This week my travels find me on the final day of 11 days of straight travel, which is unusual for me because I’m typically home on the weekends. However, this week-and-a-half business adventure has certainly been worthwhile and I’d like to recap some of the highlights for you now …
By Gino Blefari
This week my travels found me back at my Los Altos, CA home office following a restful family vacation in Hawaii. On Wednesday, I made a short drive to Menlo Park for a visit to Facebook and its sprawling, world headquarters.
I admire Facebook, its philosophy and corporate culture. From CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Sinmi Tinubu, an intern who helped greet my small group, everyone is encouraged to “be bold” and “focus on impact” – constantly collaborating and innovating to solve the most important challenges.
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 find me in Irvine, CA at our HSF Affiliates LLC headquarters for a Sales and Service conference. The conference brought together our sales, service, operations, education and business consulting teams for a collective, three-day event filled with presentations, team-building activities and idea-sharing. As you know, I’m a firm believer in setting Wildly Important Goals (WIGs) and not just setting these WIGS but also limiting them to only the very most important achievements you need to get done. These were our two WIGs for the meeting:
Last week my travels found me in Omaha, NE attending the Berkshire Hathaway Energy January 2017 Executive Leadership Conference and related workshops. More than 350 officers and managers from throughout the enterprise attended the three-day event, which included cross-business panel discussions and presentations related to key challenges and opportunities.
Panel discussions centered on managing competitive risk, modernizing assets, reducing our environmental footprint, enhancing cybersecurity plus an overview of political and economic effects on our businesses – all great material.
By Gino Blefari
This week my travels find me in Southern California for leadership meetings, our HSF Affiliates December Town Hall meeting and our team’s annual holiday celebration. I arrive in Irvine at the ideal time, just as we released Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices’ Q4 Homeowner Sentiment Survey to wrap up the year with a consumer-centric bow.
This week my travels find me in Boca Raton, FL but instead of talking about my meetings in the Sunshine State, I want to instead share a brilliant marketing idea I discovered on a recent trip to Dallas. The idea brings to light the importance of creative disruption and how in business you must develop, consider, reconsider, refine and modify any proposed solution to a problem in order to achieve sustainable success.
By Gino Blefari
This week my travels found me in Palm Springs, CA for the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices CFO Conference and just yesterday, in Irvine at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties’ administration center.
By Gino Blefari
This week my travels find me in Rancho Mirage, CA for our 2016 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Summit Conference. The theme for this year’s event is “storytelling and connecting,” and the two ideas couldn’t have been more central to every activity, networking opportunity, presentation and gathering that together encompassed our Summit meeting.
By Gino Blefari
This week my travels find me in Northern California for meetings and video filming (you’ll be seeing what I filmed soon!) And in between my busy schedule it struck me that we are smack in the middle of 2016. Can you believe it? Half the year is already over!
Besides being a testament to how very fast time flies—especially when you’re having fun in your job—this halfway mark is also an important reminder to reflect on the goals you set for this year and to check in and see how far you’ve gotten toward accomplishing them. Are you on track? Behind? Ahead? If you gave yourself measurable ways to gauge your success, you’ll be able to easily see how close you’ve come to hitting those goals. Now, if you haven’t achieved your goals, here are two reasons why that might be:
Thoughts on Leadership 