Moneyball Your Business

I love the movie Money Ball. If you haven’t seen it, it's based on a true story. Brad Pitt plays the GM for the Oakland A’s (a baseball team). They aren’t great and they don’t have the budget to compete with the big teams in Baseball. He finds Jonah Hill’s character that subscribes to the idea that to win games you just need to buy runs. Here is the game plan:

Putting players on base at a higher rate leads to more runs, which, therefore, translates to more wins.

Sounds simple and it makes sense. So they go all in. They trade players and start to build the team they need for this strategy.

There was a moment of doubt where they questioned if it was going to work - a valley of despair you could call it. They hadn’t won very many games. They based everything on an unproven plan. So, should they turn back to the old way of thinking or keep moving forward? No spoilers here. Go watch or re-watch it.

I often think of this when I have a game plan and I hit that doubt wall or valley of despair. It might happen when I haven’t seen a win for a while. Or maybe if my early wins end up crashing and failing. I think, “Was everything before this a fluke and I need to change plans, tactics, or strategies?”

Gary Keller in the 2022 Mega Camp CEO Summit laid out a way for us to know. He talked about certainty and uncertainty. The future will always bring uncertainty - even the weather app seems to be uncertain when it will rain.

The way we get more certain is to find a model and be 100% willing to do everything in the model.

If in Money Ball, Brad Pitt wanted to see if Jonah Hill’s theory would work he had to do it and be 100% in. As agents, we are luckier. We can look around and see what has worked for others in the past. Then we need to be 100% following the model.

Say you think, “The 36 touch doesn’t work for me” or “I don’t get the results because of my sphere.” I would ask, did you follow the model 100%? Did you email them 26 times this year? Did you call them 4 times? Did you mail them 4 things of value? Did you have 2 events? or did you do a little bit of all of those inconsistently?

If you have found your model, go all in and be willing to do everything no matter how much it is in your comfort zone. If it were in your comfort zone, you would already be doing it. It is going to feel hard and strange until it doesn’t - like learning to swing a golf club correctly.

Let’s Moneyball your business

You can run an economic model to figure out how many appointments you need to go on to make a certain income. So our Moneyball formula becomes:

Putting players agents on base in appointments at a higher rate leads to more runs clients, which, therefore, translates to more wins income.

This makes us focus on 1 of 2 things - activities and/or leverage:

1- Are you doing the activities that will lead to you getting more appointments? (addition by addition)

2- Do you need to hire an experienced agent who will do the activity to get appointments? Or, rather than an agent, is it an ISA to set appointments? (addition by multiplication)

Whether you do either or both, you need to find the model you will follow to get those appointments. Define it so clearly that you know if you are falling short or leaning on your natural abilities rather than the model. Get uncomfortable doing it the model’s way. Don’t look back or deviate from your model.

Find the model. Do it 100%. Don’t stop, you are all in.