Interview with Everold Reid (part 3/3)

Hey everybody, glad you’re back listening to 4X Formula radio. This is episode number 3 with Everold Reid. We had a great conversation touching on so many different topics. There’s such rich content in here that I had to let you listen to it all. This is the final episode of the conversation with Everold Reid, writer of the book entitled The Reid Method.

Kelly Johnston: Remember we were talking about, you can’t change or adjust what you don’t measure, right? So keeping track of things, understanding where you’re at. Like if I’m in the month… I know, in my business, where I need to be in June, that will translate into what I’m going to earn for the balance of the year. Because the spring is huge and I know the fall is huge. Summer’s little bit different in my market. Someone in Florida, it might be different story, right? But I, I know that’s my market.

I understand that because I’ve been keeping stats for years. I understand where my hills and valleys will be. One thing about my business that I can kind of brag about if I’m going to brag about anything, and I don’t like to brag, but I have never missed a month getting a commission check and this is… Not many people in real estate can say that. For 17 years! You know, and in that, my light bulbs (plural), didn’t come on really for me in understanding how to break things down and kind of go, “Okay, what am I even doing?” Just like you did when you wrote your book, it causes you to think, right, it causes you to kind of start to break things down and it’s all in your brain here. You thought I got to empty my brain and get it onto something.

Everold Reid: That’s really happened. It was too much to carry around.

Kelly Johnston: Totally. And that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been writing stuff, writing stuff, writing stuff, but I never thought to like get a publisher or whatever. I’ve been thinking about putting it down so I could organize everything so I could give really good value to people in an organized way. Right? Yeah, but then I thought about it. I’m going, you know what? It doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t even matter what I teach them. It doesn’t even matter. Here’s the things you need to do. I can’t tell you how to do it. We’re not moving onto the next module until you do it. I mean, prove to me you’ve done it and we’ve measured it and then we’re going to move onto the next module because I do not want you to fail. If you take this course, I want to know your succeeding, so don’t even take this course unless plan succeed. That’s how I’m going to be presenting this course, so I’m not just doing it for the sake of doing it. I really want to know anybody who pays the money and takes this course and it’s going to be a fraction of the cost of the benefit they’ll receive. For sure. I know that’s going to happen. The reason I know that is because I’m going to make sure they’re do the doing. But the thing is they’re not going to do it unless they know why they’re doing it.

Everold Reid: Yeah, absolutely.

Kelly Johnston: So we were talking about measuring and you said, you know, I could ask some guys, where are they at this year or how many deals are going on… How much money… What’s your goal here? I want to sell this many cars. Yeah. Why? Why? Do you get into that?

Everold Reid: Absolutely. So what made me start doing this was… I’ve always been results driven. Okay. Results driven. So whereas most salespeople and we are talking about the 95, at least 90% do not have a goal sheet. There’s nothing on their computer. There’s nothing on their desktop. There’s nothing on their phone that says this is how much money I like to earn for this year. Um, they don’t read much. Most salespeople have never picked up a book to read. They don’t invest in themselves. So personal development and yeah. So, and this is part of my whole success lately is, you know, and I’m like, oh my God, can you imagine if I had invested in myself at a much earlier time in my life. Where this is where all this gold stuff comes from, right? Where I’m like, okay, I just don’t want to have just a regular goal, you know, in my head. I evolved. And here’s the thing about the goals that we’re talking about, goal setting and measuring and tracking results and progress. When I do workshops, I actually show where I’m at now and it’s a great big excel sheet that literally when I asked the audience, I said, what do you think this is? The response from the audience usually is that’s the dealership’s financial statement. Or it’s some sort of financial statements because it’s very detailed. And I go, yes, it’s some sort of statement, but it’s actually my personal goal sheet. And they go, what? And I said, but it’s evolved to this. This is not where it started. And that’s the other thing too, that the audience, you know, everybody listening tonight is that you don’t have to start off being a pro at setting goals or measuring goals but you got to start somewhere. And write it down. Not by thinking it, just thinking it first obviously, but putting it on paper and start measuring. And my goal sheet, there is seven plus years on the same excel file. So if you scroll back every month, you’ll see every single month for the last seven plus years. And how I started and where it was just a four column spreadsheet. Just measuring the average and the of the person and the model of a car.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah.

Everold Reid: Today the entire sheet is full and now I track my income. So every paycheck you get it’s a simple formula. You plug in the number, you plug in the amount of the check, you put the date in, and then there’s a formula that you know based on biweekly equal payments of projects times 26 to what you’re year end will be. So if your goal is a hundred thousand or 200,000 or 300,000. You know if you’re actually on track or fallen behind or ahead of that goal.

Kelly Johnston: What percentage of the goal you’re at.

Everold Reid: Yeah!

Kelly Johnston: And we do have a whole year to do it! So what I call it in my course I call it turn it on the tap. So you need to be able to be empowered to be able to turn on the tap when you need to. So you know what? I’m a little bit behind right now because remember, and it’s gotta be true for car sales. Where you’re at today was from work you did 60 to 90 days ago, right? So guess what? You can’t go back in time, right?

Everold Reid: Absolutely.

Kelly Johnston: You can’t go back in time. So now maybe you’re in a bit of a valley right now. All you gotta do is dig in, turn on the tap. Now, the funny thing about salespeople, they love working out of emergency mode. I don’t know what it is.

Everold Reid: I have some of that still in me. It drives me crazy!

Kelly Johnston: It’s something inherent in that, right? But to me, and I’m kind of like that too. I kind of thrive on that little pressure thing a bit. But as you get older, I’m now 50, you know, and…

Everold Reid: I’m turning 50 this year. We’re both, remember? Are we both September.

Kelly Johnston: I’m end of August so very close.

Everold Reid: Yeah, that’s right.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah. And I just turned 50. I went to Paris last year. That was so awesome. Just me and my wife. We had a great time. But you, you start to kind of go, you know what, I don’t want that crazy stress anymore. I want to organize things, you know? And that’s why I never missed a month in the last 17 years because I understand that concept of I am fully responsible, right. 60 to 90 days, what was I doing 60 to 90 days ago? I know when I’m slacking off. Everybody does know about it.

Everold Reid: Oh, absolutely!

Kelly Johnston: Right? And so if you break down your goals from yearly to monthly to weekly to, okay, now what do I got to do each day? And then you take that thing and you go, okay, now you know what, I know I’m going to work 300 and whatever days in the year. You divide that out based on the income. What’s your dollar per hour worth? Right. I know what my dollar per hour is worth. I know that. So now when I’m spending time with somebody that might be a waste of time or I’m having the coffee talk or story conversation with somebody or… You start calculating your time and go, you know it is costing me, if my time is worth $200 an hour, which I believe it is, at least minimum, then I start to think, don’t want to spend an hour doing this right now! (laughing)

Everold Reid: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And when I started earning a higher income, I was able to divide it up into the working days and saying, okay, what is my per day? Obviously down to the hour as well. Essentially we’ve done the same thing when you were talking about slacking off a little bit. I’m known at the office for the guy that can in the last 10 days of the month pulling it out of the hat and still sell more than everybody else. But for the first quarter, for the first time, and this is the eighth year now, for the quarter of this year, it was rough. I mean with personal issues that I’m dealing with at home and so various things, right?

Kelly Johnston: Yeah, stuff that diverts your mind a little bit. Yeah!

Everold Reid: So your mind is like, oh my God, there’s this, there’s that and your human at the end of the day.

Kelly Johnston: Absolutely.

Everold Reid: So in the first three months, I literally, I’m about 40% of my target in this month of April based on what I’m tracking now. I could actually do as much in the month of April that I did combine in the first three months. Because he’s poured on. Just pour it on and you’ve come to the realization that, okay, you have to be smarter at what you do. And here’s the tagline that I’ve adopted from my podcast is to be intentional. You have to be intentional with everything you do. And that’s what I’ve decided to do. I already ignore most people at work. I don’t really spend time. I’m not the coffee club guy. I’m not the going out to lunch for a beer guy. I’m busy as it is. So Lord knows I don’t have time for much of that. Right. But it’s to be more intentional. It’s to be deliberate in the actions you take. Whether you need to close your door, whether you need to say, okay, I’m available in an hour or two, leave me alone. Whether you need to turn off your cell phone or turn down the volume so that you can focus. Whether you need to set those goals like we talked about earlier. Whether you need to realize where you actually stand today because mostly salespeople don’t have a clue where they stand. Months to date, years to date. And then at the end of the year they wonder what the hell happened. And then they blame the economy. They blame the weather, they’ve made everything but the fact that they had no clue where they were.

Kelly Johnston: That’s exact.

Everold Reid: So that’s what you have to do is be intentional with everything you do in terms of success. Be Intentional too, folks with personal development. And those of you who have not adapted a personal development routine. That is essential because none of you, including myself, would not have realized what potential success could be until I started really investing more in myself.

Kelly Johnston: Absolutely. Learn from people that have been through it. And the thing that I love about what we’re doing is we’re still in the trenches. Both you and I are so similar, right? Wo both started… We didn’t even know, just so you know folks, for the last six years, we’ve kind of, every once in a while we’d see what we’re doing, but we didn’t actually, we went on this path of creating value for people in our industry to turn around and go back to them and say listen, I want to help you. We both did that without even knowing it.

Everold Reid: Without even knowing it.

Kelly Johnston: Without even knowing it! And that’s the exciting thing. And here we are talking today and kind of going, man, like all these things we were thinking because, and we’re both in the trenches. We’re still doing it still. We’re still refining. We’re still honing our skills. We’re still coming up with tools and systems and constantly making it better and better and better for the people that we’re serving.

Everold Reid: And the thing is, the network in what we are doing and the friendship and the relationships that we’ve built. I mean, first of all, the fact that we haven’t really communicated much in the last six years. We’ve liked and we’ve seen each other in what we’re doing, but have we, you know, we haven’t communicated. Most of all, we still respected what each other was doing. But it’s the ability to understand that, okay, sometimes you got to go back to the transit. Sometimes you’ve got to dig in. Sometimes you gotta reposition yourself. You got to learn about what you really need to do to take things to the next level. And I think for the last six years, we’ve both invested a lot in ourselves.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah.

Everold Reid: Into learning more, into choosing the right relationships, into networking with the right people. I think at the end of the day, the end result for both of us is that we want to give back a lot of what we’ve learned in our experiences and to be able to deliver on our own promises, on what makes us feel good.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah. But to go back and kind of go, hey guys, I’ve been through all this stuff. I can’t even believe. I do tell my stories in my podcast, and I do talk a lot about stuff I went through and relationships that didn’t go right and path I took that were wrong. When I started honing in real estate, I was a bankrupt. I was an assistant for somebody. That’s how I started. My wife and I got married and we had one car. We’re living in a basement suite. We had no money. I was bankrupt. I was making $1,200 a month. I had to talk somebody into loaning, you know, getting me to drive a car and I paid him off in five months and it wasn’t a very expensive car. It had cigarette burns in the seats and stunks like cigarettes and, but it was a four door.

Everold Reid: But it’s a start!

Kelly Johnston: And I remember trying to figure out where my next five bucks was so I could drive people around and show them houses. I remember those days. To go back and you look at it romantically now, right? When you go back into those times, those tough times you went through, but the key element to the whole thing, when you come to this realization, 22 years later, you know, I was 28 years old, that was a total different person. I have the self image of a pregnant ant. It couldn’t have been any lower, you know and I was learning from somebody that was teaching me all the wrong ways to do things.

Everold Reid: Absolutely.

Kelly Johnston: So then I had to kind of come to this place. By the way, when I started in real estate, it was like a default thing. It was like I failed at everything else I did. You know, my parents didn’t have any money. We grew up poor and I didn’t have the option of going to university and bettering myself.

Everold Reid: And neither did I, I mean, yeah, I was in college but it became tough to keep going. And I walked into a Toyota store as I told the story in the book and I never left after that cause like I was actually making money.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah. The thing about sales. The wonderful thing about it is, it’s all on you. There’s no one putting a stamp on your head going, “Donk, you’re worth: $25 an hour.” That’s a wonderful thing about sales. There’s no ceiling, there’s no basement, but there’s no ceiling and we get to be creative, which I believe inherently as human beings, we all need to be creative. That is a muscle that I think gets flabby. When you start working for someone else who’s told you what you’re worth, when you get to eat lunch, when you get to take breaks, when you get to go on holidays and you just get the same amount of money anyway. So why make a big difference? You lose your sense of purpose, you lose all that. And I’m not putting down people that work in jobs, but I’m just saying in sales, if you’re in sales and you’re listening to us right now, appreciate that. Like get excited about the fact that it’s all on you. You get to be creative. There’s no ceiling on what you can produce. So now knowing that, creating that why, why are you doing it? Why? What is 100,000 a year? What does that mean? What does that mean in your life? Like, how is that going to change your life? 200,000? Fine. What does it mean? What’s it going to get for you? How is that gonna change your life? What are you going to be able to give back out of that? You know, how is that going to affect your family? What kind of vehicle do you need? Picture your life! Develop that “Why?” because I’ll tell you one, just guess what? As soon as you get on the track, you read The Reid Method book or you take the 4X Formula course and you get all excited and you’re going to go on a new track now and you’re going to take this discipline approach in your life. First thing that’s going to happen – because it’s like the way life works – it’s the test. As soon as you go in that new track, you draw a line in the sand, you step over it, you start going, Bam, you’re going to get hit with a challenge. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. Every single time. That’s life. Yeah. Right? And that challenge is testing you. Is that challenge a wall or is it a speed bump? If you got your eye on the goal, it’s going to be a speed bump because you can see over top of it.

Everold Reid: Yeah.

Kelly Johnston: If you don’t have your eye on the goal and you don’t know your “why”, that challenge is going to be a wall and you’re gonna think you can’t get past it. You can’t get over it. And I want you to know that that’s a fact. That’s going to happen to all of you who are listening right now. Just know that, understand it but develop your why. Develop your why.

Everold Reid: One of my biggest examples is when at a young age, in my late twenties, I owned a used car dealership and I was two and a half years into it, you know, through inexperience and mismanagement… But had I just stuck it out, had I just asked for help, but I just, you know, listened to a couple of people and not got scared so quickly. Who knows how many dealerships I would have by now. Because that would ultimately have been the result, you know. So sometimes, like even this morning I was listening to, Gary Van Hershock and there are many speakers that you can listen to and they will tell you this. It’s, you know, when you get to this tough times, it’s usually not the time to quit because usually when you quit then, the success was just on the other side.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah.

Everold Reid: And it’s not the work as much as it is the doubts and the road blocks that come into the way. You know, we all can work and we can say we can all work as much as we can. But when you hit those roadblocks and then it knocks you down and you feel so alone in that space. And sometimes you don’t even want to tell anybody.

Kelly Johnston: I lot of time it’s a simple matter of the fact, and it’s one of the most difficult things, of looking internally for a second and going, what pattern do I need to change? What do I need to develop within myself? Where do I need to dig deep in order to overcome this thing? Sometimes you have to come to realization going, you know what, I’ve learned on my lessons here. I’m going to cut it and I’m going to move on to something else. That might be it?

Everold Reid: Sometimes you have to do that!

Kelly Johnston: But at the same time, those lessons, they need to serve you. They always need to serve you. They can’t be one of those things where you look back and go, well, if this happened or that person didn’t do that or that person did that. If you start looking at all these external reasons without looking at yourself, then you’re always going to live with regret. You’re always going to have this sense of almost hatred for that time of your life.

Everold Reid: And second guessing yourself a lot.

Kelly Johnston: Yeah. And you’ll never grow from it.

Everold Reid: Yeah. Yeah.

Kelly Johnston: And so whatever you’re going through right now, if you are going through some sort of challenges, we want to encourage you. Just letting you know, take a look at it and figure out where the patterns are. Figure out where the lesson is. Figure out what you can learn from that. And then allow that to serve you because challenges are gonna come.

Everold Reid: And here’s one thing I’ve learned about challenges and about goals. When I wrote the book, I’m like, okay, how am I going to market this book? Who’s going to even believe in this book? And I reached out to some of the world’s most recognized thought leaders like Tom Hopkins and Les Brown and Mel Robbins and Darren Hardy. Like these are all world renown guys in their space, like thought leaders and personal development trainers. And I was surprised! What surprised me was the amount of these people that are actually willing to help you.

Kelly Johnston: That’s amazing!

Everold Reid: If you actually take the time to reach out. I was shocked when I got the responses and the communication and the extended communication from Tom Hopkins who said, yes, send me a copy of your book. I’d love to see it. You know. He would reply to me from China when he was there and said, okay, when I get back, you know, let’s talk. He would come on the show and supported me five times. Like somebody who’s been in sales for 42 years, he’s trained over 5 million salespeople in live audiences alone. To give me the time to say, sure, come and meet with me. Come and talk, let’s do it. You know, for Les Brown to do it. When I started the podcast, those are the goals I had. I did have the goals, the big goals to go after big guests, you know, world renown guests.

Kelly Johnston: That’s why I’m here of course… (laughing) I’m just joking!

Everold Reid: That’s too funny!

Kelly Johnston: I finally said yes! I said no so many times! (laughing)

Everold Reid: And as you can tell, Kelly’s quite a comedian. He’s a good guy! But you know, those are the goals. Those were the goals so if you’re going to actually do something, forget about the mediocres goals. Go for the big. Who’s the biggest guests you’d like to have on your show? What’s the biggest goal or accomplishment you’d like to have? Like whatever space you’re operating in, whatever you are doing, what’s the biggest goal for you? Write that down and research how to get it. And let me tell you, when I contacted Les Brown, it was by fluke, a friend of mine litterally sitting across from me just like you are. He had come to see me and we were talking about the show and I said, yeah, I’d like to get guys like Tom Hopkins and Les Brown and this and that and he literally pulled out his cell phone, pressed a couple of buttons and turned it around to me. And he goes, “That’s Les Brown number” right in my office! I go “Get outta here.” And he goes, I’ve been trying to get a hold of him and it’s been difficult. I’ve had no contact. The first time I called, he picked up the phone.

Kelly Johnston: It’s meant to happen.

Everold Reid: Exactly. So you just don’t know until you try. And so I urge people out there, you know, 2019 is a young year. It’s only April, to reposition your goals. You know, today, whatever day it is, we’re only one quarter in. First quarter. Turn over a new page. Write those goals, reprioritize your goals, whatever makes you happy. What are your actual goals? What would it take to accomplish them? Who do you need some help from? And it’s okay to reach out to us, to ask a question or two. I’m happy, I respond to anybody who reaches out to me.

Kelly Johnston: Hey! I hope you enjoyed that last episode. Here’s the reality that you may or you may not know. The top 20% of real estate agents take home 80% of the money out there. While the bottom 80% are fighting over 20% of the scraps that are left. Do you have a desire to be on the top 20%? If you’re working hard and not sustainably making 6 figures of income and beyond, the problem is not you. It’s your system.

I struggled for years until one day the light bulb came on and I figured out how to simplify the real estate business. If you want to learn my secrets, that anyone can implement immediately, that I still use everyday, that pays me multiple 6 figures every year, go to 4xformula.com right now.