Good To Great
It is about time to pack it in for the week and I wanted to share a couple of important things with you. In getting to know each other Jim Warner of the ROCS Alliance suggested I read a couple of books by Jim Collins – Built To Last and Good To Great. This has been a good suggestion, which I pass along to you. BTW this wasn’t the first time someone suggested that to me, but was the time it created the action.
This has been good for Kathleen and me to read together.
From todays reading I felt I inspired to pass this along to you: Jim and I, and even some of you and I have discussed the fall out that is going on in Real Estate – agents being forced to leave the business.
Some will leave our business by necessity and by necessity some need to leave.
From Good To Great I leave you this thought and a strategy:
The Good-To-Great Companies focus on three core concepts: (Picture yourself as a mini company – and at the same time consider what I think we are focused on at CiUn Inc.)
1- What are you deeply passionate about?
2- What can you be the best in the world at?
3- What drives your economic engine?
Jim Collins calls The Three Circles of The Hedgehog Concept.
All three are required for a successful good to great company, or mini company. The economic engine is driving many out of our business, many that have passion and are great technicians in our industry – even love it.
Jim Warner points out that our business at CiUn is a way for agents suffering economically to still stay in the business. I will let him address his vision once you are introduced to ROCS officially.
But for CiUN Inc in the undressed network, how about us? That is what this message is about.
About # 1 Passion: Our kids, at least a few of them, are amazed at our perserverance (passion) – think we are nuts – or are on board with our passion for this network. We have a mortgage company and a real estate practice that are taking second place in our hearts to “blogs???”. I tell the service station attend we work 24/6. We love what we are doing here.
About # 2: Being The Best We are not the best, but we are good. Jim tells me Good is the Enemy of Great. Jim Collins proposes that Great Companies focus on what they can “potentially” do better than anyone else. I believe that is us, and part of that is because of you our network. Going it alone, in my opinion, is silly. Real Estate is made up of loan wolf experts – this network is counter to that. The surveys we are receiving back are going to be a benefit to all of us, with some critical and some positive feedback we need and you can benefit by. We believe the brand, the network, the technology, the support, and the focus we have can make this project great. As fast as we can, we will invest in even more for you and the network.
About # 3: A successful economic engine. We have covered our basic overhead because of our real estate practice and our mortgage business. We committed in the beginning to a term common to the internet – bootstrap. Having witnessed 2 million dollars, to a previous dotcom adventure, and seeing it not be enough and watching several others waste millions and millions more than that – we signed on to the bootstrap concept for CiUn Inc. Some really good companies started this way: Flickr, DIGG, and Google for example: Flickr sold to Yahoo for a few million and the other two eventually took on investors, but they bootstrapped until proven.
We are now positive cash flow only because we don’t take salaries. Our economic engine, to be beyond bootstrap needs us to reach 200 monthly clients. We are gearing up to get that, ROCS is gearing up to help us do that. Many of you are helping us do that. With the great ideas coming in from about 20 of us can you image the power of 200? But financially that puts CiUn in a place it can start adding things more aggressively that benefit us all.
In a nutshell: I believe we can become a great company. We appreciate your pioneering this with us. We will be ever looking to how we can make sure this is a great company and is a great tool for you.
Thanks for participating, for your input, and for all have done and will do to help us grow.
Larry Cragun
