Dave Liniger
Appearances
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
If you're dreaming, dream big. Shoot for the moon. Don't have little bitty goals. have a giant goal. My goal was to build the largest, most successful real estate company in the history of the world. With big dreams come big obstacles.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
If you have a passion and you believe it, and you go to sleep at night thinking about it, and you get up in the morning thinking about, I've got to get to the office because this is my world. This is my passion. You can Get over the day-to-day mistakes and problems that you will face. You have to be a dreamer. You're an entrepreneur. You know that. I can make the world a better place.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I'm not here to make more money. I'm here to change people's lives.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I have a marketing background, sales background, selling franchises and so on. A lot of people say the marketing person is not going to be a good manager, not going to be a good leader. I totally disagree. If you're a real estate agent and you're service oriented and you give a damn about your customer and you care more about them than you do about your commission, you're going to be a success.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker from, God, 40 years ago, he said one time, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And that even at age 20 as a real estate agent in the military with a crew cut haircut and 130 pounds, Like, I'm somebody's teenage kid.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I succeeded because I managed to convince the customer, I will work my tail off for you, and I will never sell you something that's not right. And I don't care if I make a commission or not. I'm going to solve your problem. Once I had that reputation, it made no difference if I was 20 or 30. And so I think the most important aspect is you do have to have a passion.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
You have to figure out what difference am I going to make in the world? Now, if I can say this very modestly, for 10 years, I was the youngest person in Remax. Unfortunately, 50 years later, many of My people I sold to in the 70s and 80s have retired and passed away. The biggest joy I have in my life is having letters sent to me and my wife You changed my life. I created wealth for my family.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I never had the life I thought I would have. You have impacted me so immensely. I want you to know that before I die. That's what leadership is. Leadership is not stock options. Leadership is not, I'm CEO, look at me. Leadership is, did you turn around and put your hand down to help the next person come up a couple more steps up the mountain? And that is total gratification.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Ernest Shackleton was a unique individual. He was born in a family, and I can't remember, six daughters and him, the youngest, and the daughters have a unique impression on him. In an era, 1907, 1910, where the general said, jump, and the private had to say, how high on the way up, command and control, he was unique. Women are unique business people, and most of them are more compassionate,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Most of them like to ask everybody's opinion and how we're going to succeed at this instead of a command and control situation. So he was 100 years ahead of his time. They get stuck in the ice near the South Pole. They get frozen in the ice. gets stronger and stronger. They're happy in their little boat.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
They have food, the warmth, and the boat starts to crumble and they have to get out and live on the ice flow. And so he had 27 men. They got out on the ice and they had to live for over a year and a half. At the end of of their journey, every man wrote in their diary he was the single greatest leader they'd ever met in their life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
He put people in tents, two and three people to a tent, and every day he visited each tent and sat and said, how are we doing? What's your thoughts? What do you suggest we do? Do we pull our lifeboats and try to get to land? Do we do this? Do we do that? It was a very feminine management trait at that time, which is very unusual. And so he brought them all home alive.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
By the way, in his diary, he wanted to kill them. He literally had three or four people he just wanted to shoot, but he didn't. He was one of the greatest leaders we've ever seen in our lifetime. And every man, and I'm sorry, it was all men, every man said, this is the greatest leader I've ever worked with.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
That's an amazing story of survival in desperate means with not enough food, not enough sunlight, not enough warmth. And he brought them all home.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I have a concept I read about. called We All Carry the Boxes. I felt as a leader that I had to do everything that my employees did to prove that I'll work just as hard as you will. I had an interesting situation with a black gentleman that became one of my best friends of my entire life. I was going on speaking tours five days a week.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I always took some younger people with me to set up the meeting rooms and to help set up the autograph booths and all that stuff. And this young gentleman, every place we stopped and we flew in, would grab my briefcase, grab my suitcase. Let me get that for you, Mr. Lendinger. He was like, I finally looked at him and I said, Karan, I'm a man. I can carry my own damn briefcase.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Hey, Hala. Thank you very much. It's nice to join you today.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The last stop of the week was Washington, D.C., Dulles. We were at a Marriott. And I had a whole bunch of stuff I was carrying. Briefcase, suitcase, overhead projector and all this crap. And I got to the door. I said, Karan, would you get the door for me? And he looked at me and he says... You're a man. Get your own damn door. I knew on that moment he was not scared of me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I knew at that moment he had a sense of humor and he just didn't give a damn. And he became one of my top officers in my life and one of my best friends because he showed the aptitude of, I'm not kissing your butt. You're going to be temperamental with me. I'll be temperamental back with you. And I was 30 years older than him.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And so, you know, when you look for leadership, you look for people that aren't afraid. You look at people that are willing to just grab it and go for it. And he was.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The first thing you have to understand is loyalty is a two-way street and loyalty starts at the top. going down, not the down, going up. It is your responsibility to be totally 100% loyal to your employees. Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, gave a speech. I was sitting in the front row, and he said, the customer is not always right.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
He said, if you have a drunk passenger who is harassing your flight attendants and being just a mess, throw them off your fucking airplane. He took the side of his employees and said, you're valued to me more than that customer is. The customer is not always right. My employees are doing their job. If they're right, we don't want that customer. Loyalty starts top down.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
If you're loyal to your employees, your vendors, your customers, the loyalty will be great.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Oh, this is controversial. I think that everybody needs to be treated fair. but not equal. So if I have a good franchisee in Canyon City, Colorado, that has 15 agents, and that individual calls me and says, Dave, will you come to my Christmas party? Will you come to my New Year's grand opening? And I have to say, no, I have 9,000 offices and I can't be there, but I can do a DVD or a hyperlink.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
and say hi to everybody. If my biggest broker in California has 100 Premax offices, and he says, can you fly out to my meeting with my agents? The answer is, hell yes. I'm sorry, I can't go to 15 agents. I can go to 2,000 agents. And so you have to start prioritizing the fact of everybody's valuable. But you have such limited personal time to care for the network. You have to run the business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
You have to do all the things you have as an entrepreneur. And you still have to try to have friendships and personal relationships. And so fair, but not necessarily equal.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
That's easy. Just be who you are. If you make a mistake, admit it immediately. Don't be phony. Don't be false. Don't be superhero. Don't be Wonder Woman. Just say, hey. Team, I screwed up. I made a mistake. I'm sincerely sorry I will not make the same mistake twice. And it's amazing. Your employees will be very forgiving. They don't want you to be God.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
They don't want you to be different than them. They want to know that you're a human being.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
How I was very young when I tried to go to college. I was just barely 17. I wasn't disciplined. My mommy and daddy weren't there to tell me to study every night. And I failed. Not failed because I was stupid. My ACT scores are out of the world. I was undisciplined. I didn't have the maturity that I needed.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
People are incredibly kind. They like transparency. They like honesty. And the hardest thing in the world is laying people off because of the economy or whatever it might be. You're affecting their lives. You can't sugarcoat it. And I had to do layoffs twice in Rematch's history. And I'm sorry. I'm a manly man. I cried both times. They knew that I hurt having to lay them off.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Well, we sat around having shots of tequila, some salt and wine, and nobody wanted to call it Dave Leninger Real Estate. I thought that was pretty egotistical. And at the time, Esso had just changed the name to Exxon. They'd spent millions of dollars on this trademark, only to find out it was a foul language in a different country. But anyway, it was five letters and a couple of slashes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And we sat around. We said, well, Remax, that's real estate maximums. Maximum commission to the agent. Maximum service to the customer with no part-timers or beginners. maximum profit for the broker owner. And we came up with RE Max. And we looked at that and said, somebody's going to think there's a Mr. or Mrs. RE Max.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
We took the periods out, threw a slash in, five Vietnam vets, so we had a red, white, and blue sign. A lot of market research went into this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
In 1973, the traditional commission split between the real estate agent and the owner of the office was 50-50. The owner of the office used their 50%. pay overhead, marketing, secretaries, rent, et cetera, and make a profit. The agent, they got their 50%, but they had to pay for their automobile. Nobody pays for retirement for real estate agents.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Nobody pays for social security or insurance or whatever. And so in reality, real estate agent never did make 50-50. After paying their own personal expenses and stuff, they were more like, I don't know, 80-20 or 75-25.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And so we looked at it and said, why not have an office like a group of doctors, lawyers, architects, or dentists that shares office space, pays their own personal expenses, and they're part of the office space, and keeps the majority for themselves? Cheaper than going into business for yourself. And the end result was, as we started the company, the split changed about 85-15.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
So very controversial. The industry hated it. They hated me. Today, I'm an icon. But I outlived everybody because they were all in their 40s and 50s when they were trying to drive me out of business. And so as a model, we changed the entire real estate industry's commission splits.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I decided that I was not in the real estate business. I was in the real estate agent business. And my job was to create an environment where real estate agents could could be more successful than any place else in the world. They were in the real estate business. They handled the buyers and sellers. We stuck with that for 50-some years. It is the backbone of our company.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Our average agent has twice the experience and three times the sales volume of other full-time realtors in the world, and it worked.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I finally gave up on this college route and ended up joining the United States Air Force and went to Vietnam. I spent six years in the Air Force. It bought me six years to mature as a young man. So everybody knows young women, they're pretty mature at 18, and young men sometimes It takes an extra 10 or 20 or 30 years to get there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
As we started to expand REMAX from Colorado with an amazing success story after five years, and we went into various markets, and we went to Atlanta, and they said, well, we don't steal each other's agents down here. We're kind of genteel. Then we went to Chicago, and they said, you guys are cowboys. You wear cowboy clothes and blue jeans. We're sophisticated. We have coats and ties.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Went to Quebec. They said, you don't even speak French. So everybody said, we're different, we're different, we're different. And as we went around the world, every country is different. We're in socialist countries. We're in communist countries. We're in democracies. We're in countries that 80% of the countries we're in don't even have a multiple listing service or realtors.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And everybody keeps saying we're different. And in every country we went to, we became incredibly successful. And the thing that's fascinating about the success was I couldn't figure out why with all the differences. And it finally came down to human beings have some common commonalities, if you will, what human beings want.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
We want to raise our children to our moral standards and our religious beliefs, not somebody else's. We want to make more money so that we can provide elder care or child care or provide for our children. We want to do our business our way. I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, where I want to do it, how I want to do it, and with who I want to do it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
So it had nothing to do with the commission split working in 110 countries. It had everything to do with the leadership concept of, I have one job in this real estate office. I'm not here to motivate you to become more successful. I can put a gun to your head and say, stand up. If you don't stand up, you're an idiot. The minute the police take me away, you never think about me again.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
My job as a leader, for any person that's listening to this podcast, Your job is to create an environment where the people that work for you can achieve the level of success they want. We had 100% Club 73 make $100,000 a year, which is an unreal figure at that time. And I couldn't figure out, why in the world didn't everybody want to work that hard? It took me about 10 years to figure it out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And there are people who are very happy at age 60 are not going to work 18-hour days anymore. They've got good clients. They've got referrals. And they want to have time to golf and be with the grandkids. And they're happy making $60,000 a year. And so it finally dawned on me that it's not my responsibility to say everybody should make $100,000 or $200,000 a year.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I'm supposed to create an environment where they can achieve the level of success they want.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
If he read the book, I'd talk about leadership. And the number one most important factor of a leader is a leader sells hope. I don't care if it's Martin Luther King. He's talking to Brown. and white people, of our children can do better. They can be equal. We can live in the same neighborhoods. We can have the same advantages.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And he was nonviolent, and he tried to preach there's hope in the future for us. If you go back to Reagan, Reagan said, make America great. The only thing Trump did was say, make America great again. Hillary said, stronger with Hillary. Nobody gave a damn. Obama had one word, hope. And he won. And so great leaders have to be optimistic. But they have to have a dream.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And that bought me the time to mature enough to where I knew where I wanted to go.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And they have to sell to their followers that we together will have a better life together. And so as an entrepreneur, I had dozens of people who tried to hire my officers away from me in the 70s and 80s and 90s. offering them twice what they could make. And they never left because we had our dream together. And we had this optimism that we would change the world. And we did.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I had been licensed for six months. I had no intention of being a real estate agent. I was buying investment properties. But I got a license to maybe save the commission. And I looked around at these old people in my office. I was still in the military and they were old. I mean, some of them 40, 50, 60 years old. And they make a deal once every three or four months.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And I thought, man, I could do this. And six months into it, crew cut, haircut, 130 pounds, Volkswagen with a cracked windshield and no air conditioning in Phoenix in the summer. and not one deal. I quit. I got my little cardboard box. My manager stood there and said, I didn't think you would ever make it. And I said, well, why the hell did you hire me?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And he says, we're in the real estate business. Everybody's got a mother, a brother, a next door neighbor, and a best friend. You never know when you can get a deal. I'd paid to go to Dave Stone's seminar, $25. This is 19, I don't know, 67, 68, whatever it was, Mountain Shadows Country Club in Scottsdale. I went, I sat in the front row, even though I'd quit, and he was mesmerizing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
He was so smooth. He was so cool. He had a gift to gab for everything. And he was talking about how to handle objections, how to do this, how to do that. And I'm sitting there every break. I jumped up and grabbed his hand like an idiot. Oh, oh my God, Mr. Stone. That's fascinating, man. If I had your, your gift, I could be a success. He says, how long have you been trying? And I said, six months.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And he says, well, How many deals have you got? And I said, none. And he says, if I were you, I'd quit. And I said, I did. But I'm going back. I'm going back to work today. I can do this. Strange world. I'm going home that night. My stupid Volkswagen with a cracked windshield, no air conditioning. Latino girl. probably about 20 or 21, is talking to her father, half English, half Spanish.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
No, I was so confident in my abilities being a combat vet. that I just felt I could pull my way through the China closet and we'd be okay. So the thing that was the defining moment was I realized I was not sophisticated. I did not have management experience to speak of. And I looked for an administrative vice president. By the way, they were all women. I interviewed 27 people. I said no to 27.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I stopped in to get a gallon of milk for the kids. And I said, excuse me, are you talking about real estate? And she said, my father's moving to Albuquerque and we need to sell his house, but we don't know how to do that. And I looked at him, and I said, senor, do you know how much a real estate commission is? And he said, no, lo comprende, or something. I don't know what he said.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I said, do you know what title insurance is? No, lo comprende. I said, he needs me. I'm a realtor. I followed him home, listed the house on, this is terrible, $10,500. That house today would be $200 and some thousand dollars. Two full price offers that night. The next morning, I'm laying in bed with my wife, slapped her on her bottom and say, wake up. And she said, what?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
You're sleeping with one hell of a fine realtor, man. 100% of my listings have sold for full price in less than two hours. That day, I took... the girl and her fiance and sold them a house. That afternoon, I sold their best friends a house. And the next morning, I sold their friends a house. So in basically 48 hours, I hadn't sold a single Anglo person a house.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The girls hugged me and kissed me and said, oh my God, my parents don't even own a house and we now own a house. And the guys slapped me on the back and shook hands and said, hey, amigo, this is fabulous. My parents don't own a house. It was a set. I did 365 transactions part-time, still in the military, in the next 365 days.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The only difference was those four customers gave me the confidence to be able to look at the next customer and say, well, I've made three deals this week. The same Volkswagen with a cracked windshield, the same 135-pound combat soldier. And overnight, Stone changed my life. He gave me the confidence. I followed him. He helped me design Remax when I designed it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
He gave me a 300-page manual on why it would never work and a 20-page attachment that said, but if you do this and this and this, you will. And I was very fortunate. I had this unbelievable, remarkable man that changed my life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I was so aggressive. Yeah. I was just a groupie. He had to look at me and think, you idiot. But I pushed it, I pushed it, I pushed it, and ended up becoming one of the best friends of my life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Lots of people will ask me to mentor them. And as you get older, you're very young, but as you get older, you start measuring your hours and saying, what's important to me? And what's important to me is giving a hand down to help the next person get up the mountain. And so many people have been kind to me in my life. And so that becomes part of what do you want to do as a mentor?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The problem with being a mentor is Nine out of 10 people will nod and take notes and smile, but they won't execute. They'll ask you for advice and you tell them the advice and they say, oh, that's wonderful. And they won't execute the next day. And so you get to the point where you don't want to mentor people because you're wasting my time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Firing is tough. I used to brag for 38 years, not one individual had left RE-MAX as one of my officers on their own. I didn't fire anybody. I took a seminar, can't remember where, and it was the first time you think that you ought to fire somebody is the day you should fire them. And yet, if you're a realtor or you're a salesperson or an entrepreneur, you want to be liked.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And the 28th was magic. It was a woman by the name of Gail Main. She was a new bride, trailing spouse, followed her husband to made DNF stores from St. Louis, where she had had her college and her management experience. And he brought her to Denver. She really wasn't serious about being an administrative vice president. But I told her, I said, look, she was charismatic. She was confident.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And so you'll tolerate nonsense from idiots. And the day you finally have the guts to fire somebody, the next morning you get up and say, why the hell didn't I do that 10 years ago? So the problem with me was my officers traveled with me constantly. We did 200 and some speaking days a year and officers went with me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
We had breakfast together, lunch together, dinner and flights together and cocktails. And we went to each other's marriages and divorces and cancer with their parents and our funerals and whatever. It's hard when you're close friends with everybody.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
So I take this course and I came home to Gail and I said, we got four of these guys that I've worked with for years and they don't have fire on the belly anymore. They feel entitled. They've been here 25 years. I don't have to work that hard. And I said, you and I still work this hard. I've got to solve this problem. She and I brainstormed.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
and role-played, and I called each one in individually, and I said, hi, it's time for a serious conversation. I've talked to you for two years about, I don't think you've got the fire in the belly, and I don't think you care about the network like we do, and so I've made a decision, and that decision is, I can fire you and give you a two-week severance package, or
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
You can resign, and I'll give you a one-year severance package. Which do you want? And that starts the argument of, no, no, no, no. Oh, you don't understand me. I really work hard. I said, nope. I'm sorry. My decision has been made. I'm done. This is your decision. Two-week severance, and I fire you. Or you resign, and I'll give you a year severance. All four of them took it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The next day was a company-wide meeting for the employees at headquarters, 400 people. We do the meeting. We put out the awards and talk about the updates. And at the end, I always said, are there any questions for me? So I'm fairly conservative. I have a very liberal left-wing Democrat in the editorial staff. And he
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
He stood up and he says, Dave, what the hell did he have on you that you didn't fire him 10 years ago? And now I'm in front of 400 people. And I said, I didn't have the personal courage to be the leader that you deserved. And that I finally realized that when I don't fire somebody that's incompetent, I have three groups of people. I hurt the individual because they're pigeonholed.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I'm never going to promote them or I give them another pay raise. I hurt the people that work for them because they know that person's an idiot. And I hurt myself and my shareholders because I didn't have the personal courage to face up to a friendship challenge of we were no longer a good fit together. And the room applauded. I was vulnerable. I said it was my mistake. It's my fault.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And they accepted it. So when you talk about leadership concepts, firing is the most important thing you can do. If you have somebody that's abusing, nasty, just unkind to their employees, you're tolerating that. The fact that you don't make a decision is you made the decision. If you can't make the decision to fire them, you've made the decision, I'll put up with their crap.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
It's a tough deal. That's why we get paid the big paycheck, right? And so when you talk about leadership, that's the hardest thing. Hiring, you should hire very, very slow and fire very, very fast.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
In the sales field- There are hunters and farmers. The hunters live for the kill. They want to go out, kill something, put it over their shoulder, bring it back to the teepee, and put it on the ground and say, hey, let's have some food. And they want to go out and hunt again. Farmers, they are slow, methodical. They want to build relationships. They want a lifetime experience with this individual.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
You need both salespeople. You need farmers that will have the patience to build relationships over periods and periods of years. But you still got to have the hunters that can go out and score the kill.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
She was well-poised. I said, I don't know how to run a real estate business. I can be a sales manager. I can be a trainer. But I need somebody that could find office space, rent it, buy furniture, hire secretaries and bookkeepers and receptionists, and run the company. And I got lucky. I was so lucky. She said yes. I told her I was going to build the biggest real estate company in history.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I think the most actionable thing is you have to be a lifelong learner. One of the biggest deficiencies I've seen in many of the officers I've hired is they got their college degree, they know it all, they don't buy a book. If they buy a book, it's fiction, and they don't continue to study and find out, how do I build my business? How do I build my life? That's the most important aspect of
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The most successful people I've mentored are sponges. They will learn from everybody, everything they can, and they will execute.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The old classic is Think and Grow Rich.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
By Napoleon Hill. It is tried. It's tired. Half the book is worthless. The first half is pretty darn good. I think the best book out there is Success Principles by Jack Canfield. And it is a fabulous book. It's big. It's 600, 700 pages. But it's three to four page chapters that you can pick and choose what you want to learn from. It's very motivational.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The other thing is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. And it is little steps forward. done repeatedly over years, gives you amazing results. And the final one would be Kaizen. And that's the Japanese concept of 1% improvement of 100 things every day and not 100% improvement once a year.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Profiting in life is what is your goal? And so... If your goal was to reach 65 and retire and go fishing, then you've been successful. I have an interesting company right now. It's called PortaSups. It's a sub sandwich company, the highest, best quality sub sandwich in the world. It's based really in Nevada with a couple of adjoining states.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And I bought it from the guy that retired, but I'm developing it very rapidly. And regional developer model, we've got 20 some regions sold. We're going to expand. We'll be worldwide in no time at all. The thing that was fascinating to me about it was in the real estate business, I change, I should say Gail and I change the world because we hired women. And in 73, that was not popular.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The part-time housewife was like, well, they're not serious about the business. They're taking jobs away from a white man and all this crap. It was an old white man's, white-haired deal. So we changed a lot of lives, but we changed it with women. Eventually, we changed it multicultural as we became big and successful. Port-a-Subs is amazing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
It's much less expensive to start a sub sandwich shop than it is to start a McDonald's for $10 million. And it is a chance for multiculturals to get their foot into private ownership of an enterprise. And so 65% of our franchisees are multicultural. In most cases, the first person in the family to own a business. And it's been around 50 years.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And so we have multicultural people whose children are the first children in their family to go to college and are now taking over the business. And so to me, entrepreneurship is about getting a chance to get your foot in the door. And so a lot of times, the first generation are immigrants. They may be a teacher or a doctor in a foreign country, but they can't do that here.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And so they become a janitor or whatever, or a carpenter. Second generation usually is one of the trades. And the third generation are small business owners that are hiring the trades. It is a wonderful evolution of people having a chance to build family wealth.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And she very naively believed it. And so fast forward 10 years. She ran the business. I was on the road selling franchises, opening offices, expanding the company. And we both grew together. But we complemented each other's abilities and lack of abilities. And so I'm the super salesman. She was the super leader. And She did end up becoming CEO of the company.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
DaveLendiger.com. You can follow me along there. There's all kinds of things like God knows what, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. But it's a pleasure to be able to give back and maybe help the next person one more step up.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
You're a delight. Thank you so much.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
We were not romantically involved for 10 years. And at the end of 10 years, every officer I had had become divorced. We fell in love with this crazy mistress called Remax that, hey, you stand on a stage in front of 1,000, 10,000 people, and it's mesmerizing. And so it was just natural that we had no friends outside the company. And she and I became incredibly close.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
How do you want to change the world? Why are you so passionate about this business that you're starting?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
So I have to tell you, 51 years as my partner, 41 years as my wife, and she was awesome. And we made the perfect pair complimenting each other.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Unfortunately, I was stubborn. I was too aggressive. And I thought I had all the answers in the world. And fast forward 50 years of growing up and maturing and figuring it out is I look back on those days and think, oh, my God, how the hell did we succeed? And in essence, I am the direct result of of people, mentors, managers, leaders, books, seminars, of trying to find my way to success.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And I was blessed with the most amazing group of people around me that when I was failing the first two or three years, I sat down and I said, I'm screwing up. I know I'm not doing a good job. What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? And realtors will tell you the truth. Our managers of our offices that Gail and I started were 20 years older than us.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Ignore it. Everybody has an opinion. That doesn't mean everybody is right. Loyalty is a two-way street, and loyalty starts at the top going down, not the down going up. Your job is to create an environment where the people that work for you can achieve the level of success they want. The number one most important factor of a leader is a leader sells hope.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And they sat down and they took me to the woodshed. And I said, I'm coachable. I'm not smart, but I'm sure coachable. Tell me how to be the leader you want me to be. And those people said, And all the other things that happened in 50 years changed me immensely as a leader and a human being.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Well, this isn't the answer you want. It's ignore it. Everybody has an opinion. That doesn't mean everybody is right. If you're succeeding at what you're doing, criticism comes with a job title. And everybody's going to think I could do her job better than she can. That's nonsense.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
If you're the entrepreneur and you built the business, some clerk in the mailroom has not got the ability to tell you how the hell to run your business. So I always tell everybody, you will get advice from many sources. Whatever you do, you're the boss. You own it, you live with it, and you die with it. Never let an attorney or an accountant or a consultant run your business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
If they run into the ground, they walk away and you pay their fee. You are the person responsible for your corporation. Believe in yourself and charge forward. Listen to your confidants and be willing to accept criticism It's okay because we all make mistakes, but you just can't take the people that have no concept of what it's like to be responsible for an enterprise.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Each individual has to determine success for themself. The best definition I have ever heard of success is bannered about by three or four of the platform speakers. And it's very simple. I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, where I want to do it, how I want to do it, and with who I want to do it. And that is success. So I'm 79. I had a critical injury 12, 13 years ago.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I survived it. I can't do the things that I did before. I drove NASCAR. I flew aerobatic jet planes. I scuba dived all over the world. I skydived. I did all these things. And all of a sudden, you wake up and you're paralyzed. I was a quad for almost a year. And so then you start thinking, what is success? And I realized doors open and doors close.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And as much as I'd love to be at Daytona in February, leading the poll, ain't never going to happen at a man my age with my reflexes and my strength and my ability. So the doors closed, but other doors open up. So I was very fortunate one time. I had a dinner with a marvelous actress. She was 30 years older than me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
The best definition I have ever heard of success is...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
And I asked her about, well, you were young and you were extraordinarily beautiful. You were a screen star. What's it like now to be in your 60s? And that dinner was a lasting impression to me. She said, when I was young, I was like a vibrant, young, wild, tasty wine. And now, 30, 40 years later, I'm a different taste of wine. I've mellowed, but I'm still strong. And I'm happy with who I am.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
I've never forgotten that conversation because that's our world. We all will age. And the starting quarterback that was MVP after 35 is never going to be there again. And so you have to come to a feeling of, That was then. This is now. Who can I be now?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
A legacy? I was helped by dozens and dozens of people. Building a real estate company with a major conventions, you hire the best speakers that are out there, you become bosom buddies with them and they accept their check and you get their advice, but you grow. And I made so many mistakes because I was so immature and uneducated. The College of Hard Knocks is a hell of an education.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
Most people can't afford the tuition. And so there's not an original thought in the book. I try to put that in the forward of, hey, I have learned from the shoulders of giants of the very best in the world. None of this is original to me. It's all been passed down over hundreds of years. And the knowledge of Aristotle, anybody back in the time, is just as relevant today.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
It's 2,000 years later, and we still think the same way they thought. Our abilities have changed because of education, but in reality, common sense is common sense. And so every one of us should learn everything we can from anybody else.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Liniger: Top Leadership Principles to Achieve Extraordinary Entrepreneurship Success | E323
How do you want to change the world? Are you starting this thing to get rich? Are you starting this thing to dump it in five years and walk with a big paycheck and retire in Tahiti? What's your cause? What's your why? Why are you so passionate about this business that you're starting?