By Gino Blefari
This week my travels found me in Santa Barbara, CA for the 2017 Berkshire Elite Circle Conference, honoring the Top 50 brokerages in the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices network. It was an experience to be remembered, a celebration of some of our network’s finest leaders and a chance to gather actionable insights from the wisdom of not only these wise real estate innovators but also our keynote speakers, and my good friends, Tom McCarthy and Carmine Gallo. Both Tom and Carmine presented on the topic of … presenting, and delivered straightforward, sharp advice related to the subject.
I believe presenting is such a large part of any business—not just in real estate with listing presentations but for anyone involved in any business. You must always present your story, your product and your brand to others and do so in a way that captures their attention. Given the significance of presentations, I want to share some of my favorite takeaways from everything Carmine and Tom said.
By Gino Blefari
This week my travels found me in Charleston, West Virginia to meet with the team at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Great Expectations Realty and I had the opportunity to sit next to U.S. Senator Joe Manchin at dinner Thursday night then had a brief meeting at the office of Senator Shelley Moore Capito the following day. After West Virginia it was off to Minneapolis for meetings with the HomeServices of America, Inc. board and then Northern California where I had lunch with Carmine Gallo, best-selling author of one of my favorite books, The Storyteller’s Secret. Carmine is also a keynote speaker at this month’s upcoming Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Summit Conference in Palm Springs, Sept. 18-20 and I can’t wait for him to share his wisdom with the crowd!
Our theme for 2016 Summit is “connecting” and this fits squarely with Carmine’s philosophy: The best way to connect, he says, is through the stories we tell. Think about it. What is it we really remember from meetings, trips or big events? Is it the gate number for our flight? Is it the very date a particular conference call took place? No. Those are details and they’re easily forgotten. What we remember are the stories we take away from these experiences and the stories others have shared with us. Here are three traits of inspiring storytellers, as defined by Carmine in his book:
By Gino Blefari
This week my travels find me in Southern California for a meeting with the HomeServices of America, Inc. board and to work with our staff at HQ on products and services that will help our brokerage networks achieve even greater success this year. Just before arriving in California, I had finished The Storyteller’s Secret by best-selling author Carmine Gallo—who also wrote one of my favorite books, Talk Like TED—about the power of stories to impress, illuminate and inspire.
“We’re all storytellers,” Gallo writes. “We don’t call ourselves storytellers but it’s what we do every day.” He goes on to explain that in this twenty-first century age of information—the “knowledge economy”—we are only as valuable as our ideas. In the spirit of idea-sharing, here are five of my favorite concepts Gallo presents in his book:
Thoughts on Leadership 