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

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How do you want to change the world? Why are you so passionate about this business that you're starting.

What's your advice to leaders to get better at receiving feedback, no matter who it's from?

Ignore it. Everybody has an opinion. That doesn't mean everybody is right. Loyalty is a two-way street. And loyalty starts at the top going down, not the down, going up. Your job is to create an environment where the people that work for you can achieve the level of success they want. The number one most important factor of a leader is a leader sells hope.

What does success mean to you?

The best definition I have ever heard of success is...

Young and Profiters, welcome back to the show. And today we have a true real estate icon joining us, Dave Linegar. Dave Linegar is the co founder of RE/MX, which he co-founded with his wife, Gail, in 1973. Re/max is now one of the largest real estate franchises to have ever existed, and he's got over 8,000 offices, 125,000 sales agents. He's done an incredible job leading this organization over the past five decades. Dave is no longer the CEO at RE/MAX, but he still holds a leadership position as chairman, and he was CEO for 45 years plus. Dave is going to tell us all about his leadership principles. He's got a new book called Perfect Ten, which we're going to be discussing. So without further delay, here's my conversation with the real estate mogul, Dave Linegar. Dave, welcome to Young and Profiting guest.

Hey, Hauw. Thank you very much. It's nice to join you today.

I'm really looking forward to this interview because we are speaking right now to a real estate legend. You have built a remarkable legacy in the real estate industry. You're the co founder of RE/MAX It's one of the largest real estate franchises in the world. You led that company for 45 years plus as CEO. You're still involved 50 years later. That's a long time in leadership. My first question to you is how your leadership style has evolved over the years? Because I could imagine with all that experience and so many years that it's evolved several times. That's my warm-up question to you. How has your leadership style evolved?

I was very young when I tried to go to college. I was just barely 17. I wasn't disciplined. My mommy and daddy weren't there to tell me to study every night, and I failed. Not failed because Because I was stupid. My ACT scores are out of the world. I was undisciplined. I didn't have the maturity that I needed. I finally gave up on this college route and ended up joining the United States Air Force and went to Vietnam. I spent six years in the Air Force. It bought me six years to mature as a young man. Everybody knows young women, they're pretty mature at 18. And young men, sometimes it takes them an extra 10 or 20 or 30 years to get there. And that bought me the time to mature enough to where I knew where I wanted to go.

You actually started your career and you started as an entrepreneur before you even had a college degree. You didn't have a college degree or a management degree. Did you have some level of imposter syndrome before you started RE/MAX because of this?

No, I was so confident in my abilities being a combat vet that I just felt I could bull my way through the China closet and we'd be okay. The thing that was the defining moment was I realized I was not sophisticated. I did not have management experience to speak of. And I looked for an administrative vice president. By the way, they were all women. I interviewed 27 people. I said no to 27, and the 28th was magic. It was a woman by the name of Gail Maine. She was a new bride, trailing spouse, followed her husband to made DNF stores from St. Louis, where she had had her college and her management experience, and he brought her to Denver. She really wasn't serious about being an administrative vice president, but I told her, I said, Look, she was charismatic, she was confident, she was well poised. I said, I don't know how to run a real estate business. I can be a sales manager, I can be a trainer, but I need somebody that could find office space, rent it, buy furniture, hire a secretary, and bookkeepers and receptionists and run the company. And I got lucky.

I was so lucky. She said yes. I told her I was going to build the biggest real estate company in history, and she very naively believed And so fast forward 10 years, she ran the business. I was on the road selling franchises, opening offices, expanding the company, and we both grew together. But we implemented each other's abilities and lack of abilities. And so I'm the super salesman. She was a super leader, and she did end up becoming CEO of the company. We were romantically involved for 10 years. At the end of 10 years, every officer I had had become divorced. We fell in love with this crazy mistress called Remax that, Hey, stand on a stage in front of a thousand, 10,000 people, and it's mesmerizing. It was just natural that we had no friends outside the company. She and I became incredibly close. I have to tell you, 51 years is my partner, 41 years is my wife, and she was awesome. We made the perfect pair complimenting each other.

I love that story, and I love to hear how you were able to create a successful business with your partner. And I love to hear that it actually started as a business relationship and evolved into something more fulfilling and romantic. So I'm going to get to hiring later on in the interview, but first I want to focus on your leadership management style. When you first started at RE/MAX, how are you as a leader compared to how you are as a leader now?

Unfortunately, I was stubborn. I was too aggressive, and I thought I had all the answers in the world. And fast forward 50 years of growing up and maturing and figuring it out is I look back on those days and think, Oh, my God, how the hell did we succeed? And in essence, I am the direct result of people, mentors, managers, leaders, books, seminars of trying to find my way to success. And I was blessed with the most amazing group of people around me that when I was failing the first two or three years, I sat down and I said, I'm just going up. I know I'm not doing a good job. What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? And realtors will tell you the truth. Our managers of our offices that Gail and I started were 20 years older than us, and they sat down and they took me to the wood shed. And I said, I'm coachable. I'm not smart, but I'm sure coachable. Tell me how to be the leader you want me to be. Those people and all the other things that happened 50 years changed me immensely as a leader and a human being.

Feedback is so important, and maybe we can start here when we're thinking about leadership and principles and things like that. I'm an entrepreneur. I have 60 employees, and I can easily take feedback from the closest people that work with me. But it's really hard for me to hear feedback from other employees that don't work directly with me because I feel like they don't understand how hard I'm working and everything going on behind the scenes. What's your advice to leaders to get better at receiving feedback, no matter who it's from?

Well, this isn't the answer you want. It's, ignore it. Everybody has an opinion. That doesn't mean everybody is right. If you're succeeding at what you're doing, criticism comes with a job title, and everybody's going to think, I could her job better than she can. That's nonsense. If you're the entrepreneur and you built the business, some clerk in the mail room has not got the ability to tell you how the hell to run your business. So I always tell everybody. You will get advice from many sources. Whatever you do, you're the boss. You own it, you live with it, and you die with it. Never let an attorney or an accountant or a consultant run your business. If they run into the ground, they walk away and you pay their fee. You are the person responsible for your corporation. Believe in yourself and charge forward Listen to your confidence and be willing to accept criticism. It's okay because we all make mistakes, but you just can't take the people that have no concept of what it's to be responsible for an enterprise.

I totally agree. I'm happy you gave me that advice because that's what I told my confidante. I had a situation where somebody gave me this book of feedback. When I read it, my heart sunk because I was like, Man, she has no idea what she's talking about. I can't listen to this feedback, and I just threw it away and moved on. I'm glad you're on the same page here. Dave, you've got this new book. It's called Perfect Ten: Ten Leadership Principles to Achieve True Independence, Extreme Wealth, and huge success. Now, I have a lot of people that come on the show, and especially lately, a lot of people don't define success with money and working harder and independence and things like that anymore. I want to understand your perspective of what success means. What does success mean to you?

Each individual has to determine success for themselves. The best definition I have ever heard of success is bannered about by three or four of the platform speakers, and it's very simple. 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. And that is success. So I'm 79. I had a critical injury 12, 13 years ago. I survived it. I can't do the things that I did before. I drove NASCAR, I flew aerobatic jet planes. I I scuba-dived all over the world. I sky-dived. I did all these things. And all of a sudden, you wake up and you're paralyzed. I was a quad for almost a year. And so then you start thinking, what is success? And I realized doors open and doors close. And as much as I'd love to be at Dayton in February leading the poll, it ain't never What's ever going to happen at a man my age with my reflexes and my strength and my ability. So the doors closed, but other doors opened up. So I was very fortunate one time.

I had a dinner with a marvelous actress. She was 30 years older than me. And I asked her about, Well, you were young and you were extraordinarily beautiful. You were a screen star. What's it like to be in your '60s. That dinner was a lasting impression to me. She said, When I was young, I was like a vibrant, young, wild, tasty wine. Now, 30, 40 years later, I'm a different taste of wine. I've mellowed, but I'm still strong, and I'm happy with who I am. I've never forgotten that conversation because that's our world. We all Will Hage, and the starting quarterback that was MVP after 35 is never going to be there again. And so you have to come to a feeling of, That was then, this is now. Who can I be now?

I love that. I love that concept of your goalpost always changing and that there's different goals at different stages of life. I think that's really beautiful. What was your goal in writing the Perfect Ten. Why did you write this book?

A Legacy? I was helped by dozens and dozens of people. Building a real estate company with a major convention, you hire the best speakers that are out there, you become bosom buddies with them, and they accept their check, and you get their advice, but you grow. I made so many mistakes because I was so immature and uneducated. The College of Hard Knocks is a hell of an education. Most people can't afford the tuition. There's not an original thought in the book. I try to put that in the foreword of, Hey, I have learned from the shoulders of giants of the very best in the world. None of this is original to me. It's all been passed down over hundreds of years, and the Knowledge, Aristotle, anybody back in the time, is just as relevant today. It's 2,000 years later, and we still think the same way they thought. Our abilities have changed because of education But in reality, common sense is common sense. And so every one of us should learn everything we can from anybody else.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I know you're such a proponent of reading, and I loved reading your book and hearing about the stories from other entrepreneurs and writers and things like that. So a lot of people who are tuning in, they are entrepreneurs. And I know that you invest in businesses. And in your book, you say the most important question that you ask an entrepreneur when considering to invest in their business is, why are you starting this business? And you say there's just one right answer to this. You're not looking for any answer except for one right answer. Can you tell us this answer and why responding in this way is so important to How do you want to change the world?

Are you starting this thing to get rich? Are you starting this thing to dump it in five years and walk with a big paycheck and retire in Tahiti? What's your cause? What's your why? Why are you so passionate about this business that you're starting?

Why is passion so important to you? Because a lot of people say, Don't follow your passion. Passion doesn't make you money. But why do feel like passion makes a good entrepreneur?

If you're dreaming, dream big. Shoe for the moon. Don't have little bitty goals. Have a giant goal. My goal was to build the largest, most successful real estate company in the history of the world. With big dreams come big obstacles. If you have a passion and you believe it, and you go to sleep at night thinking about it, and you get up in the morning thinking I've got to get to the office because this is my world, this is my passion. You can get over the day-to-day mistakes and problems that you will face. You have to be a dreamer. You're an entrepreneur. You know that. I can make the world a better place. I'm not here to make more money. I'm here to change people's lives.

It's so true. When building my company, I pay attention to the numbers and stuff, but that's definitely not what motivates me. What motivates me just keep building and innovating and growing a team and making an impact. When it comes to entrepreneurship, you obviously are literally one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in the world. Can you talk about the personality traits and the skills that you think are conducive to entrepreneurship?

I have a marketing background, sales background, selling franchises and so on. A lot of people say the marketing person is not going to be a good manager. Not going to be a good leader. I totally disagree. If you're a real estate agent and you're service-oriented, and you give a damn about your customer and you care more about them than you do about your commission, you're going to be a success. Zig Zigler, motivational speaker from, God, 40 years ago, he said one time, People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that even at age 20 as a real estate agent in the military with a crew-cut haircut and 130 pounds, like I'm somebody's teenage kid. I succeeded because I managed to convince the customer, I will work my tail off for you, and I will never sell you something that's not right. I don't care if I make a commission or not, I'm going to solve your problem. Once I had that reputation, it made no difference if I was 20 or 30. And so I think the most important aspect is you do have to have a passion.

You have to figure out what difference am I going to make in the world? Now, if I can say this very modestly, for 10 years, I was the youngest person in RE/MEX. Unfortunately, 50 years later, many of my people I sold to in the '70s and '80s have retired and passed away. The biggest joy I have in my life is having letters sent to me and my wife, You changed my life. I created wealth for my family. I never had the life I thought I would have. You have impacted me so immensely. I want you to know that before I die. That's what leadership is. Leadership is not stock options. Leadership is not, I'm CEO, look at me. Leadership is, did you turn around and put your hand down to help the next person come up a couple more steps up the mountain? And that is total gratification.

I completely agree. I feel like the impact you make on other people is such a big part of leadership and getting motivated as a leader. Another aspect that you call out in your book in terms of what makes a good leader is optimism. You highlight the power of optimism in a story with with Ernest Shackleton and his crew's survival in Antarctica. Can you share that story with us?

Ernest Shackleton was a unique individual. He was born in a family, and I can't remember. His six daughters and him, the youngest. The daughters had a unique impression on him. In an era, 1907, 1910, where the general said, jump, and the private had to say how high on the way up, command and control. He was unique. Women are unique business people, and most of them are more compassionate. Most of them like to ask everybody's opinion and how are we going to succeed at this instead of a command and control situation. So he was 100 years ahead of his time. They get stuck the ice near the South Pole. They get frozen in. The ice gets stronger and stronger. They're happy in their little boat. They had food, the warmth, and the boat starts to crumble. And they have to get out and live on the ice flow. And so he had 27 men. They got out on the ice, and they had to live for over a year and a half. At the end of their journey, every man wrote in their diary, he was the single greatest leader they had ever met in their life.

He put people in tents, two and three people to a tent, and every day he visited each tent and sat and said, How are we doing? What's your thoughts? What do you suggest we do? Do we pull our lifeboats and try to get to land? Do we do this? Do we do that? It was a very feminine management trait at that time, which is very unusual. And so he brought them all home alive. By the way, in his diary, he wanted to kill him. He literally had three or four people he just wanted to shoot, but he didn't. He was one of the greatest leaders we've ever seen in our lifetime. And every man, and I'm sorry, it was all men, every man said, This is the greatest leader I've ever worked with. That's an amazing story of survival in desperate means with not enough food, not enough sunlight, not enough warmth, and he brought them all home.

I know that one of the things that he did was actually lead by example. He was helping them on the ground. He was very hands-on in making sure that everybody was going to be okay and everything got done that needed to get done for survival. But I know that bringing it back to modern times, the more that you scale your business, when you first start as an entrepreneur, you're more hands-on because you're starting the business from scratch, you're involved in everything. But then as you hire and scale and hire and scale and hire and scale, you naturally start to just get more strategic and less hands-on. How can we actually lead by example as our company scales?

I have a concept I read about called We all carry the boxes. I felt as a leader that I had to do everything that my employees did to prove that I'll work just as hard as you will. I had an interesting situation with a black gentleman that became one of my best friends of my entire life. I was going on speaking tours five days a week. I always took some younger people with me to set up the meeting rooms and just help set up the autographe booths and all that stuff. And this young gentleman, every place we stopped and we flew in, would grab my briefcase, grab my suitcase. Let me get that for you, Mr. Linniger. He was like, I finally looked at him and I said, Ciaran, I'm a man. I can carry my own damn briefcase. The last stop of the week was Washington, DC, Dulles. We were at a Marriott, and I had a whole bunch of stuff I was carrying: briefcase, suitcase, overhead projector and all this crap. And I got to the door. I said, Cron, would you get the door for me? He looked at me and he says, You're a man.

Get your own damn door. I knew on that moment, he was not scared of me. I knew at that moment he had a sense of humor, and he just didn't give a damn. He became one of my top officers in my life and one of my best friends because he showed the aptitude of, I'm not kissing your butt. You're going to be temperamental with me. I'll be right temperamental back with you. And I was 30 years older than him. When you look for leadership, you look for people that are afraid. You look at people that are willing to just grab it and go for it. And he was.

Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. I 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. He 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 replated.

I know that in your book, you also say you have to be fair and responsible to all your stakeholders. You can't just only focus on your customers. You've got to think if you've got shareholders, board members, members, employees, vendors, there's so many other people to care about. I know there's a lot of priority balancing. How do you suggest we handle that?

This is controversial. I think that everybody needs to be treated fair, but not equal. 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 Type your link and say hi to everybody. If my biggest broker in California has 100 pre-max offices, and he says, Can you fly out to my meeting with my agents? The answer is, Hell, yes. I'm sorry, I can't go to 15 agents. I can go to 2,000 agents. 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 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. How do you suggest we be more vulnerable?

It's easy. Just be who you are. If you make a mistake, admit it immediately. Don'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. 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 Bayhar. I interviewed Howard Bayhar years ago. He's the President of Starbucks, former President of Starbucks for many years. He told me something that I'll never forget about leadership. He said, Only the truth sounds like the truth. 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. 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. I never forgot 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. 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. I had to do layoffss twice in Remex's history I'm sorry, I'm a manly man. I cried both times. They knew that I hurt having to lay them off.

Speaking of RE/MAX, let's talk about RE/MAX 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 wine, and nobody wanted to call it Dave Lenniger Real Estate. I thought that was pretty egotistical. At the time, Esso had just changed the name to Exxon. They had 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 of slashes, and we sat around and we said, Well, RE/MAX, that's real estate maximums. Maximum commission to agent, maximum service to the customer with no part-timers or beginners, maximum profit for the broker owner. We came up with RE/MX, 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, threw a slash in, five Vietnam vets, so we had a red, white, and blue sign. A lot of market research went into this.

Your balloon logo is one of the most recognized visible logos in the world. You, as an entrepreneur, were 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 et cetera, and make a profit. The agent, they had their 50%, but they had to pay for their automobile. Nobody pays for retirement for real estate agents. Nobody pays for social security or insurance or whatever. 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. 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. The end result was, as we started the company, the split changed about 85, 15. 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. As a model, we changed the entire real estate industry's commission It's really interesting.

Yeah. Something else that you did differently is that your perspective of who the customer was changed. Originally, the customer was the buyer, the seller, and now the customer was the agent. Can you tell us more about that?

I I decided that I was not in the real estate business. I was in the real estate agent business. 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 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 RE/MAX, from Colorado with an amazing success story after five years, and we went into the various markets, and we went to Atlanta, and they said, Well, we don't steal each other's agents down here. We're 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. And the thing was fascinating about the success was I couldn't figure out why, with all the differences. It finally came down to human beings have some commonalities, if you will, of 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 childcare 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. It 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. When 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 $100,000 a year, which is unreal figure at that time. 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. 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, and they're happy making $60,000 a year. And so it finally dawned on me, that's 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. Aside from payment structure, 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. Aside 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 talk about leadership. The number one most important factor of a leader is the 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. Do The only thing Trump did was say, Make America great again. Hillary said, Stronger with Hillary. Nobody gave a damn. Obama had one word, hope, and he won. And so Trade 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 who 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. I know one of your mentors was Dave Stone. 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. I looked around these old people in my office I was still in the military, and they were old. I mean, some of them, 40, 50, 60 years old, and they make a deal once every three or four months. And 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 and just stood there and said, I didn't think you would ever make it. And I said, Why the hell would 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 never know when you can get a deal. I'd paid to go to Dave Stone's seminar, $25. This is, God, I don't know, '67, '68, whatever it was, Mountain Shadows, Country Club in Scottsdale. I 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. I'm sitting there every break, I jumped up and grabbed his hand like an idiot, grooping. And I said, Oh, my God, Mr. Stone. That's fascinating. Man, if I had your gift, I could be a success. He He says, How long have you been trying? I said, Six months. He says, How many deals have you got? I said, None. He says, If I were you, I'd quit. I said, I did. But 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. 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? 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, Señor, Do you know how much a real estate commission is?

He said, No, little comprende, or something. I don't know what he said. I said, Do you know what title insurance is? No, little comprende. I said, He needs me. I'm a realtor. I followed him home, listed the house, this is terrible, $10,500. That house today would be $200 and some thousand dollars. Two full-price offers that night. The next morning, I'm laying in bed with my wife, slapped her on her bottom and say, Hey, 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 2 hours. That day, I took the her girl and her fiance and sold them a house. That afternoon, I sold their best friend's house, and the next morning, I sold their friend's 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 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. The 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 RE/MAX 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 be your mentor if you were struggling? What were the ways that you actually got him to be your mentor?

I was so aggressive. I was just a groupie. He 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 called 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. 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? What's important to is giving a hand down to help the next person get up the mountain. So many people have been kind to me in my life. That becomes part of what do you want to do as a mentor. The problem with being a mentor is Nine 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.

I 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 RE/MAX 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. And 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? 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, and flights together, and cocktails. We went to each other's marriages and divorces and cancer with their parents and our funerals and whatever. It's hard when you're close friends with everybody. So I take 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 got the fire on the belly and I don't think you care about the network like we do. So I've made a decision decision. 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? That starts the argument of, No, no, no, no. Oh, you don't understand me. I really work hard. I said, No, I'm sorry. My decision has been made. I'm done. This is your decision. Two-week severance and I fire you, or you resign, and I'll give you a year's severals. 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, and at the end, 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 pigeonholved. I'm never going to promote them or I give them another pay raise. I hurt the people that work for them because they know that person's an idiot. 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. When you talk about leadership concepts, Firing is the most important thing you 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.

It'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 TP, and put it on the ground and say, Hey, let's have some food. And 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 got to 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, and this can be outside of everything that we talked about today. Just answer from your heart. The first one is, what is one actionable thing our young improvisers 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. They will learn from everybody everything they can, and they will ask you.

I know you're a huge, huge reader. What recommendations do you have in terms of books that us entrepreneurs read?

The old classic is Think and Grow Rich. Yeah, I love that. 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. 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. And it is little steps done repeatedly over years, gives you amazing results. The final one would be Kaizen, and that's the Japanese concept of one % 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. What would you say, this is the last and final question, what is your secret to profiting and in life?

Profiting in life is what is your goal? If your goal was to eat 65 and retire and go fishing, then you've been successful. I have an interesting company right now. It's called Port-a-Sups. 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. I bought it from the guy that retired, but I'm developing it very rapidly. Regional developer model, we 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 change, I should say Gail and I change the world because we hired women. And in '73, that was not popular. And A part-time housewife was like, Oh, they're not serious about the business. They're taking jobs away from a white man, all that crap. It was an old white man's, white hair 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. Port-a-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 dollars, 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. It's been around 50 years. We have multicultural people whose children are the first children in their family to go to college and are now taking over the business. To me, entrepreneurship is about getting a chance to get your foot in the door. 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 a carpenter. Second generation, usually, is one of the trades. And the third generation our small business owners that are hiring the trades. It is a wonderful evolution of people having a chance to build family wealth.

Well, 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?

Daveleniger. Com. You can follow me along there. There's all kinds of things like God knows what, Facebook, Instagram, 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. Yeah, Bam.

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 RE/MAX, how it got its start how it's 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. Like Simon human cynic 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. And 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 If you 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. If you did enjoy this show and you learned something, then take a couple of minutes and drop us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Guys, 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 want to know the good, I want to know the bad. Tell me what you think about the show. 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 Hala, or LinkedIn, search my name, it's Hala Taha. 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.