05 Mar March 5, 2019 – $13 Billion Yearly Sales Lennox Scott, Introvert’s Guide Jane Finkle and IBM Food
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Lennox Scott – Chairman and CEO of John L. Scott Real Estate – Read interview highlights here.
Excitement keeps me up at night. I am not worrying about a situation.
I am not thinking ‘I want.’
Lennox Scott is the third-generation Chairman and CEO of John L. Scott Real Estate. The company has grown to become one of the top 20 residential real estate brands in the nation. Annually, John L. Scott now closes more than 33,000 transactions totaling more than $13B in sales volume.
Jane Finkle – Career Coach and Author of The Introvert’s Complete Career Guide: From Landing a Job, to Surviving, Thriving, and Moving on Up
We all have to move beyond our comfort zone. When we challenge
ourselves, we build confidence.
Jane Finkle has 25 years of experience as a career coach for universities and has run her own career counseling firm since 2002. She also created and led the Wharton Career Discovery seminar, a program still offered today. Finkle has written a weekly column, “Career Blueprints,” for Abington Patch and has been published in the Huffington Post and Adirondack Life. She resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Chef Melissa King and IBM VP Jeffrey Welser
In 2024, the world’s population is expected to reach eight billion. Over the next five years, this global population growth will continue to impact and strain agriculture, food and water production, and other resources that are crucial for the planet’s sustainability. That’s why IBM’s 2019 “5 in 5,” focuses on how research, innovation, and technology development today can help transform the food supply chain of tomorrow. Chef Melissa King is one of the most exciting young talents in America’s culinary scene — with a unique, hyper-local cooking style that combines the Bay Area’s best ingredients with modern techniques and Asian flavors. She earned national recognition placing as a finalist on the Bravo television series Top Chef and has been recognized as “one of the best female chefs in San Francisco” and “40 under 40: Rising Star”. Dr. Jeff Welser, Vice President of IBM Research – Almaden in San Jose, California oversees scientists and engineers performing exploratory and applied research at the home of the relational database and world’s first hard disk drive.
Lennox Scott
Market Update
We are in a frenzy real estate market and that makes it a seller’s market. All the focus is on each individual new listing that comes on the market, because we’re sold out in the middle, in the more affordable and mid price ranges. It’s a little bit tougher on buyers right now. But again, with these low interest rates, it makes it good for buyers at the same time! We’ve had such low interest rates for a long time compared to the late 70s or times like that.
You should be optimistic. Over these past six years, we’ve had great affordability, great price appreciation driven mainly by job growth. And then interest rates kept going down. Now, they’ve bottomed out about a year ago. But they’re at a really fantastic rate on a historical basis at this time.
I’m hearing interest rates are going to stay lower longer than we expected. They were expecting interest rates to be up to 5% by the end of this year 2019. But now the new projections are in the upper 4% range. A much different scenario than they were expecting the last fall.
There’s been so much Wall Street and investment money going into apartments. Well, we need it because the returns have been so great and this happens every decade, but shortly we will see that money starting to come back and more towards condominiums. We will see apartments converted to condominiums which will provide more supply in the more affordable and attainable price ranges in each market areas. And that’s when we’ll start to see some balance of price appreciation slowing down a better opportunity for first time buyers and that second move up buyer to get their next property.
Our broker associates are independent contractors. They come to work each day for their own individual business within a team environment. And that’s what we bring in. We bring in that positive energy, that experiential training, the marketing programs, the technology tools to enhance and to help them.
Components of the Positive Mindset
We have a success plan that’s called the Components of the Positive Mindset.
My wife wrote a book called Speaking the Language of Miracles. In this book, the key concept is you can change your life in an instant by walking in the positive outcome, to walk in the solutions of what you want to accomplish.
This situation is not who you are. And so that’s our approach in the company. We help identify your situation and then we focus in on the positive outcome. We do transactional excellence within our business and we continually improve our skills, and of course in business, it’s all about relationships, personal engagement, activities with your current relationships and meeting new people. Without that personal engagement, either in person on phone, social media, card or note, without that no business takes place.
Yes, my wife wrote the book with her son. He was diagnosed with cancer, very serious illness, very serious situation. But she writes about how they approached his illness. And the approach was the illness is not who my son is. They focused on that he’s going to be cancer free and walk out of the hospital, because they always walked in the positive outcome.
By focusing in on the positive outcome, it helped them. It helped them interact with the doctors and nurses and about how to approach things.
Five Step Approach to Success
I came up with a five step approach to success.
Step one is understand the situation. ‘What is the situation?”
Step two is ‘What are the possibilities? What is the positive outcome that we want to achieve? You know all the different possibilities. So we can really focus in and get our energy up.
Step three is creating an affirmation or or what we call a declaration of positive outcome.
Step four is ‘what are the activities were solutions to backup my declaration.
Step five is sense and track how I’m doing. You have a have a game plan down and look at each month or look each week what am I doing to keep moving forward.
Jane Finkle
Introvert Career guide
There are a lot of misconceptions, especially about introversion. People think it’s about social skills, but it’s really about energy.
Extroverts are more energized when they have lots of opportunity to interact externally. Whether it’s activity or people it certainly doesn’t mean they don’t like to be alone. And they tend to think and talk at the same time. So if there’s a problem, they’re likely to start talking because that’s their process for trying to solve problems.
Introverts are more energized by internal thoughts. They reflect; they often think very carefully before they speak. So it isn’t as if they don’t like people. And many of them have excellent social skills because they are listening so carefully. So they’re keen listeners and observers, and they tend to be highly perceptive, because they’re quiet. They’re taking, they’re doing more of the observing where extroverts are doing more of initiating and taking action.
So, extroverts strength is that they initiate easily and they speak up. And the strength of introversion is that they listen really carefully. And sometimes it allows them to come up with, you know, a lot of insightful comments or thoughts.
Bill Gates talks about this because he’s a well known introvert. Introverts often have this intense concentration, and they can dig deep. And sometimes that’s really valuable when you’re trying to solve problems.
The truth is both extraversion and introversion have their strengths and areas that they need to watch out for. So it’s just a different style and a different energy.
Extroverts might find sitting behind a computer for seven hours pretty oppressive. What’s interesting is that Myers Briggs, when they developed the test, that that was their goal. They realized you can’t decide somebody’s career just based on their energy, their style. It’s about interest, it’s about skills, it’s about values, it’s lifestyle needs.
Entrepreneurship and Introverts
I think it’s all about balance. So if you’re highly extroverted, you want when you’re hiring other people, or when you’re taking advantage of experts. You go to the side that you know, maybe will balance the extraversion so maybe you as the extrovert you’re really good at business development and marketing and getting out there, but you need somebody to help to sort of think through the problems are and come up with some of the systems. You might balance that with somebody who’s a little bit more introverted or has the skills that you feel you lack. But you know, there are many famous introverts that have been successful in business from Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
The excitement for entrepreneurs is the idea and the vision and that doesn’t matter if you’re extroverted or introverted.
Wherever your energy is, or wherever your skills are, you just have to balance it out with somebody who may have different strengths.
Dealing with the Other Kind!
I have that dynamic in my marriage, my husband is more extroverted and loves to go to these big events and carry on and I complain, but I go, and I end up having a really good time. I think one of the things is we all have to move in your comfort zone. If you are in business areas, you have a partner that doesn’t like to do the networking. I think they need a gentle push. I mean, maybe they don’t need to go to every single event. And it’s also a way of when we challenge ourselves, we build confidence. So I don’t go by this idea that you’re an introvert and you don’t need to like events. Sometimes you just have to push yourself and if you know it’s a partnership, I guess they have to have a talk with each other.
The duo of an extrovert introvert going to an event like that could be quite powerful because the extrovert will easily ease into a conversation and be able to talk about the business and it’s likely that the introvert will listen and then come up with some good comments that might be very valuable to that conversation.
We all have experiences that enhance or impede our energy. One of the challenges that introverts have is that the American culture is very extroverted and the workplace is certainly extroverted. You’re rewarded for speaking up and taking action. It’s important to be able to market your accomplishments and how you add value. So that’s what the challenge is for an introvert.
People can, I’m not sure it’s so much, change, but they can shift.
Challenge Yourself
Well, you know, I think that it’s good, as I said before, whether you’re extroverted or introverted, challenge yourself. So if extroverts sometimes have trouble listening, they should challenge themselves sometimes to spend some time alone or not interrupting or not feeling like they have to speak up all the time.
There were parts of introversion that were really good, but I had to figure out how to speak up and market myself and I wished I know I have the tools that I’ve included in my book to help people and so that’s really the purpose of my book.