Walker & Dunlop, Inc. (WD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon. I'm Susan Weber. And joining Walker & Dunlop CEO, Willy Walker, today is Jack Daly, entrepreneur, legendary sales coach and best-selling author of books, including Hyper Sales Growth and Jack Daly's Life By Design. Willy and Jack will discuss the key to dramatic sales growth, how to build a winning company culture, his incredible athletic career competing in over 93 marathons and more. Thank you for joining us today. And now over to Willy.

Good afternoon, and welcome to another Walker Webcast. It is a true pleasure for me to have my friend, and I would underscore friend as well as incredible coach, mentor and true partner, to be honest, as it relates to the growth of Walker & Dunlop, Jack Daly. Let me do a quick bio on Jack and then we'll dive into my questions. Jack Daly is known as the king of street-tested methods about smart selling. He is a man with a remarkable 30-plus year track record in sales, executive and entrepreneurial positions, has been called the best professional sales trainer in America. Jack is an avid speaker, award-winning author and 15-time Ironman competitor. Jack strives to make a difference in the lives of those in the field of sales and sales management across the globe. I want to back up quick, Jack, to start for those listening about our personal interaction. And the first day I met you was in 2007 at a Young Presidents' Organization speech that you were giving down at the Inn at Perry Cabin. And I -- honestly, as I've told you before, Jack, thought I needed to listen to a sales coach like I needed a hole in the head. And I somehow convinced myself to go in and sit down and listen to you. And that speech changed my life. It changed my life and it changed the trajectory of Walker & Dunlop. And there were 2 things that you said in that presentation that stuck with me. The first one was you talked about if you have a vision for your company, you need to make sure that everybody in your company aligns with that vision. And if you have anybody who doesn't align with that vision, they can't be on your team because they are cancer inside of your organization. And I wrote on a white pad next to me to a gentleman who is in my YPO chapter, "I've got one of those." And my friend wrote back, "Well, you heard the man, he's got to go." And I wrote him back and said, "What if he's 75% of revenues?" And my friend wrote at the bottom of the page, "You're f*****!" But I did return from listening to you say that and said, "I've got to get in a plan in place to remove that person from Walker & Dunlop." And it took me almost 5 years to do so. But it was with that thinking of you saying, if you don't have everyone bought into your vision, is there are cancer building inside of your company. The other one, which was, I would say the most impactful thing I have ever been told. And as you well know, I did almost 800 case studies at Harvard Business School and so I have plenty of people telling me important things about business. But you said at the beginning of that meeting, that if you pulled up in front of the Inn at Perry Cabin in a brand-new Ferrari, the first question that someone getting into would have was not why did you pick Ferrari Red, why did you pick the Alcantara leather? The first question they'd have was where are we going? And if you aren't answering that question for your team every single day, you were failing as a CEO. And I took those words and what you said, and it transformed the way I thought about Walker & Dunlop. And from that moment forward, we created 5-year business plans, which we've been executing on ever since. And so I give those 2 anecdotes, if you will, to, a, underscore the importance of you and what you have said in the past and you've obviously worked with Walker & Dunlop subsequently.

But if I can, Jack, roll the tape back to 2007. Roll the tape back to your career at that point and take us through, for a moment, your coaching and your speaking over the last 13 to 14 years and where you've had an impact on companies like Walker & Dunlop.

Well, before I even do that, Willy, I'm just going to reach out and give you a big virtual hug. Just great to see you. And I'm really glad to see how healthy you are as well. Look, I remember that obsession for YPO in the D.C. area like it was yesterday. I can't believe it was that long ago. And if you recall, it was in a big white tent with fans going on because it was just really hot. And I'm going to do still a little bit of a wrinkle on the way you reported the story, because I remember that you got stuck in the back of the tent and wanted to get out because the sales guy was going to be speaking of what do I need sales for, but you couldn't get out without being obstructive to the rest of the group. And it ended up being fortuitous as you said. Look, the business of building a business is all about what is it going to look like down the road, not what it looks like presently, but what does it look like down the road. I do CEO coaching, as you know, with CEOs around the world, and it's all over the phone. And one of the places we start is, I can't help you if I don't know what the destination is. And the way I say it in a very awkward way is, you can't get there unless you know what there is. Stephen Covey said it better than me, begin with the end in mind, right? And so the frustrating thing that I will tell you about my business as a coach and as a trainer speaker is that my stuff works. But unfortunately, too few people take action. So one of the pleasures of working with you and Walker & Dunlop is you don't let this stuff die in the room, you actually implement. Things as simple as the money bag and handwritten notes. And for the listener and viewer, if you were to go on YouTube and punch in Jack Daly Money Bag and spend 5 minutes on that video, it could be a material change for your salespeople, sales managers, employees and customers. And so simple, easily implementable tools that work. If I go back in time, Willy, what I could tell the listener and viewer is that between the ages of 26 and 46, I was an entrepreneur that had the opportunity to build not 1, not 2, but 6 companies. They all scaled nationwide. They were all very fast growing on the revenue and the profit line and 2 of which I sold to Wall Street. And at 46 years old, I stopped doing that. And the reason I stopped doing that was because I lost my passion for what I was doing. And I'm a big believer that success comes by a result of being involved in something you're passionate about, and running a business was no longer passionate for me. And so at 46 years old, I decided that I was going to take a year off, figure out what I'm going to do in my next iteration. And all of a sudden, the phone started ringing and people wanted to know, could I speak at their company, speak at their company's trade association and all of these types of opportunities started to present themselves. I came home to my wife and I said, "My God, this is really rewarding. This is a lot of fun. I think I'm going to stay with it." And I've been staying with it now for approaching 3 decades.

So Jack, you have a book called The Sales Playbook, and The Sales Playbook outlines a number of things that you talk about in your presentations. You just mentioned the Money Bag. Talk through a little bit what the key components of The Sales Playbook are.

Sure. So where that book came from, and that book is a textbook. It's not on audio, never will be. I won't be responsible for people listening to it in their car, falling asleep and having an accident. It literally is a textbook on how to build a playbook. And the reason that I wrote that book is the predecessor book was called Hyper Sales Growth. And Hyper Sales Growth went off to great success, and I pounded away on the importance of systems and processes in the sales side of the house. And one of the analogies I gave was sports teams are run better than most businesses. It doesn't matter what the sport is. It doesn't matter what level of sport, whether it's high school or college or professional. There isn't a coach in any sport at any level that we consider putting the players on the field without a playbook. But when I wrote Hyper Sales Growth and people contacted me and said, "I want you to help me grow the company like you talk about in this book." I said, "Send me your sales playbook because if I know how you sell today, I can build the next iteration above." 98 out of every 100 companies couldn't send me their playbook because they didn't have one. What that means, Willy, is this. If your company doesn't have a sales playbook, by default, it means that each salesperson is doing it their own way, which is absolute insanity. My largest sales force that I had was 2,600 salespeople. And what I used to say in those 100-plus offices as I visited them was, there aren't 2,600 best ways to sell our product. Figure out the best way, build the system and process and then practice the systems and processes. So that's it in a nutshell. But here's what I really want to push and that is that if you look at your company from an operations side of the house, there's probably a playbook. HR, there's probably a playbook. The financial side, there's probably a playbook. Why is it that we leave our salespeople to just wing it and do their own thing? One of the disruptors that I have in the sales side of the house is, I have my own style. That doesn't work for me. I can't have thousands of people representing my company doing it their way. And so that's the chances of the...

I've been in the room where you've said that, and I've watched a number of salespeople get really uncomfortable. I've seen them wiggle in their chair physically when you say that, because they do think they've got their own special sauce. And so how do you teach very successful salespeople to change their game or to standardize their game given that the whole way they got in that room was that they're one of the best salespeople at that company?

So I love the sports analogies. And the sports analogy is really work in business for me, and I look at the top performers in any sport and what they're trying to do in their practice and getting it down. You see in golf, you want -- when you've got that 180-yard shot, you know which club to pick and you have ground in -- you ground it in as to how to hit that shot so that it's within a birdie putt on the green. We go to the Olympics and look at the Olympic stars and they do it over and over and over again at the point of excellence. And so what I say to the top salespeople is this, "I'm not looking for you to throw out everything that you've got that's made you successful today. What I'd like to do is I'd like to figure out what are the systems and process, what are the things that the best salespeople are doing in the organization and see if we can kind of bring those together in a playbook. And then all of us get enhanced with our income and with our productivity." So it's not a wholesale change, and I'm not trying to make salespeople into being telemarketers with a script necessarily. But if I give you, Willy, the example of objections, and let's just use the one that I hear most commonly, "Your price is too high." Well, there's probably 1 or 2 answers that are really the diamonds in terms of how to handle that objection. Why would we leave it to each individual to kind of respond to that? And by the way, one of the dangers that really exists with that is that if it didn't work with the last prospect, they'll change it for the next prospect. And so we're changing it on a regular ongoing basis. I'm all about process and systems.

So one of the things you mentioned in the Money Bag and inside the money, why don't you describe what the money bag is? And I think the real question I have for you, Jack, is, when I hear you talk about the money bag, I think it's antiquated. It's old school. It's old business. There's nothing fancy or digital or whizbang about it. So why don't you talk for a moment about the money bag and why you think it's such an incredible tool for most sales executives in America or around the globe?

Yes. So it's -- first of all, it's very simple and basic. The bottom foundation of the money bag is handwritten notes. That's it in a nutshell. And all I have is a bag that the shop owners years ago used to put their checks and cash in and take it down to the bank for deposit on a daily basis. I call it the money bag not because of that. I call it the money bag because this bag literally has made me millions of dollars in relationships over the years. I have my thank you cards, I have my envelopes, I have my stamps, I have my pens. I have everything ready so that I can write a handwritten note immediately after meeting somebody before I've even gotten in my car or any transportation or an Uber or what have you and put it in the mailbox nearest where they're at. Now I also will tell you that I'm capable technologically as well. And so as I leave a prospect call, I'm sending them an email before I even left the building, thanking them for their time and reconfirming what we agreed on is to happen next. So I'm there, but then for that person to get a handwritten note from me the very next day, it is a game changer. I've had so many people tell me this. And so we can trace back, and I have people all over the world, Willy, today that are sending me messages by LinkedIn and Facebook and personal messages to my email account saying, "This money bag is gold. It's just an amazing thing." And by the way, here's the best part. The more we get driven by technology, the less people do a handwritten note, which means it stands out in the crowd. So I'm going to get today about 300 email messages, unsolicited, and I'm going to hit the lead on most of them all day. But when the U.S. mail delivers my mail each day, I actually open up damn near every envelope. And so it's a standout from the pack type of thing. And I get audiences now where they're approaching my grandkids' ages here, and they're looking at me like, "This guy is a wacko, right?" And then I get somebody to bite, and then they come back and say, "My God, it really works." And again, you're the embodiment of taking action, Willy, because you're on the road and all of a sudden, you'll send me a postcard from San Francisco, saying, "Hey, this is my money bag for the day. Thanks for giving me that tip," right?

So talk about the Jack Daly Sales Playbook. Talk about how you've grown your business. And what I'd love to get a sense of, Jack, is you present, prepandemic, and now we're back and you're doing more and more. But prepandemic, you would present in front of hundreds of audiences a year. First of all, how do you build your business up to getting to that size and scale when you travel all over the globe? So you've got clients just as much in Singapore as you do in South Carolina. So how did you go global, if you will? And then I want to get to -- when you -- what I really want to understand is when you present to various groups, how do you know which are the winning companies and which are the companies that aren't going to listen to what you're saying? But go to how you built -- what's the sales playbook for Jack Daly in the growth of your business? And then I want to get to that next piece.

Yes. That last question will hold for just a moment and I'll pack it in on this because that was a difficult one to wrestle down. If I had the answer, man, that would be great. So look, the first thing I would tell you, Willy, is that I was blessed in life. I had a mentor by the name of Jim Pratt. Every book that I have published, I make a note in there acknowledging Jim and the lessons I learned. One of the things that is a signature item of Jack Daly is model the masters, find people that have already had success at something and dig out of them what you can. And so I started that practice literally at 13 years old. At 13 years old, I interviewed approximately 50 successful people over the summer on how to build a successful company and then took those pearls of wisdom and implemented them in my professional and personal life. I've been doing that for a long time. That's 60 years ago. So when I got into the speaking business, as I mentioned, I got into it by default. I was taking the year off, I'm going to figure out what I'm going to do next, and then the phone starts ringing, right? So I start responding. And I said, "Okay, where's the professionals?" And the professionals were in what's called NSA, National Speakers Association. So I started to kind of figure out what's going on in that world. And what I learned was this, that the majority of gigs get booked through speaker viewers or meeting planners. And that population out there is tough to crack and there are thousands of speakers trying to get into those speaker bureau-type thing. And if you use them, they take a 30% cut, but not just a 30% cut of your fee, but let's say I was speaking to a technology audience of 1,000 people. And the head of Google comes up and says, "That was fantastic. Do that 30 more times around the world for us this year." I have to give that to the speaker bureau for their 30% cut. I just didn't think it was fair. And so I said, "I'm going to build my business the way I know how to build a business, and I'm going to self-generate. So who writes the check? That's the question as a speaker should ask, "Who writes the check?" And so my audiences write the check through the CEO entrepreneur, business owner. So then the next question was, "Where do they assemble?" Well, they get together in YPO, EO, Vistage, Council Growing company (sic) [ Council for Growth ], CEO Global. Well, okay, then I'm going to invest my time speaking in front of those groups, and if I have to do it for free, I'll do for free. I just want people to know that my content is rich and that I deliver a performance that's beyond what their expectation is. And if I do that consistently, I will build up a network of referrals and I will build up a network of repeat business. Today, what I can tell you, Willy, is that I'm not willing to be in a hotel for 100 nights a year for business. I don't want to do that. And so I'm choosy about which clients that I take. And 90% of my business today is repeat and referral, which is the prized place to be. By the first of the year, 80% of my speaking engagements are already on the calendar for the year. I ask this of any business, "How would you like to start the year and 80% of your business is already in the house?" And so all we have to do is pay a little bit of a price on the front end of investing your time and energy into the markets where the money is, where -- who writes the check. And I believe that that's true in any business.

So as you well know, I've referred you to lots of people. And one of the reasons why I referred you to lots of people is because like you did for my friend, Andy Florance at CoStar, you brought your A game, and you've got 2 standing ovations during your presentation to CoStar a couple of weeks ago in Texas -- excuse me, in Florida. You go in to meet with a new company like CoStar. How much specific work do you do to understand their business and what you're talking about versus go to, if you will, the kind of the core tenets of Jack Daly and what you teach all companies?

Yes, that's a great question. The first thing that I can tell you is, unlike so many speakers, I don't have a speech. There are speakers out there that you can hire them to do a 60-minute speech, a 90-minute speech, 2-hour speech. And let's just say you hired one of those speakers to do 1-hour presentation, and 10 minutes before showtime, the client comes up and says, "Hey, we're running out of time. Take that hour and make it 45 minutes." That guy is running to the bathroom on both ends because they don't know what to do with that situation. It doesn't matter to me. Just tell me how long and when you want me to finish and I'm good to go, I'll take stories out, I'll put stories in, all of those types of things. And I'm going to react, while in front of a group, to whether the audience within the first 5, 10, 15 minutes is buying in or not buying in and if they're not buying in, I need to pivot. And I need to find a way to get through whatever barriers that I have diagnosed are there. So back to the question of preparation, I need to understand the industry, I need to understand the business, I need to understand the strengths, I need to understand the weakness. And here's the big question that I love asking the client, and that is, "When I walk offstage, when I am finished, what will be success in your eyes? Tell me what success is. Because if you tell me, again, that there is, I can craft it such that we're there." So in Andy's example that you gave me in the Florida gig that you were gracious enough to introduce me to, it was all about moving them from being transactional salespeople to relationship salespeople. Well, that's what I teach naturally anyway. But the fact that you gave me that as a referral, and Andy took me in without having any knowledge of me other than the trust that you have with him, I walked into a more than 1,000-person audience and no one in the audience had ever heard me speak before. And here's -- so in it -- so I used that as an example of how I got there. And I walked offstage and what does the leadership team there say, "You haven't seen the last of us." So the repeat business is coming, right?

So it's fascinating to me on that though, that's a -- I still haven't gotten to what happens, how do you know it's a good presentation, who's going to get it and who's not. I want to loop back that. But there's so much here that's so rich. So you just said, if you will, a digital company trying to transform itself into a relationship company. And I started this by saying isn't the money bag old school and aren't we going towards a digitized world? And it's fascinating to think there that here's CoStar, one of the most successful companies out there from a growth standpoint, from a revenue growth standpoint, from a market cap standpoint, basically is the provider of information in the commercial real estate industry. And yet they're, right now, saying, we need to move from basically selling digits to selling relationships.

It's not one or the other, it's both. So I'm going to go back to Jim Collin's book of 35 years ago, Built to Last, it's the Tyranny of the OR, right? It's the beauty of the end. And so we need to couple both of them, but don't rely just on the transaction side, the digital side of the world, marry it up with the relationship side and some of the tried and true things in sales. People ask me an awful lot of times this question, Willy, "Look, Jack, you've been doing this for quite a long time. Hasn't the world of sales changed? Don't we need to do things differently?" The answer to that question is yes, we do, and no. For example, tried and true, selling is the transfer of trust. That was true 30 years ago. It's still true today. People do business with people they like. That was true 30 years ago, it's true today. People don't buy features, they buy solutions. They're looking to get out of their pain, so solve their pain. These are basic tried and true principles of sales. They didn't -- they haven't changed. But for me, as a salesperson today, I don't need to any longer carry around samples of my product, samples of my ware. All of that information can be gotten off of the Internet. There's so much that we can leverage from the Internet as a prospect consumer that we don't want a salesperson showing up and throwing up and telling us old school those types of things. I already know all that. So what happens is, is that now a salesperson can use their quality time to really get deep into a company by doing their homework before they get there, that we would very, very differently got much more difficult to do and assemble their questions before they get to the call so that they're intelligent about the person's business and they're asking the provocative questions. What I always say about a salesperson that's at above average level is their call, when they leave, the prospect says, "That was an entirely different experience than we're accustomed to having." And incidentally, when you follow it up with a handwritten card, it's like that's truly different than anything else I've experienced.

So as I look across W&D sales force, they come in all shapes and sizes, if you will, and the skill set that determines who is a breakthrough salesperson as it relates to their -- not what they're selling, not consistency as it relates to the W&D product, but as it relates to how they engage with their clients. Some are known as the smartest person on structuring a deal. Somebody else has a personality of "give them the bone and they'll never let go of it." They're going to cover every single detail of the deal, ad nauseam. You know if you give them a transaction to finance, there's just not going to be a single thing missed. And then somebody else who has just a more relaxed kind of personality about them and gets the client to basically tell them their problems, if you will, and then they are seen as the solver of the problems. They're really good at asking questions and getting the client to kind of divulge what their pain point is. As you think about that in those different types, Jack, what's the -- I mean, one size doesn't fit all here, right? All those 3 examples, and I'm thinking about 3 individuals at Walker & Dunlop, they're all exceptional in what they do. But is there one that you've seen across the board as it relates to either asking really good questions, being attentive to detail or being known as the most brilliant in a certain space, that is what kind of can carry the day as it relates to outsized sales growth?

I do have that answer, Willy, and I like to say that I want to access the blend of those attributes you just talked about. I want to access them. I don't have them all either. So I'm not going to be the guy with brilliance that's going to show up on the sales call. But what I want to make sure is that I've got someone that, as a salesperson, can transport themselves into what the prospect customer is. In other words, change seats, have empathy for where that client is, that customer is and all of the conversation being processed by the salesperson as if they were the prospect customer. And what I know is that, as a great example, W&D, Walker & Dunlop has all of those attributes. They just happen to be resident in different people. So what gives me comfort as a salesperson representing Walker & Dunlop is that I know that. I know that I have that reservoir of strength. All I need to do is get embed, so to speak, with the prospect customer to understand deeply where their needs really are and then be able to, if you will, be the guy with the bone that doesn't give up and find those resources within Walker & Dunlop that best match the needs of the client. One of the biggest things that I think I have an advantage over most is I can get my ego out of the way. I don't need to be the standout guy from a visibility standpoint. What I need to do is I need to really have a great attribute of listening from the perspective of the customer. That's the key.

Have you ever gotten feedback, Jack, that hurt? In other words, you presented, you thought you've nailed it or you thought you said something that was really good and someone said something to you that just said, "Man, that didn't go what I thought." And it just kind of -- it hits you in a way that you weren't expecting?

So I've had individual people that have said that. But I've never had a client that has come back to me and said anything of that nature. And that's not me being egotistical as much as just -- look, as a speaker, one of the things that I had to learn early, and Jim Pratt, my mentor, really helped me out with is that no matter what group you speak to, you're not going to be a 10 with everybody. I can remember doing post-speaking surveys on a scale of 1 to 10 and 100 people in the audience, and I've got all 9s and 10s and 3 guys gave me a 2. And I want to know who they are, and I want to talk to them because I can learn from them. And Jim said, "Look, let me give you 2 pieces of advice. One is, I want you to take the surveys and do the Olympic scoring method, and that is that you take those 3 people that gave you a 3 and you throw them away. And then if you took 3 away, take 6 of the 10s away, because you weren't that good either, they just fell in love easily. And then whatever is left, that's your blended score. That would be your real score." And then the second piece of advice he gave me was this, he said, "Look, everybody doesn't have the positive attitude that you embrace. And so those 3 guys that gave you a 3, man, you did a great job because typically, they wake up every morning as a 1." And so just don't worry about having to please everybody. We're not going to be a fit with everybody. And so -- but from an overall client perspective, I just haven't had that situation. I will tell you that my first speaking gig, I talked about exiting the business and giving the client back the fee because I felt like I was so horrible. And I have one testimonial letter that hangs up in my office here and it's right over there on the wall, and it's from that client a month later who said, "You knocked the ball out of the park and you couldn't have been more prepared and blah, blah, blah." So one of the things I have to remember about myself is that I need to lighten up a little bit, not be as hard on myself as I am at times.

I have a quick anecdote, Jack, and then I'm going to come to you on another question. But I was at my friend, Senator Hickenlooper's birthday party about 3 weeks ago. And another friend of ours, Rick Sapkin, took the then Governor Hickenlooper to a Denver Nuggets game, and it was his birthday. And the PA announcer on the governor's birthday said, "And we're pleased to have tonight Governor John Hickenlooper with us here at the Pepsi Center." And the crowd starts to applause and there's a guy who's back up a couple of rows back at the top of the section going, "Boo, boo, boo." And so it all goes away and Hickenlooper turns to Sapkin and says, "I'm going to go talk to that guy." And Sapkin's like, "Dude, come on. I mean there are 20,000 people in here. Someone in here is going to be a staunch Republican and hate everything that you possibly say." He said, "No, I'll be right back." And so I think he then gets up, walks back to the guy, sits down next to him, spent about 10 minutes up there with him and he comes back down and Sapkin looks at him and goes, "That had to have been a big waste of time." He goes, "No, I think he's now a supporter." And Sapkin was, a, pointing out Hickenlooper's desire to just talk to anyone from either side of the aisle, and they might sit there behind him and booing him, but he really wanted to engage. And the other thing is that Hickenlooper might have a little bit of a sense that he has more influence over people's thoughts than he actually does after talking to him for 10 minutes thinking he was now a fan. But Jack, go to this, you travel around the globe, and I think if you show up in an audience in Singapore, they're going to react to what you're saying, forget about the language barrier, they're going to react to what you're saying a little bit differently than maybe an audience in South Carolina and et cetera. When you're up there, you just said 10, 15 minutes into it, I need to be looking at the audience to figure out whether they are kind of on the page or not and what I need to do to adapt to it. First of all, is that more challenging with international audiences, which I think you're going to say pretty quickly it is. And the second thing is how do you then, audible, how do you change what you're saying to try and get the audience to start to engage with you in a way that they aren't in that first 10 to 15 minutes?

So it's ironic that you would use Singapore as the example. I had a 3-hour speaking gig at Singapore just prior to the pandemic. There were about 300 people in the audience. And we were going to take a bio break in the middle, so 1.5 hours and 1.5 hours. In the first 1.5 hours, I'm profusely sweating because the group, there's no emotion. I felt like I was in a room and no one was there. And I'm trying every which way to get there. And some of the ways that -- when you feel like you're not getting there, I go to see if I can get interaction amongst the group, because if I get interaction, we get a little bit closer. I walked offstage and get down with the folks and start one-on-oneing with people. And when I do that, and we -- and I look for humor somehow to get people laughing and get them upbeat and then I can bring them back. In Singapore, I couldn't figure it out. And so I came back from the break and I just kept trying, and I spent 3 hours in living hell, quite frankly. And I just figured I bombed and the client came back and said, "I was the buzz of the conference. It was a 3-day conference and people got more out of it, they couldn't stop taking notes and they couldn't be more complimentary." It was just a different culture than what I'm accustomed to in being expressive. And it was my first speaking gig in Singapore, and I didn't understand that aspect of the audience. But let me go back just a moment here on this question. One of the things that I've been surprised about is that in most countries, and in 2019, I've spoken in over 30 countries, 250,000 air miles. In most countries, I don't need to make much of an adjustment to my style of presenting nor my content. Our world is getting closer and closer together, at least that's my perspective. So there's not a lot of customization to the culture of the country as I suspect that there would need to be.

So your new book, Life By Design, Jack, it comes out today. So anyone watching this can go on Amazon and buy Jack's new book, Life By Design. I don't think I know another person who is as prescriptive about their own life as you are. I have spoken to you both -- I've seen you talk about it on stage as well as I've spoken to you about it personally as it relates to how prescriptive you are in building an annual business plan. You previously mentioned you don't want to spend 100 nights in a hotel this year. As you well know, I have no idea how many nights I'm going to spend in a hotel this year because I -- someone says I need you in Atlanta next week. And guess what, I'm going to Atlanta next week. And talk for a moment, Jack, about how you build your annual business plan and then what went into this book as it relates to Life By Design?

Yes. So thank you for mentioning it. It's an exciting day for me. Today is the official release date of -- I happen to have a copy of the book handy here, it's called Jack Daly's Life By Design. And for anyone that's listening and interested, there's a new website up that's called jackdalyslifebydesign.com. And in the book, there's over 100 pages of appendix with all of the templates and examples of the things that I've used on those templates with my own personal life, all sitting on the website for free. You don't even need to buy the book and you can access it, but the book will tell you how to utilize those tools. We started, Willy, by talking about the playbook and systems and processes. And all I said was, to myself early in life, is build the systems and processes to lead an exceptional life. I don't want to be the guy -- no matter how passionate I am about my business and how enjoyable it is, I don't want to be the guy that only has 2 or 3 weeks a year where they have time off. I want to suck the marrow out of life. I want to do a tremendous amount of things. And so when I'm at work, I'm all in, and I am all in. But I'm all in, in life, on the personal side of my life. So as an example, when you talk about the nights that you'll sleep at a hotel, each year, I sit down and say, "What do I want to accomplish in my personal life? What trips do I want to make personally and where do I want to go? What races do I want to do? Because I'm a triathlete, I'm a marathoner, those types of things." And I booked them, and those are mine, and they're mine. And then I live at the beach in Southern California. Well, I ought to take advantage of that. I grew up in the Philly area where it's typically cold and nasty or hot and sweaty. So how many nights do I want to sleep in my own bed? And I figure out what those are. And then what's left is what we sell. And typically, my year has been 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. I track and measure every day where I sleep. And if it needs to be recalibrated because something is getting out of hand, then we bring it back. I'll take less gigs later on in the year or what have you. And typically, my actual results compared to my plan, are within about a 3% to 5% variance. So it works. I track and measure things on my cumbersome life every day. I have 5 people I call the Board of Directors in my life. They one-on-one meet with me on my personal goals 4x a year. That's 20 one-on-one sessions on my personal life, so I don't get off-kilter. The criteria to be on the Board of Directors in my life is 2 things: care immensely about me and won't tolerate my bulls***, so they have to be strong people who care about me. And I report monthly and quarterly and annually the results compared to plan and compared to last year. Now that sounds like what we do in business. But if we do that in business and have great results as a business, why not apply those things to our personal life? And so I've been doing this now, Willy, for 60 years. After interviewing those 50 successful people at 13 years old, I've got my first annual plan. And one of the things that people will find on the jackdalyslifebydesign.com in that appendix is my bucket list. There's over 400 items on my bucket list, 75% of which are completed, right? So it works. And I just said, let's give the formula out to other people so they can elevate their game on their personal lives.

So tell the anecdote about wanting to play the top 100 golf courses in America.

Somebody gifted me a book, that was a coffee table-type book that said, here's the top 100 golf courses in the United States. And every golf course got 2 or 3 pages with a write-up in the photos. And I said, "Gosh, that sounds like a good bucket list item. I'll put that on there." And so how long will it take me? Well, if I did 10 courses a year, it would take me 10 years. And so I said that sounds like a legitimate thing. And so I'd start knocking these golf courses off the list. And then it ended up being a longer journey for a lot of different reasons. And so I sit here today at 95 of the top 100 golf courses that I have played in the United States. Look, I brought on marathon, as you know, in all 50 states. Well, here's the story on that one. I ran my first marathon at 46 years old. And then I said, "You know what, that was kind of fun. I'll run one a year." So for 10 years, I ran one per year. So my first one was in Portland, Oregon. The next 9 were in California. My tenth marathon was Los Angeles Marathon. It was my fourth L.A. Marathon and a guy ran by me with a shirt that said, "I run a marathon in all 50 states." So I caught back up with him and I said, "Hey, tell me about the 50-state marathon." He says, "There's a club on the Internet called the 50 Staters. And you ought to go on and take a look." I went on and I said, "That belongs to my bucket list." And so I just started knocking these things off. And then I met some guys in the journey that said they were doing the 7 continents. And I'm like, "Well, s***, that sounds like a good thing. I'm going to put the 7 continents on the list." And so there's less than 200 people, Willy, that have done all 7 continents and all 50 states, and I'm one of them. And so I didn't start out by thinking, "Let's do a marathon in all 50 states." I didn't start out by saying, "Let's play the top 100 golf courses necessarily because I was putting around the offing." It was just being alert to "Hey, that would be kind of fun, right?" You're a -- look, YPO-er, watch this one. I put on my list and I wanted to fly a jet fighter plane. And I don't know how to fly. But a YPO member looked at one of my websites, saw my bucket list and he sent me an email, and he said, "Hey, is that one still available?" And I said, "Yes, I haven't gotten that one done yet." And he sent me another email with a picture of a U.S. Air Force jet fighter plane, he said he bought it from the U.S. Air Force. And what we need to do is find a day and time and let's go. And so his name is [ Wei Chen ], and he's about a 6'4 Chinese guy, and he pulls into the airport and loads me up in the back -- in the cockpit and we're talking to each other. He asked me about aerodynamics, and I said, "Sure, I'm game for anything. We do all these viral roles and things." And then we level out and then he goes, "Are you ready?" And I said, "Ready. I mean, what else could we be doing?" And he said, "Well, you haven't flown it yet. Between your knees is a little toggle switch, grab it with 2 fingers and a thumb, and I'm going to pass the controls over to you," and I flew a jet fighter plane. Look, here's the message, Willy, people will come out of the woodwork to help you with your bucket list, but you got to know what your bucket list is. People will help you get wherever you want in life if you know where you want to be in life. So why not sit down and say, "If I could do anything, what would I like to do?" So as an example, undone things. I want to hold the torch during the Olympics. I don't need to be a guy -- the final way, but they pass it from guy to guy along the way. I want to be that. And by the way, you get to keep the torch as a memento so that you can put it in a shadow box and hang it up in the house. I want to meet the President of the United States in the Oval Office. I'm going to fly on Air Force One. And people look at these things that I put on my list and say, "Well, that's foolish. That's not going to happen." Well, I already have 4 people that have said, "Whatever Olympics I wanted to hold the torch, I'm done." I've got a backup to a backup that can help me with that. But again, if you don't know where you want to go, you can't get there, right?

Jack, what do you think it is that makes it so that people don't do that? So what's the core emotion that says either too insecure to put it out there, I don't have the time to plan it, I don't like thinking that -- why is it that most people who hear what you just said say, "That sounds really cool, but I'm not going to do it for myself for whatever reason."

Yes. There's probably a laundry list of reasons, Willy, and I'm not going to say something very complementary right now, but it's my belief. I think it's personal inertia. I just don't feel that people have the appetite as a general rule. If I gave you a secondary reason, I would say that people are too concerned about other people's opinions of them. I'm the oldest of 5 kids, my brother's 3 years younger than I am. But we were in the same high school at the same time. I was a senior, he was a freshman. His name is Joe. Imagine as a senior being referred to everybody in the school as Joe Daly's brother. Shouldn't it work the other way? Shouldn't Joe be Jack Daly's brother? I was the senior. But out of 275 kids in my graduating class, I can tell you I know less than 10, because if I found that they weren't going to add value to where I wanted to go in life, I just didn't invest my time with them. My brother was a social butterfly. He cared about what people thought, he wanted to be the big man on campus. I watched my brother. We shared a bedroom, forced himself to learn how to smoke. He spit every time that he took a drag, I've never smoked. But smoking was making him part of the cool set. I think an awful lot of people are too concerned about other people's opinions of why not just say, we're only on the planet once. Let's make it one hell of a good ride. What would you think would be a good ride and just go for it?

The one thing that I just love about the fighter jet anecdote and the golf anecdote. The marathon anecdote is fantastic, except as you know very well, as long as you have the determination and the drive to do it, you can sign up for those races and go do them, whereas playing the top 100 golf courses in the country, there are many on that list that are private. And therefore, you can't just show up and say, "I'll pay whatever your greens fees are, and I'll go play it." And what I find to be so insightful there is until you put out there that you want to play those courses, someone doesn't come to you and say, "Hey, you want to play [ Augusta ] or you want to play Pine Valley, I can get you on it." And I do find that to be very, very insightful as it relates to business and where you want to go as a business. Because unless you tell your team, and this is looping back to what really got me going at Walker & Dunlop on, if you will, the Jack Daly medicine is until you tell people where you're going, nobody can help you get there. And so by -- I remember distinctly when we put out our first 5-year business plan, which was in 2007, just pre-GFC, to grow revenues, EBITDA and net income 5x in 5 years. And my entire team thought that I had gone into my office and smoked some really good California Sinsemilla. And they're like, "You want to do what?" And I remember distinctly looking at the team in our conference room and everyone's glossed over going, "Has this guy really lost his mind? 5x in 5 years on revenue, EBITDA and net income?" And as you well know, over the next 5 years, we had the great financial crisis, not planned. We bought a company in 2009 from Credit Suisse, not planned. We went public in 2010, not planned. We bought another company in 2012, not planned. And we ended up growing revenues 4.96x, net income 4.92x and EBITDA 5.01x. And what -- the whole issue was having the gumption, having the audacity, having the dream to put out there 5x in 5 years and then to watch the team go to it. But I found it to be so inspirational because you said, if you don't put it out there, if you're not telling people where you're going, you're never going to get there. And the way you live your life and the way that you do your work, and fortunately, at W&D, the team we pulled together and the way we put out there our goals and ambitions, have all worked exactly to your plan.

Yes. Look, if I had a critique of what you just said, I would say, "Gosh, you should have said 7x."

Well, you know, Jack, one of the interesting things that I do find about that, we've now done this 3x, we're on our fourth. And on every one of them, the team doesn't outperform by 25% or underperformed by 25%. It hits it on the dot. And it's sort of back to you as it relates to your annual planning, you said to me, I'm within a variance of about 3% on what I put out there. It's very interesting that when you put those goals out there, you're generally speaking, coalesce around the goal. And as you refine it, to your point of like in hindsight, what I'd love to have done 7x. Yes. But you know what, 5x is pretty damn good at that time. But it's a really interesting concept as it relates to setting these, and you mentioned Jim Collins previously, these bold, highly ambitious goals that you can put out there. They better darn well be achievable, yet highly ambitious or else they're never adapted to.

Yes. So once you put that 5x out there as the goal, you're going to spend time with the team figuring out whether it's real or not real before you broadcast it throughout the organization. It can't be fantasy number. There's got to be some reality to it. So I have a client right now who spent 38 years getting to $180 million in sales. That's an acceptable good result. But the CEO now that's in place now wants to take it to $500 million in less than 4 years. And we've stress test that and it's real, but the team needed to really be a part of stress testing it. How many more stores are we going to need to open, what are we going to do online, all of those particulars. And once we broke it all down into its subparts, each of the subparts was doable. I have a client today who is doing house painting, interior house painting. And their differential is they will have your entire house painted inside in less than 24 hours. And when people hear this, "Well, wait a second, I've had painters come into my house and they're there for days upon days upon days and it's terrible living conditions. That's not possible. I have a 5,000 square foot house. There's no way that you can do that." Well, the answer to that is, well, if you hired me to do your dining room, could you buy that I could get it done in a day? Well, yes, if you just pick 1 room. Well, that would take me like 2 guys. So I'll put 2 guys in the dining room, 3 in the living room, 2 up in the bedroom, they're seeing that. And so we're going to take over your house with 25, 30 people for the day. We're going to move you into a hotel for the night, and give us 24 hours and then come back and open up the door and the house will be complete. No mats around the house or any of that. And then we taught him to put a bouquet of flowers, [ degreening ] it as they open up the door. Like it is a competitive, unique advantage. But until you break it down into its individual parts, then the concept of "I can get this done in 24 hours" sounds absurd. 5x sounds absurd until you break it down into its component parts and then somebody needs to own each of the parts. Somebody needs to own the dining room and, in your business, somebody needs to own each part. Every business can be done that way.

So Jack, I started this conversation, and I know you've got something coming right up on the other side of this, so I want to be mindful of your time. I honestly can't underscore. We took -- when I first met you, Walker & Dunlop probably had a value of about -- man, I'll swag it and say, in 2007, we probably had a value of somewhere between $50 million and $75 million. And as you know, our market cap went over $5 billion at the end of 2021. And I do, as people ask me, what's the special sauce of W&D's success? I go straight to our 5-year business planning and where we're going. And that all goes back to that speech that you gave in 2007 that said, "If you get in that Ferrari, you're not asking me what color it is, you're not asking me about the leather, you're asking me where we're going." And so as someone who has been a great guide to me in giving W&D the path forward, I'm deeply indebted to you. I'm so appreciative of our friendship. And I'm really excited to see you in about 3 to 4 weeks at the Walker & Dunlop Company annual company meeting in Denver and have you talk to everyone at Walker & Dunlop and share with all of us your incredible insights.

And give a physical hug instead of a virtual hug. So that's cool, too. So this has been a joy to spend the time with you, Willy. I will tell you, when the public heard that this -- that I was going to be a guest on your show today, I had several people independently reach out and say, "Of all of the podcasts that are out there, this one happens to be my favorite."

Well, that's great.

So you evidently are doing a pretty decent job of this as well.

Well, thanks, Jack. It's great to see you. To everyone for joining us today, thank you so much, and we'll see you again next week. And Jack, I look forward to seeing you soon.

See you in a few weeks. You bet.

Take care.