WHY InstituteWHY Institute"After years of trying to figure out a way to help Four Hills Country Club stay solvent, the mortgage lender couldn’t stretch any longer and decided to foreclose on the note. The last attempt to save it was a call to Larry, John, Bill, Jeff and Paul asking them to buy the club or they would be forced to foreclose.
The group didn’t want to buy the club but wanted to save it because they were sick and tired of Albuquerque and New Mexico being first at being last. They couldn’t stand to see this country club and the neighboring community fail as many others have in the past. Without the country club, the projection was that the 1400 homes in the neighborhood would lose property values of $100 million+ and that great property would be another in a long line of local failures. So the group made a deal with the lender to have 1 year to sell 100 shares to make the country club member owned.
We knew it wasn’t going to be easy as not one person besides the 6 founding shareholders felt it could be done.
Thru work with the WHY Institute we realized our WHY was to Contribute to a cause greater than ourselves, to add value, make a difference and have an impact on the neighborhood, the city and state. How we did that was by constantly looking for Better Ways to bring in 100 new shareholders and members to make the country club a Different kind of place. We were so united in our cause that nothing was going to keep it from happening. When times were tough we always went back to WHY we were doing this. That was the fuel to carry us forward.
7 years later the former Four Hills Country Club is thriving as The Canyon Club. We now have 176 shareholder members, we currently have a waiting list for new golfing members and the neighborhood has transformed with property values up by more than $100 million. We are very proud that the Canyon Club is thriving and was picked as the best Country Club and best Golf Course in the city of Albuquerque. Because our vision was clear from the onset, we were able to stay the course and are proud that we are now first at being first!"
"Dr. Sanjeev Aurora said, ""I need to raise a billion dollars so that I can treat a billion patients.""
He said he needed to get in front of the right people where he could tell his story and involve them in the Echo Project.
I (Dr. Gary) said, "let's play this out. let's say you were sitting on a plane next to Bill Gates and he told you he would give you 3 minutes to tell him about the Echo Project - what would you say?""
Dr. Aurora said, “there's no way I could tell him about the Echo Project in 3 minutes! I would need at least 45 minutes!”
And that was his dilemma. How do you powerfully and succinctly tell the world about what you do? We spent one day with the Echo Project team and took them through discovering their Business WHY.os and building their Business message.
Now when somebody asks doctor Aurora what the echo project is, he says,
"So what is ECHO?"
Let me explain it like this. A young woman, Vivian, living in Lordsburg, NM (or any small town), has rheumatoid arthritis. She cannot afford to travel to Albuquerque to see a specialist for treatment and without treatment, her hands will swell, shrivel and she will have permanent damage. It doesn’t have to be that way. At ECHO – we believe that freely sharing knowledge empowers anyone, anywhere to make their communities better. HOW we do that is by helping medical teams make sense of the challenges they face. First, we help them CONNECT. Second – we MENTOR. Third – we GROW our network to help more people in more places. We are the global leader in providing virtual specialty care to underserved communities – and that is the ECHO Model." To date the Echo Project has trained over 500,000 doctors and treated 20 million patients in underserved areas all over the world.
A couple of months ago, I got a call from the President of a very successful family owned company in our state. He said, “I’m concerned about the future of our company. My brother, sister, and I want to transition our business to the next generation but we’re not sure how to communicate what the business means to us and more importantly, what it meant to our father, who founded it almost 60 years ago. We’re afraid that they won’t know how to express the values of our company as they move into the 21st century and that we’ll become just another company or worse, not be able to transition successfully, and lose the business we’ve worked so hard to create.”
The WHY Institute brought the executive team together for two full days and worked with them to discover their individual WHY’s and to develop a unified WHY Based message for their company. Over those two days, they got to know each other better than they ever thought possible. We had each of them take the WHY Discovery, and they learned WHY they do what they do the way they do it. They learned that they have a diverse team and that each of them have a WHY that brings strengths, challenges, and solutions unique to their WHY. We helped them craft a WHY based message and create We Believe statements that represent what they believe as a company and that helps them communicate clearly to their clients.
They walked away from the workshops united in their vision for the future and excited that it’s aligned with their father's original vision. They also felt that because of this, the transition to the next generation will be smoother as they now have the filters to make better quicker decisions with which they are all aligned. The opportunities for growth are huge, all the while keeping true to their founder's vision of what they truly believe.