Lessons - He Started RE/MAX in His Kitchen and Built It to 140,000 Agents in 110 Countries | Dave Liniger - RE/MAX Co-Founder

In this lessons episode, discover why human-centered leadership and shared purpose create stronger organizations. Understand how collaboration and open feedback build high-performing teams. Explore why adaptability matters when plans inevitably change. And uncover how humility, accountability, and learning from failure can turn early mistakes into lasting success. You're very human driven because you're focusing on the human for you're like a human centric organization. I guess that's why it was successful, but I'm just thinking of other companies that do that well. And I don't know the policies of like the apples and the Amazons, but you definitely don't, you don't hear that from the employees of that company to the same degree, but I think that the aligning the company mission with the human mission, I think that's very important. You know, if you. If you look at my book, it's probably about 25% of it came from the College of Ardenox and the mistakes I made and the people that helped me succeed. And I was mentored by so many people. I was given a hand up so often. But if you look at the last 30 or 40 years of American business, it's changed dramatically. If you look at the impact that Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, whatever it is, has had on our world, it is truly amazing what they have done. The entire concept of leadership... of groupthink, of servant leadership, is changing so dramatically. And Darren Hardy, I don't know if you follow Darren at all, but he's a mentor to me. Strangely enough, at age 21, he was my top agent in California. And now, 25 years later, he was one of the most and impressive individuals I've ever worked with, he has a saying that's repeated now. What's your definition of success? I want to do what I want to do, when I want to, where to I want to, with who I want to, and how I want to. That is independence. That is success. Those five factors are, I want to do it my way. When, where, what, how, and with whom. And the best companies in the United States right now are those that are preaching that kind of a philosophy. Do you feel like those companies, the Fang, the Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, whatever, all those large companies, do you feel like they do it? Are they world class at doing that? Yes. They're different. Yeah. They're collaborative. They're built on consensus by an entrepreneur that wants to win. If you look at the old military, the general says to the soldier, why don't I tell you jump past how high on the way up? If you look at the special ops, I don't care whether it's Delta, Green Beret, SEALs, Rangers, or whatever it is, it's an entirely different philosophy. They're usually a tight-knit group, a team of 8 to 10, You may have one officer in the group. You will probably have a varying group of ages. When you plan a mission, everybody has a voice in the plan. Every single person sits before you're going into this battleground and says, what about this? What about that? Have you thought about this? The lowest soldier, at least in rank, can look at the general order, look at the captain and say, I don't like this. I think we're exposed. And you can chat it out. That's consensus building. When you go in, there is one leader. You're in a combat situation. You know what happens if the leader is down. Second person is the next leader. Third person is the next leader. And if you get home, great. When you come home, the first thing they do is not a military hierarchy. It's they sit around. Depending on the leader, maybe they're going to grab some beers, and if the person's too strict, they can sit around and drink coffee. But anyway, everybody has a right to say, well, we're right, well, we're wrong. And the lowliest person can say, Lieutenant, you broke right when you were supposed to break left, and I covered you with my gun, and if I'd squeezed the trigger, you were dead, and we would have lost. You made a mistake that almost ruined this mission for us. And that leader has got to look at that person and say, you're absolutely right. I was rattled. I forgot. I went the wrong way. I will learn from that. Thank you for putting that out. That isn't a career-ending statement on those two individuals' part. It's we're a team. We win by a team or we die as a team. We all want to come home. And so when you start looking at American businesses today, this autocratic, top-down nonsense doesn't work, even in the smallest groups in a business, smallest groups in a church, smallest groups in a philanthropy. You still have to do things consensus. Everybody wants input. Everybody wants to be able to argue. And everybody knows I win some, I lose some, and I'm not going to be a pouty person if I didn't get my way this time. I had my chance to express myself. You've done that. I mean, you did that in REMAX to the degree of you were building this consensus and team concept. So I think agents were sharing resources. You were sharing all this stuff. Were they sharing leads at one point as well? Like you had everybody working together and collaborating. And I think that's something that, like you said, when REMAX was doing it, maybe you were slightly pioneering. Now it seems to be the status quo. But that's how you build this high performing team culture. I love it. You know, if you're sculling outside of New England and you got everybody in the boat and you got the oars in the water, and if one of them's dipping the oars here and the other one's weeding and dipping it, you just go around in circles. Yeah. And so teamwork is where it's about. I would tell you this much. We had our 50th anniversary a year ago, the RE-MAX, but 51st this week. And I made a comment, a presentation, and I said, you do have to understand, I just got five standing ovations today. But Gail and I founding this company are mere footnotes to the story. This company was never built by Dave and Gail. It was built by hundreds of thousands of agents and brokers over 51 years that collectively figured a way to make this thing work together. You build gigantic enterprises with consensus, following a common vision, having a common mission, being proud of what you do every day, and then just accepting the world. It's going to change. You have to be adaptable. In the military world, you plan and you plan and you plan, and the first time a gun goes off, the plan goes to hell. But the fact is, you've planned 30 different plans. What happens? And when that shot goes off and your initial plan A doesn't work, you've already thought about plan B through 35B. I want to talk about a couple more sort of entrepreneurial lessons that you've learned over your career. You speak a lot about failure. I think failure is really, really an important tool for people. How did failure play its part in your career? What was the failure? What was the multiple failures? I'm sure there was thousands across the career. But pick something that stood out or a few things that stood out. How did it impact you? When we first started, I was so damn eastical. My ego was so big, I had the way. And yet the industry tried to kill me. They literally wanted us to fail because if we succeeded, it meant they had to pay all their top producers more. And they were trying to drive me out of business. And the thing I was remarkable was, they didn't need to try very hard. I was succeeding pretty well by myself with all the mistakes I was making. But I will tell you, I want to win. I do not quit. I don't want to fail. And if you want to win bad enough, swallow your pride. And I sat with my teams and I said, What did you like best about the company you worked for before you joined Remax? What did you dislike the most? What do you like best about being with Remax? What do you dislike the most? What do you like best about me, Dave Linegar, as your president and CEO? What do you dislike the most? I'm 20 years younger than all the people I led. And I said, Teach me, train me, mentor me to be the kind of a man you would like to follow. Now that hurts. To make yourself that vulnerable and know that you've opened the door to hell and you've said, okay, I know I'm screwing up, but tell me how. And some people are diplomatic, and some people are just flat forceful and say, you know, you just don't keep your word. You promised you'd do this and this and this, and you didn't. And all of a sudden you realize, I did talk about that in one of our meetings, and I didn't keep a written record of it, and so it's not in front of me as a to-do list, and so I screwed up. And so most entrepreneurs don't really understand. Your followers will forgive you. if you're up front and transparent and say, I know I've made some mistakes. I don't want to make the same ones twice. Help me here, please. Grow me up a little bit. That's the great part of Remax's success is I had so many failures, but I was willing to take the blame for them myself. If the team wins, the team wins. How long did it take you to get rid of the ego when you first started out? It took probably about three years. It was pretty disastrous. But once I grew into my position, I became a mature individual. The journey, it's a journey. There's no end. It's just a journey. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.