Why Your Business Feels Unpredictable (and how to fix it) w/ Jordan Freed

One of the things that we've been kicking around is as we coach businesses and we help businesses, how do we help them make their business more predictable? And you and I both come from the real estate industry, and it's pretty well documented the moment we get an appointment with a potential buyer or seller, our odds of getting closed business and income start to become very predictable from that point.

Everything up to that can be a little crazy, and we especially love the idea of a listing.

For those who are not familiar with real estate, that means you have a contract to help someone sell their home, which is in fact the inventory of our store in real estate, right? That's the product that everybody is either hoping to buy or sell.

And that looks different in every industry, but every entrepreneur wants their business to be more predictable.

How do we help people identify what that first step in the process is? You kinda call it finding the first down, right?

Yeah.

So the first down actually came from, Jay, a conference that I was at in 2018, and I was in San Francisco, and one of the speakers is, uh, Joe Montana.

And if you don't know who Joe Montana is, he's a Hall of Fame quarterback.

He actually played at the f- San Francisco, and then he came to the Kansas City Chiefs, my beloved Kansas City Chiefs.

Uh, he didn't win any Super Bowls here, though.

Uh, Jay was asking how many times the Chiefs were gonna come up in this conversation, so if you're keeping track, there's the first one.

Um, but Joe Montana was up on stage, and he was being interviewed, and he said something that has just always stuck with me because he was talking about how his coach, Bill Walsh, had a very different formula for winning football games.

And his formula was not so much looking at the scoreboard.

It was the first team to get to 25 first downs would win the game, right? Now, formulas have to have credibility and track records in order for us to buy into them, and those two gentlemen, Bill Walsh and Joe Montana, won four Super Bowls together.

So-

Pretty credible track record.

Yeah, I think the credibility is there.

And so that ar- that idea of a first down, of getting clear on...

And this is what the One Thing book really helped me with, Jay, when it first came out, is thinking about what is the one area that if I get that right, everything else can go wrong, and I'll still have a high likelihood of achieving my goals, right?

So what's a first down in real estate? What do you call a first down in real estate?

Either leads or listings.

You know, in the real estate industry, I think that listings are the linchpin, that I've never coached a real estate professional that knocked down, uh, their listing taken number consistently every single month that didn't hit the rest of their goals.

And so whatever industry you're in, I think it always kinda depends upon what is your listing? What is the one thing that if you got it right, uh, everything else could go wrong, and you still have a high probability or likelihood of achieving your goals? And I had a conversation with somebody recently about this, and we even broke it down to where his first down every single week, uh, was 50 contacts.

50 contacts to people in search of listings, right? That was his first down.

And I'd like to share a little story about that, Jay, because this is somebody who has been very successful, and then COVID happened to his family and, uh, hurt his wife's business, uh, had some health issues, some things showed up, and so he was really trying to right the ship and has struggled for the last five or six years.