I haven't made a cold call in 35 years… here's how

Okay. It's Dean Jackson. And I can't tell you how exciting it's been to kind of look through these old journals and this one in particular to get ready to kind of unpack this. I don't know how long this is going to take, but it's been amazing to see the reaction to the idea and just seeing people coming out of the woodwork, people that I've known almost those whole 30 years.

I've seen in the comments and in uh the liking the uh the video. So, it's been great to do that. Um as I was looking through this, I think that the best way to kind of approach this is to look at you know, what was going on at that time. What cuz there's going to be people that make their first appearance in these journals that are you know, big players in my life.

I was sharing with uh Dan Sullivan. I do a podcast with Dan uh every week called Welcome to Cloudlandia. And I was sharing with him you'll hear in a few minutes here that he made his uh first appearance here in journal number one. And uh I'll I'll I'll tell the story about how that happened to be, but I told him he would be on my Mount Rushmore of of people in my life from that were the most influential.

And it's kind of cool to see it you know, 30 years I've been uh you know, learning from from Dan Sullivan. But, I would be remiss if I didn't say right now that the reason that I journal like this is because Joe Stump introduced the idea of keeping a permanent record. I would journal. I would write things in notebooks and I would do scheming, but Joe Stump was the person who really influenced me to take the journaling to a new level and he's on my Mount Rushmore.

That this whole thing wouldn't happen if I had not met Joe Stump and this journal here marks the beginning of my journey with with Joe and uh 14 years after this very first event, the opening page starts in Virginia Beach in April 14th of 19 96 and that was the first time that at that event was the first day that I met Eben Pagan in person. We had been talking on the phone. We had been you know just fascinated with marketing together. I met him through Joe Stump and this was the first time that we met.

We were both uh going to the main event which was the big real estate seminars that we did for years and years with Joe. We traveled all over the country. So, this was my first time speaking at a main event and so it was really something to meet Eben because that for the the first 18 months almost 2 years of journaling here. Eben Pagan and I spent probably 25% of our live our lives within 8 ft of each other for that entire time.

Uh, we would travel to every main event together. We would share a room and extend our stay so that we could, uh, you know, see the city and and hang out and do some evil scheming. Even though we that's not what we were calling it then. We were just brainstorming and and talking about things, but to see some of the concepts that we would develop in here was, uh, was pretty amazing.

And this is, you know, I think about it before Eben had created the whole, uh, David DeAngelo uh, adventure where he built one of the largest, if not the largest, dating advice websites that you'll hear about in future, uh, future journals here. But I look back and I think so fondly about these this, uh, time that we spent together. And the reason that I was at the the main events, the reason I even got to come and speak at the main events is because of the work that I was doing in my own real estate business in Toronto. I mentioned in 1988 that I made the decision to change, get off the tennis path, and get on to the business path.

And I chose real estate because that's what Lars had done. And Lars, he lived at the beach. He had a house on the Intracoastal. He drove a Porsche 911.

He was like everything that you would want to be. Had lots of time to to play tennis. And so, I thought, that's a good entrepreneurial thing, and you don't need a degree to get a to start in real estate. You're basically starting your own business.

So, I loved everything about it. And for the first couple of years, all I would do, I would do cold calls. I was making telephone calls to people, you know, back in the day when there was no caller ID. The dial the phone actually had one of those rotary things in the very beginning.

We were just getting to where there were push-button phones, but there's no caller ID. And people would actually answer the phone. So, I got to make these cold calls, and I would find people who wanted to sell their house. But, I realized very quickly that that was a hamster wheel.

And I learned that if I can really just focus on lead getting, that I would be able to step away from making those cold calls, and let the lead getting do the work for me. That was a concept that I learned from Michael Gerber in a book called The E-Myth, which was the very first sort of awakening book for me. I'm going to talk a lot about over the time here the books that have had the biggest impact on me. And The E-Myth was certainly one of those, because I learned the concept of working on your business instead of in your business.

And work making cold calls is like being on the hamster wheel. And I was actually, if I took me out of the business, there was no business. So, when I learned direct response and I could replace myself with a lead getting system, that was now something that was duplicatable. So, I learned I created a system where I created a guide to Halton Hills real estate prices.

Now, when I where I lived in uh the greater Toronto area, the GTA as it was called, was a the last kind of you know, GTA ring stop on the GO train that would go into the city. So, much like people work in New York City and live in Connecticut, that's what Halton Hills was like. People would work in the city and they would live in Halton Hills. But, there's no internet.

There's no way for people to get information about Halton Hills without getting in the car and coming to Halton Hills to check it out. And there's no online There's no Zillow. There's no online MLS where you can go and look up all the homes. You had to drive in, you had to stop in a real estate office, and you had to ask for information about homes that were for sale.

All the information came in these MLS catalogs. And I realized that there was a lot of similar homes that were all built around the same time. In this period, there was some new development happening in Halton Hills, and I went into the new home uh construction uh sites where they would have model homes and they'd have sales centers, and you would go in and they would have these big topographical maps of the whole uh area with all the streets and the lots that were available. And then on the walls around, they had pictures of all the elevation types and floor plans.

So, you could pick your floor plan, then you could go pick your lot and put that house on that lot. And I used to love going into those places, but there was a lady in my office. I was again at at Royal LePage. She was retiring and she'd been in real estate for 30-something years, since the '50s.

This was 1988, and she gave me a box with all of the sales packets for every uh every new home uh project that was built in the 30 years that she had been in real estate. And I had this immediate epiphany that wow, yeah, all of these homes, they were all floor plans at one point. And so, I had this idea of what if we could put together a what if we could put together a guide that gave people an idea of what you get for your money in Georgetown. I took 60 pictures of the different types of homes that were available, and I put it all together in a guide with a pricing key that would show people how much certain homes uh cost.

So, we'd start with condos and townhomes and semi-detached and detached bungalows all the way up to the luxury homes and a map that showed where these neighborhoods were. And I wrote an ad that offered people the guide to Halton Hills real estate prices. And I would talk about it like having the teachers edition of your high school algebra book. So, you could learn about Halton Hills without having to come out to Halton Hills.

And I put it in a real estate magazine that was just getting started that had covered the entire West End of Toronto. And I put this in no internet, so we had to call. I had a special separate phone line with a voicemail that people could call and listen to a recorded message, leave their name and their information. And I would send them the guide or they could fill in the little coupon code at the bottom of the page of the ad.

And that produced so many leads for my business that every day people were calling and asking for the guide and I would send them a physical copy of the guide and then every 2 weeks when the MLS catalog came out I would photocopy all of the new listings, put it together in what I called a market watch newsletter, and physically mail this to everybody every 2 weeks. And all of the sudden it was like this velocity now of a real system that I was able to create that was working when I was not. That it was working while I'm doing whatever I'm doing, the ads are running. While I'm not making any cold calls, new leads are coming in.

I was able to then hire an assistant to help with putting together the MarketWatch. So, I had a real system that would generate leads, educate and motivate them, and then when they were ready to go and look at homes, they would call and we would go out and help them find a home. So, I, like Michael Gerber, Michael Gerber taught this concept of treating your business like a prototype that you're going to duplicate 5,000 times. And when I read that and heard that, I that really resonated with me and I got that on a deep level.

The idea of the duplicatable model, just like McDonald's is the same restaurant everywhere you go. And so, I was able to then take that system that I had created for Halton Hills, and we created a guide called 40 Great Places to Live Within Hour of the City. And it was called Toronto and Beyond. And we there were 40 communities like Halton Hills, and we licensed this whole system to 40 different real estate agents.

And I partnered with James Hodgins, was a good friend and a realtor who were the same age, getting started in real estate. And James was the one who went and met all of these realtors. He filled out the thing without James Hodgins, that would never have happened. So, shout out to James, still an active realtor in uh in Toronto.

And because of that I was sharing this with people in the By Referral Only um community. It wasn't even called By Referral Only at the time. Joe Stump was running his program. It was all seminar-based, and it was called Star Performance Seminars.

And he would do a main event uh you know, in a different city every month. And so, we had the idea that Eban and Joe and I would form a consulting division, and we would take this system, and we would spread it to top realtors all over North America. Joe had amazing reach, where every month he was going out and and had hundreds of people at every seminar. So, that's exactly what we did, and that's why Eban and I were going to the main event to share the idea of direct response marketing, and we would meet people that would potentially become consulting clients.

We were calling it our mastery program. And that's what how it shows up on page six in my journal here is a map of it. I'll put in a little uh page of this for you to take a look at. But, the whole that core system that still operates today uh in terms of getting people information offering them the uh updates on all the things that happened in the market, and giving them an opportunity when they're ready to go out and look at homes and find the perfect home for them.

So, this became the beginning this was the the platform of something that I created a little bit later called money-making websites. But, it's great to see where it all started right here. So, let's continue the conversation and I'll pick up from there as to how we were able to take that, turn that into a system that I've used to model in many other situations as well. So, there we are.

We're on page six of journal number one. But, the story is it's amazing to me to come back and relive all of this. So, I hope you enjoyed it. I'll keep going here.