Last week I attended the Real Estate & Entrepreneurship Conference for Physicians, in Dallas, TX. (PIMDCON24). It was great meeting with fellow entrepreneurs in person. Shaking hands and talking face-to-face is so much nicer than meeting on zoom.
I was overjoyed by meeting people who have been positively impacted by my writing. It makes me feel that my efforts have been useful. At one of the lectures, I sat in front of a physician who said, “I’ve read all of your books.” Another said he met me at this conference three years ago and purchased my Locum Tenens Course which changed his life. Another person said my Automating Your Real Estate Investments Course got his wife and he to start investing in real estate. Then I saw one of my coaching clients speaking on stage and I felt like a proud papa. Meeting these people as well as others made the conference very fun for me.
Since I was there to teach and help other physicians, I was often in the halls answering questions and therefore missed some of the lectures. I heard great things about what I missed and will be catching them on video soon. But of the lectures I was available to attend, there were a few that really caught my attention and taught me things that I want to pass on to you. These are lectures I plan to watch again as soon as I have access to the recordings from the conference. Here are the highlights.
“Buyer Beware” How to Spot Bad Deals and Bad People
This was my favorite lecture of the conference. Dr. Tom Burns is a seasoned investor and orthopedic surgeon from Texas. He has participated in a lot of deals and encountered a few “Wolves” along the way.
He shared a few red flags to get our “Wolf Radar” up and running, and hopefully keep us away from bad deals and bad people.
He categorized the wolf tricks into ten areas we need to be watching out for.
1: Becoming your new best friend. Wolves like to become your best friend until they get you to write a check. Then they move on to become someone else’s new best friend.
2: Offering a better mousetrap which seems too good to be true.
3: Making things seem so complex that you feel you need the wolf to guide you.
4: Making things confusing so you are not able to figure out that you are being led to slaughter.
5: Creating chaos is another way to keep you from seeing the truth.
6: Communicating well until you give them a check and then all you hear are crickets.
7: Making commitments they do not keep or only appear to be keeping.
8: Delaying things to keep you from finding the truth. Once you suspect a wolf, they have ways of staying in the weeds so you can’t quite prove it until it is too late. I loved his quote: “K-1s are often late because they couldn’t finish cooking the books in time.”
9: Delegating failure to someone else. The wolf is the person behind the wins while someone on their team is the idiot behind the things that didn’t go as planned. They do not assume the responsibility when they should.
10: Misdirecting you from the truth by changing the subject or pointing you somewhere else when you are getting close to the truth.
If you detect wolf tricks and it gets your wolf radar running, it is best to find another deal. There is always another deal to be had. Getting deep into a deal with a wolf is a bad experience. I felt this one lecture was worth the entire admission price to this conference. If this lecture stops you from getting taken by just one wolf, it was worth it. A wolf can cost you millions.
Expanding your Identity Beyond Medicine
Dr. Peter Kim, the organizer of this conference, gave a lecture about how we identify ourselves. Many of us are locked in the “Doctor Box.” We only identify with being a physician. If that is our sole identity, what happens when we are no longer practicing medicine? We lose more than just our job we lose our entire identity.
We are more than physicians. We are friends, spouses, parents, entrepreneurs, investors, musicians, artists, athletes, teachers, and so much more. We were encouraged to acknowledge the other things besides being a physician that define who we are.
Everyone at the lecture participated in an exercise with a name tag, the kind we often wear stuck to our lapel. We were challenged to give ourselves a new name by answering the following: I am ____________. But the blank must be filled in with something other than “a doctor” or anything like it.
We all came up with other aspects of our lives that could be used to define us. I loved this so much that during each of the mastermind sessions I lead, I asked those in my group to tell me what they wrote on their name tags. It was fun to hear the answers. Everyone in my groups wrote some aspect of business or success. Mine was very different from anyone else’s I encountered. Mine read “I am Grandpop.”
For me, being involved in raising my grandsons has redefined who I am. I am no longer chasing the things I spent so much time and energy pursuing over the years. I am now chasing after the things that will make a difference in my grandsons’ future.
What are you chasing and how do you define who you are. Fill in your name tag and see where it leads you.
AI: The Biggest Opportunity in Real Estate
I wasn’t interested in attending this lecture as I have been avoiding artificial intelligence since it started. This lecture changed my mind and rocked my world. I had no idea that so many things could be accomplished well with artificial intelligence.
This was a real estate conference so she showed us what AI could do for our real estate businesses. But she added other things it could do as well. By the time she was finished, I saw AI in a whole new light.
Imagine having AI answer your medical office phones at night. The person calling would not get a recording, or leave a message, instead they would think they were talking to a real person. Questions would be answered, and appointments made in real time. Then when your receptionist or nurse arrives at work in the morning, there are no overnight messages to respond to. Patients did not have to wait for a scheduler to call them back the next morning because the AI answering the phone was able to take care of both the scheduling and answering any questions they had.
She made her point that in a very few years the business world will be divided into two categories: Those who use AI and those who don’t. Those who use AI will be so much more productive than those who don’t. It is worth looking into how AI can help you and your business.
The Power of Physician Coaching: Evidence-Based
I have been coaching physicians for many years and have seen firsthand what changes are made in the lives of people who don’t think they can change anything. I note significant changes after only the first session! This lecture put some real numbers into that effect.
The study did an assessment of each participant before coaching began and again after only eight weeks of coaching. The following three statistics stood out to me.
Professional Fulfillment went up from 27% to 68%. (Increased 252%)
Burnout dropped from 77% to 33%. (Decreased 56%)
Positive Self-Valuation increased from 17% to 63%. (Increased 370%)
This is an incredible result and mirrors what I have seen from my own clients.
If a blood pressure pill drops systolic BP from 150 to 140 (a 7% decrease) it is thought to be a great success.
If physician coaching was a pill, with these incredible results, everyone would be taking it.
I had a great time at PIMDCON24 and suggest that you click on it and purchase a copy of the recorded lectures for yourself. Hope to see you in person next time.
