This article represents the ninth and final blog posting for my series “The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership”. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned from it. I wanted to use this also as a reminder to take this information and apply it to your professional life. Once you eliminated these seven deadly sins from your professional life, the sky is the limit! Employees and peers will want to follow you. Let’s do a quick re-cap of the “The 7 Deadly Sins of Leadership”. Sin #1 – Relevancy: As a leader, know what your focus should be and don’t get sidetracked. Stay relevant! Sin #2 – Dispassionate: True passion is not limited to a single focus. It is the way a great leader thinks about ALL THINGS. Sin #3 – Hypocrisy: We cannot guarantee to our followers that we will live flawlessly. However, we can promise them that we won’t live hypocritically. Sin #4 – Unnecessary Wars: A successful leader chooses carefully his battles. Just be sure you are the one who picks your fights. Don’t delegate that privilege to anyone but yourself. Sin #5 – Leadership Production: There can be no equivocation as a leader. Ted Turner’s desk motto says: “Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way”. Cursed is the leader who puts on the appearance without bearing the expected fruit. Sin #6 – The Soft Bribe: State your purpose, establish clear and simple policies, insist that everyone follow the policies and set the example. Then enforce fairly using generous doses of training, patience, example and reward. Sin #7 – The Wrong Bottom Line: What should trump, yet increase profits? Satisfied, mature and well-balanced employees. Will you ever be a perfect leader? No. Will I? No. However, my goal for this multi-part series was to help you become a better leader. My hope is that readers will at a minimum, take some of these recommendations and apply them to their professional lives. In doing so, not only are you improving your leadership style but you are creating a better work environment for all of your employees. If enough of us apply these changes, we become the antidote for a poisoned corporate society. Thank you for your readership! Be sure to bookmark this page for future reference and feel free to subscribe to my blog by registering on the right hand side of this page. There will be many quality blog series to come! Until next time. ...
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The importance of quality real estate photos We all know that the first impression is important and typically, is the most lasting impression. For years in real estate investing, everyone stressed the point about “curb appeal“. If your house didn’t have curb appeal, buyers would just keep driving on. The whole point of curb appeal is to get buyers to want to come in and take a look. Then make an offer! With the modern digital age, is curb appeal enough or do investors need more? Today, the majority of interested buyers have high-speed internet access and they use it! The internet has become almost as important as breathing in today’s business world! Whether potential customers buy online or research a purchase online, buyers are clicking through pages at high rates of speed! With all the clicking, there’s no doubt that they are skimming and skipping through pages. They are just waiting for something to pop out at them. IF something stands out, they may give it a few extra seconds of a glance before they move on. That is the most time you’ll have their attention. You spent so much time on that curb appeal. The interior, the tile, the floors, the kitchen and the baths. You have just a brief moment to capture the buyers attention long enough to get a click. So if your buyer is clicking through on a computer or a smartphone, are you willing to let that curb appeal go to waste because of a bland photograph? You put time and effort in every other aspect of your house. Don’t drop the ball when it comes down to the presentation! Remember, most buyers will visit your home online before they ever decide to drive out in front of it, and first impressions are most important! Just a thought to think about! So, the next time you find yourself staring back into your camera phone screen taking another selfie, save the memory space and go take some snapshots of your investment! It could be the deciding factor in your next sale. Be sure to check for future updates! Next time, I’ll be going over “The Importance of Photos, Part 2 – Should you let the agent take the photos of your investment?” ...
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In last Friday’s DIY video, we told you to keep an eye out for “Free Bonuses“. We previously kept a bonus and reused it in an updated and upgraded bathroom. In this video, we’ll give you another idea on what do with some of those “Bonuses“! Enjoy! ...
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Marketing 101: 3 Ways to create more Mental Space: Each person has the capacity of remembering and absorbing only so much information. Even though the human brain is said to have the capacity of 2.5 petabytes (one million gigabytes!), we have a much smaller capacity to recall short term, fast-paced promotional material. Not only that but according to the NY Times, every week, the average person sees upwards of 20,000 marketing messages. So how do you create more mental space inside of the brain of the people you want to do business with? We each have our own unique filters by which we experience the world. Here are some commonalities and ways to generate more Mental Space and make your message stick with your potential customer: 1) An Unforgettable Benefit. A person will rarely forget something that has never been offered before. This reminds me of a local jeweler in the Chicago-area that offered a full refund to any jewelry purchased during the Christmas holiday if it snowed more than a foot on New Years Day. His offer made me consider an unplanned purchase just for the chance that I might get my money back if the impossible happened. What can you offer that no-one else can or will? 2) Evoke Emotion. Emotion coupled with information is a very strong tool in creating “stickiness” for your message in the consumers brain. Try to use emotions such as excitement, passion or even fear. Can you bring tears to someone’s eyes? If you can, they will not forget. This reminds me of a current Duracell commercial featuring the NFL’s first totally deaf player, Derrick Coleman of the Seattle Seahawks. At the end of this article, take a moment to watch this commercial. It brings tears to my eyes every time! It worked and it evoked strong emotion! 3) Paradigm Shift. The majority of the American public has been taught in public schools, read public textbooks, and experienced the same media culture. What that tells me is that there are very few individually unique thoughts that exist. If you want to create more mental space you must create new ways of thinking. The book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” comes to mind. It goes against the grain of the traditional way of thinking. If you are going to contribute to “more of the same,” then get used to being placed on the mental shelf of the persons brain who you want to do business with. The example of a true paradigm shift is when light enters into a prism and reflects in a different direction. Because of your marketing the mental processes of the consumer should be affected and forced to think differently! ...
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