Thinking Out Loud with Dean Jackson

Good morning.

What if you prepared your marketing the way an attorney prepares a case?

Not sat down to write an ad. Prepared a case.

That's where my head was in March of 1997. Journal number five.

I was reading How to Argue and Win Every Time, and it put me into a completely different way of thinking about the people I was trying to reach.

Page ten of that journal, there's one question written at the top.

What is the secret for getting listings?

Every waking thought I had was pointed at real estate agents back then. But the question works for anything.

What's the secret for getting new deck builds. New lawn customers. New clients.

Underneath it, six questions I worked through with my pen. Here they are.

First one. What reasons would somebody have to do this at all?

For me that was, what reasons would people have to sell their homes?

Moving up to a bigger house. Building a better one. Finally buying in the neighborhood they've always wanted. The lakefront house.

Or the other direction. Downsizing. Retiring into assisted living.

Then the ones nobody puts on a brochure. Money problems. Divorce. A job transfer. Somebody dies. Health changes.

I listed all of them.

Because every one of those is a different conversation.

You don't talk to somebody chasing their dream house the same way you talk to somebody who has to sell one.

Those aren't one market. They're different target markets wearing the same label.

Second. What are they going to consider first?

I thought about it and realized nobody wakes up motivated to sell a house.

They're moving toward the new one. The lakefront place, the house in the country.

Selling the one they've got is only the mechanism that gets them there.

Worth knowing which end of that you're talking to.

Third. What methods could I use to reach these people?

Direct mail. Postcards. Telephone. Newspaper ads. The real estate publications.

That's 1997, so look at what's not on the list. No Instagram, no Facebook, no YouTube, no Google. No email. Not even the internet.

Those were the megaphones. Every one we had.

Whatever your version of that list is today, write it out... because the message and the megaphone get built together.

Fourth. What are the best methods being used right now?

The collected wisdom of your industry. What everybody already does.

Realtors chased expired listings. Called for sale by owners. Cold calls, farming an area, door knocking, evaluation certificates.

Financial advisors run the dinner seminar. Invitations go out, everybody comes down to the steakhouse, there's a presentation, a few of them book a meeting.

That's the baseline. You have to know it before you can step off it.

Fifth, and this is the fun one. What new ideas could work here?

I wrote down: what about the houses right around a home that just sold?

That became a whole program called The Listing Next Door. The twenty homes surrounding a sold sign.

Another one. Geographically complementary areas. Not asking a neighborhood if they want to sell... but marketing it to the people already dreaming about moving into it. Townhomes to detached. Condos and apartments to starter homes.

And the one that actually started my career. A telephone research survey.

Not calling to get listings. Calling to status people.

Mr. McQuade, it's Dean Jackson calling from Royal LePage. We're conducting an area market survey, I wonder if you'd have just a minute to be included.

They'd usually say no.

And I'd say, it's only five questions, one minute, I promise.

Then they'd say yes.

That's rejection and retreat, straight out of Cialdini. They turn down the bigger thing, so you retreat to the smaller one.

Five questions. Have you lived in Georgetown more than five years. How many years in your current home. Where did you live before. How did you happen to choose Georgetown. And if you were to move, would you stay in Georgetown or leave... and when would that be.

That was the whole call.

Every hundred people I called gave me the ones looking to sell right now.

But it also gave me a record of everybody friendly who'd told me roughly when they were going to move. Two years out. Three years out.

That's the long game, and hardly anybody plays it.

Sixth. What's already rolling around in their head?

Somebody thinking about selling wants to know what their house is worth. That's the number that tells them whether the move is even possible.

What do buyers look for now. How do I get the house ready. What's it really going to cost me to move up.

Somebody thinking about a deck wants to know what decks cost. What the options are. Wood, or the fiber stuff they've been hearing about.

Answer the questions already going on in their mind and you've cleared the path for them to do business with you.

That's it. Six questions, a pen, and a page.

You come out the other side with the raw material to write anything.

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed to myself, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder this Friday at 1pm. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Write question one at the top of a page. What reasons would somebody have to want what I sell at all?

Don't stop at three. Get to ten...

Then look at how many different people you've been talking to as if they were one.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/067-how-to-figure-out-why-people-actually-buy-your-stuff/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Sometimes the easiest way to sell a horse is with a sign that says horse for sale.

That was the peak thinking in my journal in 1997... and I still use it every week.

Here's where it came from.

When I first moved to Florida I drove past the same house every day on the way to the golf course.

The woman who lived there had a little sign stuck in her front lawn. Tupperware sold here.

That's it. That's the whole ad.

If you're looking for Tupperware... there it is.

It stuck with me because it's crystal clear. Nothing to work out.

Now jump forward to San Francisco.

Eben Pagan and I were speaking at an event about direct response ads, and how different they are from clever image ads.

Afterwards a sales rep came up to us. He was selling loft condos for a developer and he was frustrated.

He showed us what the developer was running. A full page in the San Francisco Chronicle real estate section. Twenty thousand dollars a week.

The ad was an overhead drawing of a turtle shell.

One arrow pointing at the turtle's head. This is you.

Another arrow pointing at the shell. This is your new loft.

Little logo at the bottom. That was the entire ad.

You can picture the meeting where that got presented. The developer's son ran the marketing, his designer friend came up with it, everybody in the room said isn't this clever.

And the lofts sat empty every weekend. Nobody came.

So we wrote him a classified ad instead.

SOMA. Really cool loft. Details on voicemail. And the phone number.

That's all of it.

Two things in there were deliberate.

We wanted it to read like one person selling one thing, not a developer with a marketing budget.

And we said details on voicemail rather than free recorded message or 24-hour hotline. Same mechanism. Completely different feeling.

Here's the part I'd underline.

The job of the ad isn't to sell somebody the thing.

The job of the ad is to sell the next step.

All I wanted was for somebody to call and listen to the message. That's the only thing it had to do.

And then the message only had one job too. Get them to come and see the loft, or leave their name.

One insertion. Under two hundred dollars.

Twenty-eight people came to the lofts that weekend.

The twenty thousand dollar ad brought nobody.

I see this everywhere now that I know to look for it.

I was in Toronto and there was a little sandwich board out on the sidewalk. Delicious coffee this way. An arrow pointing down an alley.

That's the whole thing.

We've got it easier than we did in 1997, too. Back then the next step was call and listen to a recorded message. Now it's click here.

So here's the question.

What's the plainest way you could say what you actually sell... and then say click here?

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed to myself, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder this Friday at 1pm. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Take the ad, or the page, or the email you're currently using to get people to take the next step.

Write the horse for sale version of it. One line saying plainly what it is... one line saying exactly what to do next.

Then see which one you'd actually respond to.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/066-the-easiest-way-to-sell-a-horse-details-inside/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Quick question before anything else.

How many of the things running your business today started as an idea you had years ago?

I bet it's more than you think.

Now the other side of it.

How many ideas are still rolling around in your head that never made it out into the world?

That one's probably more than you think too.

This is my 50th daily video. Journal number four, 1997.

Going back through these has taught me a few things. I want to give you four of them today.

First one. Focus.

What made that stretch of my life so prolific is that I was specializing in one thing.

Real estate agents. Every waking thought pointed at that one market.

I started by applying everything I was learning to my own business... then packaging it so other people could use it too.

I've been genuinely shocked at how much of what I still use today had its genesis thirty years ago.

Second. Compounding.

It started with a guide to Halton Hills for my own business.

That turned into licensing the system to 40 agents in 40 different areas around Toronto.

That led to Joe Stumpf, and the two of us taking the whole thing to North America.

None of that was luck. It compounded because I was building it with the end in mind.

That's Michael Gerber's idea from the E-Myth. Think about your business as a machine you're going to duplicate 5,000 times.

Build it that way from the start and everything you make stacks on top of everything you already made.

Third. Time moves at the speed of reality.

Your mind can see the whole finished thing in an instant. There are no rails on it.

But the building of it still happens in real time, one day at a time.

That gap is where most ideas quietly die.

Fourth, and this is the one I'd underline.

Nothing is happening in your journal.

No idea comes to life sitting on the page. It has to make it out into the real world.

Woody Allen made a movie a year for 45 years.

He writes his ideas on a yellow pad and puts them in a drawer. An actual drawer.

When it's time to make one, he opens it up, spreads them all out, picks one, and puts the rest away.

Tarantino set out to make 10 movies. He's made nine. He's 100% immersed in one until it's finished.

And Dan Sullivan. When he was 70 we were walking around London, talking about writing a short book in a short space of time.

We shook hands on it. Two weeks later we both turned up at Strategic Coach with a finished book.

I built the whole 90-Minute Book process around that.

Dan's written one book a quarter ever since. Twelve years of it. He's somewhere around book 48 now.

One idea. Write it. On to the next.

That's the law of compounding with a face on it.

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed to myself, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder this Friday at 1pm. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Open your journal and find one idea that's been sitting there waiting. Just one.

Pick the smallest piece of it you could put into the real world this week... and go do that piece.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/065-how-to-stop-your-best-ideas-from-dying-in-your-notebooks/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

This one's a doozy.

A double spread in the journal, early 1997, Rancho Santa Fe.

The late Jerry Ballinger was walking a room through something he called the Ferrari Mind Tuneup.

And looking at it now, thirty years on, I can see what it actually is.

It isn't about going fast.

It's about laying a foundation so you can go fast in exactly the direction you want to go.

Big difference.

I turned 60 in May, and this whole year has been me going back through these journals... and finding out I've quietly been running Jerry's process on myself the entire time without calling it that.

Quick side note before the steps.

I was doing a lot of mind mapping back then. Mind maps are out, for me.

Too convoluted for the way I think. I think logically and sequentially, one thing leading to the next.

I suspect there are two kinds of people. Mind map people, and process people.

I'm a process person. So here's the process.

First step is fuel.

Not gas in the tank. What you're taking in.

What you know. What you're reading, who you're listening to, what you're naturally curious about and can't help chasing.

Those are all clues. They point at the direction that's actually right for you.

This is the collect part of collect, combine, create. The raw material for your thinking.

Nothing good comes out if nothing good goes in.

Second step Jerry called the 24-hour franchise prototype.

Getting your day right.

And here's the part that got me. I read what I'd written in 1997 and it's still my favorite version of a day.

Bed at 11. Up at 7. Out the door at 8. Here with you at 9. Ten to twelve in my journal hatching evil schemes. Afternoons working and sharing with people. Evenings doing whatever I want.

Thirty years later. Same day.

Whatever you end up doing with your time... what's the shape of it going to be?

Third step. Stabilize, systemize, standardize, optimize.

In that order. And the first one is the one everybody skips.

Deming said you can only observe and make predictable change in a stable system.

So if your days are random and fractal, and you couldn't describe one if somebody asked... there's nothing to improve. There's no baseline to improve from.

That's honestly been my whole year. Stabilizing.

Now here's where it gets fun.

Ned Hallowell, the most-cited psychiatrist on ADHD, talks about the Ferrari mind too.

He said to me one time that the ideal is to think of your day like a bobsled run. You get in at the top, you slide through, and the rails keep you on course.

The opposite of that, the natural tendency, he calls going through your day like a toddler at a picnic.

You can picture that one. Wandering about. Oh look, a butterfly.

I've reached a compromise between the two.

I treat my days like a slalom race.

Total freedom to go wherever you want in between... but you've got to hit the gates.

10:00, phone in the lock box. 11:00, lights out. 8:00, out the door. 10:00, pencils up in the journal. 12:30, lunch and the video goes up. 1:00, appointments start. 6:30, what we've come to call Meat 30, dinner right on time.

That's the great slalom run of the day.

And the more runs you do, the better you get at going fast between the gates.

The gates don't slow you down. They're the reason you can go that fast.

Fourth step. Your unique ability.

That's Dan's framing. Look at everything you do in a week and sort it into layers.

Unique ability is the top one. The things that energize you, that you're best at, that you have unending attention for.

Below that, things you're excellent at. Then competent. Then incompetent.

Tom Peters got at the same idea with his joy scale.

What can you take off the list? What do you want more of?

Fifth step. What service do you want to render?

Everything up to here has been about you. This one's about the outlet.

Given all of it... what result do you help somebody get faster, better, or less expensively by working with you?

For me it simplified right down. We help people build prospect vending machines. Get leads, convert leads.

Thirty years ago that was valuable. It'll be valuable thirty years from now.

People are always going to need new ways to get new clients.

That's a good direction to point a tuned-up mind.

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed to myself, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder this Friday at 1pm. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Pick one gate. Just one. The one that would make tomorrow work better than today did.

Put it in the calendar and go hit it.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/064-structure-doesnt-slow-you-down-it-lets-you-fly/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Another reading from the good book today. Cash Copy, by Jeffrey Lant.

We started a Lead Conversion workshop yesterday, and somebody on it said something that sent me straight back to journal number four.

Almost everything you need to know about marketing and writing great copy fits into four words.

You get benefit now.

That's the test. That's the whole thing.

Eben and I used to call each other up just to quote Jeffrey at each other.

And the one I keep coming back to is his egregious error number twelve.

You don't know what you want the prospect to do, and you're not prepared for the prospect when he takes action.

Read that again, because underneath it that's a statement about leadership.

Your job is to lead people into action. In the direction you already know is the best thing for them.

Not to convince anybody. Not to get somebody to do something against their will.

Just to say, clearly, I understand exactly what your problem is... maybe better than you've said it yourself... and here's the next best step for you right now.

Now here's a page I wish I could put a number on.

Page 172 of journal number four, 1997. The first time these words were ever written down anywhere.

We'd made a little information booklet called How to Sell Your House for Top Dollar Fast. You get benefit now, right there in the title.

And the copy offering it went like this.

If you're going to sell your house in the next 6 to 12 months, what you do right now could make a difference of thousands of dollars. Especially if you're buying another home.

I have no idea how many millions of dollars have been made from that one paragraph.

But look at who it's talking to.

Every other agent's ad was talking to the people who are in the market today. Now's the time to sell. List your house with me. Call Dean and start packing.

Mine was talking to somebody 6 to 12 months out. Which, by the way, includes a good chunk of the people who are about to move right now anyway.

Here's the part that made me laugh this week.

Arash in Toronto has been running this as a Facebook ad. It's his primary thing at the moment.

He followed up with a woman who'd downloaded the book, recorded the call, and sent it to me.

Hi, it's Arash. I sent you the How to Sell Your House for Top Dollar Fast book. I was just curious... what was it about the ad that caught your attention?

She paused for about a second.

Well, I'm going to sell my house in the next year. And I saw that there were some things I should be doing now, and I wondered what they were.

That's the ad. She just said the ad back to him.

And it turned out her daughter was moving to town, they were selling, and the two of them were both going to buy in the same area.

None of that happens with flashy language. Or manipulative language.

It happens with leadership language. Real language.

Taking somebody by the hand and letting them know you know exactly where they're going, and you can get them there.

Jeffrey puts it better than I can.

The aim of this book is to teach you how to write masterful copy, to select the right words and to use them properly, so that your prospects spend more of their money on what you are selling than they do on what other people are selling.

But you will only achieve this desirable result if you act like a leader, not an obsequious cringer.

An obsequious cringer. Thirty years on, that still gets me.

And if you want the full picture of this, it isn't one book. It's three.

Cash Copy, for the words.

Jerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time.

And Cialdini's six weapons of influence, for what's actually moving somebody underneath the decision.

Put those three together and you understand how people move through a decision... and how to guide them to one that includes you.

Being able to write words that get somebody to take action, remotely, on your behalf. That is a skill worth having.

Thousands of real estate agents have used this exact system to get listings in their own market.

And notice where it starts. Not with we're ready to sell right now.

Some of the best business you'll ever get comes from reaching people early, while they're still preparing to do the thing.

What you read about you think about. And what you think about comes about.

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed to myself, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder this Friday at 1pm. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Open a page and write down what your best prospect is thinking about 6 to 12 months before they ever need you.

Then write the sentence that meets them there.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/063-how-to-write-copy-that-leads-people-to-yes/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

I can't stop thinking about yesterday's page.

We found the genesis of the 8 Profit Activators, sketched around a pool in 1997... and I've been sitting with it ever since.

Because what I actually walked away with that afternoon wasn't a marketing framework.

It was a lens.

Everything I do with a business, thirty years later, still gets run through it. I can look at somebody's business, spot where the big opportunity is, and immediately have thirty years of ideas ready to combine with it.

That's been my magic. My winning formula.

And having your own frame of reference is the whole thing. Not borrowing somebody else's. Having one of your own that everything passes through.

Now here's where my head went next.

Max Martin.

He lives in Sweden. The list of people who've written the most number one songs on the Billboard charts goes Paul McCartney, then Max Martin, then John Lennon.

His first top ten was 1997. Same year as this journal page.

Backstreet Boys. Britney. NSYNC. Pink. Katy Perry.

And if you listen closely, they're all the same song.

Not the melody. The chassis.

The first six seconds is a distinct sound. I call it the ooh, turn it up moment... the thing that makes a teenager lunge for the dial the second it comes on.

Then the first verse. Singsongy, one octave, so easy you're singing along before you know the words.

And inside 35 seconds you're into the chest voice, anthemic chorus.

Every single time.

He didn't write hit after hit because he's a creative person who gets visited by the muse. He worked out a chassis, and then he built on it.

Which is exactly what I'd done with a business.

Take the seven categories where people actually spend money. Their home, their auto, their money, their food, their health, their kids, and them.

That's durable. That's not changing.

Wayfair figured out a chassis too. One hyper-focused ecom brand per thing. All bar stools. Grandfather clocks. Ottomans. Speaker racks.

Same chassis. Different body on top of it.

So... is there a formula for having ideas?

I think there is, and my friend Chad Jenkins has the cleanest version of it. He calls it IC3. Three C's.

Collect. Go read, watch, pay attention, expose yourself to things. Take input in on purpose.

Combine. Run what you collected through the framework you already have. Your lens.

Create. That's the part everybody thinks is the whole thing.

But it's the third step. It's never the first one.

There's no mystery to being creative. It isn't that some people are creative and you're not.

Collect, combine, create. Do the steps and the ideas turn up.

And honestly, that's all I'm doing here. I've got 160 of these journals and we're only on number four. Everything that came after is thirty years of running things through the same filter.

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed to myself, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Open a page and write down your chassis. The handful of things you run every new idea through.

If you can't name it yet... that's the most valuable thing you could work out this week.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/062-creativity-isnt-a-gift-its-a-formula/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning. This is a good one today.

I've been going through these journals hoping to find the genesis moments. The pages where something I'm still using thirty years later first showed up.

Today is one of those days.

You know the Beatles documentary? There's a scene where Paul is sitting there strumming, working out Get Back, making up the words as he goes.

That's what this page feels like.

Early 1997. Me, Eben Pagan and Joe Stumpf, sitting around the pool at Joe's place in Encinitas.

And here's what I'm realizing the more I go back through all of this... every idea worth having was at least three things combined.

Here were the three.

One, storyboarding. Laying something out in sequence so you can see the whole journey at once.

Two, a book I was reading called The Loyalty Effect. Its whole frame was that people climb a ladder. Prospects, shoppers, customers, clients, advocates.

Three, the question I kept chewing on. What are we actually doing at each rung to move somebody up?

And then I added one the book didn't have.

What is somebody BEFORE they're a prospect?

They're a suspect.

So I storyboarded it. Seven steps.

Select your target market.

Compel prospects to call you.

Educate and motivate them to meet with you.

Present your unique service offer.

Deliver world class service.

Provide after-sale service.

Nurture lifetime relationships.

Read those back. That's the 8 Profit Activators, near enough word for word, thirty years early.

Number one became select a single target market.

Number five became deliver a world class experience. Not just the result, but the way it feels to get it.

And I added an eighth. Orchestrate referrals.

Which is a different animal than nurturing lifetime relationships. Nurturing is staying in someone's life. Orchestrating is engineering the introduction.

The way I worked it was always the same. Take one step and list everything that sits underneath it.

What do we need to do to fully select a market?

What do we need to do to compel somebody to call?

Because the moment they call, they've moved. They're not a suspect anymore. We know who they are.

Then you educate and motivate, because you can't present your unique service offer until you've got somebody's full attention.

Here's what actually strikes me about the page, though.

None of it was invented that afternoon. It was assembled.

I was reading constantly, taking things in, processing them in my journal. And then two of them bumped into each other on a page.

That's the whole trick. That's all it is.

One mental model, sketched by a pool in 1997, is responsible for basically everything I do with a business now. It's what a Breakthrough Blueprint gets built on.

So here's what I'd have you think about.

Are you paying attention to what you're taking in? Are you running it against the things you're already doing?

Are you writing any of it down somewhere the pieces can find each other?

Because that's how you end up with your own intellectual property instead of somebody else's.

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed to myself, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Open a page and put two things on it that have never been in the same room. The book you're reading and the problem you're stuck on.

That's where the next thirty years starts.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/061-the-poolside-sketch-that-still-runs-my-whole-business/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Yesterday I said it's okay to want what you want.

Today is the harder half. Actually knowing what that is.

Because after I made yesterday's video I sat down for a couple of hours and wrote the whole thing out. Every vision. Crystal clear.

And there's something almost magical about writing it down. Your mind gets to hear you say, I want this.

Dan Sullivan has a book called Wanting What You Want.

Every day for 25 years he opened his journal and wrote the same question. What do I want?

He missed about 12 days in the whole 25 years.

He started because he noticed the situations he'd landed in were the ones where he'd never been crystal clear on what he wanted in the first place.

So that's where I'd start you. Open the page and ask, what do I want?

And don't limit yourself.

Now, going back through my own journals, the same few flavors of that question keep showing up.

First one is my favorite. What do I want my days to look like?

I write them as vignettes. Painting the picture of the day. The environment, the pace, the way things flow.

And you really can't go wrong attaching your variety to the things that are stable.

Because the rhythm of existence is a constant. There's always going to be a morning. There's always going to be sleep.

That structure isn't going anywhere in the next 30 years, so hang everything you want on it.

Second one is your environment.

When somebody buys an apartment complex or a commercial property, they walk the whole thing with a clipboard and write a property improvement plan. Every single thing that could be better.

Do that with your life.

I keep a page in my journal called better ideas. Anything I notice that could be improved goes on it.

That's where the garbage can by the door of my car came from. Tiny thing. But now it's easy to grab it and empty it, and a problem I hadn't even named just stopped existing.

Walk around with that eye. What would make this better? What would solve this?

Third one is pure fun. The wish list.

The Christmas list. The supermarket spree where you fill the cart with anything you want.

You get a little dopamine hit just imagining having them. That's fine. Write them down anyway.

Then there's the quadrant. If you only do one of these, do this one.

Draw a cross on the page.

Personal satisfactions. The things that genuinely make you happy.

Personal dissatisfactions. The things you don't want in your life, and how to spot them while they're happening.

Professional satisfactions. The work you're happiest doing.

Professional dissatisfactions. The work you'd be glad to never do again.

That lines up almost exactly with Dan's idea of your unique ability.

I'm rereading a Tom Peters book right now, and he cites a survey where executives did a version of this.

They listed the activities that light them up. Then the ones they can take or leave. Then the ones that drive them crazy.

I call them the verbs. All the things you actually do with your time.

Here's what the survey found.

20% was high value work that made them feel great.

60% was mundane. Take it or leave it.

20% was driving them crazy.

That list becomes your working document. Now you know exactly what to drive out.

And this is the beautiful part of being an entrepreneur. You have the power to design whatever you want.

It's okay to want what you want. But you can't want what you want until you know what you want.

Which starts with a pen, some paper, some time, and some thoughtful directed thinking.

By the way, while I was sitting here reading this page back, a bird pooped on my journal. So that's how the morning is going.

One more thing.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in 30 years, went through my brain and my pen and onto a journal page before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm running the 50-Minute Profit Finder for the first time. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll take you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and something to write on. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business, and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Open a page and write, what do I want?

Then keep going until you can see it.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/060-you-cant-want-what-you-want-until-you-know-what-you-want/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning.

Journal number four, somewhere around February 1997.

Quick note before we get into the page... if you're going to journal, start every entry with where you are, and the date, and the time.

I didn't do that back then. So now I'm sitting here surmising when things happened.

I do it every single day now. Give your future self a frame of reference.

Okay. This page is about a month into moving to Florida, and what strikes me reading it is how little has actually changed in thirty years.

We still move at 60 minutes per hour. There's still a morning and an evening and sleep in between.

The structure of the day hasn't changed, and it's not going to change in the next thirty years either.

So the only real question is what you put inside it.

Thirty-year-old me had already made his list. Read. Study. Play golf. Scheme. Talk on the phone.

Here's the funny part. That's still the list.

Read. Write. Be on small Zoom groups, or one-on-one with somebody. Develop my projects. Make art, really, is what it is.

Do you ever watch DJ Khaled? There's a guy just living his best life.

And his whole frame is two words. Golf and studio.

That's it. That's the day.

So then it comes down to how much of that thing you actually want to do.

And I think the sweet spot is two or three hours a day. You can be world class at anything with two or three focused hours a day.

When I was playing tennis, that's exactly what it was. School in the morning, then all afternoon was tennis and working out and stretching. The core of it was two or three hours on the court.

Stephen King says the same thing in On Writing. Three hours a day.

The clues are everywhere once you start looking for them.

Josh and I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi the other night. Third or fourth time I've seen it.

An 85-year-old man with ten seats at a counter in a Tokyo subway station. Three Michelin stars. Three hundred dollars to sit down, booked months in advance.

One craft. Making sushi, making better sushi, innovating with sushi. He talks about waking up from dreams about sushi.

What an amazing life.

And that's what I see all over this 1997 page. The seeds were already planted. I really did know who I was.

It just took a while to weed out everything that wasn't those things.

Back then it was only me. No support team. Now everything administrative is handled, everything financial is handled, the house is handled. There's a designer, there are web people, there are people who work with our clients.

It takes a village to raise my ADHD entrepreneur life.

Which means I get to just do the scheming.

So if you're starting to journal, this is the thing I'd spend the time on.

What do I want?

Because you can have anything you can imagine. That's the joy of being an entrepreneur. You're self-directed.

You get to choose what you focus on, what your life looks like, and more importantly how you're going to contribute.

A woman came up to me at an event once and gave me the most sincere hug. She'd been a client for ten years, a realtor, and her daughter had just graduated college with no student loan debt.

That was only possible because she had an engine fueling her real estate business. Excess capital to do the things she wanted in her life.

That's a bigger reward than the money. By a mile.

I got a funny email from Rick the other day. Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?

And I laughed, because... yes. That's exactly what I do.

Every idea I've ever had, and every dollar I've made in thirty years, went through my brain, through my pen, onto a page in my journal before it ever went out into the real world.

So I'm going to run the 50-Minute Profit Finder. Free, live on Zoom, and I'll walk you through the exercise myself.

Bring a pen and a notebook. We'll go looking for the lowest hanging fruit in your business... and probably some fruit you didn't know was there.

And here's your nudge for today.

Open a page and write down the day you actually want.

Then start chipping away everything that isn't it.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/059-its-ok-to-want-what-you-want-heres-how-to-get-it/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast

Good morning from Honeycomb.

January 1997. Journal number four. And the heading at the top of today's page is: here's how to get referrals from your listings every single week until they sell.

Thirty-year-old me was pretty pleased with that headline.

But this is the page where something bigger started. The beginning of thinking about the people you're already working with as multipliers.

We call it your multiplier index now. Back then it was just a question... how do I turn this one listing into more than one transaction?

Here's the setup.

Every year the National Association of Realtors surveyed home buyers and sellers on where the buyer came from. Signs. Ad calls. There was no internet yet, remember.

And one slice of that pie chart was direct or indirect referral. Someone who knows someone who knows someone.

18%.

Almost a fifth of the market, and most agents were doing nothing about it. Put it in the MLS, stick a sign in the yard, maybe run an ad. Then wait.

So we built the whole thing around that missing 18%.

It starts at the listing appointment. You show the sellers where buyers actually come from, you show them that slice, and then you ask them for one commitment.

Keep your eyes and ears open for anybody buying or selling a home while we've got your house on the market.

Then you explain why that's going to be easier than they think.

The reticular activator. The part of your brain that notices what's relevant to you right now.

It's why pregnant women see pregnant women everywhere. It's why the day you drive home a new red pickup truck, everybody else got a new red pickup truck today, too.

The sign goes up in the yard, and suddenly they're hearing real estate conversations they'd have walked right past a week ago.

You don't have to convince anybody of this. They already know it's true.

Then you equip them.

We gave every seller little business cards with a picture of their house on them and a recorded message number to call. Property flyers to hand out at work. Little flyers for the lunchroom board.

And by the way... all of our other sellers are out doing the same thing for you.

Now here's the core of it.

We called every seller, every single week, at the same time. Which is just good business. They want to know what's happening.

But the call had a structure, and the structure never changed.

We had six showings this week.

Here's what the agents told me their buyers said.

Here's what sold this week.

Because we framed every listing as a horse race. If somebody's in the market for a house like yours, there are 5, 10, 20 viable options. That's your field. We identify it on day one so you know exactly who you're running against.

Here are the new listings. New competitors just entered your race.

Here's what's coming up. Three showings arranged, an ad in Homes and Land, classified ads running, and this many people called the recorded message.

And we got a referral from the Smiths, another one of our sellers, so I sent them information on your house.

Every week. Same order.

Then you ask one question.

How did you do this week?

And then shut up.

The first time, it's awkward. What do you mean, how did I do?

Well... who did you hear about? Any conversations this week?

But I guarantee you the next time you ask it, they're ready. Oh, John from my office, his brother's looking, I gave him one of the cards.

That's it. That's the whole system.

I wonder how many referrals that generated across the thousands of agents who used it. What I wonder more is how many of them ever actually ran it.

Because it only clicks once you see what's really going on in the transactional period.

While you're building somebody's deck, decks are all they talk about. The neighbors notice. The crew out front gets noticed. They're showing the renderings at work.

Somebody buys a new car and for the next 90 days it's the first thing out of their mouth.

Your customers are having those conversations right now. Whether or not you've given them anything to do with them.

So here's your nudge for today.

Open your journal and ask yourself... how could I create a referral opportunity while somebody is still doing business with me?

And if you can make it self-serving for them, even better.

Show notes: https://deanjackson.com/podcasts/tol/058-how-to-get-referrals-while-youre-still-doing-the-work/

Join me live on the next free 50-Minute Profit Finder call: 50minuteprofitfinder.com/podcast