Hector_LaMarque_-_Leadership_2_-_01_Time_Management

The CD is about the importance of accountability and time management. The speaker suggests using a PalmPilot as a planning device and planning every hour of the day and week. They emphasize the need to be diligent in managing time to avoid wasting it. Successful people are careful about how they use their time and constantly adjust their direction to stay on track. The speaker shares their own routine of planning appointments and training sessions throughout the week, while also prioritizing family time. They believe in building relationships with team members through social events to create a supportive environment. Setting appointments should be done throughout the week rather than just on Sundays. The following material is copyrighted. It is intended solely for training purposes within the Lamarck hierarchy. Any unauthorized duplication, reproduction, or distribution outside of the Lamarck hierarchy is prohibited and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent allowable by law. Hey, welcome. This next CD is about accountability and time management. Both accountability and time management are crucial to your success. What you have to do, you have to use a planning device religiously. A PalmPilot makes the most sense today because Primerica's applications are Palm-based. We've got the Turbo Apps, and everything in the future coming down is going to be Palm-based. So it makes sense for you to use a PalmPilot as your planning device. You should plan every hour of your day and week on your PalmPilot. Before you go to bed at night, one of the things I always did, before I went to bed at night, I would plan my entire next day. I would have it pre-planned on my PalmPilot. I would have written down who I'm going to see next to their name. I would put their phone number or their address if I needed to. I would put it right next to the time I was going to call them. I knew every single thing I was going to do every single day the night before. So that when I went to bed at night, I had everything pre-planned. I could sleep a lot better because I knew what I was going to do. As soon as I got up and got ready, I went out the door. I was on a mission. I knew where I was going. I knew who I was calling. I knew what I was going to do. I knew I was going to create something and make something happen that day because I had a plan. If you don't do that, time is going to get away from you and you're going to blow hours and blow days. It's going to take so much longer for you to get where you want to go. The more careful you are in planning your hours and days, the more you're going to accomplish. The most successful people that I know, and I know a lot of really successful people today, they are fanatical about their time and the planning of it. They don't waste any time. They have really strict timelines. They budget their time. They're very careful about who they spend it with and how they use it because they know they have a limited amount of it. Their edge is how effectively they use the time. That's how they surpass the competition because they're very careful about the way that they use their time. They realize that time will get away from them if they don't plan it and account for all of it because time just goes. That's what the mediocre do. They don't plan anything. They don't even know what they did. They don't even know how it got away from them. Successful people recognize that the mediocre don't value their time and tend to spend and waste it in huge increments. They don't want anything to do with being mediocre. I developed a habit of checking every hour on the hour what I did to move me in the direction of my goals the previous hour. I would check, Hector, what did you do the last hour? Right away I could see what I did or didn't do. If I did a good job, great, fantastic, keep things going. If I just wasted an hour, I could quickly correct what I was doing and make a move in the right direction. If I was going in the direction away from my goals, which means I was doing nothing, that's a danger signal. That's kind of like a red flag. It's kind of like a pilot of an airplane or a pilot of a boat. When you're in an airplane, you probably don't realize this, or you're in a boat. I used to have a boat and it would go over to Catalina Island sometimes. You're going in a certain direction, either northwest or whatever. But if you're not constantly checking that thing and adjusting the direction you're going and watching that compass, you'll get off track and you'll go miles out of your way. Same thing in an airplane. An airplane, even when it's an automatic pilot, it's constantly adjusting the direction because the wind has effect on it. So if the plane doesn't constantly adjust for the different things, it's going to be way off course. And so what you've got to do is check what you did hour by hour so that you can adjust if you're going off course. Because if you're going off course, it's going to get you longer to get to your destination. It's common sense. You want to really, really manage your time. If I didn't do anything productive the previous hour, I would immediately get back on track. I'd start making phone calls. I'd go out to see someone. I'd call referrals. I would do anything that would lead to an appointment or a potential recruit in a sale. I would just get back on and try to make something happen. And for the most part, I built my business, folks, Monday through Thursday. Those are the prime time days in Prime America, especially 5 to 9 in the evening. So I would work as hard as I possibly could to pack in as many appointments in those days as possible. It was my intention to set up four face-to-face appointments in someone's home every night. About 50% of the appointments rescheduled. That's pretty much standard in Prime America. They just reschedule for whatever reason. Things happen. So I realized that if I set four, I was pretty much assured to have at least two appointments Monday through Thursday. And if you can have eight quality appointments a week, which is 32 a month, and you're a good closer and you're in the right market, you're going to be closing 10 or 15 transactions easily. You're probably going to be recruiting 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 people. It's not that difficult to do. I did that for years and years. And by the way, the way to have a lot of appointments is to be a really good recruiter because the recruits are the ones who are going to be setting those appointments for you. So that was Monday through Thursday. On Fridays, I usually spent Friday planning Saturday meetings. And then I would take my family out. It's kind of difficult to get appointments on Friday night. It's not impossible. Usually it's difficult. So I would usually take my family out on Friday night. And then Saturday, I did training in the morning. We usually would go from 9 to noon. And then in the afternoon, I would usually set that up for doing training appointments and going to see people, maybe deliver policies, whatever. Usually Saturday afternoon, I'd be real busy. Saturdays were actually really good days. On Saturday night, it's a little more difficult to set up appointments because people go out and they do things. And so Saturday nights, I would do the same thing, spend time with my family, go do something fun, go to the movies, go out to dinner. And then on Sundays, also on Saturdays, one Saturday a month, I would have a potluck. We'd have a potluck and we'd invite all our Bay Shop over. As our Bay Shop started getting bigger, we started limiting who could come. You'd have to be a sales leader above or whatever because we started getting really big. But in the beginning, we'd just invite everybody. We would have a potluck every Saturday, one Saturday a month. And the reason we'd do that, usually towards the middle or the end of the month so that we could take the numbers from the previous month and do some recognition. But the primary function of that Saturday potluck that we had was to build relationships. We'd get to know our people better and especially get to know the spouses, the partner, because a lot of times the partners weren't as involved. And I wanted to make sure that if it was somebody's wife came to our house and they got to see we're just normal people and a lot of nice people in the business and I would get to talk to them and make them feel comfortable and make them feel special and make them feel like they wanted their partner to spend time with us, to be involved in the business because they saw good things happening and they saw that we were good people and that we were really positive and we really cared about them. And then we would do some recognition and make people feel special. But mostly we just had fun. We got to know each other. And then the people in the business, what they started doing, all of them all at Bay Shop, they would start developing relationships and they would start developing really tight friendships with all of their peers. And so one of the things from this is that it's very hard to quit on friends. It's easy to quit on a boss, right, but it's hard to quit on friends. And what people do is they get connected to these other people and they want to stay in primary because they love the relationship and the feelings. And that's why you want to do things like that that are fun. In the summertime what we would do is we'd have beach parties where we'd tell everybody, okay, this Sunday we're all going to meet at Corona Del Mar and we'd have everybody show up with their kids and bring picnic lunches and we'd spend all day on Sunday at the beach having a blast, having fun. Same thing, building relationships. On Saturdays we did that training like I mentioned and that was great. On Sundays we spent it with our spiritual life with God and our family. I rarely did appointments on Sunday. In the evening I planned my week, making a list of all the people I was going to be calling for the following week. But usually I focused on setting all my appointments every day. Every day I would set appointments for the following week. A lot of people say, well, I set all my appointments on Sunday. I think it's too late to set appointments on Sunday. I think you need to be setting those appointments starting Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for the following week or two weeks ahead so that you can make sure and get those booked up. If you're only setting appointments on Sunday it's hard to set them up for that week because people usually have things going. I was always day to day I made time to set appointments for the following week or I spent time with my trainees teaching them how to set appointments so that we could have people to see the following week. That's basically the time management. That's how I operated that. I know that if you pay strict attention to your time, you really, really are careful with it, and you look at your time like you can do one of two things with your time. You can invest or you can waste it. What you want to learn how to do is invest your time, not waste it.