0:00 so for someone who's who's struggling i would imagine you you'd say find yourself a coach so i say you need three things who are you and where are you going what do you want together we'll find the ideal path on the way to wow show with your host kevin bennel lest i've given the impression over the last you know season plus that i've already found my way to
0:37 wow i assure you i i have not i'm still working on it hopefully along with you and sometimes i need some help finding my way back to that path our guest today is a long-standing friend of mine and one of the people who helps me get back on my way to wow so we're going to talk about how to do that and i think you're going to appreciate what bill gross has to say but before that and bill has been looking forward to this for a long long time
1:12 we're going to have blaine adams mix up a cocktail hello and thank you so people think a lot of times you're making cocktails that you have to get crazy and use a million ingredients but today i'm going to go back to basics and show you how to make a very simple four ingredient cocktail that's full of flavor and life but just really really easy to make so it's going to be a mixed drink that you're going to stir instead of shake so i'm going to start off by filling my mixing glass here with some ice if you don't have one of these fancy mixing glasses if you've got a beer pint at home that
1:48 can work just as well so we're going to start off here with my favorite whistle pig rye whiskey you're gonna do two ounces of this guy um and i like using rye for old fashions because rye as a grain is just a little bit heartier a little bit more uh strong in terms of flavor so you're gonna get all that good stuff that you really want and be able to dilute it and have other flavors dance in and out so if you're making a cake this is the cake base and now it's time to add the icing so normally we make an old-fashioned you're gonna put some sort of sugar in
2:23 there or a honey or a maple instead we're gonna be using apricot liqueur which is a sweet liqueur and that's gonna sub in as your sweetener so you wanna do about a quarter ounce of that to about two ounces of your rye whiskey drop that in and if you like your drinks a little sweeter you can always feel free to add a little more apricot i go for a little more balance but choose your own destiny next you're going to use angostura bitters the classic bitters you're going to do two dashes and then just for good measure to add a little more of that citrus element you're gonna do one dash of the angostura orange bitters
2:58 and drop that in there like that and once we have all that in our mixing glass take your bar spoon and give it a stir and this is when i'll regale you of beautiful stories of the times i used to ride the rails and live the dream you want to make sure as you dilute you really want those flavors to marry together and really give you a beautiful beautiful cocktail and now once those are all together you'll take your glass now i am serving these up but you could serve them on the rocks if you're feeling frisky it's really up to you and then give it a nice pour if you're making multiple drinks make sure you
3:33 split them as you pour so that way the people drinking it will get equal kind of cocktails if you go just dump dump the cocktails might be a little bit different in terms of dilution and we all want consistency in life and our cocktails all right one little dab there and now those are in glasses take a white peeler be careful one of the most dangerous things in the kitchen you want to make sure you get a nice beautiful orange peel i'm making two here pull that up and when those are done you're going to express them over when you express an orange peel it looks very simple and elegant
4:09 and it doesn't look like you're doing much other than casting a spell over your drinks and you might be doing that but you actually are adding a lot of flavor and the final touch is you just want to wipe the edge of your glass and the stem so that way when the person's drinking their drink they're going to get some of that beautiful orange oil on their fingers it'll add a nice accent to the drink give a little twist off drop in and there's your apricot old fashioned friends and i'll pass them over thank you sir whoa we did it we did it we didn't spill i
4:44 want to hear about riding the rails another time another time oh thank you [Music] sir so blaine adams made this for us thank you this is an apricot old-fashioned well my breakfast drink yeah right try this kick them every day um um yeah very nice yep
5:22 i'm going to read a short bio that i wrote about you okay the idea since you're such a long-standing friend is to try and embarrass you let's see if this works good luck okay you know we will have to know i yeah i mean it's probably a fruitless but you know you have to give it you have to give the college try right native californian bill gross has been in the real estate business for over three decades which means i must have met you just not too long after you got into the real estate business yeah i started 1986 i probably met you around 1990 or so yeah i think so yeah uh he has worked in
5:58 lending and sales closing thousands of transactions thousands um as a broker associate at exp realty he is one of the top producing agent agents in its network closing eight figures in sales um but that's actually not what i asked you here to talk about so bill's success has come from his ability to help people gain success in what is an extremely competitive business he's coached thousands of agents including several of the top brokers in the country
6:34 and i look to you as one of my coaches well as you know likewise yeah oh very nice thank you yeah but you're not embarrassed no because it's all true in the end well that's not who i am as a person those are some of the things i've done some accomplishments but you know it's not defined doesn't define me as a person it's just some activities so i i want to jump right in um i mean i talked about how competitive the real estate business is but but and we've talked about this many times every business today is is competitive yes right more so than ever every
7:09 industry that's the constant theme in every business i talk to being a real estate talk to attorneys accountants manufacturers sales every issue's constant uh refrain is the business more competitive that used to be right i mean and and i remember this is going back when i was still in the real estate business um i was sharing offices with one of my clients it was the the client was just a few older than me but his father was also part of the business at the time and he was you know semi-retired at that point and i remember going out to lunch with him and this is this is back in you know the 1990s and and he was saying he says he says
7:45 i'm so glad to be basically done with business because even back then it was just so much more competitive than it was you know when he started out back in the 60s so so how do we how do we gain an edge in this relentlessly competitive business environment that that we all live in and i think what you were describing is on one hand business is easier than ever with technology and internationalization and lowered costs that brings if you're able to leverage it at the same time things are more difficult how can that be the answer the
8:20 competition is also using those tools to their advantage so at the end of the day i think the answer is there is no competition is just you being the best you can be and with all these opportunities if you focus on what your purpose and your goal is there's more resources than ever to to leverage into those opportunities when you focus on that the business gets easier when you focus on trying to make a sale getting a check it's very very difficult because now you're not serving a purpose you're more trying to do transactions and that's more challenging so when you say
8:56 you're you're in in touch with your purpose you're in touch with you can you be be more specific for us about that if you will what is what does that really mean so it's easier for me to use the context of real estate it's very easy to get caught up in a commission check so if i'm selling your house as a problem that comes up there are moments where i need to say to you something that will reduce the chance of me getting paid hey let's cancel the deal let's not sell the house this is a problem it's not to your advantage um and as a real estate agent the challenge is to overcome the the urge to say well i want to tell them that then i won't get paid
9:31 and do it's right for the customer so my first coach was zig ziglar he said that you have anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want and so when we focus on helping people and i'll get paid on this deal but i won't get paid on this one but i'll get paid on the next one because of that one but we're serving people these resources then become tools we can use on our purpose but when we really focus on just a commission check is a very competitive business it gets to be a grind it also doesn't give us the joy and the pleasure of fulfilling our purpose we're just getting paid and there's a limit to how valuable that is
10:06 at the end of the day so when you talk about our our purpose do we all then have essentially the same purpose i.e to serve other people within whatever business we're in well i think it's a deep spiritual question that we all have to ask ourselves i obviously answer that as you know me as a religious jew so i look at ultimately what's god's purpose for me but i think for everybody it's about you know whatever you're going to do be the best at that take joy in being the best of that and helping other people and whatever's
10:42 supposed to happen to you what happened at the highest level there's a scene in in um the movie gandhi where ghani's wife and and and gandhi gandhi has an argument with his wife imagine that it makes me feel better and it's her turn to rake and cover the latrine and and they argue she's going to do it she's his wife she says you have to do it she says fine i'll do it and he says no no no you'll either rake and cover between with love or you won't do it at all and the point i think he was making there was that everything we do either we do it to be a service and do it with love or we're not doing the right thing and so i would say to you that when i find
11:18 people who have amazing lives they have financial success as defined as freedom from stress they have family life they have social life they have other things in life that they value inevitably they're focused on just doing what they do well and helping other people as much as they can and they're not as focused on last year to 10 million and next year we do 15 million that's not to say we should have goals that's just not the purpose that's maybe a scorecard we keep i'm a i'm a single parent i have three children i don't know how i'm gonna feed my
11:54 children next week right how do i keep myself focused on my purpose and and not let you know the the desperation and and and by the way uh that's to my mind that's you know if there is such a thing justifiable desperation right nobody sure wants to see their kids go hungry so the difference between desperation is i have to do something and desperation that caused us to cut corners and do things we shouldn't do so i think that when i've been in positions where i've lost everything i
12:30 had to start over and that's not a reason you should do business with me right that i'm desperate in fact you might be concerned am i gonna steal your money you know times that i'm in real estate people write checks in the old days we give us checks to deposit right are they about me stealing them if they knew i was desperate maybe they would be comfortable that but also gets in the way of serving you as a customer if i'm desperate for money my focus should be who can i help and get paid not how do i get paid and that requires discipline that requires faith that requires you know uh fortune those are challenges i faced them in my life and and so um but i've also known people
13:07 who were that poor and they didn't see themselves as being that poor they just did the things they had to do they called for help they went to a a church they went to a pastor a rabbi a friend or whatever got the food they had to get got themselves a breathing room and went back and found a job and i often find that people are so desperate and they'll they'll share with you the desperation but by relieving that pain they're not taking the actions to solve it which at the end of the day probably means you got to get a job or start a business or find somebody who needs you to do something for them they can get paid for so i think that there's there's a it's not about the desperations how you
13:43 channel that energy you put in a positive way or do you allow to be overwhelming or negative way i'll give you a perfect example if i can yeah i had a real estate agent who was you know not able to fight for his family and was leaving the business and taking a job as a warehouse person and because he didn't have the money for his multiple listing service dues i said to him he said he couldn't afford too much money that's like 300 i said i'm just curious do you have cable tv yeah how much is that monthly about 140 a month i said really so unless we might say i don't have cable tv but i said you found money for that beat
14:18 my money for the dues that pay for your business so on one hand he he could tell you he was desperate you might go oh well that's really sad you have to go get a job but he didn't take the actions he take the desperation and move it into action to do things he should have done to generate some business so so you've you've coached a lot of a lot of people um and and i assume that example you just gave is comes from somebody that you coached right real so for someone who's who's struggling
14:54 i would imagine you you'd say find yourself a coach so i say you need three things you need to have a coach or a mentor or a teacher a rabbi or a pastor somebody who's in charge that you respect their authority second you have to have a process or a system or a book or methodology that you know what you're supposed to do every day you should never wonder what am i supposed to do today so if you're if in real estate when you're self-employed you need to have a schedule and be working that schedule that comes from your system the third thing i think we need is a community or a team or a group or a congregation
15:31 so that we have peers with peer pressure to push us forward we have peers who need our help so we're helping them and then we've earned the right to ask we're hoping we need it and i find that you have to have those three things together uh absent that is very difficult to be successful in business but but but you know i really want to drill down on this so where we find the mentor that makes sense go find someone who's who's already had the kind of success that we're looking for and and talk to that person or or maybe i guess buy that person's book read their book right so for for the
16:08 uh for the other two right where do we where do we find that system where do we find that community well i find that successful coaches leaders pastors rabbis have those other two right they have a system they promote to you okay uh you can pick anyone in any area of your life and and i find anybody who's a leader in that area will promote a particular system or methodology or process and they'll have a group of people around them who achieve success or starting out or in process and you have to sign up for all of it you know there's a in again because i'm
16:43 religious i would go back as a study why did joshua succeed moses for the jewish people it says because he was the one who stayed after moses gave lectures and put the chairs away in essence he put the rugs away right what does that mean well when you put the chairs away for the leader you've earned the right to ask him questions and get extra time with him and so i'd say when you find somebody who's that way be it class early and help set up be at class afterwards and help clean up make sure he gets things thrown away or whatever make it easier for him to deliver to everybody he'll find a way to or she will find a way to encourage you and support you because they need you around so i remember
17:20 this is again back when i was still in business i think it was felix roy hatton who said this he someone asked him you know what is the key to success and he said make yourself indispensable yes i don't know that i would say that to your customers to your coach to your mentor or pastor or whatever and people say to me well i can't develop a relationship with other people coming with spiritual questions with this rabbi or this pastor well if you're there at the class early and you're there afterwards cleaning up afterwards believe me he'll find a way to keep you around you know he builds organizations is
17:55 stupid they built the organization because he did certain things over time and achieved a level of success so i would say 100 make yourself indispensable to customers or to your coach or your system for sure so you're you know you find someone you think would be the ideal coach and for whatever reason they're not receptive what do you do i don't i don't hear that happening very often i mean i guess find another but um we're not talking about nba coaches where they're paid professionally and will only take their
18:30 own team and even those guys my guess is they have summer camps and they have i mean i've met them actually i've met nba coaches and they have summer camps if you sign up your kid the summer camp and you show up there to help out you're his best friend that week i mean we're all that way we all need help i one thing about really successful people that i've noticed when i meet them is how human they really are you know on stage it might be indispensable or in untouchable but in real life they're human they have the challenges too and find the moments where they need help and i would i i don't i guess i would reject the premature question i don't
19:06 people who are successful are good at delegating tasks to people to help create a win-win situation that's why they're leaders so i don't i don't think that really is what people would say to me i just don't buy it okay so so in other words because i could imagine somebody watching this is thinking myself i i i i can't approach this successful person it's it's too daunting it's it's you know i'll i'll get rejected well i think you might get rejected what you asked for but they need to find something they're not going to reject you for right meet them if you know they're going to a certain meeting if you're
19:41 there early right like like i used to go to court to meet certain people attorneys or investors or or homeowners if i knew they'd be at court 830 i was there at 7 45 and some people get there early well there i am in a suit and a tie with a cup of coffee and time to talk to them if i'm not there at 7 45 i have the chance to talk to them if i see them walking in the door hey so-and-so i just i always had a lady call me an attorney who i met that way about a year and a half ago and she's calling me with some business why i just happened to be at court and saw her and then when i called her a week later hey i saw you in court i know you're busy i'd love to take you to lunch talk about how i can help you
20:16 she's now open to cause i already met her so i think that yeah you might get rejected the first time but you know if it's valuable relationship is worth a second and also change your tactic or strategy because everybody needs something just find out what they need right so now now you've you've you've you've got the coach you you're developing that relationship with them they have the system and you're you're learning that system you're building that community how long does it take well it takes as
20:51 long as it takes i think i think life's a process is my destination and so i would say that you know i think your question really is how do i know that i'm making progress right because if i said it takes two years to go from zero to making a living in real estate and along the way you'll close some deals but you're not making a living you know well but what's the benchmark in 90 days and six months and nine months in a year that's a different question so i would say what are the benchmarks and that's a good question for your coach and then i always go back to what they're doing the things you're supposed to do to get there to use real estate as an example because that's what i mean most commonly
21:26 oftentimes i break down to real estate agents and say the end of the day it's about how many people you talk to and how many people you meet if those two numbers aren't sufficient you're not it's like a baseball you're not gonna get enough chances of bat to hit a home run and you never get good enough to hit a ball if you ever get your bat on the ball so people obviously why you know it's 90 days i haven't got a deal yet okay but did you do the calls you're supposed to do did you meet with the people you're supposed to meet and usually the answer is no if they're struggling the people who do the activities they don't ask that question because they have that faith every day that's what drives them to do
22:02 the activities and so that's where i think the coach and the community come into play if you're doing this whatever the activity is and you see a guy who's three months ahead of you and a year ahead of you and they're achieving what you want you don't stop and ask them on the right path or not you just keep following them very good well i got the high sign we have to wrap up okay so um find a coach or mentor a process and a community and then if you just follow those three things that that should get you that should get you on your way to wow if you do your coach says i think that's
22:37 always a question are you doing what he says what would so-and-so tell you to do oh yeah you tell me to do this then do that so that should get you on your way to well for sure bill thanks so much my pleasure always that's our show for this week thinking back to what bill gross said if we want to be successful if we want to find our way to wow we need three things we need a coach or mentor we need a process and we need a community but of the three we need the coach or mentor because they'll help us find the other two
23:14 and as i think back about my own life that's absolutely been the case for me and i think it's been the case for every successful person there's ever been we don't do it on our own we need other people to help us show to help show us the way so go out and find that coach or mentor if you're not sure who that person is why don't you drop us a line tell us where what what you want to find success in we'll see if we can't find you somebody to get in touch with
23:51 courage at all times my friends and marie darling you're still my bell [Music]
24:31 [Music] you