Can-Do Guru

Gary Keller is in his Austin, TX, office among the red leather office furniture he purchased two decades ago at a garage sale. He is wearing his standard attire – T-shirt, jeans, and clogs – and is unshaven. He just returned from a fly-fishing trip, and he jokes that all he caught was a cold. Not true, of course. But even if it were true, one senses Keller wouldn’t be all that upset. In fact, that’s how he became the cofounder and chairman of Keller Williams, the fourth-largest and fastest growing real estate firm in
North America: by not being afraid to let a few fish wriggle off the hook.

“I want to know who people are,” Keller says. “I want to understand why we’re talking. What is it that I can do to help them today? I realized early on that I didn’t need to worry about whether they did business with me or not. I needed to help them make a good decision. If, at the end of the conversation, they didn’t need to buy a home or, later in my life, get into real estate, or later, buy one of our franchises, then I didn’t want them to do it. They never needed to do it. I never needed to worry about me. I just needed to worry about them.”

The philosophy has taken Keller far from his roots in Houston, TX, where he got into so much trouble growing up that his parents were “terrified that I wouldn’t turn out to be anything.” Eventually he would start a revolution in the real estate industry by offering his real estate agents the chance to become business partners through an exclusive profit-sharing program. In addition to traditional commission earnings, Keller Williams Realty agents receive a percentage of the profit guaranteed by their recruits, and their recruits’ recruits, up to seven levels. In 2005, Keller Williams posted $2 billion in total commissions earned. Last year, that number broke $2.5 billion, and the company shared a profit of more than $52 million with its agents. The company keeps growing as more agents jump on the Keller Williams bandwagon. As of this year, more than 75,000 agents are fulfilling the Keller Williams vision of “building careers worth having, business worth owning, and lives worth living.”

“One of the mysteries of life is why did that person get what they got and why the other person didn’t,” Keller says. “I realized that the answer to that is kind of a twist on the phrase, ‘If it’s to be, it’s up to me.’ I added an extra line to that. I said, ‘If it’s to be, why not me?’

“If you say, ‘I want it to be me,’ odds are, it will probably end up being you, if you stick with that and don’t give up.”

The Magic Touch

Of course, Keller understands all too well what he calls “the pressure of the sale.” In fact, when he first got into real estate sales, he had no idea it was a commission job – despite the fact that he had just earned a degree in the subject from Baylor University.

“At my first interview, at the end, the sales manager leans back – I can still see him doing this – he leans back, and says, ‘Well now, Gary, how much would you like to make your first year in sales?’ This was 1979. And back then, we were being told that $18,000 to $22,000 a year would be a great first-year income for someone in a typical sales job. So, I told the man, ‘I would like to make at least $18,000 my first year.’ And the guy stood up, stuck out his hand, and said, ‘Well, good luck, I hope you make it. It will cost you $1,000 to get into the business.’ And here I am, 21 years old, and I think I am negotiating salary like I’ve been taught in business school, only to discover it is a 100 percent commission job. I remember driving back in my little Volkswagen Beetle to Waco. I got on the phone with my father and said, ‘Did you know that this is a 100 percent commission job? This is nuts.’”

Keller borrowed $1,000 from his father and jumped into the game with both feet. His initial foray was an astonishing success: in just 30 days he sold five houses. Keller was euphoric. Clearly, he had the magic sales touch.

For the next five months, however, despite writing two contracts a month, Keller failed to close a single contract. To add insult to injury, interest rates that year went from 10 percent to 21 percent. By Christmas, Keller was broke. His mother suggested getting a part-time job at 7-11.

“I said, ‘No, Mother, I’m not going to do that,’” he recalls. “‘I’m either going to make it at this or not on a full-time basis. And, by gosh, I’m going to make it!’”

Keller showed his father his day timer, full of appointments that had added up to nothing. His father wrote him a check for $500, and Keller was off and running once more. In the next six months he sold so much that he nearly made Rookie of the Year. He probably would have, too, had he not chosen to take a month off to hang out, see friends and family, and relax. Why? He had met all his financial goals, and the time to re-charge was more important to him than accolades. For Keller, a low-stress environment helps him avoid burning out. Even today, he has no idea how many hours he logs in the office each day. For him, the hours are irrelevant.

“Working hard is not the issue,” Keller insists. “I can go out and slam a hammer into a nail all day or a sledgehammer into a spike, and that’s hard. People say ‘I work hard.’ But the issue is working focused. The number one question I learned to ask myself every day is, If there is one thing I can do to make everything else easier, what would that one thing be? When I know that answer, that’s what I do.”

Failing Toward Success

When he was in school, one of Keller’s professors told him something he never forgot.

“It was the head of the Real Estate Department,” Keller says. “He said to me, ‘You know, Gary, you’re pretty smart. But there are people who have lived before you. You might be wise to slow down a little bit and discover what they have learned and then build on it rather than try to reinvent everything.’”

Keller has used this principle to his advantage throughout his career. When he first got into the real estate industry, the idea of autonomous agents was downright laughable. At age 25, Keller was the VP of expansion in the largest real estate company around. And he quit. He felt the company philosophy was that everybody worked for the head honcho.

“I believed that the company works for the people,” Keller said in an online audio interview with Broker Agent News. “If you just focus on helping people they would build your company for you. They would take it anywhere you wanted to go.”

With an initial investment of $42,000, Keller, along with Joe Williams, founded Keller Williams Real Estate in 1983. As it turned out, their instinct to move away from traditional top-down approach was right on the money. In their first year, they made more than $100,000. As the company accumulated an army of associates whose success would translate into profits for the company, Keller saw the need for education on the fundamentals of customer service and building relationships.

“That is the way the world works,” he says. “They teach you the skill of doing the job, but they don’t teach you the skill of building relationships so you connect to people you can do the job for. And this is true of almost all professions. I bet if you went and interviewed lawyers coming out of law school, you’d find that they spent very little time teaching them how to generate clients and provide good customer service. Or how about doctors? Do you think in medical school they spend any time at all teaching them how to generate clients and get customers and serve customers for life?”

Instead of working harder, Keller works smarter by investing his time in generating leads. If you know you’ve got plenty of backup, you can stave off that edge of desperation that spooks potential customers. “I remember watching a video tape during the first week or so of my career,” Keller says. “The sales trainer said, ‘The issue is to have more leads than you can handle, so you never have to worry about the sale and you can focus on people.’ That makes total sense to me. If I have more leads than I need, more opportunities to help people than I can handle, then I don’t have to worry about the sale; I
can just focus on helping people.

“So, from the very beginning of my career, and even to this day, the 20 percent that I spend 80 percent of my time on is in lead generation,” says Keller. “Looking for people who were motivated and had needs that I could help fulfill. And if I had enough of those, I never had to worry again about me making a sale.”

By putting his worry on the sidelines, Keller felt free to focus on finding the best solution for the customer, even if that meant losing out in the short term. If people said they wanted to back out of the contract, he let them. “I didn’t try to pressure people, I didn’t try to hook them. Whatever it felt like was best for them, I let it work. I needed to build up a backlog of people who wanted to do business with me. I knew that they would either do business with me today, or they’d do business with me later, or they would refer someone to do business with me because they trusted me and believed in me. So, I just placed my faith in them. I was trying to build a career, not have just a great year.”
What holds most salespeople back, Keller says, is an unwillingness to take that leap of faith and to embrace failures as stepping stones to success.

“You don’t succeed your way to success,” he says. “When people experience failure, when something doesn’t work, they think, ‘Oh, my gosh, what am I doing wrong?’ You aren’t doing anything wrong. In fact, you may be on the road to success.”

“What I realized is that everybody succeeds and everybody fails, and that successful people are the ones who just keep failing their way all of the way to the top.”

This is not to say that failures won’t depress you from time to time. Keller admits freely that the temptation to quit never goes away when you’re down and out.

“I think it’s pretty naive and probably out of touch with yourself to actually say there wasn’t a time when you felt like quitting,” Keller observes. “I mean there were certainly days when I would wake up and say, ‘Man, I don’t want to get up and I don’t want to do that.’ Whenever I hear these perky people who talk about ways to be ‘up’ and never being ‘down,’ I just kind of look at them and go, ‘What planet do you come from?’ That isn’t a part of my life experience. And the people that are the most real, I find, have done it like that. They wake up and say, ‘Yeah, I have bad days, I have hard days, I have days where I get knocked down.”

People who succeed, however, don’t give in to the impulse to quit. “There’s a difference between feeling like quitting and quitting, isn’t there?” Keller asks. “For me, every day is a new day. There is no promise of success. There is no promise of failure, either. In the end, the ones who succeed are the ones who just don’t give up.”

Keller continues to work on expanding his empire through education. To help agents avoid having to reinvent the wheel, he wrote The Millionaire Real Estate Agent (McGraw-Hill, 2004) sharing with the competition what his agents had learned by trial and error. Initially self-published, the book sold more than 100,000 copies in a year, at which point McGraw-Hill picked up the book. Keller has since cowritten a second bestseller, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor (McGraw-Hill, 2005). In his quest to build a model for how to be successful in real estate, he has donated $5 million dollars to Baylor University to fund the Keller Center, which will focus exclusively on real estate research.

“The great thing about humans is that we get to bring definition to our lives,” says Keller. “I used to have a wonderful dog named Sadie and she lived a very long life. What is interesting is when she passed away and I went back to her yard, I noticed that she never improved it. It looked just like the day she first went in it. She hadn’t built any doggie condos, she hadn’t built it up, she hadn’t developed any dog friends. She hadn’t lived her life in any way other than just waking up every day. Human beings are driven by more
than that.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘What is important?’ ‘Where am I going?’ Let’s go to the end of your life and you tell me what you’ve done. What did you accomplish, what did it mean to you, what did it mean to others, what did it mean to the earth? You show me how a decision today puts you in alignment with that. The only reality you and I have is this very moment. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is an unfulfilled promise. The only reality we have is today.”
Feedback: gschwandtner@sellingpower.com