A tuxedoed Russell Shaw holds forth at the newcomer’s reception at tonight’s opening session of the StarPower Conference. An important principle of the StarPower method is the idea that success is contagious, that highly-motivated Realtors can hoist themselves to the next level not just by learning new skills and techniques, but also by learning from and modeling the behavior of mega-producers like Russ.
I’m skeptical of anything that sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but I do love the idea of learning new skills and techniques, and I deeply admire many of the people StarPower has brought to Phoenix.
As an example, we got to meet Joe and JoAnn Calloway tonight. In Phoenix, they’re famous as Those Calloways, another team, like Russell’s, that does hundreds of millions of dollars in business every year. As much as Russ is big, blustering and brash, the Calloways are small, gentle and very quiet. You would never, ever peg them as Realtors, yet they completely dominate some of the richest zip codes in Scottsdale.
Immediately to Russell’s left in the photo is Richard Pomisel, with whom I took pre-licensing more than six years ago. Do the math: A class of around 30 students. Many didn’t pass the school test. More didn’t pass the state test. Still more didn’t get licensed. The failure rate for new licensees is 85% in the first year, very high thereafter. And yet two people out of one pre-licensing class are still working.
I don’t want to oversell StarPower. This is very much old-school real estate. Even where they think they’re being hi-tech, they talk about things like “stealth” web sites, marketing-by-trickery. But the bulk of the curriculum is a devout belief in the power of business-like systems for organizing and growing a real estate practice. Cathy and I have taken a divide-and-conquer approach to the classes to bring home the most new information.
I don’t know if success is contagious, and I don’t have much truck for mumbo-jumbo. But I will tell you one “law of attraction” that never fails: Nothing brings out immediate real estate needs like a real estate class. StarPower runs all day Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So I came home tonight to an email from a relocating client who has one day — Friday — to look at houses. And I will tell you an important rule for success as a Realtor: Don’t let anything — not even expensive training classes — come between you and money work.
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Russell Shaw says:
It isn’t Starpower that endlessly promotes “catch success”, that would be me. When looking at Consideration and Mechanics, I have (since I became highly successful) believed that Starpower had way too much emphasis on the mechanics. As many different Stars have very diverse methods of marketing to get their business I realized that the mechanics involved were not the senior element but in fact a junior element involved in achieving success.
Most agents below the “success level” tend to view highly successful agents as different than themselves. It is when they can find one or more, they can identify with – who are highly successful – who they see as “like themselves”, that the real magic happens. Once the person sees that they are like the successful person there is a paradigm shift. Once that shift in viewpoint occurs the various mechanical “things they did to achieve success” can be observed but it is always the shift that occurs first.
For various combinations of reasons, some fortunate people are born and raised in an environment that truly teaches them early on that they can expect real success from their efforts in life. They have never known real scarcity of money or resources and tend to simply start out winning. Some of them will tend to look at other people who don’t achieve excellent results easily as different and less capable. Because I personally struggled through SO many barriers I have a very good understanding of the level of impact those barriers can have. I could almost say that now my mission in life has become sharing the benefits of the solutions to the problems I used to have.
July 26, 2007 — 3:14 am