Ask Del Now!
The Notebook
Have you ever had an opportunity to go back and clean out old sets of records and boxes and books and stuff like that? I had a need for some information, some data, that had been filed away many years ago, and we since had changed offices.
And when digging around, I couldn’t find the data I wanted, but I did find a notebook. And I started cleaning out things as I was going through them I found this notebook. It was rather interesting because this notebook was a sitting down and a writing out of a set of theories and thought processes I had to change Lifestyles.
And I have to take you way back. When I first decided to do Lifestyles Unlimited, myself and Steve Davis sat down and we wrote out exactly what we wanted Lifestyles to be, something completely different that had never been around before. And to this date don’t believe there is another one like it anywhere in the country if not the world.
A New Level
And what it is is a situation where we wanted to take real estate training to a new level. We wanted to take it to the point where instead of just buying a set of books and tapes—which really in the old days that’s what you did. You would go to a seminar, sell you a set of books and tapes, and you would go home and study the stuff and go out and try to do real estate.
Make a lot of mistakes, lose a lot of money, and eventually hack your way through it and figure out how to do it in most cases. Some cases you just get burned out, not do it right, and leave it, say that’s not for me and move onto stocks and bonds again.
Real Estate is a Team Sport
But what I wanted to do was I created a concept called information service and support. The concept was to do real estate you not only need information, you need services. Real estate investing is a team sport. You need attorneys; you need CPAs; you need title companies; you need real estate agents and brokers; you need contractors to do the work on the properties that you own, and you need all of these services to be able to do this business. So I wanted to have both the information for people to be able to learn how to do it, but also the service.
Information, service, and the last was support. Support is that thing like, you know, if you ever looked at a keyboard and you tried to figure out how to do something with like say Microsoft or something like that, and you have no idea where to look in all the menus. The help doesn’t really tell you what you need to know.
No matter how hard you try, you can’t figure out how to do something, make the computer do something you want it to do. And so you call up one of your geek friends, and computer geek comes over and in ten seconds he goes control alt delete and the thing works. And you go I didn’t even know what question to ask. I didn’t even know how to phrase what I wanted it to do to ask the question to get the answer.
And so the concept that I came up with was support, that there’s got to be somebody you can go to that just understands what you’re going through and can identify for you what it is that you are doing wrong. And that’s where the consulting part of this business came about. We started consulting people. I started consulting people on their real estate operations. In addition to their purchases we started working on their operations.
Support is a Popular Concept
Now, this worked out so effectively and people liked it so much that our little start-up company went berserko. We went from ten members to a hundred members in a month. We went from a hundred members or—I am sorry, ten members to a hundred members in like probably six months. We went from a hundred members to 500 members in another year.
But what happened was is that I was working with each and every one of those people. Well, at some point along the way our company was no longer a hundred-member membership, it was now a 3,000-member membership. And at that point it was myself and maybe three other people here that were doing all the work.
Now, the interesting point was at that point, which was only like six years ago, we had hit a point where the company was going to explode. It was going to blow itself up. And this happens with everybody. Either your life changes—whatever it is that worked in the past doesn’t continue to work. Whatever it is you do is absolutely effective in getting you where you are, but it’s not effective at getting you further where you want to go.
A New Manifesto
And so at that point with massive frustration setting in I told Steve that we probably need to shut the company down, probably no way to, you know, fix this problem that we created. We created the problem of what all entrepreneurs do is they create a bottleneck with themselves. They are the bottleneck.
So I sat down and I wrote a new manifesto and the manifesto stated that I was not going to have a job. I was not going to work in the business; I was going to work on the business only and that I was going to delete myself from every job description that I was doing at that time.
As it came to be, that literally came out to be 15 different job descriptions. I was doing 15 different things for the company just like every entrepreneur does. And I eliminated all of those except one, which is giving the seminars. And this year I am training people to do the seminars, so next year I won’t even be doing the seminars.
I didn’t used to do the radio shows. I got talked into doing the radio shows couple years ago because I wanted to get people before we lost you. In other words, before you had already had gone and lost your money doing something else, I wanted to go convince you you needed to change your life.
Everything Was Accomplished
But back to the story here. So what happened was I found this manifesto. And what’s interesting is six years later everything that was in this manifesto had been accomplished. Now, go backwards again back to when Steve and I originally designed this company.
We designed this company on a manifesto the same way—wrote out everything that was going to occur. And we look back ten years later and everything that we had thought was going to happen had happened. Including the amounts of money that we said we were going to make, the amount of real estate we said we were going to own, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So here we are now ten years later and we figured out that everything we had dreamed would happen did happen. But now that it has, it has become so successful it no longer works. And so we’ve had to re-invent the entire product to where it could survive without me, Del Walmsley. And in doing so, we rewrote this new manifesto and decided to take and make all the changes.
Three Phases
And there were really three phases to this manifesto. Phase number one, we had all these problems that were going on right now because of growth. We grew too quickly, we didn’t have enough staff, the staff wasn’t trained well enough, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, this is like six or seven years ago. And so we decided that phase one was to fix it with me still in it. In other words, let’s get this company to have the amount of staff that it needs, to have it in the right places, and to have it trained well—that was step number one.
Step number two was to have it work without me. And so job description after job description after job description, once that job description was stabilized and we knew it was being done correctly, it got handed off to a new person who was trained to do it correctly.
