If you know anything about real estate, the name Keller Williams would probably ring a bell for you. This global real estate powerhouse is the epitome of success in the industry. How does a brokerage get to such heights? Join host Oma on another enlightening episode of Mystical Mavericks as she delves deep into the world of success with special guest Joe Williams, co-founder of Keller Williams Realty. In this captivating conversation, Oma and Joe explore the essence of success, drawing upon Joe’s remarkable journey in shaping Keller Williams into a global real estate powerhouse. From the founding principles of Keller Williams to the invaluable lessons learned along the way, Joe shares insights on clarity, vision, and the importance of nurturing a thriving culture. Discover the keys to unlocking your full potential and embracing success in both business and life. Tune in to uncover the wisdom and inspiration behind Joe Williams’ extraordinary success story!
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Building A Global Real Estate Powerhouse: The Secrets To Keller Williams’ Success With Joe Williams
Welcome to another incredible moment in time with a beautiful soul. Let me ask you this. Have you heard of this empire and business called Keller Williams Realty? Guess what, we have with us, the heartbeat and the creator and CoFounder of Keller Williams itself, the one who created this legacy of real estate brokerage and is going to amplify the importance of why you should be a creator, entrepreneur, key and principle to success in a very beautiful direct way. Let’s welcome, Joe Williams.
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Mission accomplished, Joe. Is this the grand final for you? You’ve accomplished your mission on Earth, you’re happy with what you accomplished, or is there so much more to do? The purpose in life, isn’t it what we’re here to do? Maybe or maybe not. You can answer this question, but I want to know from you what you feel about this. Is your big mission already accomplished and then there is more as far as your purpose here on Earth?
If you’re alive and thinking about what you’re doing all the time, you have to reinvent yourself every 8, 9, 10 years or so. Once you have a certain plateau, then you look around and go, “What else would I like to do?” I’ve always been that way because I like to put things together. If you’re one of those people who likes to put things together, then you’re constantly working on projects.
That is very enlightening because a lot of entrepreneurs would achieve their big success. Now they have their $2 million or whatever their goal was, and then they’re like coast because all of a sudden they feel like, “It’s important what I feel because we are multidimensional like this.” What you say was key because the first thing you said, which touched me was, “If you are truly alive. If you’re here.”
I’ll share something. There was a guy, and I don’t remember his name, I’m sure if googled him, I can find the data, but what he did is he wrote a college thesis. The gist of the thesis was to go find 100 people who were 100 years old. What he did is he interviewed them all and he asked one question. The question was, “What would you do if you could do it all over again?” He said there were three main points that they made.
Point 1) “I would’ve risked more. I would’ve grabbed for the brass ring. I would’ve called Oma and asked of the high school Bram.” It was interesting the things that they knew in their life that they realized they never did they probably should have done it. You can only get that when you get to an advanced stage and you look back and you go, “Why did I do that?”
2) “I would’ve lived every day better. I would’ve gotten up in the morning and realized that life is probably the most incredible thing out there. I’ve got a life. What am I going to do with it today to fulfill my destiny whatever that’s going to be? How do I impact people better today? How do I enjoy what Mother Nature has put before me? How do I live every day to the fullest?” It’s interesting that he said that he heard that from about everybody.
The last thing they said, and I thought this was good too is when they were dead and gone, they wanted to leave something behind so everybody knew they’d been here, whether it was your children or a project that lived on past you, or it could be physical, a house, whatever. They created something that years from now, people would say, “I don’t remember that guy. He was a good guy. He did this. He did that, or whatever.” When you look at those three things, they’re good lessons about how everybody needs to look at life. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are.
Business And Human Nature
As you said, “Things are different from many years ago.” They are and aren’t. Certain things about life never change. It’s like a conversation I had with a bunch of high school juniors. They were talking about the Constitution of the United States. They said, “It doesn’t apply today that the document’s 200 years old.” I told them, “If you go back and you read the books that have to do with the letters that the Founding Fathers wrote about how they felt as they were drafted in the Constitution, what you would learn is everything in that Constitution is as apropos today as it was 200 years ago.It’s a living document.” The reason is that human nature rarely changes. We’re teaching real estate agents. I tell them there are four basic rules to follow in any sales job. One of those is that. Rule 2) Everything changes except human nature.

You speak the truth. This is why it was important. Sometimes the truth is a difficult pill to swallow for some people because the ego is in the way. You show up tremendous legacy that you build. We know tremendous, beyond tremendous, beyond names, numbers and forms tremendous. You show up like this and then you start speaking and you don’t speak from your mind. You speak directly. Few people are capable of sitting and then drilling, transferring and transmitting the truth like this.
They have to have some core values that they live from. Let’s go back to that same group of juniors in high school. I was trying to explain. I said, “Let me illustrate about human nature.” I go up to the board and I draw a bell curve. I explained to them, “At the far left end, think of this bell curve as the world’s total population. Here’s the world’s total population. Here’s what we know. At the far left end of the bell curve, there’s a very small half percent of the world’s population. This group are incredible people for a number of reasons. They could be wealthy, very smart, very funny or whatever, but they’re incredible people if you’re lucky in life, you might meet ten of them in your lifetime. You’re going to know it when you meet them and when they walk in the room.”
Some of you reading this would know people like that right now where you go, “That guy’s incredible. That lady’s unbelievable.” I look at Taylor Swift and go, “She’s in that group.” There are a lot of people that would fall into that group. That’s the good news. The bad news is at the very far right into that bell curve. You have a half percent of the world’s population that are not good people and they’re not going to change.
They’re Hamas, Isis, dictators and corrupt government officials. This exists. on the far right end of that bell curve. That’s when I look at these students in high school when I tell them, “This is why, if you want to live a peaceful life, you have a standing army. This is why the United States has to have an army and the Navy and the Air Force. These people are not going to change. Whatever it is you have, they want, whether they tell you that or not. They want their neighbors’ assets. They are bad people.”
My point is they’re not ever going to change. If you go back and look at that bell curve again, next to the incredibly cool people, a half percent, there’s another 19.5% and they’re good people. They are not as incredible as the little half percent, but they’re good people. These are the people you want your children to know and associate with at school. When they get up in the morning, guess what? The glass is half full. They’re ready to fill the rest of the glass, “How am I going to work every day to do it?” You love hanging with them because they’re positive. They believe that attitude is important. They get up every day and they go, “I’m alive. What can I go do?”
On the flip side of that other, under the bell curve, you’ve got that 19.5%. When they get up in the morning, the glass is half empty. They’re not trying to fill it. They don’t have the same attitude in life. What we would joke about in real estate is we would say, “These are the people who run your homeowner’s association. These are the staff of the Citywide development office. They work at the Social Security Administration.” I don’t want to paint a brush, but you get what I’m saying. What that leaves in the middle is that 60% of the population.
I hate to say it, but they follow people. They shade one way or another, but they tend to follow people. They don’t get up in the morning and have directions automatically. They go with the flow. We had a guy who came to speak to us one time, and he was describing these groups. He said, “This group over here, this is oh yeah, oh no, and this group in the middle, they were okay.” The point is human nature doesn’t tend to change. People tend to do what personalities want them to do.
Personality is one of these things. If you have kids, you’re going to teach your kids things. Hard work, love, dedication and integrity. These are the things that you as a parent teach your children. The one thing you don’t impact is their personality. Those little personalities. I’m convinced they’re set in the womb I can go speak to any number of parents in a group, and I’ll ask, “How many of you all have more than one child?” A lot of hands go up then I say, “Leave the hands up. Of all the hands up. How many of y’all would say that every single child you have has a different personality,” and everybody’s hand is still up?
No brainer.
Personalities change, but personalities tend to be wedded to certain human nature prognostications. That’s why I say human nature doesn’t change. People in the long run are looking out for their personal selves. As you move toward this end of the bell curve, they’re more magnanimous to realize the better off everybody is floating all boats help community and the society. These people will think that way, but the reality is, once you understand how human nature works, you’re going to be a lot better off in your business because it doesn’t tend to change a lot.
Once you really understand how human nature works, you're going to be a lot better off in your business. Share on XLet’s say you’re an entrepreneur and you’re obviously in a 19%. You’re a creator. You’re out there creating a beautiful world, making an impact, influencing, becoming a leader, a mentor, and all these things. Would you say that, is there any chance at all that this 19%, and this is the question for you to answer, because maybe you’ve seen it happen, potentially they have the ability now because now they’re wired in a certain way. I call it like a divine blueprint, an extraordinary something within them that woke up to potentially influence their own mind to go towards that 1% in the front of the line. Do they have the potential to become the 1%, anybody that is 19%?
A Synergy Of Factors
You’re hitting on something that is very important. One of the things we train a lot is that if you study successful companies if you have a successful marriage, typically what happens is you’ve got 3, but most likely 4 ingredients working together in synergy to make this happen. Let me give you a good analogy. I was in St. Paul Minnesota. I had a group of realtors there. I asked them, “Let me ask you guys a question, what does it take to run a good restaurant?”
We had a whiteboard there. They started naming things. When we wrote everything up on the board, it was easy to see that it all fit into four basic things, not surprisingly good food, decent service, a reasonable price for what I’m eating and a decent location. I’m only going to drive so far to get a good taco. I said, “Good food, good service, reasonable price and good location.” They said, “That’s it.” I said, “Let me ask you a question. In St. Paul, Minnesota, how many restaurants have been in business for twenty-plus years that are not franchises? In other words, not McDonald’s, like a family-owned operation. How many have made it twenty years or more?”
What’s interesting is you could do this in any town in the USA. Everybody gets the first five. Everybody knows the first five is easy, but then when they get to the second hand, it’s amazing how it slows down very quickly. In St. Paul, Minnesota, they only got to eight restaurants, then I turned to them and I said, “What’s the population in St. Paul, Minnesota? 1 out of 1 million, it’s St. Paul, not the town next door, which is huge. If that’s the case, you’re telling me that in a town of 1 million people, only 8 people had figured out this formula?”
That’s the eye-opener because all of a sudden they go, “Good point.” I call this the Stable Table Theory. If I create a company and I come up with one great synergistic idea, that’s not enough to give the company stability. There are other things that have to come into play. I got to have people. There are other things. It’s like all they say, “If you built me a table with one leg, it isn’t stable. With two legs, it’s not stable. With three, it’s a stool, but I wouldn’t want my grandson on it. Give me a table with four steady legs and we’re in business.”
Take any company in the USA and study it long enough. You’ll see that what they did was they created a stable table inside their company. We look at Southwest Airlines. A good friend of mine works at Southwest. He’s an upper management and a good guy. We were talking about this. I said, “I realized when Southwest Airlines started, the most powerful thing they had going for them was clarity.” The vision of who they wanted to be was incredibly strong. Their whole deal is we’re going to run an airline that’s inexpensive, gets people from point A to point B quickly and it’s going to be a great flying experience, and it was.
If you ever flew Southwest Airlines all the time, it’s the only airline that you’re sitting on where you’re laughing, if the stewards and everybody decided are doing their thing. I flew from Orlando to Austin. When we got on, and I was sitting there and they were loading the plane.” The attendant came on and said, “If any of you are looking for the first class section, those seats are blue.” All of the seats are blue.
As we’re all getting on, everybody cracked up at that.
It’s a great fine experience and a very reasonable number. Those have changed over the years, but stable awake number one for them was a vision as to who it is they wanted to be because if your vision is strong, it’s like losing weight. If you don’t sit there and think about, “What’s my life going to be like if I lose these 20 pounds? What’s the good thing about that besides my health?” It could be vanity. How much better you’re going to look? It could be the fact that you can now wear half the stuff in your closet you don’t even touch. If the vision about losing weight is strong enough, you won’t lose the weight. You won’t develop the discipline that you need to get the habits that you need to lose weight.
In starting a company, one of the most important things is that vision. Gary Keller and I started a company. We went to our agents and said, “We don’t think that the company is the brand. We think that you, the agent are the brand. Instead of us building this behemoth company where KW is the brand, it’s going to be you guys, we’re going to show you how to create your own business, team and operation. All we’re going to do is take them to help pay our bill, but you are going to make the bulk of the money. By the way, we’re not going to do any advertising. We’re going to give you a better commission split. You are making most of the money, and then you can decide if you think it makes sense to go advertise or not.
If you do, it’s your advertising, not ours.”
You have to understand, that many years ago, nobody was doing that. I had broker friends going, “You guys are crazy.” I said, “We’re not. We think that when somebody’s playing golf with their buddies and they’re getting transferred to Seattle, that guy turns to his three golfing buddies and he says, ‘We’re getting transferred up to Microsoft in Bellevue.’ Do any guys know a good local realtor? they don’t ask. Do any of you guys know a good big company I can call? They say, ‘Do you know a realtor’ 1 of the 3 hopefully goes, ‘You got to call Joe Williams and Keller Williams. He’s my guy. He’s a great guy. I got his number.’”
It’s like the first time you get pregnant and you have to go find a pediatrician, what you call and ask your friends is, “Who’s your pediatrician? Do you like them? Tell me about them.” We went to our brokers and said, “We think that’s how people find the realtor they’re going to work with. It’s not a company-oriented thing. It’s an agent-oriented thing. We’re going to design a company where we become your coach and consultant to your company.”
I had a friend of mine, and this is a great line, by the way. He was an ER doctor. He once said to me, “Hospitals don’t have patients. Doctors do, but doctors work so much better with a surgical center set up at a hospital.” His whole point to me was, what you guys are doing with KW, it’s the same thing. Your agents are the physicians. They have their clients. Those clients don’t belong to me. They belong to the agents.
Many years ago when we did that, it was such a vision-changing way to look at the business. That was the big key to our success. When we looked at the agents and said, “I know it’s been this way for years. Real estate had been around for thousands of years, but nobody had ever looked at the industry this way.” The example I always give and you’re so much younger than me on the, I’m 70 years old. When I was a young boy, all you could do was get peanut butter in glass bottles. They came in like a ball jar.
For years, it all came in a glass jar. One day they put peanut butter in a plastic jar, and yet you could get ketchup in a plastic squeeze bottle at the drive-in for twenty years prior to that. How did somebody not mentally make that connection for twenty years? For Gary and I, it was a case where we looked at the agents and said, “This is crazy. Why are we doing all the advertising? This is nuts. You are the brand. We’re going to make you the brand.”
The table lake for us was changing how we did the business from us as the central person to the agent, but every company has to be able to have a vision that is strong and guiding that as they follow it, they’re going to be successful. It’s like when you produce a product, there has to be demand. The old thing about, we say, “You come up with something. Will the dog eat the dog food?”
With Southwest Airlines, their vision was, “We’re going to create this great flying experience at the lowest price.” The second table lake for them was better economics. What they did was what they did, they started out flying from Dallas to San Antonio to Houston. All they did was they had three planes in the air all the time because that market was completely underserved. They realized that. As they grew, they did a lot of things to keep the cost down.
1) They flew the same plane. Most of the time, when you get on the Southwest Airlines jet, it’s the same 7 7. If a park breaks down, they don’t have to fly to DFW to get it. There’s a good chance the parts are right there in Baltimore or wherever. I fly American Airlines occasionally. The problem with American Airlines is they fly 30 different jets. I’ve been in Baltimore when the plane broke down and they got to fly somebody to DFW to pick up the park to get it back to fix it.
Hours and hours.
Southwest was economically doing a lot of neat things. Fly the same plane. They don’t charge for bags. I mean, American Delta, everybody now charges. They don’t charge for bags. You can take two bags per person. They don’t charge if you have to change your flight. All of these things for them were table leg number two, better economics. They figured out a better way to run the airline like that. Their third leg is a very standard thing. That is, go get the best people. It’s amazing how you don’t end up with a lot of problems and issues in a company when you’ve got the most talented people.

I’ll share a great little story that your readers will enjoy. In 1993, Gary and I had about 60 offices,
in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Louisiana, primarily or franchises. We hired a guy, Bain. He’s a good guy. He came down. He interviewed Gary and all of our operating partners because they own these offices. They’re franchise owned he came back and he said a couple of things. He said, “1) I love your ideas. I love how you guys are remaking the real estate industry. 2) You all don’t know anything about franchising.” He’s right. We were the classic entrepreneurs. We’ve been very successful real estate brokers, but we never franchised anything.
He sat down and said, “Franchising is all about three things, primarily. Go get the most talented operator owners, install models, systems that are consistent.” That Keller Williams office in Austin, Texas functions like a Keller Williams office in Western Virginia like a McDonald’s should look and function the same everywhere. He said, “First, thing I’m going to teach you is how you go find talented people. By the way, it’s a ten-step process to do this. It takes us 30 to 40 hours to go through the process with a serious candidate.”
As you go through each step, the system is designed to knock them out if they’re the wrong person because I don’t want to spend 40 hours with somebody who if I know in 10 hours it’s not going to work, then that’s how it’s designed. It’s interesting because the tips and things that he gave us were incredible to know, especially the entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are good because they come up with a great idea, vision and a determination to get there, but they’re not always the best managers. They don’t always know how to go find the most talented people. Many times they are not the CEO or should not be. They’re the visionary.
Bain said that to Gary. He said, “You’re not the CEO. You’re a visionary.” Gary has been a fantastic partner and visionary guy. He said, “You are not the CEO.” “I certainly wasn’t. I’m a developer guy. I’m a sales guy. I’m not the guy to go play CEO.” The first thing he told us is to go find a good CEO.” It was incredible what he taught us about how to get the most talented people. For many of these companies, that third table leg is that. It could be argued, that anytime you fly Southwest Airlines, they have good people. Whether it’s behind a ticket counter, at the gate and loading the luggage on the plane, they have some of the best people.
This is such a tough, probably this third key, because it’s a big key to the success of the company. If you don’t have those key people, it would be a nightmare that never ends.
There’s another part to that. Getting talented people and acquiring them is very important. The way you tie a ribbon around the whole company is the fourth table lake. For most good companies, that creates a culture that is good that nobody would ever have to leave you. In some companies, you can’t do that. If I’m running a Chick-fil-A, I need a bunch of high school kids in my shop, but they’re not likely to be there more than 1 year or 2. If I can figure out how to get the manager to stay with me for fifteen years, that’s what I’m talking about. If you can design a company that every morning they get up and they go, “I’m going to work at,” wherever, then you’re a long way on creating that a culture.
Creating A Culture
We see it time and again when you look at your professional sports teams. When you find a team that does extremely well, a lot of it gets right back to what they’re saying every time they talk, “I love these guys. I love my teammates.” They figured out how to get that culture inside the organization. It’s the glue. We did something that was unusual to help create that culture. You’ll love this. We get paid by commission primarily. We’re real estate guys.
We eat what we kill. If we don’t kill things, we don’t eat. We go broke. We went to the agents one day and said, “We got an idea because in real estate, you’re only as good as your last deal. You’re not on salary. Once you closed, you got to go close something else. We think we could come up with a profit share program where based on our growth, you guys have the chance to share in the corporate’s profit.” They said, “Tell me how this is going to work.”
In real estate, you're only as good as your last deal. Share on X“It was real simple. If I’m out there in the field and I come across an agent who works for a competitor, who’s not happy, but they’re a good agent, I’m going to sit down and say, You got to come talk to our manager. I think he’d enjoy working over at our shop.’ What we did was, if that agent came to our office, interviewed with a manager, came on board with us, whatever the company made, the company split off that agent. Not their commission. They kept their commission. We would pay a small percentage of that back to you for having made the recommendation. What’s interesting, is that idea in and of itself is not. A lot of brokers have been doing that for years. What’s cool is if that agent who comes over makes a recruiting recommendation and another agent comes on board, I’m going to pay that agent money and I’m going to pay you.”
Before you get this, nobody else did?
What does that look like? It’s multi-level.
Multi-level binary or not, it looks like that, because that is the brokerage. You have that tree, the branches, and then it keeps on.
My point is, when I got out of college, I went to a presentation that somebody didn’t. I think it was Amway.
That’s how they work.
The guy was drawing the circles on the board. Back then it was primarily I wish there. We’re going back 45 years here. I remember after everybody left the room, I said, “Tell me how these circles were,” because I looked at the circles and said, “Those make obvious sense to me. If you’re in a selling business and you’re bringing people in because everybody’s selling, why can’t I make recommendations on people we should hire? If you pay me based on what their production is, then that’s great, because now you get me thinking like I’m the owner, not an employee. Our guys aren’t employees anyway.” If I’ve got a vested interest in how much profit we make every month, because I’m bringing people in and you’re going to pay me a percentage of that profit tapper, I start thinking like an owner.
It’s like, “Hey.”
I’ll give you a great example. We have an agent leadership council. They meet every month. If the agents are invested like owners, and we had this situation the other day. We have a copy machine and it’s doing pretty good, but it’s having issues. The copy machine’s pretty important inside your office. If it’s not working, people are not happy. We were talking about it. One of the guys was saying, “Maybe we need to get a new machine.” A lot of our agents were in there looking at the bottom line profit going, “Can we fix this? Is there a way to fix this thing? How about we go get a three-year-old machine?”
It now had them thinking like owners. It makes a difference. When you’ve got a culture where everybody’s pulling together with the same vision it works. You can apply this to a lot of things. I’m talking with a friend of mine the other day, and we’re talking about a good marriage. A good marriage works on this Stable Table Theory. 1) If you both don’t have a vision of why you got together and where it is you’re trying to go, that’s a problem right there. The stronger that vision is, and the stronger the goals are, the better that alliance is going to be because you and I both know you have good days and bad days in marriage. It’s not the good days you worry about, it’s the bad days. Sometimes it’s not a bad day. It could be a bad year. There are going to be a lot of things that impact two people together. When you look at the table legs of that, one of them is communication.
I was about to ask you, to tell me more about the way to communicate all of that because one of the keys of that glue to stick is if you don’t have the right communication, the right feeling behind that communication and the right intention, what do you do?
You have to understand something. This gets back to human nature never changing. One of the things that Bain taught us about human nature is to give me a room of 100 people. In that room, I will tell you, there are four basic personalities. Everybody in that room is going to fit into one of those personalities. A lot of relationship management has a lot to do with who are the personalities. I’m not saying men aren’t different from women. I think in a lot of cases that’s the case. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by Dr. Gray. I read that book because in many ways he’s absolutely correct.
The brain is wired differently. Women, you’re wired to have children, and therefore you’re going to be different when you come back to human nature.
The point about communication is I always go back and say, “What personality am I am I trying to blend up there?” For example, the four personalities, there’s Abramson, the guy who came out with a task called the DISC and Myers-Briggs. They’re all based on the same study. All they said was, “You got CEO personality. The high D. You have the high I.” I’m a perfect example of the high I personality. You’ve got the S, very stable, very patient, then you got the C which is the very exacting cross T dot the I, the engineer, the surgeon, the airline pilot and the CPA. They tend to fall into that C category. When you put two of those together in a marriage, it depends on what the personalities are. Sometimes the best marriages I see have opposite personalities. They tend to work better together.
I laugh because my wife and I are both high I. we fight like cats and dogs. Making up is fun. We’ve got the same personality. What we learned from him was how to work with those different personalities. What we did was we took our jobs, looked at the specific job and said, “What personality needs to be in that job?” It worked very well. We know for a fact, that if I hire a high I in a job that requires massive detail, we got problems. It isn’t going to work. It is not a strength of an I. They make great team leaders, they make good managers, but they got to have a staff out there to do all the detail work because they’re not great at detail unless they’re like me and they’re Virgo.
Virgos are detail-oriented, but generally a high I is not going to be a detailed person. We learn to take all of our jobs and then move them, define who the personality is we need in that job let me tell you, here’s why that’s important. Here’s a perfect example. The pandemic showed up in 2020. All of a sudden everybody had to go home. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Everybody was scared to death. Everybody was locking down everything.
Four months later, we discovered is things hadn’t changed that much. Why? For two years prior to the pandemic, I was commuting to the office, opening up my laptop and talking on my mobile phone. When the pandemic hit, now I had to go home, but I opened up my laptop and I talked on my mobile phone. Nothing changed. That’s not totally true, but you get the point.
All of a sudden, we now realize that not everybody needs to be in an office. In places like Chicago, LA, New York, and Miami or normally there’s some commute attached. Some of these people are working from home, and guess what? They like it. This is the big but as they’re going through this, of the 4 personality styles, 2 of those styles don’t work well at home it’s because it’s in their personality not to be home by themselves.
Not talking to anyone and not interacting. That is not them. My point is, when I’m talking to these office landlords, I’m telling them, “It’s going to take a little while to work through this flex work environment to figure out what it looks like?.” Some of these companies were having real difficulty trying to adjust to that. I thought it was incredible to see Zoom. Zoom sent a memo to everybody and said, “We need you back in the office.” If Zoom can’t make it work with everybody out of the office, what does that tell you?
You pivot that way with the home situation. As far as the human narrative, now we’re home and we don’t have a community. Did you find it very difficult?
First of all, with real estate agents, they were used to working in and around their houses. When the pandemic hit, everybody had to go home, but they’re used to being in the field. They were able to make those transitions better than most companies. Nowadays, a lot of companies have realized that it’s hard to maintain a culture when everybody’s everywhere else. In certain businesses, people want to see people and want to collaborate.
If I’m running an advertising firm, you almost have to have everybody there. It’s the same with Google and Facebook. They sent everybody home. It was Facebook that said, “We may never need you back in the office ever.” That didn’t last very long. lot of them need collaboration. If I’m young and I’ve started with the company, how am I going to get noticed if I’m on a bunch of Zooms? That’s a horrible recipe for disaster. My gut feeling is that within another eighteen months, we’re going to figure this out. What it’s likely going to look like. However, I’m afraid there are a lot of B-class office buildings. I’m not sure what they’re going to do.
Talk about this a little bit. What you said was your gut feeling.
The bottom line is whenever you have a tight real estate market, there’s a flight to a class-type space. The only thing I can say for certain in real estate is this. Everybody is going to work with less space. I talked to brokers across the country. Everybody’s in complete agreement about that. They’re all going to go to less space. The guy who’s in the C-Class building and he’s running a call center, he’s there because it’s cheap. He’s not moving. He went there because it was cheap. It’s not in a great location. He doesn’t care.
That part of the market I think is going to do fine. The A class building, if I’m going to B class building with 20,000 feet, I’m in my mind going, “How can I run this on 12,000 feet?” What I’m going to do is go to the A-class building, better location, more amenities better views, and easier commute, and I’m going to go get 12,000 feet. That’s what you’re going to see. Other real estate asset classes will be much better off than what the office market is.
What I’m seeing locally here in Miami, which is incredible when the world is opening to is more collaboration what’s happening, and you’re probably witnessing this is that they are creators that would get a beautiful space, not too big, but a space. They would create very beautiful multi-dimensional spaces to collaborate like boutique style, community style-driven businesses, networking style very elevated and classy where you have a Chanel boutique, you have a Joer, you have whatever an artist that would come and would hang their beautiful art on the wall.
They have now those community spaces, collaborative, high-level centers. It’s incredible. They would have business owners that would rent a very little square office where they can have their jewelry boutique-ish style, but they won’t have to go, “I’m going to open my own boutique.” There is this collaboration happening with all the little business owners within this square. Everybody collaborates together, then I see this in Miami. It’s incredible.
It’s the same concept that WeWork had, except they didn’t know how to implement it well. It’s going to happen and the office isn’t going to go away. People are still going to get together and make ideas and dreams come through. You got to get everybody together to do that type of stuff.
The world is opening up.
The Key Success Principle
I’m talking to our agents. I tell them, “Your key success principle is what I call VDPR. The V is Vision. In other words, why are you in real estate? Why are you getting up every morning? What is it you want to try to get done this year?” You don’t visualize things. What is it? They often say a ship without a rudder still may go place that has no idea where it’s going to end up. The vision is the rudder on your ship. It keeps you going in the direction you’re going to go. If your vision is strong, most success, it’s a matter of writing it down and then going and doing it. It’s not complicated sound, real estate and market science. It’s easy to learn, but then why does few people get successful?
The vision is the rudder on your ship. It keeps you going in the direction you're going to go. Share on XA few people have the ability to visualize their success. It’s not just real estate. It’s being a good teacher, mother or pastor. All of those things take the visualization of saying, “If I’m going to have an incredible church this year, what would have to happen for me to make that happen?” We call that a future self-exercise. It’s the process of visualizing what your goals are going to be because if you can visualize that, you are going to be able to figure that out. It’s what you back up on to be able to know where you’re going to go.
If a vision is strong, now you acquire the D, which is the discipline. Do the things you have to do to make it happen. Without the vision, you won’t acquire the discipline. You won’t lose weight until you think about what your life will look like if you lose weight. It’s crystal clear to you why you’re doing this, then you’re going to be able to push away from that dessert, then you’re going to walk an additional mile or two miles. It’s not going to be hard. You know what this is going to lead to.
The P is the easy part. That’s the Planning. What I tell my agents is you have to write it down, “Here’s my week It isn’t complicated. It’s written it down. It’s scarring.” What’s important is having a column where the deals stuff will work. Everyone gets changes. The example I give, and you’ll love this. I ask people, “Have you ever gone on a trip for ten days?” Everybody goes, “Yes.” I go, “Ask yourself why were you productive the five days prior to when you had to leave?” The answer is that they had to make a list. The rule is what you write down has a way of getting done. That’s the plan. If I’ve got the vision, if the vision won’t give me the discipline to go get it done, I want to then write it down and get a plan and you end up with R, which is the Results. That’s it. It’s not complicated. I haven’t even asked this question. Are you married?
Yes.
Let me give you a real fun exercise. Did I meet your husband?
Yes.
Here’s what I want you and Rock to do. I want you to go to your favorite place to eat. After you’ve had your meal, eat a dessert, get yourself an after-dinner, drink a glass of wine or whatever. Here’s what you’re going to do. E rock’s going to look at you. He is going to say, “I imagine that if we were in this restaurant a year from today and you were able to turn to me and say, ‘This has been the most incredible year of our marriage ever.’ What I want to know is what would I have to do for you this year for you to feel that way?”
I guarantee you, you’re going to be able to make some suggestions to him. It could be things you’re asking him to do all the time. It’s a future self-exercise. That exercise is quid pro quo because what’s going to happen is you are then going to look at him and say, “If we met a year from now and you were able to say to me, ‘This has been the most incredible year of our marriage,’ what will I have to be able to do for you to feel that way?” He’s going to give you a list. Those two lists are the foundation of your planning.
That’s what’s known as a future self exercise. When Bain came to us and told us, “Here’s the ten steps that it takes to go find talented people,” that was step number seven because by then we knew we were going to make a commitment to them. We walked them through a future self exercise so as their employer, I totally understand how they define success with us at the company. It’s a pretty cool exercise.
It’s life-changing.
It tells you where you need to be going. What’s important?
You touched about the 1%. The 1% for sure is there.
If you’re interviewing Mark Cuban and people like this, he is in that half percent. It’s not necessarily money. I’ve got people I can put into that half percent are incredible people. Some of them aren’t rich at all, but who they are is incredible. I love the fact that I know them. It’s testimony to the fact that everybody’s going to be different and human nature that’s cool, dedicated and good is fun to get to know.
The power of association, it’s in there within your teaching.
For real estate agents, we teach the Stable Table Theory to them. Table leg number four for them is leverage. Who do they know that can leverage their business, what they’re doing and their personal life? I mean, I’m talking with my daughter. I love her to death. She’s got four grandkids, but she’s behind finding a good babysitter. It crimps. You got kids, you know exactly it. It crimps their ability to get out and do some things because if or my wife can’t watch the little one, we got a little 2-year-old little girl, they can’t go anywhere. Sometimes, we’re busy.
Who do you like and who can you trust. That’s part of that whole situation of culture.
Tou understand as if you’re a mom. If you’re trying to raise a family, having the leverage of having someone who can come in that you like and trust to watch your kids, is critical for you and your husband to be able to get off and do anything without having kids attached to you. That’s important.
It’s priceless.
I’m telling the guys all the time, “If you don’t plan that mind, it doesn’t happen.”

You talk about gut feeling a while back.I know you gave a lot of your energy and time, I want to make sure that I keep it too close. Decision-making in your industry obviously is a key also to success. In your business and even personal life, is this something that comes intuitively to you? Do you sit in there?
Everybody has to learn. First of all, there was a great speaker and it, this is probably before you were even born, his name was Charlie “Tremendous Jones.” You could probably Google him. I remember he said something I never forgot. He said, “Everybody is a compilation of the books we read and the people we meet.” Nowadays, a lot of the books you’re going to read will come right off the internet which your exposure to knowledge and the people you meet. In a decision-making process what I’ve learned as you get older, for me especially, I don’t make the decisions too quick. It’s very in my younger days. I was, “Go that way.” As you get older, you start to learn, “Don’t be too fast. Let’s go gather the facts.”
I always say, “Do what you can to do two things. 1) Go find experts who know about the subject better than you do.” You’d be amazed how many people are happy to give you an educated opinion without having to pay money for it. the second is to start to take the emotion out of it and try to be more fact-based. I have to work on doing that. It’s like we talk about sales. Here’s where human nature doesn’t change. I tell my agents, “The average person makes a decision with either this or this. Statistically, 20% of them will make the decision based on this. They’re head people, ‘Tell me how much it costs. Tell me how long it’ll run I get a warranty. Can I get this?’” All the questions are facts and databases.
They want to know that you are dependable, but they don’t care whether you’re the top guy or not. They want to know, “Are you dependable with the facts and data that you’re giving me?” I call head people. They’re not all engineers. That’s how they make their decisions. On the other hand, the vast majority of people are more heart-oriented. What they want to do before they buy anything from you, they want to like you and trust you.
They want to build a relationship with you before they’re going to buy the product. This can happen in the first three minutes. My wife and I went shopping for a car. We happened to be down in San Antonio. We stopped in to see what their inventory down there looked like because it was a big dealership. I could tell you, within four minutes of meeting that salesperson, I would do business with him. You could tell. I’m one of these people who like to know who I’m dealing with.
My point is that when it comes to decision-making, a head person is more fact-involved. Here’s a perfect example. Gary and I are two completely different personalities. Gary’s a head guy. I’m a heart guy. We went to go buy our first copy machine. Gary’s in there asking him questions, “How much is the machine? How much is the paper? How much is the drum?” In the old days, they had a thing in the machine called a drum. If it went out, you were in trouble. Everybody had to ask about the warranty on the drum and all. Gary’s asking all those questions. I’m a heart guy. I look at the guy and say, “Give me a list of three people who have had this machine for six months.”
That’s what am I going to do. I’m going to get on the phone. I’m going to call the people. I said, “That’s what heart people do.” When a heart person goes to Hotels.com and they look at a potential hotel, the first thing they zero in on is the testimonials because that’s what heart people do. When you ask about the decision-making process I will tell you that the person that uses this thinks one way and the person that uses this thinks another way. If you’re a heart person, what I’m always trying to do is to make sure that I’m looking carefully at the facts because I’m more apt to make a gut decision based on my philosophy as a heart person.
You would ask an expert if you don’t have all the facts or the information, or you’re not an expert at a machine, then the solution would be, “I’m going to go to an expert and make sure that it matches my heart decision.”
If you’re a heart person, it doesn’t necessarily have to be an expert. It has to be someone you can talk to who’s on this machine. In my mind, if this guy down the halls had the machine for six months, I can call him and he’s likely to give me the straight scoop on, “It’s a good machine.”
You are also saying by this gut feeling decision that it could be also a lot faster to get to what you want to get to instead of all the intellectual facts and the this and the that.
It’s a logical way to help make a decision. It’s like when we buy real estate because real estate’s all about value. It’s all about establishing value, “What’s the value got to be in the future? What is it today?” You’re going to talk to a lot of people, they all get that determined, but that’s the decision-making process.
It’s interesting because the sharks on the set of Shark Tank said the same thing. I said, “How do you base your fact on making a decision whether you’re going to invest in this product or person?” They said, “No, we don’t invest in products. We invest in people.
We don't invest in product. We invest in people. Share on X
Especially there because there’s entrepreneurs bringing the product.
The product has to be good. However, most of them will say that they make the decision literally when the person walks there. They don’t even have to speak yet. They already made their decision based on that feeling of what they get, which is intuition or whatever you want to call it. It confirms also that’s another key to success that I think needs to be developed in business. It’s how conscious you are in that moment and how you feel. Listening to that feeling. You are brilliant. This whole transmission, using the words and the light that you use is a book by itself. Maybe take that whole thing and have somebody do the download and turn it into a book. Do you have your own books?
I ran into a guy and he is a great guy. He is a wonderful author. If I gave you his name, you’re going to know who it is. He’s been after me. He said, “Of all people I’ve ever met, you need to write a book.”
I talked with my good friend, Jack Canfield and many incredible, who came in through the show and we have a personal relationship with incredible human beings, as yourself.
In fact, this guy was Jack Canfield’s partner. Mark Victor Hansen.
He’s in my show. He’s not far behind you. If you read his interview, I love him so much.
He’s a great guy. He wrote A 4th Course Of Chicken Soup For The Soul.
Jack’s been on the show, Jeff Hoffman and all the great guys as you are. I’m like, “What a blessing to have you here. This is why I was honored because you’re part of this valuable wisdom that you all shared. The keys is very similar to one another. This was impactful because when an entrepreneur read this, they don’t read something outside. They’re like, “If this Joe Williams himself says the same thing that Jack Canfield and all these people say, it must be true. It must be something about it. I need to pay more attention.”
I know all products. The knowledge we’ve acquired, any experiences that we’ve had, because I would say the older you get, not that I was ever acerbic or anything. If you talk to people and ask, “Who’s Joe Williams?” “He’s a great guy. He’s funny and great sense.” I don’t take myself too seriously. My dad died when I was ten. It’s mom and the three kids. We all went to work. It’s a classic story of the middle class working your way up so you appreciate what you’ve got, but you never forget where you came from. There’s a humility that I think you never lose. I worry more when I look around and I see that we seem to have lost a lot of civilities, certainly in politics, it’s like an MME fight every night on Fox and MSNBC. It’s terrible.
We have to get humility and civility back. With politics, the fear I’ve got after we need to get on another subject. The fear that I have there is the jobs themself have lost their respectability. When I go to a local high school and I talk to a bunch of juniors and I go, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Nobody says they want to be president or senator. There are not many issues in life that leadership can’t solve. That’s the problem we have at the political level. The other thing is, and this is another saying for years, I didn’t invent it by the way, “The greatest infectious disease in the world is ignorance.”
Take a breath here because this is the core and we’re getting to the end of that bubble or conversation, what you said is the core of the whole message. In fact, this is the reason that I brought you here, is to have you speak those words of truth to cancel ignorance. What you said is, “I don’t even have a word for what to do because it’s like the holy water.”
That’s what you’re combating around the world. I think about my son-in-law, who was a detective for the Austin Police Department. Prior to that, he was in the army. He was over in Iraq. Bomb would go off, his group would analyze the bomb. He was in the chemical weapons area. They could find the guy that built the bomb and exploded it. They’d bring him in and they would say, “Why did you do this?” He would say, “The Quran tells me to do that.” They’d pull out a Quran and hand it to him and say, “Show us where the Quran that says to do this.”
He would look at him and say, “I can’t because I can’t read.” It’s a perfect example of ignorance. Bad people take advantage of people who don’t know what they’re doing. That causes 99.9% of the misery in the world. I’m teaching young people that I’m telling them, “Your best bet to make it through life is to be able to get yourself educated, not just in a book or diploma.” I have a degree in Real Estate from the University of Texas, Austin.
$5 will get me a cafe mocha in real estate because real estate is a street business. You learn it by doing it. So much of life is exactly that. You learn it by the experiences and the knowledge that you acquire and you put that together and that becomes who you are. Ignorance is such a terrible thing. That’s what we got to battle. When I talk about getting stability back, as my mom used to say, “You get twice as much with honey as you do with a stick.” There are ways for us to treat and respect each other. It’s like with China. It’s the media that plays up this thing with China. They’re bad and horrible and yet you go to China and you talk to the average Chinese guy. He’s trying to raise his family. He’s trying to do the same thing we’re doing. That’s correct.
Real estate is a street business. You learn it by doing it. And so much of life is exactly like that. Share on XHe’d be better off going and talking to a lot of these countries and say, “You’re who you are. We’re who we are. We can spend money and get ready to go do battle or we can figure out how to become economic partners. You can get what you need and we can get what we need by creating a system where we collaborate with each other. Tell me, what is it you want? If they’re bad people, then it’s a problem because they’re not likely to change it because of human nature. Certainly, there are enough good leaders in that country to sit down and say, ‘I get what you’re talking about. Let’s go figure out how to collaborate and make this happen, missiles at each other because that doesn’t help anybody in the long run. You know and I know.’” That’s diplomacy. That’s what you do. That’s how you create a vision that everybody can latch onto.
For the last, to wrap it up and confirm affirm commend a book, you should birth a couple of books. This is almost ridiculous. You should have now plenty of those. Now is the time to do it because whatever it is politically you want to share or share your story. However, real estate related. You need to put your wisdom there because that’s what I’m trying to do my best for you to be here. It’s recorded once and for all. It doesn’t change. It will be done. It’s out there. To have a book with your wisdom is essential. The last word that you want to share for humanity, is something that you like to see the next wave of humanity to look like. Anything that you’d like to share from your heart?
The thing I would say at the end of the day, I once took a course it was put on by a bunch of Japanese guys. It was incredible. The word gun pie, what it meant in the Japanese vernacular is that, “War is business. Business is war.” It was interesting because in the course, this guy went around to us and he basically asked us to go home and think about this question, “If you found that you were going to die in a week, what would be your greatest fear?”
These were all CEO types in the room, what was amazing is almost all of us had the same fear. It was this, “I died without ever hitting my full potential” In other words, don’t waste your life. Do everything you can to get to the highest potential that you have or your family, life or health. I love Richard Wilson who puts on the family office club. Every meeting he harps on these rich millionaires in the room.

Your most important asset is your health. What are you spending on your health? You’re buying a freaking Lamborghini. You’re not even going down and getting your health checked every quarter. I’s amazing. It’s the one thing I’ve gotten from him that I think is cool. Without your health, you’re not going to hit your potential. The key is thinking every day, “How can I be the best I can be?” If you can do that, let’s face it, nobody’s escaping this place or was it Fred Dyer? I can’t remember who the guy was who said, “You don’t own your body. You’re just renting it.” Do everything you can to make sure you’re hitting your potential. That’s how when you’re in your bed and you can’t get up and you know it’s the end, at least you can say, “I had a hell of a life.”
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Talking to someone like Joe and giving so much. You can see magically he speaks from his heart. He’s very humble and genuine. That’s a key to success, love and abundance. Showing up like this in your own light and truth, sometimes is enough. The wisdom comes because of your experience, but it’s also there in the first place from your natural truth, natural essence and inherent essence that is always here. Be you. It’s easy to say. Joe demonstrated that in his showing up you can tell the background is his own office. He’s very humble, very clear, and talking about clarity, share that a lot.
You cannot start something and not know where you’re going, at least have a vision. In the vision, what I found out in my own personal journey is that the vision is very clear, even though the vision sometimes clears, but it changes a little bit. It doesn’t stay exactly the same. You also have to know to grow with your vision. I think it’s very important. Don’t get stuck in your way saying, “This is the vision and this is exactly where I’m going because life is going to give you some other path.” It’s ignorance to not look at what life puts in front of you. I think this is valuable.
I found out this. You have a vision and a goal, but life might give you other directions. What do you do? You’re going to push life away, which is nature itself. You’re going to put intuition apart and a side of it? No. you have a vision, but it doesn’t mean that this vision is not going to grow into a different outcome or goal. If you do have an intention and create a very thick wall around this intention, what happens is that you’re going to limit your full potential. At the end of the day, it’s almost like, you’re not going to be happy with yourself because you’re not going to feel content or fulfilled.
You have to dance with the flow of what life brings in front of you, but also go with your own direct experience and the things you learn about those experiences, the lessons, and go with that. He said four ingredients that he teaches his own team. He speaks a lot on the subject of real estate, but he always was to go with life, the subject of success, self and life that incorporates all of this in business. He said the four ingredients, Stable Table Theory.
The number one stability for the table is clarity. If you’re not clear, good luck. If you are blurry about what you want, it is going to be not possible. Then the second one is to find something that is better economically. It is more simple. The third one is the best people you can get around yourself to accomplish the things that you want. Finding those key people is very important if you are going to start a business. The fourth one that I truly believe without this, when I was speaking to him, I call the glue of your company is the culture, to create a culture around what you do.
At the end of the day, it would be to create a culture, but isn’t it a culture to create a feeling of being home? If you go to work every day and you don’t have this feeling, it’s going to be very difficult to go to work every day. Believing the same goal after day after day, you won’t be able to survive this. Creating a culture also means that this culture must be created within yourself as well. If you’re going to want to create this culture in your business, it has to be part of you first. If it’s a culture, because you say, “I need to create a culture, A, B, C, intellectually, because I read it in a book and now I’m going to apply in my business,” sure in my work. The book cannot teach you the feeling of it.
You must have it within yourself first, and then you’re going to amplify it around you. The culture is very necessary. It’s like the music behind the scenes. Is the music very soft? Find the culture, find the music, the rhythm behind what you create. There has to be integration within yourself. You cannot separate yourself from the things you create because the things you create are the vibrations that are in alignment with you. Creating a culture for what you do. It doesn’t matter the aspect of what you do, you can be an event organizer. We know that culture is very important because you’re going to have to have a rhythm that go with it. You can build a business around food. You’re going to have to create a culture, a rhythm.
What is the essence of what you’re trying to create is going to be part of you. What is part of you, not disconnected? If you read the whole episode, there is so much wisdom that was revealed. One read like this and go into the next, you can do that. If I were you, I would make a little pause. I would read a few of Joe Williams’s sharing. I’m going to take it. It might seem easy to digest, but it’s not because you are multiple levels of your own self. It takes a while to absorb this knowledge. This is not a knowledge cookie-cutter. Those are like the gold of success.
We’re giving you like this giving you on a platter. Those people that we invite their masters and it’s like this for you. Can you imagine? You can’t put a price on this. I would say to start to be more intentional when you read, don’t read just with the eyes. There is a different method to read. There is a method that is here now. When you read, you can take notes, but there is another way to read to absorb this knowledge. There is most important eye to read is the eye of your heart. There is a cavity in your heart. Think of this eye that receives this knowledge that would create abundance for you. This is for you. This is to enjoy.
I’m here. I believe so much in this knowledge that I give like because if you’re serious about you, where you’re going in your life and your success, you would not mess around with those keys. You’re going to read a few and come back later. Don’t just read and go, “I’m done reading” This is not the reading I want for this show because this reading you do it a lot. Learn how to the skill of reading because those people are not just people’s personas. They have a fountain of wealth, wisdom and health like this they give. They’re gurus because they’re holding this knowledge. I’m very happy to do it. I’m also very grateful, not just for the guests, but I’m grateful for those who are coming here to read to this and to have a better experience.
It’s very simple. Don’t make it complicated. With that, I will make sure to continue to assist and guide you in the process of your own path, a higher path that amplifies you and your full potential and then you can access your divine potential. I’m very happy for that. I leave you with this with love and light. Thank you so much for being here with us and reading this very unique sharing method. Love and light. Mercy.
Important Links
- Keller Williams Realty
- Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
- Hotels.com
- Jack Canfield – Past Episode
- Mark Victor Hansen – Past Episode
- A 4th Course Of Chicken Soup For The Soul
- Jeff Hoffman – Past Episode
About Joe Williams
Joe Williams serves as the Co-Founder of Keller Williams Realty, headquartered in Austin, Texas. Established in 1983, Keller Williams has grown to become the largest real estate franchise globally, boasting over 1,000 offices and 180,000 associates spanning across North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Keller Williams has garnered recognition for its innovation and commitment to excellence. In a recent accolade, Fast Company named Keller Williams the #1 Most Innovative Real Estate Company. Additionally, in 2015, Training Magazine ranked Keller Williams as the #1 training organization across all industries worldwide.
Under Williams’ leadership, Keller Williams achieved remarkable success, including being ranked #1 in units closed and total sales volume across the United States in 2019. Notably, these achievements were attained without any advertising budget or corporate debt, emphasizing the company’s financial strength and strategic prowess.
Williams’ contributions extend beyond residential real estate. He played a pivotal role in launching the KW Commercial Division in 2008, which has since become the fastest-growing commercial operation in the country.
Williams earned his Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in Real Estate from the University of Texas at Austin. He continues to reside in Austin with his wife Janine, along with their two children and three grandsons.
The Keller Williams model has attracted significant attention from business schools nationwide and has been likened to the “Southwest Airlines” of the real estate industry, as noted in publications by the Stanford School of Business. Through his ongoing dedication and strategic vision, Joe Williams remains an integral part of Keller Williams’ continued success and growth.