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My first lesson in people leverage came when I cut my entrepreneurial teeth with a lawn mowing business in high school. I knocked on doors and secured three lawns for the summer. To mow and trim a lawn I charged $20 (or about $65 in today’s dollars.) Sixty dollars a week was big money for a high school freshman. I could ride my ten-speed to Gridley’s Bar-B-Q for a rack of ribs and still have plenty left for comics and other stuff.

My wife’s team recently celebrated 15 years in the business of helping families find and sell homes, investors build wealth, and homeowners navigate all the twists and turns of homeownership. We’ve served about 2,200 so far! A big part of our success has been building and maintaining relationships over the years. The only way to do that well is with the help of a database.

Tony DiCello is basically my coaching godfather (cue the mandolin music). All of my coaches from the past 15 years – Bruce Neely, Abe Shreve, Sajag Patel, and Jordan Freed – worked with and learned from Tony before coaching me. “One of the things I learned from Tony” is a phrase I’ve heard more than a few times. Gary Keller interviewed Tony at our 2023 CEO Summit. Reviewing my notes, I found Tony DiCello’s “Three Qualities of an Exceptional Coach” circled and underlined. I’ll share and unpack them today.

On Christmas Eve 1971, Juliane Diller boarded a flight with her mom. They were to fly from Lima, Peru, on the coast, over the Andes to Pucallpa in the Amazon jungle. The weather was bad. The plane shook and bags fell out of the overhead compartments. From her window seat in the back row, 17-year-old Juliane saw lightning strike the plane’s wing. The plane entered a nosedive and her mother cried, “Now it’s all over.” In moments the aircraft broke apart. Juliane, still belted to her row of three seats, was ejected 10,000 feet above the ground.

I heard a great story about choice on a recent episode of ​The Morgan Housel Podcast​. As a young child, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s days were highly structured and dictated by rules. He hated it. Little FDR shared, “Mom, from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed, there is a strict structure that I have to follow throughout the entire day.” His mother, Sarah Roosevelt, agreed to give him a day of absolute freedom. He could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Sarah would later write in her diary that FDR woke up that day and resumed his regular schedule. He did it on his terms and quite happily. What?