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Creating contests and incentives is important for effective leadership. Contests help identify motivated and competitive individuals in your business. If contests don't work, it's a sign to recruit new people. Spend time with the top 20% of producers. Contests should revolve around recruiting and production. Determine prizes based on production goals. Incentives can include tickets, dinners, resorts, cash bonuses, jackets, Palm Pilots, gas cards, time with top leaders, and educational materials. Have a contest every month and focus on motivated and competitive people. True leadership is caring about your people's success. Hey, part of being a really effective leader too is creating contests and incentives. You know, it's important to always have some contest or incentive to move the motivated. What I found out is contests don't work on people who are not motivated or not competitive. You know, the purpose of a contest and incentives is to reveal who the motivated and who the competitive are in your business. That's what you want to discover. Who are those people? Because you're going to build your business a lot faster, a lot bigger if you find out who the motivated and the competitive are. If you run contests and they don't work, it's a red flag telling you, you need to go out and recruit some new people who are. Because if you're running contests and people aren't responding, you have the wrong people. You're not going to get where you want to go in Primerica without motivated competitive people. See, these are the people who will face their fears because they want to win more than they want to be comfortable. And the people that aren't competitive, the people that aren't motivated, their fears will stop them dead in their tracks. The people that are competitive, they may still be afraid, but they'll keep moving because they want to win. This will allow you to, when you run contests, this is going to allow you to identify who you need to be spending the majority of your time with. You know, it's a natural law that 20% of the people do 80% of the production. I don't care what company, what business, it's always the same. So what you do is you better find out who they are. Who are those 20%? So that you can get to know them, so you can build relationships with them, so you can help them, so you can, you know, really lock them in. You know, I have contests so I can spend time with those 20%ers, those winners, and feed them the thinking they need to have to win big. So every time I have a contest, it's always geared so I can identify who are those 20%ers, whether it's dinner or something we're going to do. So I can spend time with them and I can work on their thinking and get them to start thinking like a winner and doing the things that winners think like, and I can sell them the dream on why it's worth it to keep doing what they're doing. You know, I could spend time with passive and non-competitive people until the end of time and nothing would happen. They aren't the right people. Your time is too valuable. So you need to qualify your people just like you qualify your clients. If you want to save time, make more money, grow faster, have more fun, use less energy to build something great, you've got to be very careful qualifying the people you spend time with. Contests can be very simple. In fact, the simpler the better. They should be designed to create the behavior that creates the results you want. So everything should be aimed as you design this contest, what is the behavior you want to create? So the contest needs to be designed about the behavior you want to create. They should revolve around recruiting and life production. I think every contest should always revolve primarily around recruiting and life production. If it's not revolved around that, you're off base completely because that needs to be the focus. The kind of prizes that you award are going to be determined by the amount of production required. For instance, the bigger the reward, the more the production has to be. How I generally figured out financially what I was going to give away in terms of reward, I would first figure out based on what I want them to do production-wise, whether let's say I say they need to do $5,000 in premium and two recruits, I would figure out what am I going to make in overrides on that $5,000 of production. Let's say it's $2,000. I would automatically say, okay, if I'm going to make $2,000 net, then I am willing to invest $500 of that $2,000 or 25% of it in the contest. So then I can do something really good for somebody that does that kind of production. Smaller production, smaller prizes. That's how you do it. So you just focus on that. Incentives can be lots of different things. You should have all kinds of different contests. You should be changing them up all the time. Try something different. Just have fun with it. Some of the contests that I have run and do run now are maybe tickets to concerts or sporting events, dinners. They could be really informal at a spaghetti place, or they could be really elegant at a place like Mastro's, which is one of the best steakhouses in the country, where you really spoil people when they do something special. They can be overnight stays at resorts. We have things like that going all the time. We have great resorts here in Newport Beach and Santa Barbara and all that. So we'll do something where they'll have to do $10,000 in personal production. If they do that, we'll spend a night at a really fabulous resort where it's $500 a night to stay there, and they get massages and all kinds of stuff. I tell you, man, not a lot of people win them, but you sure find out who the winners are, and you want to spend time with those people. It's an awesome way to do that. Overnight stays at great resorts. I just mentioned that. It could just be cash. You do so much production, you get a cash bonus this month, right? It could be shirts and T-shirts. A lot of times people kill to get a really cool shirt or a T-shirt. It could be jackets. A lot of people in our business, they have things where if you do $10,000 in person premium, you get a letterman's jacket or something like that, right? In my business, we have an inner circle contest every year that if you do $40,000 two months in a row, you get a beautifully custom-designed leather jacket, and then we take them on a little vacation to Cabo or to Hawaii or something like that. So that's a little bigger level, right? It could be a Palm Pilot. If they do a certain amount of stuff while they're getting trained, you give them a Palm Pilot when they get their license. It could be gas cards on Saturday morning. You give $25 gas cards. Gas is so expensive now. People love to get those. Or it could be time with top leaders. You could have a contest where if you do something, you arrange a lunch with a top leader, and you take those people to lunch, and they get to talk to and pick the brain of somebody that's really doing a great job. Or it could be CDs or DVDs on building a business, on how to do a great presentation or different parts of leadership, whatever it has to do with being successful in our business. And you could use your imagination. It can be all kinds of things, right? But you should really focus on doing contests. I think you should have a contest every single month without fail. And if you're not, again, getting results, then you need new people. That just tells you, go find some people who will compete because you're not going to build something great unless people are motivated and competitive. You need those kind of people to do something great, right? Just like you can't have a great sports team without competitive, motivated athletes, you can't have a great business without competitive, motivated people that are building a Primerica business. In conclusion, you guys, being a leader is simply deciding to be a leader. Just know where you want to go. Just focus on that. And then be the perfect example. That's what true leadership is. You care about your people. You care about their success. That's what true leadership is.
