Have you ever heard of Dave Ramsey? A lot of us have heard of Dave Ramsey but he is someone that wasn't super popular like five years ago. But over the last few years, boy, he's really taken a leadership position even within the real estate industry.

So who's Dave Ramsey? Dave Ramsey is a financial author, consultant, and coach. He has a podcast and hosts a radio program, which is highly syndicated across the country in many different media outlets.

What Dave Ramsey is doing is interesting. Because a lot of people don't know that he's now earning upwards of $40 million a year just in real estate referrals.

What he's doing is he positions himself as someone that's the expert. And then people come and say, hey, who does Dave Ramsey trust in each of the markets to list my home? He then collects a referral fee by referring agents to his audiences.

What a brilliant idea.

But what's really interesting about this when we take a hard...

What can you learn from Guns n Roses about real estate?

My wife and I took a road trip recently and I took the time to download a book for us to listen to. I don't think she was too impressed in the beginning, but she learned to love it. It was a great book by Duff McKagan talking about his experience as the bassist for Guns n Roses.

We learned his crazy biography of how he got started with the band and what he went through in his life. One thing that he talked about, which really fascinated me, was when Guns n Roses was beginning as a young LA band. They would have to go out and meet with club owners and lounge owners to try to talk them into using them as a band.

In other words, they had to sell themselves. And something the lounge owners and business owners did was instead of just paying these kids to come in and play -- and if they were terrible, make their guests run out -- they would make the bands pay them to play in the lounge or...

There's one key thing that all great leaders possess: The ability to be self-critical. They're aware that they're not perfect. And that they need to change, adapt, and pivot to be more competitive in their market.

So how do you do that?

One way is to encourage brutal honesty and absolute transparency with your teams — both inside your office and community as well as outside of it.

If you're an agent, this means asking your escrow officers, lenders, and co-op agents to be brutally honest with you.

Now there's a magic question to help you do this that I learned years ago from a top producer that took her business from around $2 million a year to $10 million a year in only about two years.

When I asked her what she did to transform her business from 2 million to 10 million, she told me she just started asking this key question after every closing.

Here's her key question: "Hey, listen, I'm working really hard to improve my business this year. I really...

Have you gotten all of your reviews and recommendations from your past clients over the past year? If the answer is no, you're missing a huge opportunity because there's a young, aggressive, and strong agent that's rising rapidly and would like to capture your future clients.

These young agents are listening to podcasts, watching webinars, and they're learning about a secret weapon in the market — and they may be beating you without actually beating you.

Here's what I mean by that:

These young, aggressive agents are capturing reviews and recommendations. And they are hyper-conscious of getting five-star reviews from everyone and anyone who will give them to them. They're making sure that those reviews go on all the right places, which I'm going to outline for you. And what happens is you can have an agent that's only been in the business 2-3 years, but online, they look like they are super experienced because they've stacked up more reviews and...