YouSaid · the spoken record

Gary Keller

lines on the record: 118
first: 2019-12-12
most recent: 2019-12-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It was important to do it. I can't, it can't disappear. I have to move it someplace else in my calendar. So it's really a simple idea that I really struggle with the idea of doing planning off of a technology-based daytimer”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I believe that, and I didn't always believe this, right? You learn as you go, and if you learn, you grow, right? And I'm having trouble visualizing my life. And I get this month at a glance and instantaneously I can see where all my energy this month is going. I can see how I'm investing my life. And so I begin this practice back in my 20s of using this month at a glance. And I could see everything at one time, right? And I use an eraser because if you erase, you must replace. So I go through the month and I kind of mark, you know, what I think I should be doing on these days in order to hit my personal and professional and financial goals. And I'm happy to erase if I need to, but by doing it this way.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She had told her son that I had basically saved her life. And when my son was real, Mary, my wife, and our son were in a grocery store here in Austin. And this franchisee happened to be here visiting her sister. And they ran into her at a grocery store. And my wife tells me that she got down on her knees to stare at my little boy and proceed to tell him though he couldn't comprehend the words she was saying, how what I did had changed her life. So anyway, so that's the story of 89. The story of 89 was I took a year off and I reinvented how I did business. And I basically created the platform, if you want to call it that, for building a nationwide real estate franchise.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will assure you it is the most valuable asset of the company. Hands down, it's the most valuable asset. There's not even a close second. It is the key asset. So I went back. So now I take these manuals and I take the franchise document. I go back to Houston. I meet this lovely individual who sadly just passed away last year. But this is 1989. And so I go back, sign her up, I give her a two-week training program, and then I leave and I hold my breath and go, come on sevens, right? I mean, I'm holding my breath because I'm not coming back, right? I can't scale this thing if I have to go do it. I can only scale it if others can follow the model. And she did real well. And that is a hugely successful business today. In fact, it's funny that”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we came out. So, by the way, so at the end of 89, by the way, I did spend all my money. I just want to be clear that hiring that attorney said she gave me a bid to build that document. At $100,000, she quit billing me. That's how expensive the document was. It was a serious document And yeah, absolutely. So then I take this document and I take now.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually hired them to help me build a franchise document, the lawyer. And then she came back and said, you don't want to do what the others do. So the way we built our document was we went and got our hands on our competitors' documents and we got our hands on McDonald's document. And then we took them by sections. So we created, I don't think it was like 19 manuals. And each manual had how each of these franchisors dealt with issue number one. The next manual was how they dealt with issue number two. The third manual was how they all dealt. So I now can pick up manual one and I can see how all these franchisors have dealt with that issue in their document. And with Joyce's guidance, we went through and made decisions chapter by chapter, if you will, on how we want to. To build our franchise, if that makes sense.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's the French fry story. That was like that. Yeah, so I read the French fry story about that time. And then I said, okay, so the number one thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go do that. The second thing I'm going to do is, so I'm going to create an operating set of manuals that absolutely show how to launch it, how to run it. And the second thing I did was I discovered a list of the top 10 franchise attorneys in the country. And I started interviewing. And I ended up hiring this amazing individual out of Dallas. And she was the one, it was her who said, you do not want to master a franchise. You want to read, you want to use a regional representative approach.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An audio recorder, no book and pin, and a camera. And I said, I want you to follow me around, and I'm going to go launch another office. And I want you to document every little thing that I do.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're licensing to use your name and systems, but you don't really have any control or influence. With the license versus franchising. So I was using a simple license agreement. Well, I was literally traveling four days a week, right? If it was Monday, I'm in San Antonio. If I'm in Houston, it's Tuesday. I mean, I was living my life that way. And all the businesses that we launched were successful and profitable. And me, I'm thinking I'm a genius. So I come home and then they all fail. And so what I did was I did two things. Number one is I hired an individual and that individual, this is now we're getting to 89, okay? So I then take that year off, if you will. I'm not franchising. I'm not licensing. I'm not doing anything. I've hired a manager to run my Austin operation. So I have the freedom and I hired a gentleman and gave him a video recorder,”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a separate issue. So the plan is what ultimately created a model that I could go teach other people and I could franchise that model. So then let's go to 887, 88. So I go around the state of Texas and I'm showing how I'm doing business and people are buying at that time license agreements because I wasn't franchising at the time. So they bought license agreements and the agreement said if I ever franchise you have to become a franchisee or have the right to buy your business.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So, now I just want to set the stage for 89. So now what's happened is I'm in debt to my eyeballs. The market is crashing, right? And my competitors are taking my people. So I'm literally sitting at the desk with no one to run the business other than me. And I'm in desperate need of a plan that would actually help me hop higher. And so I created that plan. And one year later, we were the largest real estate company in Austin. And the next year we sold more real estate than anyone. And the next year after that, I paid everybody off in cash. And I was 31 years old. Towards the end of 31, by the way, I paid everyone off in cash. I was debt-free, and I was the number one real estate company in my city.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe sooner, but not much before I'm debt free. And that depressed the heck out of me. And so I got really creative. Then one last thing happened. Then one of my competitors, a Remax office, set up shop down the street, and they were a lot less expensive than what we did. And I had five of my top 10 producers leave the firm. And I had grown to over 70 associates. The economy going down took me to 38 associates. We were still profitable, nicely profitable. And then I lost five of the top ten. And so now I'm at 33 associates. And then they came back and they got my bookkeeper, my receptionist, and my relocation coordinator.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the way I kind of describe it, particularly when I'm talking to kids, is that it was like I'd been going through life hopping, you know, seven feet and fell in a 10 foot hole. And that right there has become the central theme of my life since that happened because I'd been going through life and competing as a business person in a sort of organic progressive way. In other words, it's the next thing I should do. So I do there. I go there. But I wasn't on an exponential path. In other words, I wasn't running my business out of a business plan that would deliver exponential growth. I always was living off of an organic plan. And I looked down and I realized, oh my gosh, it's going to take me 10 years under this current earnings path I'm on.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go bankrupt, and he didn't to his credit. He did not. He's just a stand up guy. But he came to me and said, Hey, I need to sell the shares. So all of a sudden, I didn't have the cash, so I had to sign a note to the banks, take out another insurance policy. So essentially, whether I live or die, everyone's going to get their money. Does that make sense? It makes sense.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's keep me on track here, but I want to go back and I want to build to the moment of 89 so you'll understand what happened. So we launch in the last quarter of 83, I end up in February of 84 becoming, you know, going through a divorce. And now I am in debt because I didn't have the cash. I had to sign a note. And then I had to take an insurance policy in case I died my former spouse got paid. And then within a year, Joe Williams came in and said he has to sell his shares in the residential company. We'd already shut the other one down, commercial down, but he needed to sell his shares because he bought a lot of real estate. The markets, this is now 87, right? This is 88. The markets are crashing. And he doesn't.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they went all the way back to where they bought the potato. And they documented, they tracked and documented all the steps from the field to the table. And they discovered something. And that is the McDonald brothers had not invented a way to cook a French fry. They had stumbled on a way to cure of a potato. What was happening, the step that the McDonald's brothers never told Ray Croc was that when they got the potatoes, they put them in open-air burlap sacks. And the climate where the McDonald's operated when you put potatoes in an open-air burlap sack in that temperature the potato cures.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he calls the McDonald's brothers and says, tell me what we did wrong or whatever. And nobody could figure it out. So what McDonald's did, and I love this phrase, they suspended their need to understand.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guy Ray Crock. This is Keller all the way, right? So Ray Kroc, he hears about these McDonald's brothers and people line up around the block to get their food. And he's a salesman. And so he wants to go down and meet with them and understand their secrets so he can go back and take it to his customers so then they could order more Dixie cups and whatever he was selling them. He got down there and was enamored with them and asked could he franchise. And it was a tough negotiation. They ultimately allowed him. He goes back to Illinois. He builds out the stuff that he needs to build out in order to be able to deliver stores that sell food exactly like the McDonald's brothers. And the challenge was the French fries didn't taste right.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is a great story. And it hit me like a ton of bricks when I read it. And I'm just going to paraphrase and tell it to you as if it's a bedtime story. Please do.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every time, every time. So when people read a franchise document, if they don't say heck no, I'm not signing this, it's an intelligence test. That should be your first reaction What I explained to them is that this is a disagreement and that the odds are pretty strong that anything we don't address here as my rights become your rights by default. So this is going to read like the most one-sided agreement you've ever seen. But I just want you to realize that anything that isn't covered in this document automatically goes to you and you are the decider. So that was the regional side of that story. The other side of the McDonald's behind the Golden Arches that just really profoundly impacted me was the story of the French fries. Do you know that story?”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have that's that's that's right without having to go into the weeds on documents you you said that very well the the document lays out the rights of the franchisor and the reason is because if a right isn't acknowledged in that document the judge will automatically give it to the franchisee If it's an unstated right, then the courts will take it away.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they're not sub franchisors. They are simply representatives. So they have the same job description of a sub-franchise. They have the same financial opportunity of a sub franchise. They don't have the authority.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So McDonald's was doing it and really making inroads fast. And so Dairy Queen calls a meeting and says, hey, our franchisees need to be putting in playgrounds. And the subfranchisors, the regional people said, no, not going to do it. And by the way, that was the beginning of Dairy Queen sliding into a much smaller company than they could have been. And they never really recovered from that. So I read that and my plan then was, I'm not going to repeat that. So we did what's called a regional representative agreement. So the financial opportunity is the same. So we have 31 regions in the US and Canada. And those are owned by individuals.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And it's called sub franchising. And so I read the Dairy Queen story because when McDonald's came out with their playground, that was actually an amazing value hack, right? I mean, they realized that if they could get the kids wanting to come to McDonald's, the parents would take them, right? And there's a playground. There was a famous meeting where these master franchisors, if you will, the sub franchisor, met, and I don't know how many there were in it, but they met and they decided that they didn't want to do the playgrounds.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I took a year off in 89. And one of the things and began to document the business because there's an incredible story about the McDonald's brothers and behind the golden arches that really just changed my world. And one of them was around franchising. And the other one was about building a successful model. And the franchising part was that we looked into it and we discovered that the way that franchising had been done was flawed. And what they had done is they had sold the rights for the franchises, what you would call the regional franchises, to then be the franchisor of the franchisees. So the print company wasn't, all it was franchising was these regional businesses to then go and they would sell franchises and they would support the franchises.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. I just want to, so let's talk about that regional. So when we as a company, we're ready to go out of state, if you will, we began to study how others had done it. And we discovered that in the real estate industry and other industries as well, that at the time they did what's called master franchises. So franchising remembers is just another vehicle financial vehicle, right? If you don't have the money franchise and ask other people to come in and front the cost that it would have been had you employed them. So that's one of the ways you keep from having to borrow money understand is you could use franchising and essentially use other people's money. I had actually expanded into four cities and all of them did great as long as I showed up. And then when I didn't show up, they all started failing.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And having a document, whether it be with helping loved ones protect themselves or in business, it actually is really important. People have asked me over the years about Keller Williamson and what's important about it. And I always give the same answer. And that is our most important asset is our franchise document, which is a massive disagreement.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one statement about that. Just one of the lessons that I've learned, Tim, is that money won't change you, but it will reveal you. And when people have an opportunity to have a financial windfall, their character is getting ready to be revealed.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it happened. And the weird thing is that for that little sheet of paper, she took a gentleman who was suffering from dementia and she took it to her lawyer, the same one that had drawn up her side of the prenuptial. And of course, we hired a good law firm and that took about five minutes to the law firm had to recuse themselves. And then to basically explain that we would drag this out forever because the man had dementia and it was documented. We went back and checked and it was documented. But the spouse had never told the kids any of that. So my little lesson turned around and paid huge dividends for my father-in-law and his estate because they could not pierce it.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the last year of my father-in-law's life, where he was beginning to get dementia. And he then passes away. And within a few days after him passing away, we get an envelope that in it is a handwritten, I give all my money to my wife, right? I give all of my liquid assets to my wife and it has his signature. Now at the time, we didn't know that he actually had been diagnosed with dementia. We were unaware of that. And he had actually said just a month or so before he died, he said, watch her. She's going to try to take everything.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let me tell you a funny story, or I don't know how funny it is, but so after that divorce, I met the love of my life, Mary, and we've been married for 32 years. And her father, when he was alive, her mother had passed away from cancer many, many years ago. And her father was now getting remarried. And I now, having lived this, Tim, I turned to my father-in-law and said, I'm getting you a lawyer. And your fiance needs to get a lawyer and they need to be separate and there needs to be essentially a prenuptial contract, which is very closely related to the buy sell. Basically, it's a disillusionment agreement, right? So they did. They each got separate attorneys and they did this prenuptial. Well, fast forward.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we had used the same attorney. Good attorney, and he hadn't cheated anybody. It was a fair buy-sell agreement. But they threw it out.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, that's basically a buy sell. It's a prearranged way that things are going to go if you decide to park company for any reason. Or you need to park company for any reason. Well, I had one, Tim, but the judge in the case says, well, okay, I see you have a buy-sell agreement. Who represented you, Mr. Keller? And I said, my attorney standing here. He said, who represented her? And I said, My attorney's standing here. And they threw it out.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, this simply means that if I'm one of the partners and I want out, what happens? Does the document address that at all? Can I sell the stock to anybody? Does the company have to buy it? If the company has to buy it or wants to buy it, what are the terms of that? Or are there no terms? And it's just strictly a cash deal. Does that make sense?”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Yeah, they don't have it. They have no means of reconciliation. They have no means of parting without bankrupting the other business. So what happened to me was when I got to the divorce, I had a buy-sell agreement, by the way. And it would have meant that I would have, I could have gone into my bank account and written the check for what I owed under the buy-sell agreement.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started out at a million dollar valuation on a one year old company that if you took me out of it would be worthless. And I ended up negotiating my divorce with my former boss. So if you want to read between the lines and think about that, you're welcome to do so. Right. I turn to my attorney and said, why am I taking the deposition of that guy? My attorney just looked at me and says, Well, time will reveal all. And it did, by the way. But the agreement to break up, right, if someone passes away or if someone wants to sell, to me, that becomes one of the biggest clauses in those agreements. And candidly, you'd be really, really smart at this because this is where people go, oh, we get along, we're good friends or whatever. We're going to found a company together and they look up later and they realize that they don't have a disagreement.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to reframe it. Well, and the biggest issue, I find the biggest issues are who has control, who's the decision maker, can that decision maker be relieved from that if you have to? How are you going to handle cash flow if there's profit? Are you going to distribute it monthly, quarterly, annually, never? What are you going to do? And then the other one is the dissolution. And that is what happens if this isn't working out and one of you needs to buy the other one out. One of the things that happened to me was, so we ended up forming this firm. And in 80, in February of 84, and I'd now been married less than three years, the company was just a little over one year old. And my wife of that at that time said she didn't love me and she'd never loved me. And we headed to divorce. And they...”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that really informs the way you look at a document when you call it a disagreement because it should be there to deal with it when you deal with things, when you disagree. Otherwise, if you agree, you never read the document. You never go back to it”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That your agreements between you and your partners, I call them disagreements because the only time you're going to read it is when you disagree.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, between he and I know it was a natural thing. We didn't have an agreement that said that we had to take one pot of money and give it to the other pot. And it was amicable. I mean, there was no, I would say that I don't think that Joe and I ever had a crossword. I think that it's a testimony to him. He's just a stand-up guy. But on the other hand, I'm not going to keep putting good money into a bad situation that you can see doesn't have a plan that it can execute successfully on. So it was really that simple. They were separate businesses and I wasn't obligated to give the money, so I just stopped. I hit the red light and I just stopped. And so that's kind of, you know, I would say if you want to ask the question of what have you learned over time, not what did you learn from that?”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, probably the biggest red light that I had to hit early on was the commercial side red light because it never made a profit. And his response was well, how am I going to pay the bills? And my response was exactly, exactly. How are you going to pay your bills? And then he voluntarily shut the company down within a few months.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company. You can generate all the cash flow you need to do that. Even in these times right now of, you know, I have competitors who have raised over a billion dollars and are just spending the money like crazy in the real estate space. But what I understand is it doesn't take all that money to do that. It takes smart money more than it takes a lot of money.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. And the best way to learn, right? So I was intimate. I had intimate knowledge with the financials and what it cost, and I understood how much revenue I had to generate in order to cross the hurdle into positive cash flow. And so I just knew it. So I set the business up that way. I kind of play a game that I call red light, green light, and meaning that if I'm doing well, then green light keep going that direction. If something happens, I don't keep hitting the green light, right? If something happens that should cause me to pause in any way, particularly from a financial standpoint, then I'm going to hit red light fast and I'm going to back up and ask the question, what do I need to do? What did I do wrong? Whatever, what happened? So the building of a real estate”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I understood value. So, what I understood was that the real estate agent has the relationship with the client and the real estate brokerage company has a relationship with the agent. And I understood exactly what the value proposition needed to be to attract and retain really terrific people. So I understood that. And the way I like to say it is Keller Williams was my third business, if you think about it, because I'd already launched two businesses for my former boss.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you can come in as a job, and then as you generate more income, you just get rid of, you start shedding the jobs, and it naturally leads to a business with employed people. I don't know if that makes sense, but you can literally leverage your way all the way from being a salesperson to owning a business. I contrast that to like the people that do the maintenance in this building. There's no natural path from being, you know, being the maintenance crew on a building to owning the building. It's not a natural path. It doesn't lead to that. But in real estate, it actually does. You can literally, you do all the jobs from day one. And as you lever up and bring in other people. So you ultimately get rid of all the jobs. So maybe that helps explain why I actually didn't need the capital. It didn't need it because I was organically growing.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Man, that's a wonderful question. I'll cheat and I'll give you a quote from Robert Kiyosaki, which is assets feed me liabilities, eat me. And that mantra kind of plays in my head a little bit, that if you have to borrow money, it means you can't afford what you're fixing to buy. Even though that's, by the way, that's not true, right? It's not true. I definitely use debt to buy real estate when it makes sense. I use debt when it makes sense to buy a business. So I'm not the no-debt guy, but I do come from a position of I want to be, I want to be smart with money such that money doesn't leave me. And that's a way to do that. So other than that, the reality is that it didn't take a lot of money to build a real estate business because real estate is one of the few careers.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrific, terrific. Real estate agent prospects. And I just gave him the list. If I'd had just stayed a little longer, he'd owed me a huge bonus check. But I didn't care about it. And I walked out. And there was a gentleman that was in the commercial area of that company called Joe Williams. And I approached Joe and I said, why don't we form two companies? I'll form a residential uniform commercial. We'll each own, you know, 50% of each and we'll go build this. And the commercial company never took off. But the residential side took off immediately and never lost money. We had borrowed $44,000 to launch the business and we paid that back in a little over a year. And to this day, we have no operational debt on the company. I've never borrowed or money and I've never taken any outside money to build a Keller Williams. We all did it by...”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in other words, I too could work for 20 years for a guy like that and then having pull the rug out and not have anything. That's the way I internalized that. So I quit. And my wife at the time, I'd been married now for approximately a year and a half. And my wife became his assistant. And she was already in the firm. And she'd actually had been an administrative assistant in the firm. And so he recruited her to come more directly for him. So I ended up, he called me and treated me that way. I went in the next day and quit. And this time I didn't name a price. I just said I'm done. And I gave him all the names of all the people I had recruited and all the info I had on him. And it was, I think approximately, it was 14 people. And they were all.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is firm where there were men and women who had been with him a long, long time, and he had promised them compensation in the form of stock or profits interest. And what was happening was now he was taking all that back. He was undoing all of that and trying to pull everything back into himself.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into that at most. He called me up out of the blue and wanted to know what I'd done for him. Now understand that my office was in an office building in South Austin and I was in the broom closet. And I know it was the broom closet because there were brooms in it. And it did have a window, however, and they gave me a folding table for my desk, a folding table as a credenza, if you will. And then they gave me two folding chairs and a flip chart and a phone and said, go build another company. Well, I did. And had I stayed, this was in 1983. Had I stayed, he owed me a huge bonus, but it was never about the money. In the end, and so I just quit. And I didn't know what I was going to do. That's the thing. I really didn't know. I just knew that I wasn't going to work for someone who talked to people that way. And the other thing that was going on.”
2019-12-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT