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So Dave Jenks, how you doing, man? Well, thank you so much for taking time out to join us. I love to have these little legacy conversations, just to catch up with some of the folks who are probably, you know, watching at home. You've been in the industry for 35 plus years as a master trainer, business consultant, starting with the Dale Carnegie Institute, Century 21, Keller Williams. Many know you from the best-selling book she co-authored, you know, MREA, Millionaire Real Estate Agent, Millionaire Real Estate Investor, Shift, among many others. You also helped found Keller Williams University and write those training programs. What a lot of people may not know is industry leaders seek you out for guidance and counsel as well. And I think of you personally as one of the Titans who helped build this company. So, did I miss anything in there that would be important for us?
Good, right? That was a good run. Except, you know, every, everything is a calling. One of the things that's an important thing for people to understand is, you hear people say, you know, "Do what you love and the money will follow." And I think it's the other way around. I think it's, "Love what you do, and the options will come open." So, what I find is, in my whole career, I just dove into what I did at the time. I was a high school teacher. I dove into that. I got to be a college administrator. I dove into that. I got to take, I got to get into business for the first time, and I dove into that, learning marketing and sales. And I took the Dale Carnegie course, and I learned from that. I'd dive into, "What does it mean to be a good salesman?" Yeah. And then they asked me to come and teach the course, and then I dove into their great training, Dale Carnegie training, on how to be a great teacher. I mean, they, they have mastered the art of adult education. I mean, they're probably the largest, have the most graduates of any adult education program in the world. So, the, I say all that because what, what happens is, when you do that, other people get to see you, and then they call you to their venture. So, I mean, Mo Anderson got to see me leading Century 21, and then she called me to be with Keller Williams. And so, what happens is, when you do, when you just dive into what you're doing today and learn it and master it, you'll get the skill and the education you need to move on to whatever the next level is going to be for you.
You know, it's funny, we had the opportunity to interview Mike Brody. Named, I'm sorry, familiar with. And he said a very similar story. You know, "Grow where you're planted, and the opportunities will come." They will. They do. They do. And for some people, you create them. Like Gary Keller creates his. Gary's a, Gary's an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs create opportunity. Others of us, like I'm a collaborator. I get called to opportunities. So, I got to team up with Mo, and then Gary. And, and then what I find is, just like in writing a book, I mean, 20 years before we wrote the book, I had it on my goal list to write two best-selling business books. So, my goal is, yeah, and I didn't know how it would happen, you know. But what happened was, I needed to be with somebody to collaborate. And I am a much better writer, thinker, teacher when I am doing it collaboratively than what I'm trying to do it on my own. So, collaboration works.
Yeah. You mentioned Mo Anderson there. There is a famous story that Mo references in her book, you know, "Lessons of a Tenant Farmer's Daughter," where she talks about you were actually pursuing her to be in business at Century 21. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, it was, it was an interesting thing. I was a divisional president for Century 21. They had moved me from New York down to Texas to form four states into a mega-region, and then three more states came in. And we were the Century 21 South Central States Division, and I was the president and CEO of that corporation, wholly owned. And, and I needed five regional directors. And so, I knew Mo was available because I had known Mo anyway. Over, which she was, she was actually the number three producing office in all of Century 21 before she sold and went to Merrill Lynch. So, I knew who she was, and, and I wanted to recruit her to me. So, we had wonderful meetings, and she said, "Dave, I'd love to be in business with you." And I offered her a lot of money and a good opportunity. And she called me back and said, "Dave, I'm really sorry, I can't do it." And I said, "Why?" She said, "Well, I'm going to open up the Keller Williams region for Oklahoma." And I, I said, "You mean that little pyramid company down in Austin?" Just because I'm a competitor, right? And she said, "No, no, it's a great, it's, I think it's going to be a big company." And I said, "Well, Mo, have you signed a contract?" And she said, "Not yet, we're working on it." And I said, "Well, you know, it is a contractual business. So, if you don't have a contract yet, let's just work that out and come on with me, right?" And she said, "Dave, I shook hands on it. And when I shake hands on something," which she did with Gary Keller, she said, "then I'm committed." So, that, I got right off because I knew the, the level of quality of the kind of leader and person Mo is. Yeah.
And so, then fast forward, you know, a few years from there, she becomes CEO of Keller Williams, right? And she turns around and says, "Dave, you're going to be my first hire." Tell me about some of the most memorable moments you've had since that decision to partner with KW.
Well, there have been, there have been so many. Okay. And I would say that early on, it was to really grab hold of what the company needed. So, I said, "Mo, what is, what is it? What do we need?" And she said, "We need training. She said, my regions haven't had training, my OPs haven't had training. We say we're a training company, but we really haven't been delivering any." So, we organized an event just two months after I joined. I joined in April, April 15th, actually, tax day of '96. And in June of '96, we ran a Leadership Summit in Dallas. We had people fly in from around the country, and we did one day of training for regional leaders, one day. And then they stayed on, and one day of training for OPs and team leaders. And then we brought in our international ALC and did a day with them. And everyone just, you know, thought, "Wow, this is really what we signed up for." So, I think that was, that was number one. And the number two is, of course, you know, building the university with Gary. That we were so synergistic. The reason we did so many wonderful, over the years, double presentations at Mega Camp and vision speech and all that, is we spent so many hours together brainstorming things, debating things, sharing information with each other. And then ultimately, in writing the books. But we had, we had spent so much synergistic mental time and thought time that we really, it isn't that we thought the same, because we're very two very different people. But we really, we really talked in synergy, right, in sync with each other. So, that was a great opportunity. And then I think it's the, the, the rest of it is, I don't know, a whole series of really wonderful steps. When you read the growth is taking place, and you realize that what you've envisioned is happening. And of course, the writing of the book, when it was so well received, and it felt so good to have put that together. And then to really realize that it became kind of the primary recruiting tool for the company to attract people to it. That was a good thing. And so, lots of, lots of moments. And I think that I have, I still have them now. I mean, when I meet with other regions now and get a chance to, you know, get a sense of where the company is now, that is always amazingly rewarding to me.
Yeah, that's cool. So, in that time, you've got to co-author some of the most impactful books to our industry. Yeah. You developed the core training material for Keller Williams University alongside some very smart people, of course. If you had to sum up everything, you know, about achieving success in real estate into a few words or a few thoughts, what would they be?
Focus on service and focus on your own personal development. I think that there, there are, there are three areas of knowledge we get paid for in real estate: contracts, financing, and property evaluation. Right? It's almost, you could say, you know, it's almost like the lawyer, mortgage officer, appraiser. But we're not a, we're none of those three typically. But we have to have the level of expertise in those. So, anything that an agent does to become a master of those three areas of knowledge is good. Then, the skill area is asking for business. You have to learn how to ask for business. That's what's so powerful about Bold. Bold helps people get confident at asking for business, right? Because you have to, if you're going to be in business, you got to ask for business. There's no question. Do you have to do that, right? The second one is making effective presentations. So, you have to learn scripts and dialogues and a presentation, a listing presentation, a buyer rep presentation. And then negotiating win-win agreements. You have to bring about the meeting of the minds. And often, it, you know, people are adversarial, and you have to get them to understand where the, where the right place is for them to accomplish what they want. And I think those are the three skills. So, if you, you focus on the knowledge and the skills. And of course, that's then too, I would have three books in front of me, of course. I mean, I would have "The Millionaire Real Estate Agent," the "Shift" book, which is about the pragmatic, technical, tactical skills and language of selling. And then "My First Home," which is, which is one that is sort of underappreciated in the company, but it really, really tells people how to work with buyers. Those three. That's beautiful. They were thought of that way. That's very cool.
So, one of the things that kind of goes with Keller Williams culture is this whole "Follow the Model." Yeah. In your experience, what does it mean to follow the model? And would you kind of comment on some of those people that would say the model doesn't work for today?
Well, it depends on which model. But what I've found is, and, and Gary uses the phrase, "Success leaves clues." And that when you, and, and we both quoted Anthony Robbins about that, that great successful people are model makers and model implementers. So, what, what you find is, when you, when you see something that works, then just do what that model says works, right? So, when we first, twelve years, I was the, the teacher of franchise systems orientation, and I would teach people the seven systems of Keller Williams. I said, "If you do these seven systems, you will build a great real estate office." And then in the same way, with the leads, listings, and leverage, and some of the other things that we put in both of the, the real estate sales books, though the four models and all of that, we said, "If you will follow these models, you will be successful." What, what happens for people is, one, they don't learn the model, so they wing it. And so, they, they kind of get part of the model. Like, one of the big ones, and MREA is the seventh level. So, people are in such a hurry to get to the seventh level, they don't understand what we said in the book so many times. You've got to master each level before you go to the next one. And they try and jump levels and do the, find shortcuts and all that, and they get in trouble, right? I mean, they lose momentum, they lose money, all of that. And then the other, the other for the, I think that for a Keller Williams office, one of the things that people really need to understand is that running a profitable, successful, productive real estate office is a very difficult thing to do. Real estate brokerage, meaning owning an office, is is one of the toughest businesses there is because the margin is so thin, and it's so perishable. People can leave you and in, and out, right? And there's so many moving parts going on all at once. So, Keller Williams has mastered the art of running really good, productive real estate offices. And again, we teach that. And what we find is that those who try and reinvent it, say, "Well, this'll work, but I got a better way to do it." They, they fall off the track, right? They, the ones who are disciplined to it, see the creativity comes in the implementation, not in changing the model. It's, "How am I going to make this work, right? How am I going to make my calls? How am I going to run my sales meetings? How am I going to, you know, do all of that?" So, the implementation is key. It takes creativity to this business, but not in inventing the models.
When I love in the, the session that we had before this, we talked about, you know, what would you add to MREA? And you had a brilliant addition that the chapters four through kind of nine, ten, and Shift, yeah, was the tactical piece.
Well, it was. And what we realized when we were writing, because we decided that when we wrote MREA, and it first came out, we said, "We knew we knew we had written a classic." We said, "Okay, well, all classics, you revise it. You know, you do a five-year second edition, and then five years later, you do another edition." And so, we, we, as dedicated authors and co-ventures, Jay and Gary and I got together and said, "Okay, what would we do differently in MREA?" And what we said is, "Nothing in MREA is wrong, and there isn't much to add to it, maybe expansion." Because we were kind of playing with the expansion ideas, maybe. But what we said, what we really left out of there are the details of real estate sales production. How do you, how do you do lead generation? We said in there, "It's leads," but we only said database and all that. But we didn't say, "What do you say to people?" You know, we didn't say, "How do you find the motivated?" We didn't say, "How do you get them to the table?" I mean, how do you convince them to have a meet with you? We didn't really talk about how do you get them to price it right and stage it right. And we didn't talk about how you build urgency with buyers, right? And so, and so, and then we didn't, we didn't really focus on how do you keep transactions together, what we call bulletproofing the transaction. So, what we started to build was this more sales-oriented book about, about the real estate sales business. Well, then, then we got into the market shift. And so, we then say, "Well, okay, these fundamentals work in all markets of all kinds. So, let's, let's take this out as the way to deal with a shift. Go back to the basics, right?" But we never meant that these basics only work in a shift, you know. And so, people, because of the title, have kind of confused it. So, I would just say the key is that you, that's why you want MREA and Shift next to each other on your desk with the spiral binding, the coil binding, so it lays flat, and you can review any part of it you want. And that becomes kind of a dashboard of your business. And it's a novel. Then you add "My First Home" next to it. Well, that's if you're, for them, for the, really focus on buyers. You know, one of the things that, it's funny how we wrote books for different purposes. We wrote "The Millionaire Real Estate Investor" as a book for agents to become investors to build wealth through real estate investing, right, in the game. And number two, is to become an investor's agent, right? You know, and, and well, with the buyer, we wrote the book to hand out to buyers so they could understand the reality of how to buy a home and why having the right agent matters. But we also wrote in a lot of other things, like why sign a buyer rep agreement, and why stop renting and start owning, and all these kind of things that buyers need to do. And in there, we really gave the scripts and dialogues for an agent to use to describe to buyers why it's valuable to work with them. Yeah.
Yes, phenomenal. So, fast-forward to today, what are some of the biggest challenges you see facing the real estate business professional today?
I, I think it's the confusion of social media. That's one. Okay? Because, because somehow social media has tried to say that you've got to have this presence, you got to be, and podcast, you got to be doing video blogs, you got to be doing this, you got to have a lot of likes, and you got to be on all the media platforms. And what I find is that people who are successful at that are spending immense amount of time doing it, right? And sometimes, like a couple people I know, they're the lead generator, but they don't have time to go convert it and actually do business. So, the thing that's important for agents to understand is, it's still a relationship game, and it's still local. And the more they get to know individuals, go out, get in the way of buyers and sellers, open houses, knock on doors around open houses, get to know a neighborhood, get build a database. We always said it's the, it's the core of MREA. Build a database. A database that has a lot of information that you know about them. In other words, a lot of people are thin. They have an address, or maybe an email, or maybe, maybe a, you know, a cell phone number. But they don't have any information on the person. And yet, agents are so good at going in and in a 15, 20-minute interview with somebody, learning everything about them, right? But they don't capture it. So, the thing is, I love Gary Gentry's method for that. He leaves every appointment, he leaves, he gets his cell phone, goes in, hits record, and he records a 10, 5, 10-minute of everything he learned from that person, where they went to school, where they work, where they were born. And then he sends that to his admin and says, "Put that in the file." And so, which, one, he keeps the audio files, so if he ever wanted to go re-listen to it. Second, is she puts in his all the fields that he covers, you know, employment, all that, and any notes go in notes. And then when he goes back to visit them, all he has to do is call that file up, and all those things he talked about, he remembers. I know. But see, this is the core. The core is building these relationships and a database. That's what Command is going to do. Command is going to give you the, I mean, incredible tools for using your database. But the database still has to have information in it. So, I would say that would be the big thing. You know, that's the amazing thing at Family Reunion, they, they launch Command, people start uploading, and they come back and say, "Well, only 20% of all contacts have addresses." That's what we sell. You know, come on, get the address. Absolutely.
So, so with that, we've covered a lot of other questions that I like to hit. I really got to let you wrap you up. Sure. In your opinion, what are the top reasons someone should partner with KW today?
Well, I think it depends on what the role is, right? So, you know, as a leader, you want to be here because this is the happening place. There's more support for leaders, for owners, for Team Leaders, for MCAs. You will get more encouragement and be surrounded by more powerful players here and really learn how to be a leader in the real estate business. So, that would be it from the, from the ownership leadership point of view. From an agent's point of view, is you, you want to be where the wisdom is. So, there is no company that is smarter about real estate than Keller Williams. And there's no company more dedicated to the role of the real estate agent as a fiduciary in the transaction than Keller Williams. So, all the stuff we're doing, ever done, whether we wrote the books, or we did the training, or we do Ignite, or we do Bold, or we do all the, the MAPS coaching, everything we do is to help an agent get really good at this business. They will never find a person, will never find an equivalent number of resources in all areas of the support they need to be successful in any, and any other company. Won't even be close to what they can get in Keller Williams.
That's awesome. And the last question I got for you, Dave. In the real estate space, how do you want to be remembered?
I want to be remembered as a, as a caring, wise teacher. You know, somebody who knew the game and was credible. Someone who cared about the people he ever touched, and who was really good at making something understandable.
I think he succeeded in that. Dave, thank you so much for sitting down with me. We're going to be linking in the video to your website, DaveJenks.com. Okay. Also, tell, what's the link for your warrior?
It's FreeEnterpriseWarriors.com. FTW. Free Enterprise Warriors. We did that because we believe deeply in the free enterprise system, and I believe to be successful at it, you have to have a warrior mentality, which is, you have to train, get good, and be willing to be competitive. And so, Free Enterprise Warrior.
I love it. And also, the, the one book that I really like right now is "Five Plus One." Yes. It's phenomenal work there. Yeah. You also have another book.
It's also a great. "Five Plus One" is a great. There's another one of my co-ventures. So, in order to make Chaz Wilson famous and for his company, Master Networks, to be attractive to people, I helped him write that book, right? Because it's what I did with Gary, right? I'm a collaborator, and I don't want, I don't have the need to be the man, right? But they do. I mean, because Gary's got to be the icon of the, of the real estate industry, and Chaz has to be the icon for entrepreneurs. But I got to write. Which, but like you say, if I'm an agent and I'm thinking I have a client who's a business person, an entrepreneur, a local business owner, there's no better gift I can give him than "Five Plus One." I would just say, "Hey, I was thinking of you. This book talks about how to fundamentally be a really successful entrepreneur. I think you'll get a lot out of it." You know?
Yeah, it's a gift tool. Yeah. Well, Dave, thank you so much, sir, for your time. And we look forward to that one. You.