The Power of More Than One

Last week I got back from a fantastic business and leadership event in Hawaii, and I’ve decided to share my top takeaways with you.

From leveraging AI to leading yourself, plus the importance of branding, there was a ton of actionable advice that is relevant for commercial real estate agency leaders.

This event also opened my eyes to the power of community; being surrounded by like-minded professionals is a great way to supercharge your success.

In fact, spending time with experienced peers was so powerful that I'm now considering incorporating more group learning into our programs at CRE Success.

I believe this can supercharge our clients’ results and I’m excited by the idea of delivering the benefit of community to more people in commercial real estate.

You can tap into the valuable insights for your commercial real estate journey – without the expense of traveling to paradise – by listening to episode 151 of CRE Success: The Podcast.

Episode transcript:

Last week I got back from Hawaii. I was over there for a conference, which was part of the program that I'm in, which is a program for business coaches.

And I spent three days with 128 of some of the world's best business coaches.

I took a few things away from that.

And in today's episode, I want to share some of my key takeaways.

Not so much the ones that are relevant for building a coaching business, but the ones which are universally applicable to business and that I think have particular relevance for commercial real estate agency leaders.

Hello, and welcome to episode 151 of CRE Success: The Podcast.

My name is Darren Krakowiak. And I help commercial real estate agency leaders to accelerate growth in their business. 

Thanks so much for joining us for today's episode.

And as I mentioned, at the top, we are talking about some things that I took away from this conference that I went to in Hawaii last week.

And well, a few things that I would say at the top is that this conference was different for a few reasons.

It was the first one that I've been to since COVID.

And it was also the first one that I've been to as a business owner, as opposed to being on a corporate junket, or at an industry conference that I was sent on by my employer.

And it's very different, I think, when you are there, representing yourself, representing your own business, and when you're paying to be there.

And everyone else in the room is paying to be there, I think people show up with a bit more intentional purpose than if the otherwise is the case.

I probably noticed that people who pay for themselves in the programs that we have versus the people who are in the program sponsored by their employer.

The people who are paying for themselves, or have skin in the game generally, not always, a probably a bit more committed, you know that the saying, 'when you pay, you pay attention'.

I guess a couple of other things that were a bit different for me at this conference, one was that I don't drink anymore.

And pretty COVID, I would go to a conference and one of my main goals was to get drunk and have fun.

And I still had fun on this conference, it was just a different type of fun. It was without a hangover. So that was a little bit different.

And I was there with my family, my wife and daughter came along.

And it was a nice way I guess, to integrate, work and personal.

And it's just I guess, nice that I have the opportunity to do that, particularly at the age of our daughter who's 3.

She's not really missing much by taking a week off daycare to come along and attend this conference with me (but not coming to the conference, even though they had some family activities).

She was there hanging out by the pool with a mom when I was in the conference, it was nice to I guess, be able to spend that time with her and to make a holiday out of it.

But what I wanted to share with you today is this conference is there to help me grow my business, but it's also there to develop me as a coach, as a leader as someone who's here to serve commercial real estate agency leaders.

And I wanted to share with you just three things that I took away from the event that I think have some relevance for our industry, commercial real estate.

So, the first one is around AI. And we did spend a lot of time talking about ChatGPT in episodes 144, 145 and 146.

And I just want to, I guess, add to what I've already said on that topic, because I gave you some information about how you can create your own tone of voice in the form of a prompt to give to ChatGPT so it speaks more like you.

Because ChatGPT needs to know how to sound like you, it doesn't automatically know that you need to tell it. 

But in this particular session, I learned more about ChatGPT, including the importance of letting ChatGPT know what it is that your business does.

So, I don't think it's enough to say I'm a commercial real estate agent, you might want to tell them a little bit more about the types of people that you serve, the types of buildings that you are leasing or selling the value, etc., etc.

So, the more that ChatGPT knows what it's talking about, the more relevant what it gives in the form of answers is going to be.

But also, you need to define the audience of who you are speaking to.

If you wanted to write a letter for employees, versus if you wanted to write a letter or content for your avatar, then ChatGPT needs to know that.

I think we've covered a little bit of that in the episodes that I shared with you previously, but I probably didn't specifically say that is something that should be a part of each of the prompts.

So, ChatGPT is something that I think we're all still learning how to use. And my takeaway from that session was that I think it's good that I can share what it is that I know.

But there's always going to be more that I can share, and that my job is to go out there and learn, I guess, and then as I learn more to be able to share that with you, and hopefully encourage you to utilize ChatGPT.

And there was a good line that someone said, "You're not likely to be replaced by AI. But you could be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI better than you". 

So, we still like people, but people's efficiency and productivity are going to increase as a result of these tools that we have at our disposal.

We want to be able to use them, so we are the most productive and efficient person for the role that we are in.

And that obviously is going to lead to you making more money as well, as well as keeping your position. 

So, AI was the first one. The second one was about leading yourself.

And I guess the real premise here was that if you don't lead yourself, then you can't lead others.

And the question that the presenter of this particular workshop asked was, "How inspired have you felt inside your business over the past six weeks, or three months?"

And everyone gave a score out of 10. And then they said, "Well, how inspiring do you think you have been for your team, for your audience, for your clients?

Again, we gave a score out of 10.

And my score about how inspired I felt was actually a little bit lower than the score I gave for how inspiring I felt I had been for others. 

And it was pointed out that that can lead to burnout, exhaustion, and also some incongruence.

And I guess it's the same with inspiration. So, it was about leading yourself so that you can lead others.

How can you be more inspiring than you are in self inspired, right? You know, in order to love others, you need to love yourself.

And one practical takeaway that I can share with you from this session is that we need to do something for ourselves that provides us with that motivation, with that inspiration.

So, what can we do to lead ourselves?

Some potential examples might be just committing to everyday spend time with your family, it might be around reading, it might be meditation, or some other form of spiritual or reflective practice, it might be exercising, stretching, whatever it is.

Committing to do something every day for yourself, so you're giving yourself that nourishment, so that you can go and also feed others is the real point.

And to take a step further, they also talked about in that session, not only doing something for yourself every day, but also doing those things that your business needs every day.

So, something to generate demand was the way that they put it in commercial real estate. We talked about prospecting, and they also talked about converting opportunities.

And I guess in the context of commercial real estate, that would be doing a listing presentation, sending a proposal following up on a proposal, or an opportunity that we haven't yet got an answer on.

These are the types of things that we can do in order to be consistently moving the ball forward every single day.

The third area that I wanted to share with you was about content and about growing your own personal brand.

And I guess something that they talked about, which I didn't expect was the stages that you go through with content as your business grows.

And this is relevant if you're in the early stages of your career as an agent. But also, if you're in the early stages of your leadership journey is that earlier on, you probably need to do a little bit more.

And maybe you're testing out different types of content, different platforms, talking about a few different things.

But then once you find your voice and you figure out what's really cutting through where you have resonance, then perhaps you focus a bit more, you go deeper on that.

So, you start wide, but shallow, but then you go more narrow but deeper.

And then once you get to a certain point, then you can go with omnipresence.

And that again is achieved by you doing less, but through a team doing it for you. So, things like repurposing and being active on various channels and managing direct messages and all this sort of stuff. 

So that was basically what I wanted to share with you today a bit about that program what I learned in Hawaii.

I think one thing it showed me was that, well firstly, it showed me how to deliver a great event for in a business coaching business, but also showed me that it's possible in a group modality.

And at the moment, my business is generally one-on-one from the main program that we offer.

We do some group coaching and delivery in another program.

But I guess I've been attached to the idea that my leadership clients want to expect or need that one-on-one support.

But what I saw was also the benefit of that can come from being surrounded and having access to a great group of people who are going through similar things, as you and I.

I noted on LinkedIn that most of them I think, are probably more experienced than me.

But also, whether people were further along or not, and there were some people who I wasn't in the bottom group when they were ranking people by revenue.

So, it's great to surround yourself with people who are further along than you.

But even the people who were less advanced than me or less experienced, there's still something I can learn from them, right?

And that's the benefit of being in a group program.

So that's something for me to think about in the future. But for now, it's one-on-one, it's a leadership program.

If you want to know more about it, you can go to cresuccess.co/leadership to find out more.

That's our episode for today. Thanks so much for listening, I will speak to you soon.