Michael Conniff (00:00)
Hello again, everybody, and welcome back to the accelerator with Michael Coniff. That's me. We're a podcast that goes out to people interested in startups and even roll ups and everything to do with being an entrepreneur. We're a companion podcast to the angel, which is more on the money side of things. Today we are joined by an extremely distinguished businessman, entrepreneur, somebody who really has done a lot to help people. Dave Linegar is.

former top executive, one of the top executives at least at Realmax. Did I say that right? No, I got that wrong. Remax, excuse me, Remax. And Dave has written a book called The Perfect Ten. Is it okay if I call it a self -help book for entrepreneurs, Dave? Okay, so tell us first of all, tell us about

Dave Liniger (00:53)
Yes, that would be appropriate.

Michael Conniff (01:00)
Sort of in a nutshell, your career with Remax, which grew into one of the great real estate empires in the world, how did that come about? And what was your role in that growth?

Dave Liniger (01:15)
Well, I was in the United States Air Force for several years. During part of my enlistment when I was stateside, I started buying and fixing up houses and eventually led me to get a real estate license, not to ever sell real estate, but to save the commission on my deals. As I got out of the service, I realized I was going full time into real estate investing. I might as well get a broker's license.

Michael Conniff (01:20)
HMMM!

Dave Liniger (01:45)
and start my own company. I moved from Scottsdale to Denver in 1971. Did a residency for six months to get my broker's license. And then I founded Bremax in January of 73. Since that period of time, it was a very hard start. Controversial, industry did not like my ideas, but we have now grown to...

Michael Conniff (01:47)
you

you

Dave Liniger (02:14)
being a very recognized kind of icon of the industry. We have offices in, let's see, 9 ,000 offices, 110 countries, and 150 ,000 agents.

Michael Conniff (02:24)
Oh my, wow. And what was, you said it was a hard start. What made it hard and what was the new wrinkle that Remax was bringing to the business? Excuse me.

Dave Liniger (02:37)
At the time that I started real estate agents shared their commission with the owner of the office. And if it was a listing, the owner kept half the agent, he half. If it was the buyer, the company kept half the agent kept half. So it was a 50 50 split around that. Uh, what we looked at was why not take experience realtors, no beginners or part -timers and operate like a co -op, a group of doctors, lawyers, architects.

Michael Conniff (02:48)
Thank you.

you

Dave Liniger (03:07)
dentist, share office space, share the overhead costs, pay our own personal expenses, and keep 100 % of our fees for ourselves. Quite controversial because if it worked, the agents were keeping 85 .15 instead of 50 .50. So the powers to be, the big successful companies, they all fought the concept, said it wouldn't work, it would never happen. They did everything they could to drive us

business. They didn't have to work too hard. I was making enough mistakes. I probably could have done it by myself, but as it is, you learn to be a street fighter. I didn't have a college education. And so I supplemented my weaknesses. First hire I made was to hire an administrative vice president. I would be the recruiter, the sales manager, the trainer, and the administrative vice president.

Michael Conniff (03:51)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Liniger (04:06)
would run the company, find the office space, hiring secretaries, bookkeepers, set up legal contracts, furnish and organize the businesses, that type of thing. And the 28th person I interviewed was a superstar. She had just moved to Denver. She was a trailing spouse. Her husband was going to be a MayDNF manager of a

of a chain of stores. And so she was looking for a new challenge. Uh, she was confident. She was, uh, very smart. Uh, she had an excellent, uh, resume, uh, lots of experience in management and marketing. And it was just a home run. So I lied to her and told her that I was going to build the largest real estate company in history of the world. If she'd helped me do it, she could run it. And that's.

Michael Conniff (04:45)
you

And what was her name?

Dave Liniger (05:05)
Her name was Gail Main and that started us off on an interesting journey. We were partners basically for the first 10 years. And after that we became married. And so my best friend has been my partner for 50 years and my wife for 40 years. It worked out extremely well.

Michael Conniff (05:17)
Okay.

That's great. And the important thing is you're still married. That's great. And I want to point out that you're coming to us from your rather expansive ranch in Colorado. So all that hard work paid off, to say the least. I'm curious about the shifting of the business model. How did you, if you're giving all of that or most of that income to the realtor, how are you?

How does Remax make money? How did you make money?

Dave Liniger (05:56)
Originally we had a management fee that was paid to the company every month for overseeing and doing the business. Eventually we kind of switched to a 95 -5 model, 95 % to the agent, 4 % to the broker that owned the office, and 1 % to headquarters, plus our regular fees. So it became financially lucrative for all three parties to the arrangement, and it has worked out extremely well for everybody.

Michael Conniff (05:57)
you

you

So what made you realize that you had to change the business model to do remax?

Dave Liniger (06:36)
Well, the business model as it was, was a high turnover business. There are no barriers to entry for an agent to get a license. In some places, it's merely a check and maybe a test in a 30 hour course. So agents come in, they think it's going to be a nice, easy job. Drive around a nice car, entertain people, buy lunches and dinners and make big commissions. The problem you get into is there are no salaries or...

uh, advances in the real estate business. So in essence, you're in business for yourself, but by yourself. And, uh, you have to find out how to make a commission. And often you don't make one in the first six months. And that's pretty damning. It's, uh, consumer federation, uh, just put out a pretty big study a couple of weeks ago, 50 % of the realtors in the United States have not closed the transaction.

Michael Conniff (07:11)
you

Dave Liniger (07:35)
in over 12 months.

Michael Conniff (07:36)
Wow. That's not surprising really because also because there's so many, the market goes up and down. It's variable by region, city, town, all sorts of things. Well, let me ask you about the Perfect 10. So I know you've got other business interests. There's lots of things you could do. Why stop and why write this book?

Dave Liniger (08:00)
Well, a lot of people helped me along the way. I didn't have a formal education. I blew my opportunity for that. I realized I wasn't mature enough to go to college. The military gave me six or seven years to grow up and become a real human being instead of a teenage boy. So I learned a lot from it. A lot of people helped me on the way.

Michael Conniff (08:03)
Ahem!

you

Dave Liniger (08:27)
When I first started the company, it was dreadful. I made all the mistakes you could, but I didn't want to fail. So I sat down, swallowed my pride and I talked to my managers. I had eight of them. They were all 20 years older than me. And I said, look, what'd you like best about the company you left? What did you dislike the most? What do you like most about Remax? What do you dislike the most? What do you like most about me? What...

Michael Conniff (08:53)
you

Dave Liniger (08:57)
Do you dislike the most? Can you teach me with your maturity and your success and my idealistic idea of I can build this empire? Can you train me to be the leader you want me to be? And they did. They flat out did. They said some things, they hurt, but I realized, yeah, I'm making those mistakes. Okay, I'm gonna fix it up. So every meeting, I wrote them down. I listened to it with a...

open mind instead of being angry and said, okay, if everybody else sees the problem and I don't, you must be right and I'm wrong. So let's fix it. I've kept an open.

Michael Conniff (09:37)
So, and you started in 73, how old were you when you started the company? 27, okay, so you're a young guy, you're in your 20s, but it strikes me that you had turned listening into an art. So, and I think that, you know, asking people, how can I do better? What am I doing well? What am I doing wrong? It's like, so isn't that so obvious, but people...

Dave Liniger (09:43)
27.

Michael Conniff (10:07)
I don't think it's part of basic management training, is it?

Dave Liniger (10:07)
But it should be. You know, in the military for generations, it was the command down concept. The general said jump and the private had to say hi on the way up. When they started creating the special forces, whether it's SEAL teams, Delta, Rangers, whatever it might be,

Michael Conniff (10:30)
you

Dave Liniger (10:35)
Uh, it's a different attitude. Uh, usually it's a smaller team, eight to 10 people usually have an officer involved. Almost everybody else has got more time. So they're mostly NCOs. Uh, there's nothing sacred about the officer. Uh, if you're in the field. Sure.

Michael Conniff (10:35)
Mm -hmm.

So.

This is an elite team, right? An elite team in the military like Delta Force, for example. So this is not the whole military, but in an elite team you're saying, you know, hierarchy kind of doesn't disappear, but it has a different meaning.

Dave Liniger (11:06)
Yeah. And the SEAL team leads from the front. Uh, the generals and most of the military lead from the rear. They're too valuable to get injured or hurt. And so you're right with your leader. And so when you design a, a concept for a, uh, job that you're going to accomplish, all eight or 10 people are equal. Uh, there's no, yes, sir. No, sir. There's no saluting by the way, in the field.

Michael Conniff (11:13)
you

Dave Liniger (11:36)
There's never saluting because the officer is the first one the sniper takes out.

Michael Conniff (11:42)
And were you yourself in Delta Force? Okay. So this is kind of, again, by observation and listening and keeping your ears open.

Dave Liniger (11:46)
No, I was not.

Learning. And so everybody puts the plan together together. They rehearsed together. They actually do the, uh, the, uh, mission together. And when they're done, they download and reassess what we're right, what we're wrong. And so it might be a lowly private that looks at the lieutenant and says, lieutenant, we cleared the room. You were supposed to go left.

Michael Conniff (11:57)
you

you

Dave Liniger (12:21)
What you did was you went to the right, right underneath my gun sights. And if I'd been less sharp, I'm not a shot you. And that the lieutenant says, I knew when I went right, I should have gone left. It was my bad, my mistake. Thanks for calling me out on it. I'll work on it. And so.

Michael Conniff (12:29)
Uh -huh.

Now how is this represented, this kind of concept, these concepts represented in your book, The Perfect Ten?

Dave Liniger (12:48)
We talk about a servant leader. We talk about a democratic leader where you take the ideas from everyone. And by the way, Remax is an extraordinarily successful company. Every single great idea in our company has come from the field. The foot soldiers in the trenches that are out there talking to people day in and day out. Now they bring us some wacky ideas and so you don't have to take every idea that comes.

Michael Conniff (12:49)
you

Dave Liniger (13:18)
but just be open -minded enough to say, when you have 140 ,000 people, there's a lot of mind power out there and you can make changes. You can't just keep doing yesterday's business with yesterday's methods today and expect to be in business tomorrow.

Michael Conniff (13:23)
you

You know, it's interesting. I've seen something similar to this. I actually just had a Zoom before this podcast with a couple of entrepreneurs who had a modest exit and are now cooking up their next thing. And part of it is like, I'm thinking to myself, well, why are they talking to me? They know I'm not going to give them money. I don't know enough about...

Dave Liniger (13:57)
you

Michael Conniff (14:04)
what their space, but basically they were doing a pretty good job of listening and indirectly tapping into my network, of course. But I think that, and I had another situation where two entrepreneurs who had worked together, one was a CTO, one was a CEO, have a new technology.

And basically they're telling people about it, select people, and they're listening, right? They're listening to what the feedback is. So it sounds to me that the one thing that really enabled you to be tremendously successful was your willingness to listen and not just, let me put it this way, not just to listen, but to hear.

Dave Liniger (14:49)
You know, I mentor a lot of people and they all nod their heads and say yes while I'm speaking and answering the questions, but you know that only three or four out of 100 are gonna do something with it because...

Michael Conniff (14:54)
Ahem.

you

Why is that? Why don't more... What holds people back?

Dave Liniger (15:11)
People don't like to change. They can agree with you that they need to change, but they'll listen. They'll say that's entertaining. Hey, that's a good idea, but they won't implement it. My most successful mentees have been the ones that were really thirsty for the knowledge, took notes, would call me back up four or five days later and say, can I have five minutes of your time? I did this and this and this like you recommended, and this is where I'm at.

Michael Conniff (15:27)
you

you

I think that's, excuse me for, yeah, excuse me for interrupting, but you know, I always take notes except during podcasts because I'm trying to concentrate on the guests, but, but it's such a simple thing and it enables you. And by the way, these new note takers, these new AI note takers, I honestly, Dave, I've been, I've been

Dave Liniger (15:44)
They're executing.

Michael Conniff (16:07)
of amazed at how much I miss even though I take notes and even though I was a trained reporter, journalist, right? I supposed to know how to do this. How much that I missed and then how much there is really to follow up upon as you go forward. So what are, I also want to get at what are some of the most important precepts that represent the Perfect 10. Tell me why the Perfect 10, why that name, why that title?

Dave Liniger (16:23)
The Perfect 10 is the concept that in platform diving, in gymnastics, in horse ice skating,

Michael Conniff (16:42)
Ice skating.

Dave Liniger (16:50)
They have judges and you do your performance at the end of the performance. You're looking desperately to the judges. We're going to write on their cards, seven, six, five, hoping, hoping not only will I get a 10, but will I get a 10 on all seven judges cards? And yeah, especially if you're American. So anyway, uh, that started the Genesis, but.

Michael Conniff (17:00)
Thank you.

Except for the Russian judge, of course, who's always going to be lower. But yeah, continue. Yeah.

Dave Liniger (17:18)
Have you heard of net promoter score as a business way of judging customer satisfaction? So NPS is a very simple set of one or two questions that you can ask a customer. For instance, you can ask them to rank how likely it is would you recommend our business to a relative or a friend? And then they rank them one being worst and 10.

Michael Conniff (17:22)
I have not. What is that?

Yeah, I think we've all filled out a lot of those online, right, where you asked for feedback. Yeah.

Dave Liniger (17:48)
best.

So what you do is you take all the nines and tens and those are promoters and you take the six, sevens and eights and ignore them. They don't care. And you take the one through fives and they're detractors. You get your total score and you take your promoters, less your detractors and that's your score. So in 2017, one of the stats we looked at was United Airlines got a two.

Michael Conniff (18:09)
you

Dave Liniger (18:24)
and Southwest Airlines got a, yeah, and Southwest got a 66. Now they have the same planes, same Bowings, same destinations, same discount prices, and yet totally different satisfactions. One, well maybe United's flight attendants have all been around with seniority. They knew what it was fun to fly 30 years ago.

Michael Conniff (18:27)
Which is...which is terrible. Wow.

you

you

Dave Liniger (18:54)
And first class was first class and now everything's a cattle car. They're overburdened. There's burnout and they're tired and they're just waiting to get that retirement check. Southwest was a much younger company, younger employees, happy -go -lucky kids that were, you know, just flying for the first five or 10 years. They were excited about their job. They laughed and joked with the audience. The pilot makes a bad landing. They want him to grab the mic and say, well, welcome here.

Michael Conniff (19:23)
Yeah, they use it's a very intentional use of humor and comedy to kind of create community and to be personable and it really makes them human beings, doesn't it?

Dave Liniger (19:23)
Kangaroo made it again and everybody laughed.

Yeah, so to get to the point, rematch to the net promoter score. We knew every agent, every office in the United States and Canada. We sent out a letter from me on an email that said, nobody will see these and your name except for one person. Me, I'm the founder of the company and I will not divulge who tells me anything, but we will develop a scorecard for each company, each office.

Michael Conniff (19:40)
Yeah.

Dave Liniger (20:07)
Et cetera. Open rate was fabulous. I'm very popular in the company. I've been speaking to them for 55 years. I'm one of them. We got an overall score of 72. So that's the same as Google, Amazon, Apple, et cetera. That's just about the highest you can get up to. So.

Michael Conniff (20:23)
Well.

Dave Liniger (20:35)
We looked at the individual offices. We had 200 offices that had the responses that were perfect 10. 200 out of 4000. And that's offices like Anchorage. We have a woman up there that's just a fabulous manager and then the second question you can ask. Why? And about half the time they'll tell you why, and so if you give it a 10 why I've got the best manager in the world.

Michael Conniff (20:54)
Mmm.

Dave Liniger (21:05)
She cares about me and my family. Every time I have a problem, I can go to her and she's got a smile on her face and said, we can work this out. So you go through those answers. We had 200 that got an actual minus 100, the worst you could get. And that's 200 out of 4 ,000 offices. And we looked at their comments and it was my broker's a jerk. He doesn't do a thing for me. I had a problem with an appraisal and he says, I don't have time to help you.

Michael Conniff (21:12)
you

Dave Liniger (21:35)
Do it yourself. And so it really comes down to outstanding leadership at the top, caring for the people that are there. Now, if you looked at the

Michael Conniff (21:43)
Were you able to fix the problems at the bottom?

Dave Liniger (21:47)
Yeah, we gave him a report card and we told him these are your deficiencies and if you can't get up into the mainstream, we're not going to renew your franchise.

Michael Conniff (21:58)
Okay, so there was a little carrot and stick. There was some stick in there.

Dave Liniger (22:02)
Oh, a lot of stick and carrot. And so if they, I can't want to make somebody more successful than what they would have make themselves. And so if we can do the study and we can say, our analysis says, this is what's going wrong. This is what you need to do to fix it. If they don't fix it, then it's too bad. I can't fix it for them.

Michael Conniff (22:04)
Yeah, yeah.

you

What do you think is the one or two lessons that you would like to people who read your book to take away from? And I know that you're a believer in Napoleon Hill, think and grow rich, which I still think is the not just me, but is regarded as the classic of the self -help field. And sometimes I feel like everybody is just riffing on Napoleon Hill.

from the 1920s literally on Andrew Carnegie sent him out to interview the most successful people in America and he came back with You know, you need purpose. You need a plan. You need goals. You need deadlines So what do you see in addition to those sort of obvious things and well -known things? What what what is kind of the the secret sauce and what you're telling people? in this book

Dave Liniger (23:15)
Well, in this book, we got 10 sections with 10 great ideas on each one. One section's on leadership, one's on scalability and making your company bigger, one's on team building, one's on personal development. And so I've tried to take the lessons that I've learned, not only from my experiences, but we had researchers that helped us and we looked at how about 75 % of the book is based on...

Amazon, Google, Apple, the other thought leaders of the last two or three generations to say, this is how these people took a simple concept and made it incredibly successful for everybody. So for instance, I've got a chapter on Sir Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton was an Arctic explorer. He tried to class.

Michael Conniff (24:10)
Yep.

Dave Liniger (24:13)
the South Pole. And in the process, they got iced in, ice flow collapsed around them. They were going to live on the ship until the ice melted, but the ice started crushing it. And they realized the ship was going to sink. So he took them out on the lifeboats, put the lifeboats on the ice flow, took all the food and everything they could carry with them and got away from the ship and it sank.

They were marooned on the ice for 22 months. There was no radios, no telegraphs, no newspapers, and it was in dark half the year. And he saved every one of his men. He finally sailed off in one of the lifeboats with a sail and two or three other explorers. And they went 700 miles in rough seas to a whaling station and got a boat back and saved him.

All the men wrote in their journals that Shackleton was the finest leader they had ever followed in their life. And in his journal, he talked about, he wanted to kill half of them and he was fed up with them. But, but the thing's amazing was he was such a kind leader. He cared about them individually. He met with every one of them every day for the 22 months. He didn't let them have clicks.

Michael Conniff (25:24)
Hahaha

Dave Liniger (25:40)
They had to change the tents, two and three people to a tent. And after a week they had to be with somebody else in another tent. It was a group effort to survive. They survived happy. They didn't lose weight. They managed to live off of seals and fish sometimes. But he was a brilliant leader. And the thing's interesting, the thing's most interesting to me, he had, I think, six or seven sisters.

and he grew up with no boyfriends. And so he grew up around girls. And as you know today, people acknowledge that women often are better leaders and better managers than men. They have a more of a consensus building feel. They don't like altercation. Most of them do not just try to be command and control. They try to do things.

more democratically, what's your idea, what's your idea? A lot of those things are incredibly important in today's management and leadership style. The command and control is gone forever.

Michael Conniff (26:50)
Yeah, it's a different, it's a different world, but it's interesting from the Arctic Tundra to, to remix finding the threads there. So let, let's, you know, every day, it seems like I talked to entrepreneurs who are struggling. It's a struggle, right? You said how hard it was when you began. And I'm as a mentor with mentees, you're probably hearing.

People are telling you things aren't working out, that they're having problems and whatnot. What's the most important thing to say to an entrepreneur at what I would call the moment of truth? When it's kind of, it wouldn't necessarily be easy to give it up, but they're certainly thinking about it, right? Because they're like, it's so much trouble. So what is the thing they need to think about right at that moment?

Dave Liniger (27:51)
It's very simple. Why are you doing this? Why are you abusing yourself? Why are you getting killed? Why are you taking all the lumps? What is it that makes you go? And what that comes down to is what were you doing it for? Why were you doing it? What was your mission? My mission in Remax had nothing in it written about mission goals, vision, anything. It was I want to make life better for top producers.

Michael Conniff (27:54)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Liniger (28:21)
because there's so many beginners and part timers and losers in my business. And the overhead is wasted on trying to make one out of 10 successful and watching nine out of 10 fail. And so my idea was why not do this co -op only with good successful people you were proud to be working with and us keep the majority of the money and have the lifestyle we wanted. And so when your passion is that, uh,

There's a reason for what I'm doing this and it's not chasing the almighty buck. You can't quit. That's, that's your life. That's, that's the dream you add. My dream wasn't to make millions. I did. I certainly did, but you can get everything in the world you want. As long as you help enough other people get what they want. And so, uh, I think that's, that just comes to the stick to the, the grit, the ambition that I will not fail. I will not quit.

Michael Conniff (29:19)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's that's really well said I want to remind everybody this is the accelerator with Michael Kahn if we're the companion podcast to the angel Make sure to sign up for a sub stack Email newsletter which delivers all podcasts right to your email box We're also up on Spotify and YouTube with audio and video and then on all the major podcast platforms audible Amazon Apple and others that don't

just begin with the letter A. Our guest today is, it's really been a privilege, the founder of Remax, Dave Lineger. He has written a new book. It's out, right Dave? The Perfect Ten. Is it out and can you buy it now?

Dave Liniger (30:04)
Yes. The official publication date is March the 24th or 26th.

Michael Conniff (30:14)
Coming up, coming up soon in a couple weeks. But I want to say like I've read, I've read big portions of this book. I read a lot. I've read a lot of self -help books and I think this is really one of the best ones I've read in part because you, you kind of incorporate a lot of other ideas and other books just as you're, you're just as you were a great listener as a CEO. So we want to thank you for so much for being with us and wish you best of luck.

Dave Liniger (30:43)
Thank you, Michael. That was fun.

Michael Conniff (30:44)
with the book and the snows of Colorado. And thank you all out there. As we like to say, we'll be back with another podcast before you know it.