do our business our way. I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, where I want to do it, how I want to do it, and with who I want to do it. So it had nothing to do with the commission split working in 110 countries.

42:08It had everything to do with the leadership concept of, I have one job in this real estate office. I'm not here to motivate you to become more successful. I can put a gun to your head and say, stand up. If you don't stand up, you're an idiot. The minute the police take me away, you never have to think about me again. My job as a leader, for any person that's listening to this podcast, your job is to create an environment where the people that work for you can achieve the level of success they want. we had 100 club 73 make a hundred thousand dollars a year which is unreal figure at that time and i couldn't figure out why in the world didn't everybody want to work that hard it took me about 10 years to figure it out and there are people who are very happy at age 60 are not going to work 18 hour days anymore they've got good clients they got referrals and they want to have time to golf and be with their grandkids.

43:11And they're happy making$60 ,000 a year. And so it finally dawned on me, this is not my responsibility to say everybody should make$100 ,000 or$200 ,000 a year. I'm supposed to create an environment where they can achieve the level of success they want, period. I love that you called that out. I literally had in quotes to say next, Our job as a leader isn't about getting everything we can from somebody. It's about creating an environment in which people can achieve as much as they want. That is so powerful. So aside from payment structure, so I know that you really changed the game in terms of the amount of commission that people make, where if they sell more, they make more.

43:54Aside from the payment structure, how are you creating an environment in which people can achieve as much as they want? If you read the book, I'd talk about leadership. And the number one most important factor of a leader is a leader sells hope. I don't care if it's Martin Luther King. He's talking to brown and white people of our children can do better. They can be equal. We can live in the same neighborhoods. We can have the same advantages. And he was nonviolent. and he tried to preach, there's hope in the future for us. If you go back to Reagan, Reagan said, make America great. The only thing Trump did was say, make America great again.

44:41Hillary said, stronger with Hillary. Nobody gave a damn. Obama had one word, hope, and he won. And so great leaders have to be optimistic, but they have to have a dream. And they have to sell to their followers that we together will have a better life together. And so as an entrepreneur, I had dozens of people tried to hire my officers away from me in the 70s and 80s and 90s, offering them twice what they could make. and they never left because we had our dream together and we had this optimism that we would change the world. And we did. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.

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50:23So I know one of your mentors was Dave Stone. and you said that his mentorship was really instrumental in your early success. What were some of the key lessons and strategies that you learned from Dave that you then carried on throughout your career? I had been licensed for six months. I had no intention of being a real estate agent. I was buying investment properties, but I got a license to maybe save the commission. And I looked around at these old people in my office. I was still in the military and they were old. I mean, some of them are 40, 50, 60 years old. And they make a deal once every three or four months.

51:05And I thought, man, I could do this. And six months into it, crew cut, haircut, 130 pounds, Volkswagen with a cracked windshield and no air conditioning in Phoenix. In the summer. And not one deal. I quit. I got my little cardboard box. My manager stood there and said, I didn't think you would ever make it. And I said, well, why the hell did you hire me? And he says, we're in the real estate business. Everybody's got a mother, a brother, a next door neighbor, and a best friend. You know, you never know when you can get a deal. I'd paid to go to Dave Stone's seminar,$25. This is, God, 1967, 68, whatever it was, Mountain Shadows Country Club in Scottsdale.

51:53I went. I sat in the front row, even though I'd quit. And he was mesmerizing. He was so smooth. He was so cool. He had a gift of gab for everything. And he was talking about how to handle objections, how to do this, how to do that. And I'm sitting there. Every break, I jumped up and grabbed his hand like an idiot. Groupie. And I said, oh, oh, my God, Mr. Stone. That's fascinating. Man, if I had your gift, I could be a success. He says, how long have you been trying? And I said, six months. And he says, how many deals have you got? And I said, none. And he says, if I were you, I'd quit. And I said, I did.

52:36But I'm going back. I'm going back to work today. I can do this. Strange world. I'm going home that night. My stupid Volkswagen with a cracked windshield, no air conditioning. me. Latino girl, probably about 20 or 21, is talking to her father, half English, half Spanish. I stopped in to get a gallon of milk for the kids. And I said, excuse me, are you talking about real estate? And she said, my father's moving to Albuquerque and we need to sell his house. But we don't know how to do that. And I looked at him and I said, senor, do you know how much a real estate commission is? And he said, no, lo, comprende or something.

53:15I don't know what he He said, I said, do you know what title insurance is? I don't know. I said, he needs me. I'm a realtor. I followed him home. I listed the house. This is terrible. $10 ,500. That house today would be$200 and some thousand. Two full price offers that night. The next morning, I'm laying in bed with my wife. Slapped her on her bottom and say, wake up. And she said, what? You're sleeping with one hell of a fine realtor, man. 100 % of my listings have sold for full price in less than two hours. That day, I took the girl and her fiancé and sold them a house. That afternoon, I sold their best friends a house.

54:01And the next morning, I sold their friends a house. So in basically 48 hours, I hadn't sold a single Anglo person a house. The girls hugged me and kissed me and said, oh, my God, my parents don't even own a house, and we now own a house. And the guys slapped me on the back and shook hands and said, hey, amigo, this is fabulous. My parents don't own a house. It was a set. I did 365 transactions part-time, still in the military, in the next 365 days. The only difference was those four customers gave me the confidence to be able to look at the next customer and say, well, I made three deals this week.

54:49The same Volkswagen with a cracked windshield, the same 135-pound combat soldier. And overnight, Stone changed my life. He gave me the confidence. I followed him. He helped me design Remax when I designed it. He gave me a 300-page manual on why it would never work and a 20-page attachment that said, but if you do this and this and this, you will. And I was very fortunate. I had this unbelievable, remarkable man that changed my life. And how did you get him to be your mentor if you were struggling? Like, what were the ways that you actually got him to be your mentor? I was so aggressive. I was just a groupie.

55:37He had to look at me and think, you idiot. But I pushed it, I pushed it, I pushed it, and ended up becoming one of the best friends of my life. I have a similar story. When I was first starting out in podcasting, I went after literally the top podcaster in my field, Jordan Harbinger, and I would just send him stuff, information that I had, showed him that I was working hard, working hard, and finally he started helping me. So that's how you have to do it. You have to show that you're really, really eager and you really, really want the help and you're willing to work hard for it. Lots of people will ask me to mentor them.

56:14And as you get older, you're very young. But as you get older, you start measuring your hours and saying what's important to me. And what's important to me is giving a hand down to help the next person get up the mountain. And so many people have been kind to me in my life. And so that becomes part of what do you want to do as a mentor? The problem with being a mentor is 9 out of 10 people will nod and take notes and smile, but they won't execute. They'll ask you for advice, and you tell them the advice, and they say, oh, that's wonderful, and they won't execute the next day. And so you get to the point where you don't want to mentor people because you're wasting my time.

57:01I prefer for people to intern for me now if they want my mentorship, because I feel like that's the way that I can teach them and it's mutually valuable. And then they can move on if they want to move on or get hired if they want to get hired. That's my preference now. Let's move on to strategy, hiring and firing. I know we don't have that much time left, but I definitely want to understand what is your strategy around hiring and firing at RE-MAX? Firing is tough. I used to brag for 38 years, not one individual had left Remax as one of my officers on their own. I didn't fire anybody. I took a seminar, can't remember where, and it was the first time you think that you ought to fire somebody is the day you should fire them.

57:52And yet, if you're a realtor or you're a salesperson or an entrepreneur, you want to be liked. And so you'll tolerate nonsense from idiots. And the day you finally have the guts to fire somebody, the next morning you get up and say, why the hell didn't I do that 10 years ago? So the problem with me was my officers traveled with me constantly. We did 200 and some speaking days a year and officers went with me. We had breakfast together, lunch together, dinner, flights together, and cocktails. And we went to each other's marriages and divorces and cancer with our parents and our funerals and whatever.

58:37It's hard when you're close friends with everybody. So I took this course and I came home to Gail and I said, we got four of these guys that I've worked with for years, and they don't have fire on the belly anymore. They feel entitled. They've been here 25 years. I don't have to work that hard. And I said, you and I still work this hard. I've got to solve this problem. She and I brainstormed and role-played, and I called each one in individually, and I said, hi, it's time for a serious conversation. I've talked to you for two years about, I don't think you've got the fire in the belly, and I don't think you care about the network like we do.

59:22And so I've made a decision. And that decision is, I can fire you and give you a two-week severance package, or you can resign, and I'll give you a one-year severance package. Which do you want? And that starts the argument of, no, no, no, no. Oh, you don't understand me. I really work hard. I said, nope, I'm sorry. My decision has been made. I'm done. This is your decision. Two weeks severance, and I fire you. Or you resign, and I'll give you your severance. All four of them took it. The next day was a company-wide meeting for the employees at headquarters, 400 people. We do the meeting. We put out the awards and talk about the updates.

1:00:13And I always said, are there any questions for me? so I'm fairly conservative. I have a very liberal left-wing Democrat in the editorial staff, and he stood up and he says, Dave, what the hell did he have on you that you didn't fire him 10 years ago? And now I'm in front of 400 people, and I said, I didn't have the personal courage to be the leader that you deserved. And that I finally realized that when I don't fire somebody that's incompetent, I hurt three groups of people. I hurt the individual because they're pigeonholed. I'm never going to promote them or give them another pay raise. I hurt the people that work for them because they know that person's an idiot.

1:01:02And I hurt myself and my shareholders because I didn't have the personal courage to face up to a friendship challenge of we were no longer a good fit together. And the room applauded. I was vulnerable. I said it was my mistake. It's my fault. And they accepted it. So when you talk about leadership concepts, firing is the most important thing you can do. If you have somebody that's abusing, nasty, just unkind to their employees, you're tolerating that. The fact that you don't make a decision is you made the decision. If you can't make the decision, fire them. You've made the decision. I'll put up with their crap.

1:01:48It's so true. It's a tough deal. That's why we get paid the big paycheck, right? And so when you talk about leadership, that's the hardest thing. Hiring, you should hire very, very slow and fire very, very fast. Yeah, with hiring, I love something that you mentioned in the book about hiring salespeople that I just wanted to touch on before we go. You said to hire both hunters and farmers, which I love. So tell us about that. In the sales field, there are hunters and farmers. The hunters live for the kill. They want to go out, kill something, put it over their shoulder, bring it back to the teepee, and put it on the ground and say, hey, let's have some food.

1:02:35And they want to go out and hunt again. Farmers, they are slow, methodical. They want to build relationships. They want a lifetime experience with this individual. You need both salespeople. You need farmers that will have the patience to build relationships over periods and periods of years. But you still gotta have the hunters that can go out and score the kill. Dave, this was such an awesome conversation. I feel like we learned so much about your own personal entrepreneurship journey and as well as your leadership principles and everything like that. I always end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests.

1:03:16And this can be outside of everything that we talked about today. Just answer it from your heart. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? I think the most actionable thing is you have to be a lifelong learner. One of the biggest deficiencies I've seen in many of the officers I've hired is they got their college degree. They know it all. They don't buy a book. If they buy a book, it's fiction. And they don't continue to study and find out, how do I build my business? How do I build my life? That's the most important aspect of the most successful people I've mentored are sponges.

1:03:59They will learn from everybody, everything they can, and they will ask you. And I know you're a huge, huge reader. So what recommendations do you have in terms of books that us entrepreneurs read? The old classic is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It is tried. It's tired. Half the book is worthless. The first half is pretty darn good. I think the best book out there is Success Principles by Jack Canfield. And it is a fabulous book. It's big. It's 600, 700 pages. But it's three to four page chapters that you can pick and choose what you want to learn from. It's very motivational. The other thing is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.

1:04:50and it is little steps done repeatedly over years gives you amazing results. And the final one would be Kaizen. And that's the Japanese concept of 1 % improvement of 100 things every day and not 100 % improvement once a year. I'm going to make it my mission to read all four of those books by the end of the year. Thanks to you. And what would you say, this is the last and final question, what is your secret to profiting in life? Profiting in life is what is your goal? And so if your goal was to reach 65 and retire and go fishing, then you've been successful. I have an interesting company right now.

1:05:42It's called Porta Subs. It's a sub sandwich company. the highest, best quality sub sandwich in the world. It's based really in Nevada with a couple of adjoining states. And I bought it from the guy that retired, but I'm developing it very rapidly. And regional developer model, we've got 20-some regions sold. We're going to expand. We'll be worldwide in no time at all. The thing that was fascinating to me about it was in the real estate business, I changed, I should say Gail and I changed the world because we hired women. And in 73, that was not popular. The part-time housewife was like, well, they're not serious about the business.

1:06:29They're taking jobs away from a white man, all of the crap. It was an old white man's, white haired deal. So we changed a lot of lives, but we changed it with women. Eventually, we changed it multicultural as we became big and successful. Porta Subs is amazing. It's much less expensive to start a sub sandwich shop than it is to start a McDonald's for$10 million. And it is a chance for multiculturals to get their foot into private ownership of an enterprise. And so 65 % of our franchisees are multicultural. In most cases, they're the first person in the family to own a business. And it's been around 50 years.

1:07:19And so we have multicultural people whose children are the first children in their family to go to college and are now taking over the business. And so to me, entrepreneurship is about getting a chance to get your foot in the door. And so a lot of times, the first generation are immigrants. They may be a teacher or a doctor in a foreign country, but they can't do that here. And so they become a janitor or whatever, or carpenter. Second generation usually is one of the trades. And the third generation are small business owners that are hiring the trades. It is a wonderful evolution of people having a chance to build family wealth.

1:08:04Well, Dave, thank you so much. I feel like you gave so much information, your wealth of knowledge. I'm so happy that you're giving back and building this legacy. Your book was so wonderful. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? DaveLineger.com. You can follow me along there. There's all kinds of things like God knows what, Facebook, Instagram, etc., etc. But it's a pleasure. to be able to give back and maybe help the next person one more step up. Thank you so much, Dave. You're a delight. Thank you so much.

1:08:41Yeah, Pam, I really am blessed to have this job. I love my job because it's so amazing to speak with true business legends like Dave Linegar. I got to hear the story behind a company like Remax, how it got its start, how it scaled, and how it's turned itself into an iconic brand. Dave has lived and breathed being an entrepreneur for decades now and has experienced the highs and the lows that go with that. I loved hearing the question he likes to ask other entrepreneurs when he's considering to invest in their company. Why are you starting this business? It's a simple question, but it's an answer that can tell you everything you need to know about somebody's motivations, their drive, and whether they have a chance at succeeding.

1:09:24Like Simon Sinek always says, what's your why? Dave also knows a few things about when and when not to take feedback as a leader. Be willing to accept criticism, but also be strong enough to believe in yourself and discard feedback that's not helpful. Dave also learned the hard way why sometimes you have to fire a low-performing employee. If you don't, you're hurting three groups of people. That employee who you will never promote, the people who work with them and who know that that person can't do their job and so it brings them down. And finally, yourself and your company because their continued presence at your company shows you that you don't have the courage to make a tough decision.

1:10:05And that will definitely impact your confidence. After all, leadership, as Dave put it, is really the impact that you have on others. It's not about getting everything that you want. It's about creating an environment in which others can achieve what they want. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting. If you want to have an impact on others by sharing some of these leadership lessons that you learned today on the podcast, then please share this episode with somebody who could use it. Spread this podcast by word of mouth. And if you did enjoy this show and you learned something, then take a couple minutes and drop us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

1:10:45Guys, I'm not lying when I say that I check my reviews every day. This is a platform that does not have two-way communication. It's not like social media where you guys can DM me or comment. The only way that I know that you guys are really listening and appreciating the show is by writing me a review. I check them out all the time. I wanna know the good, I wanna know the bad. Tell me what you think about the show. And if you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, you can find me on YouTube. Just look up the show, Young and Profiting. You'll find all of our episodes on there. If you want to find me on Instagram, it's yapwithhala, Y-A-P with halha, or LinkedIn, search my name, it's halataha.

1:11:23And I, of course, want to take a minute to shout out my amazing production team. Thank you guys so much for all your hard work, all your dedication. You make the show what it is. This is your host, halataha, aka the podcast princess, signing off.

1:11:45You