Webcast transcript:
Willy Walker: Good afternoon, and welcome to another Walker Webcast. It is a true pleasure for me to have my friend — and I would underscore friend as well as an incredible coach, mentor and true partner, Jack Daly.
Jack Daly is known as the king of street-tested methods about smart selling. He is a man with a remarkable 30+ year track record in sales, executive, and entrepreneurial positions and has been called the best professional sales trainer in America. Jack is an avid speaker, award-winning author, and 15-time Ironman competitor. Jack strives to make a difference in the lives of those in the field of sales and sales management across the globe.
I want to back up quick Jack to start for those listening about our personal interaction, and the first day I met you was in 2007 at a Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) speech that you were giving down at the Inn at Perry Cabin. And honestly, as I've told you before, Jack, thought I needed to listen to a sales coach like I needed a hole in the head, and I somehow convinced myself to go in and sit down and listen to you. And that speech changed my life. It changed my life, and it changed the trajectory of Walker & Dunlop. And there were two things that you said in that presentation that stuck with me.
The first one you talked about was: “If you have a vision for your company, you need to make sure that everybody in your company aligns with that vision. And if you have anybody who doesn't align with that vision, they can't be on your team because they are cancer inside of your organization.” And I wrote on a white pad to a gentleman next to me, who is in my YPO chapter to which I said, “I've got one of those.” My friend wrote back “well, you heard the man, he's got to go”. And I wrote him back and said, “What if he's 75 percent of revenues?” And my friend wrote at the bottom of the page, “You're f*cked” with an exclamation point. But I did return from listening to what you said and decided to get a plan in place to remove that person from Walker & Dunlop. And it took me almost five years to do so. But it was with that thinking of you saying if you don't have everyone bought into your vision, there’s a cancer building inside of your company.
The other one, which was, I would say, the most impactful thing I have ever been told, (and as you well know, I did almost 800 case studies at Harvard Business School and so I have plenty of people telling me important things about business.) You said at the beginning of that meeting that if you pulled up in front of the Inn at Perry Cabin in a brand-new Ferrari, the first question that someone getting into would have was not “Why'd you pick Ferrari red?” or “Why'd you pick the Alcantara leather?” The first question they'd have was “Where are we going? And if you aren't answering that question for your team every single day, you are failing as a CEO.”
I took those words, and it transformed the way I thought about Walker & Dunlop. And from that moment forward, we created five-year business plans, which we've been executing on ever since. And so, I give those two anecdotes, if you will, to underscore the importance of you and what you have said in the past and you've obviously worked with Walker & Dunlop subsequently. But if I can roll the tape back to 2007, back to your career at that point and take us through for a moment your coaching and your speaking over the last 13 to 14 years and where you've had an impact on companies like Walker & Dunlop.
Jack Daly: Well, before I even do that, Willy, I'm just going to reach out and give you a big virtual hug. Just great to see you! I'm really glad to see how healthy you are as well. Look, I remember that session for YPO in the D.C. area like it was yesterday. I can't believe it was that long ago. And if you recall, it was in a big white tent with fans going on because it was just brutally hot. And I've got to do a little bit of a wrinkle on the way you reported the story because I remember that you got stuck in the back of the tent and wanted to get out because ‘The sales guy was going to be speaking. What do I need sales for?’ But you couldn't get out without being obstructive to the rest of the group. So, it did end up being fortuitous, as you said.
The business of building a business is all about what is it going to look like down the road, not what it looks like presently, but what it looks like down the road. I do CEO coaching, as you know, with CEOs around the world and it's all over the phone. And one of the places we start is, I can't help you if I don't know what the destination is. And the way I say it in a very awkward way is you can't get there unless you know what “there” is. Stephen Covey said it better with “Begin with the end in mind”. Right? And so, the frustrating thing that I will tell you about my business as a coach, trainer/speaker is that my stuff works, but unfortunately, too few people take action. So, one of the pleasures of working with you and Walker & Dunlop is you don't let this stuff die in the room, you actually implement. Things as simple as the money bag and handwritten notes. And you know, for the listener and viewer, if you were to go on YouTube and punch in “Jack Daly Money Bag'' and spend five minutes on that video, it could be a material change for your salespeople, sales managers, employees and customers. So simply, easily implementable tools that work!
If I go back in time, Willy, what I could tell the listener and viewer is that between the ages of 26 and 46, I was an entrepreneur that had the opportunity to build not one, not two, but six companies. They all scaled nationwide. They were all very fast growing on the revenue and the profit line, and two of which I sold to Wall Street. And at 46 years old, I stopped doing that. The reason I stopped doing that was because I lost my passion for what I was doing. And I'm a big believer that success comes by a result of being involved in something you're passionate about, and running a business was no longer passionate for me. And so, at 46 years old, I decided that I was going to take a year off, figure out what I'm going to do on my next iteration. And all of a sudden the phone started ringing. People wanted to know, could I speak at their companies, at trade associations, and all of these types of opportunities started to present themselves. I came home to my wife, and I said, My God, this is really rewarding. This is a lot of fun. I think I’m going to stay with it. And I have been staying with it now for approaching three decades.
Willy Walker: So, Jack, you have a book called The Sales Playbook for Hyper Sales Growth, and it outlines a number of things that you talk about in your presentations. You just mentioned the money bag. Talk through a little bit what the key components of The Sales Playbook are.
Jack Daly: Sure. So that book is a textbook, it’s not on audio, never will be. I won’t be responsible for people listening to it in their car, falling asleep and having an accident. It literally is a textbook on how to build a playbook. And the reason that I wrote that book is because its predecessor book was called Hyper Sales Growth and it went off to great success. And I pounded away on the importance of systems and processes in the sales side of the house. And one of the analogies I gave was that sports teams are run better than most businesses. It doesn’t matter what the sport is, it doesn’t matter what level of sport, whether it’s high school or college, or professional. There isn’t a coach in any sport at any level that would consider putting their players on the field without a playbook. But when I wrote Hyper Sales Growth, people contacted me and said, “I want you to help me grow the company, like you talked about in this book.” I said, “Send me your sales playbook because if I know how you sell today, I can build the next iteration above.” Ninety-eight out of every 100 companies couldn't send me their playbook because they didn't have one. What that means Willy is this: if your company doesn't have a sales playbook by default, it means that each salesperson is doing it their own way, which is absolute insanity. My largest sales force that I had was 2,600 salespeople. And what I used to say in those 100+ offices as I visited was, there aren't 2,600 best ways to sell our product. You have to figure out the best way to build the system and process, and then practice the systems and processes. So that’s it in a nutshell, but here's what I really want to push, and that is that if you look at your company from the operations side of the house, there's probably a playbook. HR probably a playbook, the financial side probably has a playbook. Why is it that we leave our salespeople to just wing it and do their own thing? One of the disruptors that I have in the sales side of the house is, “I have my own style” that doesn't work for me. I can't have thousands of people representing my company doing it their way.
Willy Walker: I've been in the room where you said that, and I've watched a number of salespeople get really uncomfortable. I've seen them wiggle in their chair physically when you say that because they do think they've got their own special sauce. And so how do you teach very successful salespeople to change their game or to standardize their game? Given that the whole way they got in that room was that they're one of the best salespeople at that company.
Jack Daly: I love the sports analogies; they really work in business for me. I look at the top performers in any sport and what they're trying to do in their practice and getting it down. You see in golf, you want when you've got that 180-yard shot, you know which club to pick, and you have grounded in as to how to hit that shot so that it's within a birdie putt on the green. We go to the Olympics and look at the Olympic stars, and they do it over and over and over again at the point of excellence. And so, what I say to the top salespeople is this, I'm not looking for you to throw out everything that you've got that's made you successful today. What I'd like to do is I'd like you to figure out what are the systems and processes, what are the things that the best salespeople are doing in the organization and see if we can kind of bring those together in a playbook? And then all of us get enhanced with our income and with our productivity. So, it's not a wholesale change, and I'm not trying to make salespeople into being telemarketers with a script, necessarily. But you know, if I give you Willy, the example of objections and let's just use the one that I hear most commonly, “your price is too high”. Well, there's probably one or two answers that are really diamonds in terms of how to handle that objection. Why would we leave it to each individual to respond to that? And by the way, one of the dangers that really exists with that is that if it didn't work with the last prospect, they'll change it for the next prospect. And so, we're changing it on a regular, ongoing basis. I'm all about processes and systems.
Willy Walker: Why don't you describe what the money bag is? And I think the real question I have for you, Jack, is when I hear you talk about the money bag, I think it's antiquated, old school and old business. There's nothing fancy, digital or wiz band about it, so why don't you talk for a moment about the money bag and why you think it's such an incredible tool for most sales executives in America or around the globe?
Jack Daly: Yeah. So first of all, it's very simple and basic. The bottom foundation of the money bag is handwritten notes. That's it in a nutshell. And all I have is a bag that the other shop owners years ago used to put their checks and cash in and take it down to the bank for a deposit on a daily basis. I call it a money bag not because of that. I call it the money back because this bag literally has made me millions of dollars in relationships over the years. I have my thank you cards. I have my envelopes, stamps, I have my pens, I have everything ready so that I can write a handwritten note immediately after meeting somebody before I've even gotten in my car or any transportation or Uber or what have you and put it in the mailbox nearest where they're at. Now I also will tell you that I'm capable technologically as well. And so, as I leave a prospect call, I'm sending them an email before I even left the building, thanking them for their time and reconfirming what we agreed on is to happen next. So, I'm there. For that person to get a handwritten note from me the very next day, it is a game changer. So many people tell me this. And so, we can trace back. And I have people all over the world living today that are sending the messages by LinkedIn and Facebook and personal messages to my email account saying this money bag is gold. It's just an amazing thing.
And by the way, here's the best part. The more we get driven by technology, the less people do a handwritten note, which means it stands out in the crowd. So, I'm going to get today about 300 unsolicited e-mail messages, and I'm going to hit delete on most of them all day. But when the U.S. mail delivers my mail each day, I actually open up damn near every envelope. And so, it's a standout from the pack type of thing. And you know, I get audiences now where they're approaching my grandkids' ages here and they're looking at me like, this guy's a wacko, right? And then I get somebody to bite and then they come back and say, oh my God, it really works. And again, you're the embodiment of taking action, Willy because you're on the road and all of a sudden you'll send me a postcard from San Francisco saying, hey, this is my money bag for the day. Thanks for giving me that tip, right?
Willy Walker: So, talk about the Jack Daly sales playbook. Talk about how you've grown your business. What I'd love to get a sense of Jack is you present pre-pandemic and now we're back and you're doing more and more. But pre-pandemic you would present in front of hundreds of audiences a year. First of all, how did you build your business up to getting to that size and scale when you travel all over the globe? So, you know you've got clients just as much in Singapore as you do in South Carolina. So how did you go global if you will? And then what I really want to understand is when you present to various groups, how do you know which are the winning companies and which are the companies that aren't going to listen to what you're saying? What's the sales playbook for Jack Daly and the growth of your business? And then I want to get to that next piece.
Jack Daly: Yeah, that last question will hold for just a moment and then pack it in on this, because I would say that was a difficult one to wrestle down. If I had the answer Willy, that would be great. So, the first thing I would tell you, Willy, is that I was blessed in life. I had a mentor by the name of Jim Pratt. Every book that I have published, I make a note in there acknowledging Jim and the lessons I learned. One of the things that is a signature item of Jack Daly is “model the masters”, find people that have already had success at something and dig out of them what you can.
I started that practice literally at 13 years old. I interviewed approximately 50 successful people over the summer on how to build a successful company and then took those pearls of wisdom and implemented them in my professional and personal life. I've been doing that for a long time. That's 60 years ago. So, when I got into the speaking business, as I mentioned, I got into it by default, I was taking the year off and going to figure out what I'm going to do next. And then the phone starts ringing, right? So, I started responding and I said, OK, so where's the professionals? And the professionals were in the National Speakers Association (NSA). So, I started to kind of figure out what's going on in that world. And what I learned was that the majority of gigs get booked through speaker bureaus or meeting planners. And that population out there is tough to crack. And there are thousands of speakers trying to get into those speaker bureau types of things. And if you use them, they take a 30 percent cut, but not just the 30 percent cut of your fee. But let's say I was speaking to a technology audience of a thousand people, and the head of Google came up and said, “That was fantastic. Do that 30 more times around the world for us this year.” When that happens, I have to give that to the speaker bureau for their 30 percent cut. I just didn't think it was fair and so I said, I'm going to build my business the way I know how to build a business and I'm going to self-generate.
So, I thought: “Who writes the check?” That's the question a speaker should ask. And so, my audiences write the check through the CEO/entrepreneur or business owner. So, then the next question was “Where did they assemble?” Well, they get together in Young Presidents' Organization (YPO), Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO), Vistage, CEO Global, etc. OK then, I'm going to invest my time speaking in front of those groups. And if I have to do it for free, I'll do it for free. I just want people to know that my content is rich and that I deliver a performance that's beyond what their expectation is. And if I do that consistently, I will build up a network of referrals. And I will build up a network of repeat business. Today, what I can tell you, Willy, is that I'm not willing to be in a hotel for 100 nights a year for business. I don't want to do that. And so, I'm choosy about which clients that I take, and 90 percent of my business today is repeat and referral, which is the prize place to be.
By the first of the year, 80 percent of my speaking engagements are already on the calendar for the year. I ask this of any business: how would you like to start the year and 80 percent of your business is already in the house? And so, all we have to do is pay a little bit of a price on the front end of investing your time and energy into the markets where the money is, in who writes the check. And I believe that that's true in any business.
Willy Walker: As you well know, I've referred you to lots of people. And one of the reasons why I refer you to lots of people is because, like you did for my friend Andy Florance at CoStar Group. You brought your A-game and you got two standing ovations during your presentation to CoStar a couple of weeks ago in Florida. You go in to meet with a new company like CoStar. How much specific work do you do to understand their business and what you're talking about versus the kind of the core tenets of Jack Daly and what you teach all companies?
Jack Daly: Yeah, that's a great question. The first thing that I can tell you is, unlike so many speakers, I don't have a speech. There are speakers out there that you can hire them to do a 60-minute speech, a 90-minute speech or two-hour speech. And let's just say you hired one of those speakers to do an hour-long presentation and 10 minutes before showtime, the client comes up and says, hey, we're running out of time. Take that hour and make it forty-five minutes. That guy's running to the bathroom on both ends because they don't know what to do with that situation. It doesn't matter to me. Just tell me how long and when you want me to finish and I'm good to go, I'll take stories out. I'll put stories in, all of those types of things, and I'm going to react while I'm in front of a group to whether the audience within the first five, 10, 15 minutes is buying in or not buying in. And if they're not buying in, I need to pivot and I need to find a way to get through whatever barriers that I have diagnosed are there.
So back to the question of preparation, I need to understand the industry. I need to understand the business. I need to understand the strengths. I need to understand the weakness. And here's the big question that I love asking the client and that is when I walk off stage, when I am finished. What will be success in your eyes? Tell me what success is, because if you tell me again what that there is, I can craft such that we're there. So, in Andy's example that you gave me the Florida gig that you were gracious enough to introduce me to. It was all about moving them from being transactional salespeople to relationship salespeople. Well, that's what I teach naturally, anyway. But the fact that you gave me that as a referral and Andy took me in without having any knowledge of me other than the trust that you have with him, I walked into it with a more than a thousand-person audience, and no one in the audience had ever heard me speak before. So, I used that as an example of how I got there, and I walked on stage. And what does the leadership team there say: “You haven't seen the last of us.” So, the repeat business is coming, right?
Willy Walker: So, it's fascinating to me. I still haven't gotten to what happens. How do you know it's a good presentation? Who's going to get it? Who's not? I want to loop back that. But there's so much here that is so rich. So, you just said a digital company trying to transform itself into a relationship company. And I started this by saying, isn't the money bag old school and aren’t we going towards a digitized world? And it's fascinating to think there that here’s CoStar, one of the most successful companies out there from a growth, revenue, and market cap standpoint, basically is the provider of information to the commercial real estate industry. And yet they're right now saying we need to move from basically selling digits to selling relationships.
Jack Daly: It's not one or the other, it's both. I'm going to go back to Jim Collins' book of 35 years ago, Built to Last. It's the “Tyranny of the OR" and embraces the "Genius of the AND. So, we need to couple both of them, don't rely just on the transaction side, the digital side of the world, marry it up with the relationship side and some of the tried-and-true things in sales. People ask me an awful lot of times this question, Willy. “Jack, you know, you've been doing this for quite a long time. Hasn't the world of sales changed? Don't we need to do things differently?” The answer to that question is, yes, we do and no.
For example, Selling is the transfer of trust. That was true 30 years ago. It's still true today. People do business with people they like. That was true 30 years ago. It's true today. People don't buy features, they buy solutions. They're looking to get out of their pain, so solve their pain. You know, these are basic, tried, and true principles of sales and they haven't changed. But for me, as a salesperson today, I don't need to carry around samples of my product any longer, samples of my ware, all of that information can be gotten off of the internet. There's so much that we can leverage from the internet as a prospect consumer that we don't want a salesperson showing up and throwing up and telling us old school those types of things. I already know all that. So, what happens is that now a salesperson can use their quality time to really get deep into a company by doing their homework before they get there. That will be much more difficult to do and assemble their questions before they get to the call so that they're intelligent about the person's business and they're asking the provocative questions. What I always say about a salesperson that's at an above average level is in their call when they leave, the prospect says: that was an entirely different experience than we're accustomed to having. And incidentally, when you follow it up with a handwritten card, it's truly different than anything else I've experienced.
Willy Walker: So, as I look across W&D’s salesforce, they come in all shapes and sizes, if you will, and the skill set that determines who is a breakthrough salesperson as it relates to not what they're selling, not consistency as it relates to the W&D product but as it relates to how they engage with their clients. Some are known as the smartest person on structuring a deal. Somebody else has a personality of give them the bone and they'll never let go of it and they're going to cover every single detail of the deal ad nauseam. You know if you give them a transaction to finance, there's just not going to be a single thing missed. And then somebody else has just a more relaxed kind of personality about them and gets the client to basically tell them their problems and then they are seen as the solver of the problems. They're really good at asking questions and getting the client to divulge what their pain point is. As you think about that and those different types, Jack, given that one size doesn't fit all here, right? With all those three examples and three individuals at Walker & Dunlop, they're all exceptional in what they do. But is there one that you've seen across the board as it relates to either asking really good questions, being attentive to detail or being known as the most brilliant in a certain space that is what kind of can carry the day as it relates to outsized sales growth?
Jack Daly: I do have that answer, Willy and I like to say that I want to access the blend of those attributes you just talked about. I want to access them. I don't have them all either. So, I'm not going to be the guy with brilliance that's going to show up on the sales call. But what I want to make sure is that I got someone that as a salesperson can transport themselves into what the prospect customer is. In other words, change seats, have empathy for where that client is, that customer is, and all of the conversation being processed by the salesperson as if they were the prospect customer. And what I know is that as a great example, Walker & Dunlop has all of those attributes. They just happen to be resident in different people. So, what gives me comfort as a salesperson representing Walker & Dunlop is that I know that I have that reservoir of strength. All I need to do is get in bed, so to speak with the prospect customer, to understand deeply where their needs really are and then be able to be the guy with the bone that doesn't give up and find those resources within Walker & Dunlop that best match the needs of the client.
One of the biggest things that I think I have an advantage over most is I can get my ego out of the way. I don't need to be the standout guy from a visibility standpoint. What I need to do is I need to really have a great attribute of listening from the perspective of the customer. That's the key.
Willy Walker: Have you ever gotten feedback, Jack, that hurt? In other words, you went, and you present, you thought you'd nailed it, or you thought you said something that was really good, and someone said something to you that just said, man, that didn't go what I thought, and it just kind of hit you in a way that you weren't expecting.
Jack Daly: So, I've had individual people that have said that, but I've never had a client that has come back to me and said anything of that nature. And that's not me being egotistical. As a speaker, one of the things that I had to learn early from Jim Pratt, my mentor really helped me out with is that no matter what group you speak to, you're not going to be a 10 with everybody. I can remember doing post-speaking surveys on a scale of one to 10 from a 100 people in the audience. And I've got all nines and tens, and three guys gave me a two and I want to know who they are, and I want to talk to them because I can learn from them. And Jim said, “Look, let me give you two pieces of advice. One is, I want you to take the surveys and do the Olympic scoring method. And you take those three people that gave you a three and you throw them away. And then what if you took three away, take six of the 10s away because you weren't that good either, they just fell in love easily. And then whatever's left, that's your blended score. That's what would be a real score.” And then the second piece of advice he gave me was this. He said, “Look, everybody doesn't have the positive attitude that you embrace. And so, those three guys that gave you a three, man, you did a great job because typically they wake up every morning as a one. And so just don't worry about having to please everybody.”
We're not going to be a fit with everybody. And so, but from an overall client perspective, I just haven't had that situation. I will tell you that my first speaking gig, I talked about exiting the business and giving the client back that the fee because I felt like I was so horrible and I had one testimonial letter that hangs up in my office right over there on the wall and it's from that client a month later, who said: “You knocked the ball out of the park and you couldn't have been more prepared to blah blah blah blah blah.” So, one of the things I have to remember about myself is that I need to lighten up a little bit, not be as hard on myself as I am at times.
Willy Walker: I have a quick anecdote, Jack, and then I'm going to come to you on another question. But I was at my friend, Senator Hickenlooper's birthday party about three weeks ago, and another friend of ours, Rick Sapkin, took the then Governor Hickenlooper to a Denver Nuggets game and it was his birthday, and the PA announcer on the governor's birthday said, and we're pleased to have tonight Governor John Hickenlooper with us here at the Pepsi Center. And the crowd starts to applaud and there's a guy who's back up a couple rows back at the top of the section going “boo, boo boo!” And so that it all goes away, and Hickenlooper turns to Sapkin and says, “I'm going to go talk to that guy and Sapkin’s like, “Dude, come on. I mean, there are 20,000 people here. Someone in here is going to be a staunch Republican and hate everything that you possibly say. Hickenlooper says, “I'll be right back.” And so, Hickenlooper gets up, walks back to the guy, sits down next to him, spends about 10 minutes up there with them and goes back down and Sapkin and looks at him goes “That had to have been a big waste of time.” Hickenlooper says “no, I think he's now a supporter.” Sapkin was pointing out Hickenlooper's desire to just talk to anyone from either side of the aisle, and they might sit there behind him and booing him, but he really wanted to engage. And the other thing is that Hickenlooper might have a little bit of a sense that he has more influence over people's thoughts than he does after talking to him for ten minutes thinking he was now a fan.
But Jack, go to this. You travel around the globe, and I think if you show up in an audience in Singapore, they're going to react to what you're saying. Forget about the language barrier. They're going to react to what you're saying a little bit differently than maybe an audience in South Carolina et cetera. When you're up there, you just said 10, 15 minutes into it, I need to be looking at the audience to figure out whether they are kind of on the page or not and what I need to do to adapt to it. First of all, is that more challenging with international audiences, which I think you're going to say pretty quickly it is. And the second thing is, how do you then audible? How do you change what you're saying to try and get the audience to start to engage with you in a way that they aren't in that first 10 or 15 minutes?
Jack Daly: So, it's ironic that you would use Singapore as the example. I had a three-hour speaking gig in Singapore just prior to the pandemic. There were about 300 people in the audience, and we were going to take a bio break in the middle. So, an hour and a half and an hour and a half. In the first hour and a half, I'm profusely sweating because the group, there's no emotion. I felt like I was in a room, and no one was there. And I'm trying every way to get there. Some of the ways that you feel when you feel like you're not getting there. I go to see if I can get interaction among the group and because if I get interaction, we get a little bit closer. I walk off stage and get down with the folks and start one-on-one’ing with people. And when I do that, I look for humor somehow to get people laughing and get them upbeat, and then I can bring them back. In Singapore, I couldn’t figure it out. And so, I came back from the break, and I kept trying and I spent three hours in living hell, quite frankly, and I just figured I bombed, and the client came back and said I was the buzz of the three-day conference and people got more out of it. They couldn't stop taking notes and they couldn't be more complimentary. It was just a different culture than what I'm accustomed to in being expressive. And it was my first speaking gig in Singapore, and I didn't understand that aspect of the audience.
But let me go back just a moment here on this question. One of the things that I've been surprised about is that in most countries (in 2019, I spoke in over 30 countries, 250,000 air miles). In most countries, I don't need to make much of an adjustment to my style of presenting, nor my content. Our world is getting closer and closer together. At least that's my perspective. So, there's not a lot of customization to the culture of the country as I suspect that there would need to be.
Willy Walker: So, your new book, Jack Daly's Life by Design, it comes out today, so anyone watching this can go on Amazon and buy Jack's new book. I don't think I know another person who is as prescriptive about their own life as you are. I've seen you talk about it on stage as well as I've spoken to you about it personally as it relates to how prescriptive you are in building an annual business plan. You previously mentioned you don't want to spend 100 nights in a hotel this year. As you well know, I have no idea how many nights I'm going to spend in a hotel this year because someone says, I need you in Atlanta next week. And guess what? I'm going to Atlanta next week. Talk for a moment, Jack, about how you build your annual business plan and then what went into this book as it relates to Life by Design.
Jack Daly: Thank you for mentioning it, it's an exciting day for me. Today is the official release date. I happen to have a copy of the book handy here. It's called Jack Daly's Life by Design, and for anyone that's listening and interested, check out the website.
In the book, there's over a hundred pages of appendices, with all of the templates and examples of the things that I've used on those templates with my own personal life all sitting on the website for free. You don't even need to buy the book and you can access it. But the book will tell you how to utilize those tools. We started Willy by talking about the playbook and systems and processes, and all I said to myself early in life is build the systems and processes to lead an exceptional life. I don't want to be the guy, no matter how passionate I am about my business and how enjoyable it is. I don't want to be the guy that only has two or three weeks a year where they have time off. All I want is to suck the marrow out of life. I want to do a tremendous number of things. And so, when I'm at work, I'm all in, but I'm all in too on the personal side of my life.
So as an example, when you talk about the nights that you'll sleep at a hotel – each year, I sit down and say, what do I want to accomplish in my personal life? What trips do I want to make personally and where do I want to go? What races do I want to do? Because I'm a triathlete, I'm a marathoner. Those types of things. And I book them. And those are mine. And then I live at the beach in Southern California. Well, I ought to take advantage of that. I grew up in the Philly area, where it's typically cold and nasty or hot and sweaty. So how many nights do I want to sleep on my own bed, and I figure out what those are and then what's left is what we sell. And typically, my year has been a third, a third, a third. I track and measure every day where I sleep. And if it needs to be recalibrated because something's getting out of hand, then we bring it back. I'll take less gigs later on in the year or what have you and typically my actual results compared to my plan, are within about a three to five percent variance. So, it works.
I track and measure things in my personal life every day. I have five people I call the “board of directors in my life”. They one-on-one meet with me on my personal goals four times a year. That’s twenty one-on-one sessions in my personal life. So, I don’t get off kilter. The criteria to be on the board of directors of my life are two things: they care immensely about me and won’t tolerate my bullshit. So, they have to be strong people who care about me. I report monthly, quarterly, and annually the results compared to the plan and compared to last year. Now that sounds like what we do in business. But if we do that in business and have great results as a business, why not apply those things to our personal life? And so, I’ve been doing this now, Willy for 60 years. After interviewing those 50 successful people at 13 years old, I got my first annual plan and one of the things that people will find on https://jackdalyslifebydesign.com/ and that appendix is my bucket list. There are over 400 items on my bucket list. Seventy-five percent of which are completed, right? So, it works. And I just said, let's give the formula out to other people so they can elevate their game on their personal life.
Willy Walker: So, tell the anecdote about wanting to play the top 100 golf courses in America.
Jack Daly: Somebody gifted me a book that was a coffee table type book that said, here's the top 100 golf courses in the United States, and every golf course got two or three pages with a write up and photos. And I said, gosh, that sounds like a good bucket list item. I’ll put that on there. And so how long will it take me? Well, if I did 10 courses a year it would take me 10 years. And so, I said, that sounds like a legitimate thing. And so, I’d start knocking these golf courses off the list. And then it ended up being a longer journey for a lot of different reasons. And so, I sit here today at 95 of the top 100 golf courses that I have played in the United States.
I’ve run a marathon, as you know, in all 50 states. Well, here's the story of when I ran my first marathon at 46 years old. And then I said, you know what? That was kind of fun. I'll run one a year. So, for 10 years, I ran one per year. So, my first one was in Portland, Oregon. The next nine were in California. My 10th marathon was the Los Angeles Marathon. It was my fourth L.A. Marathon, and a guy ran by me with a shirt that said, “I've run a marathon in all 50 states.” So, I caught up with him and I said, hey, tell me about the 50 state marathons, he says. “There's a club on the internet called the 50 Staters, and you ought to go on and take a look.” I went on, I said, that belongs on my bucket list. And so, I just started knocking these things off. And then I met some guys on the journey that said they were doing the seven continents. And I'm like, “Well, shit, that sounds like a good thing. I'm going to put the seven continents on the list.” And so, there's less than 200 people Willy that have done all seven continents and all 50 states, and I’m one of them.
And so, I didn’t start out by thinking, let’s do a marathon in all 50 states. I didn’t start out by saying, let’s play the top 100 golf courses, necessarily because I was putting around golfing. It was just “Hey, that would be kind of fun, right?” You’re a YPOer. I put on my list that I wanted to fly a jet fighter plane, and I don't know how to fly, but a YPO member went on my website, saw my bucket list, and he sent me an email and he said, hey, is that still available? And I said, Yeah, I haven't got that one yet. And he sent me another email with a picture of a U.S. Air Force jet fighter plane, he said he bought it from the U.S. Air Force and what we need to do is find a day and time and let's go. And so, his name is Wei Chen and he's about a 6’4” Chinese guy, and he pulls into the airport and loads me up in the back, in the cockpit and we're talking to each other. He asked me about aerodynamics, and I said, Sure, I'm game for anything. We do all these barrel rolls of things and then we level out and then he goes, are you ready? And I say, ready. I mean, what else could we be doing? And he said, well, you haven’t flown yet, between your knees there's a little toggle switch. Grab it with two fingers and a thumb, and I'm going to pass the controls over to you. And I flew a jet fighter plane!
Look, here's the message Willy – people will come out of the woodwork to help you with your bucket list, but you got to know what your bucket list is. People will help you get wherever you want in life if you know where you want to be in life. So why not sit down and say, if I could do anything, what would I like to do? So as an example, undone things, I want to hold the torch during the Olympics. I don't need to be the guy in the final light. But you know, they pass it from a guy along the way, I want to be there. And by the way, you get to keep the torch as a memento so that you can put it in a shadow box and hang it up in the house. I want to meet a President of the United States in the Oval Office. I want to fly on Air Force One. You know, people look at these things that I put on my list and say, well, that's foolish, that's not going to happen. Well, I already have four people that have said that whatever Olympics that I want to hold the torch, I'm done. I've got a backup to a backup that can help me with that. But again, if you don't know where you want to go, you can't get there, right?
Willy Walker: Jack, what do you think makes it so that people don't do that? What's the core emotion that says either, I’m to insecure to put it out there. I don't have the time to plan it. Why is it that most people who hear what you just said say that sounds really cool, but I'm not going to do it for myself, for whatever reason.
Jack Daly: Yeah, there's probably a laundry list of reasons, Willy and I'm not going to say something very complimentary right now, but it's my belief that it’s personal inertia. I just don't feel that people have the appetite as a general rule. If I gave you a secondary reason, I would say that people are too concerned about other people's opinions of them. You know, I'm the oldest of five kids. My brother is three years younger than I am. We were in the same high school at the same time. I was a senior; he was a freshman. His name is Joe. Imagine as a senior being referred to by everybody in the school as Joe Daley's brother. Shouldn't it work the other way? Shouldn't Joe be Jack Daly's brother? I was the senior, but out of 275 kids in my graduating class, I can tell you I know less than 10 because if I found that they weren't going to add value to where I wanted to go in life, I just didn't invest my time with them. My brother was a social butterfly. He cared about what people thought, he wanted to be the big man on campus. I watched my brother force himself to learn how to smoke and spit every time that he took a drag. I've never smoked, but smoking was part of the cool set. I think an awful lot of people are too concerned about other people's opinions. Why not just say we're only on the planet once? Let's make it one hell of a good ride. What would you think would be a good ride and just go for it?
Willy Walker: I just love the fighter jet anecdote, the golf anecdote. The marathon anecdote is fantastic, except as you know very well, as long as you have the determination and the drive to do it, you can sign up for those races and go do them. Whereas playing the top 100 golf courses in the country, there are many on that list that are private. And therefore, you can't just show up and say, I'll pay whatever your greens fees are, and I'll go play it. And what I find to be so insightful there is until you put out there that you want to play those courses. Someone doesn't come to you and say, hey, you want to play Augusta, you want to play Pine Valley, I can get you on it. And I do find that to be very, very insightful as it relates to business and where you want to go as a business. Because unless you tell your team and this is looping back to what really got me going at Walker & Dunlop on, if you will, the Jack Daly medicine. is until you tell people where you're going, nobody can help you get there.
I remember distinctly when we put out our first five-year business plan in 2007, just pre-GFC to grow revenues, EBITDA, and net income 5X in five years. And my entire team thought that I'd gone into my office and smoked some really good California sinsemilla and they're like, “You want to do what?” I remember distinctly looking at the team in our conference room and everyone's glossed over going, is this guy really lost his mind 5X in five years on revenue, EBITDA, and net income. And as you well know, over the next five years, we had the Great Financial Crisis, not planned. We bought a company in 2009 from Credit Suisse, not planned. We went public in 2010, not planned. We bought another company in 2012, not planned. And we ended up growing revenues 4.96 times, net income at 4.92 times and in EBITDA at 5.01 times. The whole issue was having the gumption, having the audacity, having the dream to put out their 5X in five years and then to watch the team go to it.
But I found it to be so inspirational because you said if you don't put it out there, if you're not telling people where you're going, you're never going to get there. And the way you live your life in the way that you do your work and fortunately at W&D, the team we pulled together in the way we put out there our goals and ambitions have all worked exactly to your plan.
Jack Daly: Yep. Look, if I had a critique on what you just said, I would say, gosh, you should have said seven times. (Laughs)
Willy Walker: One of the interesting things that I do find about that we've now done this three times, run our fourth. And on every one of them, the team doesn't outperform by 25 percent or underperform by 25 percent. It hits it on the dot and its sort of back to you as it relates to your annual plan. And you said to me, I'm within a variance of about three percent on what I put out there. It's very interesting that when you put those goals out there, you generally speaking coalesce around the goal and as you refine it to your point of like, in hindsight, would I have loved to have done 7X, yea. But you know what, 5X is pretty damn good at that time. But it's a really interesting concept as it relates to setting these. And you mentioned Jim Collins previously, these bold, highly ambitious goals that you can put out there. They better darn well be achievable, yet highly ambitious or else they're never adapted to.
Jack Daly: Once you put that 5X out there as the goal, you're going to spend time with the team figuring out whether it's real or not real before you broadcast it throughout the organization. It can't be a fantasy number, there's got to be some reality to it. So, I have a client right now who spent 38 years getting to $180M in sales. That's an acceptable good result. But the CEO now wants to take it to $500M in less than four years. And we've stress tested that and it's real. But the team needed to really be a part of stress testing. How many more stores are we going to need to open? What are we going to do online? All of those particulars. And once we broke it all down into its sub parts, each of the sub parts was doable.
You know, I have a client today who is doing interior house painting and their differential is they will have your entire house painted inside in less than 24 hours. And when people hear this, “Well, wait a second. I've had painters come into my house and they're there for days upon days upon days and its terrible living conditions. That's not possible. I have a 5,000 square foot house. There's no way that you can do that.” Well, the answer to that is, “Well, if you hired me to do your dining room, could you buy that I could get it done in a day? Well, yeah, if you just take one room, well, that will take me like two guys.” So, I put two guys in the dining room, three in the living room, two up in the bedroom. See that. And so, we're going to take over your house with 25-30 people for the day. We're going to move you into a hotel for the night and give us 24 hours and then come back and open up the door and the house will be complete. No mats around the house or any of that. And then we told them to put a bouquet of flowers greeting them as they opened up the door. It is a competitive, unique advantage but until you break it down into its individual parts, then the concept of “I can get this done in 24 hours” sounds absurd. 5X sounds absurd until you break it down into its component parts and then somebody needs to own each of the parts. Somebody needs to own the dining room and in your business, somebody needs to own each part. Every business can be done that way.
Willy Walker: So, Jack, I started this conversation and I know you've got something coming right up on the other side of this. So, I want to be mindful of your time. I honestly can't underscore, we took when I first met you, Walker & Dunlop had a value of about $50-75M in 2007. And as you know, our market cap went over $5B at the end of 2021. People ask me, what's the special sauce of W&D’s success? I go straight to our five-year business planning and where we're going, and that all goes back to that speech that you gave in 2007 that said, “if you get in that Ferrari, you're not asking me what color it is, you're not asking me about the leather, you're asking me where we're going.” And so, as someone who has been a great guide to me in giving W&D the path forward, I'm deeply indebted to you. I'm so appreciative of our friendship, and I'm really excited to see you in about three to four weeks at the Walker & Dunlop all company meeting in Denver and have you talk to everyone and share with all of us your incredible insights.
Jack Daly: And give you a physical hug instead of a virtual hug. So that's cool, too! This has been a joy to spend the time with you, Willy. I will tell you, when the public heard that I was going to be a guest on your show today, I had several people independently reach out and say, of all the other podcasts that are out there, this one happens to be my favorite. So, you evidently are doing a pretty decent job of this as well.
Willy Walker: Well, thanks, Jack. It's great to see you. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Thank you so much and we'll see you again next week. And Jack, I look forward to seeing you soon. Take care.
Jack Daly: See you in a few weeks.
