7 WAYS TO BUILD TRUST AND DOUBLE YOUR BUSINESS AS AN APPRAISER

You’re trying to build your business but struggling with getting people to choose you or to buy from you. It’s not an uncommon complaint in business, and especially a service business like real estate sales, mortgage lending, or the appraisal profession. With a product business, often the best marketing and/or the best product win. Either you have a good product that solves a problem for the people who buy it, or you at least have some really good marketing to get people to try the product to see if it will solve their problem. 

But what about a service business? What about a business that relies on people trusting that you can solve their problem or get them the result they’re wanting and needing? Slick marketing may get them to see and hear you in a noisy and crowded marketplace, but consumers today are better educated, have more resources available to them than ever before, and are starting to research solutions to problems weeks to months in advance of actually making a choice. 

You might be tempted to think they’re looking for the features and benefits of your service, or a price versus value comparisons when they research, or the cheapest one to choose, but you’d be wrong. There is one thing, the absence of will kill all of your hopes and dreams…and your income, but the strong presence of will make you the talk of the town and can pave the path to success.

Good morning my friends and welcome back to the show. My name is Blaine Feyen, founder of the coaching academy and your host for this, and every episode of the always sponsor free, Real Value Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk about what that one thing is, why it’s so important, and the 7 actions you can, and should be taking, to master that thing. 

I won’t hold you in suspense any longer about what I’m talking about. The one thing that absolutely must be present when it comes to building a business, building relationships, making offers, and selling your services is trust. The absence of trust will absolutely kill your ability to sell your services to the market with consistency and profitability, but the strong presence of trust will set you apart from almost everyone else in the market.

There are a variety of things that need to be present when it comes to building trust, regardless of the type of relationship we’re talking about. Obviously, when it comes to your close personal and intimate relationships, there are aspects of trust that will go deeper than what may be required for a relationship with, say, a co-worker, a client, or a customer. But the same elements are required. Relationship building demands trust, and trust demands clear communication, consistency, honesty, integrity, transparency, accountability, and empathy.

If you want to build a strong and profitable business that can grow, scale, and weather all manner of economic storm, trust is the one element I would recommend focusing on. Yes, you need a solid product. Yes, you need technical proficiency. Yes, you need good customer service. Yes, you need good offers, product variation, options, and consistency in how it’s all delivered. But without trust, I submit to you that none of it matters. 

Before we jump into the 7 buckets or activities on the ladder of trust, if you are an appraiser and want to learn how to double your business in 2025 without doubling your time, you may just want to check out the Appraiser Increase Academy. A comprehensive self-study course for building a profitable appraisal business, a community of highly motivated appraisers, weekly exercises, trainings, and coaching videos, and a money back guarantee never seen in the appraiser industry. As my special gift for wanting to check it out, I’ve paid for your first month with no catch. Try it out, download whatever you wish, be part of the community, and see if your income doesn’t grow beyond what you ever thought it could. Just go to www.coachblaine.com/freemonth and try it out free for 30 days on me. 

There are 7 buckets, activities, or vehicles that we can use in business to build trust and, if you’re not doing any of these as an appraiser, an agent, a lender, or any kind of product or service-based business, you’re walking uphill, backwards, with no shoes in the snow. I’m going to lay out the 7 buckets for you in the order of slowest to fastest as it pertains to speed at which we can build trust. Lest there be any confusion as to why we’re talking about this, let me clarify. 

The reason to build a business is not to make money. The reason to build a business is to solve a problem. The end result of solving a problem in the marketplace is typically someone paying you for the solving of that problem. The bigger and more painful the problem, the more money the market is willing to pay to have it solved. The better and more efficient you are at solving the problem, the more money you make, the more customers and clients you gain, the more referrals and endorsements you invite, and the circle of business is complete. Rinse and repeat. The one main ingredient holding it all together is trust. When trust is broken at any point in that business cycle, it all falls apart. 

Have an awesome offer but shitty product or service? Trust is eventually gone. Clients talk, customers leave, you’re eventually out of business. Have a great product but unknown in the market? That’s a trust problem. You’re the best and most technically proficient appraiser around but nobody knows or cares? That’s a trust problem. If you’re not known, liked, and trusted in the market, you don’t have a business. And, by the way, take away any one of those three things and everything falls apart. 

You can be known and liked, but if you’re not trusted, you’ll be bankrupt in no time. You can be trusted and known, but if you’re not liked…bankrupt. You can be trusted and liked, but if you’re not known by enough people, you’ll struggle endlessly. It’s a 3-legged stool that requires all 3 legs to exist. 

The first bucket, activity, or vehicle for building trust in the market is advertising. It’s the slowest at doing so and likely also the most expensive, but it’s one of the rungs on the ladder of trust building. Ads cost money, people see hundreds of ads every day, ads take a long time and a lot of repetition to build any semblance of trust, and, unless you’re advertising some kind of offer that people simply can’t refuse, ads are an expensive and long-term play. 

Those of you doing Google or Facebook ads will know exactly what I’m talking about. The ads cost money, the keywords cost money, they may get your phone to ring, but there is an inherent absence of, or at least a very low level of trust from somebody calling off of an advertisement. An absence of trust doesn’t necessarily imply distrust, by the way. Somebody calling off of a Google ad doesn’t necessarily distrust you, but all of the trust building work is still ahead of you on the phone call, the options you offer, the script you use, how well you differentiate yourself from everyone else, and how well they think you can solve their problem. If you don’t have any of those things mastered, calls off of advertisements tend to be an invitation to a reverse auction where the caller is price shopping for the lowest price.

So, not only are ads costly and an inherently low trust initial interaction, but they also tend to be the least profitable sales. Any sale you make off of an ad tends to be a more negotiated sale, and then you have to subtract the cost of the ads from the fee and profit. 

Nevertheless, advertising is one of the means for having what you offer and sell become known and getting the phone to ring. If you’re really good at building rapport and trust at that stage, they can be a good way to gain a customer, albeit at a historically lower profit margin. 

The next rung on the ladder of trust building activities is writing. I’m using the term ‘writing’ over the term blogging because blogging has evolved in the 2020’s from its original meaning. Now, blogging can mean writing on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), informative Facebook posts, an actual blog on your website, a monthly newsletter, and so on. Sometimes those first ones I mentioned are referred to as ‘micro-blogging’, but blogging, nonetheless. Either way, writing is one of the ways to build trust in the market, especially if you’re halfway decent at it, can add some value with your writing, have an opinion, and a teachable point of view. Again, like advertising, it’s on the slower end of the trust building spectrum because people have to come to know you through your writing, which can take a long time to develop. 

The interesting thing about writing, or maybe I should say reading, is that, when we read, we tend to read in our own voice, and we filter what we’re reading through our own paradigm of the world. The writer doesn’t have the benefit of live interactions with you so they can’t add missing context or more color to whatever you’re reading to clear up misunderstandings. When we read, we create a little movie in our own minds about what we think the writer is trying to say. It might match what the writer intended, but it might not, which is why trust building through blogging can take a bit longer. 

Nevertheless, writing, blogging, posting informative things on social platforms and sharing your thoughts with the world is better than doing nothing. Writing is a long-term play and can have some really beneficial rewards. Writing, like podcasting and YouTube, has compounding benefits because your writing, once out in the ether, lives there forever. You might be sleeping in the middle of the night when someone halfway around the world finds your blog post from 2 years ago. 

If you’re committed to building an audience and gaining trust, which you most definitely should be, then writing is a great, albeit slower, way to do that.

The next rung on the trust building ladder, and I just mentioned it in the last one, is posting on social media. A little caveat here; what and how you post matters. If you’re just in the habit of posting your meals, your vacations, your drinking and smoking habits, or your political and religious ramblings, posting on social media may not be the best medium for you to build trust. 

If you’re a Realtor, ok, post away. That’s what all your coaches and trainers tell you to do and it’s one of the dumbest things I see agents doing, but it’s difficult to overcome some of the noise they get from the people they look up to. If you want to build trust and a following on social media, you have to do more than virtue signal about your closings, your social gatherings, your new listings, and your constant pleas to the masses about how they should call you if they have any real estate needs. It’s all just more noise in an already attention starved and noisy world. 

If you want to build trust and an audience on social media, have something of value to share. If content is going to be shared on social media, it should be informational, educational, motivational, or funny. And by funny, the best comedy for building trust is poking fun at yourself, not others. Self-deprecating humor can often be endearing to people because it shows that you don’t take life so seriously that you’d be a pain in the ass to work with. We have an automatic level of trust with people when they’re mature enough to let the world laugh at and with them. 

The fourth level of trust building activity, and we’re starting to build up the speed at which we can develop trust with each one of these, is podcasting. I know, I know, some of you will say I only added this one because I’m a podcaster, and you wouldn’t be completely incorrect. However, you’d just have the motive and result backwards. I became a podcaster because I love the medium, and also because I know it’s a much faster way to build trust than writing alone does. 

As human beings, we have very special instruments of detection built within our brains, our ears, our eyes, our nose, and our skin that are there for self-defense and survival. What I mean by that is that special wiring, the special software built within us all, and the special hardware we all have as humans is there to detect when something is a threat and when something is safe. The first things we sense in the womb are vibrations, then sounds, and then, when we emerge, we start to use our eyes and sense of feel and smell to make sense of our world. We learn through our eyes, ears, and skin what is safe and what isn’t safe. In essence, we learn trust by utilizing the hardware and software we’re given. 

With the written word alone, we can only use our eyes and the corresponding software in our brains to try and determine what is safe and what isn’t. The written word alone negates 4 of our 5 senses in the trust building and comprehension process. Even then, the sense that we do get to use, our eyes, is only allowed to see black text on a white page with which to filter through our brains and try to make sense of the world. We don’t get to see a human, an animal, a structure, or anything else with which to anchor us to the world we live in. We don’t get any other sensory input with which to feed to our brain, which hinders the trust building process. 

As soon as your brain can use one of the other senses to add nuance to the information its receiving, your brain can start to triangulate on what it’s perceiving. Just like a GPS needs at least 3 satellites to determine a two-dimensional position of an object, your brain prefers at least 3 of its senses to make the quickest calculations about safety and trust. The fastest and most preferred senses for most people are sight, sound, and feel. If you can see it, your brain can start to determine a path toward or away from a thing. If you add sound, your brain can start to really get a sense of danger, distance, and dimension. It’s able to paint a better picture of a situation than sight alone or sound alone can create. 

What that means is that, when it comes to human interactions, the human brain prefers to at least hear a human voice over just reading text on a page, even if the text on the page came from the same human that you’re listening to. Reading these words on a blog can have an effect but hearing me say these words through my own voice, your brain reacts completely differently. As soon as you hear a voice, your brain automatically humanizes the person speaking where, with written text alone, the human brain doesn’t make an immediate distinction between human or computer. 

In essence, with written text, the reader dehumanizes the writer. They detach the writer from the writing. With podcasting, we automatically recognize that there is a human on the other end of our ears and a whole different set of empathetic responses come forth. We would do and say things to an imaginary writer of a text that we would never do or say to the human on the other end of a phone call. That’s why the Appraiser Facebook forums are filled with so much negativity because there is no consequence for negative behavior when you’re merely typing on a keyboard to an imaginary being on the other end of your venom. 

However, if the person you’re denigrating in a fake forum somewhere was suddenly in front of you, you’d likely act completely different. You might still be a jerk, but you’d be way less of one because you’d be forced to humanize the person and what little empathy you may have comes out.

Podcasting is not only a way to get your literal voice out and ideas out into the world, but also a means of forcing the world to humanize you. As soon as we hear a human voice, we and they become human and the path to trust becomes much shorter and more direct. In fact, in human biology, there is a direct path from our ears to the brain and hearing something is a faster evolutionary pathway to self-defense than is seeing something. You may see a snake on a dirt path and think it’s a stick and disregard it, which can mean death, but if you hear something rustling in the tall weeds, you immediately know it’s a living thing that could mean harm. We trust our hearing more than we trust what we’re seeing.

If you have the guts, take your writing and put a voice to it and you’ll see the trust factor increase exponentially. 

The next step on the trust building ladder, and an even faster means of building trust, is what we call asynchronous video. It’s a way to refer to things like YouTube, Facebook reels and shorts, and any video that doesn’t require you to be live for the viewer to watch it. Asynchronous just means that whatever you’re seeing is not happening at the same time you’re seeing it. 

As we just talked about with podcasting and using all of our senses, as soon as you add a visual component to the audio component, you’re giving the viewer’s brain the opportunity to make much more nuanced judgments as far as trust is concerned.  Your voice does some heavy lifting as far as making you human in the ears of the listener, but then your eyes get to add a whole other dimension for the viewer’s brain. The trust factor can increase exponentially again. 

Obviously, I think you’re starting to see where I’m going with all of this. If podcasting speeds up the trust verification process, and asynchronous video exponentiates that process, live video is the next level up. Those capable and willing to do live webinars, live videos on social media, and live interactive type media will have a leg up on everyone else. When you do live video, not only does the trust factor potentially increase, but the respect factor can also increase as well due to something I call the ‘sympathetic fear factor’. 

The sympathetic fear factor is the sympathy we all share for people who do things almost every human being finds scary. When you see somebody public speaking, you have a natural sympathy for what it took to overcome the fear we all have of public speaking. There is an automatic respect garnered by the speaker for having the guts to do what most in the audience fear ever doing: public speaking. And a similar thing happens with live video. 

Most people don’t want to be on camera to begin with, let alone being on camera live. But those who are willing to do it in spite of their fear appeal to the trust and sympathetic fear centers almost all normal humans share. The trust factor has an opportunity to explode with synchronous (live) video. 

I’m sure you can all figure out what the 7^th level on the trust building ladder is by now simply by using all of your deductive reasoning capabilities. If podcasting, then asynchronous video, then live video are the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th levels, that only leaves live and in-person events, or at least interactions, at the top of the trust building ladder.

We can all relate to situations where we had to go to an event to meet people and we weren’t looking forward to it. As soon as you get there and start talking with real human beings, you realize it wasn’t as bad as you made it out to be in your mind and you leave actually liking some of the people you met.

Being live and in-person allows the others in proximity with you to use all of their sense to determine how much they want to know, like, and trust you. By now you hopefully have a better idea of how important all of our human senses are in the trust building phase of relationship building. Given that knowledge, it only makes sense that allowing other people the opportunity to use all of their human senses to build trust is a much more compassionate, not to mention expedient, way to elevate the trust factor. 

The more you can be in front of other human beings, the faster the know, like, and trust factors can be nourished. Of course, I always recommend from a time perspective to be in front of as many people as you can at one time, but if you fear crowds of people, start small and work up to larger crowds. Nothing beats being ‘belly to belly’ with other human beings when it comes to creating an impression, developing a relationship, and accelerating the trust factor.

Friends, if you’re not perpetually in the process of developing and increasing the know, the like, and especially the trust factor, you’re falling way behind. In 2024 and heading into 2025, with all the tools available to every single one of us, with the rise of AI tools, the sheer ease and simplicity of podcasting and video tools available, and especially how Artificial Intelligence is going to reshape what we think of as a relationship; what we think of as real; and just how valuable it will be to have a real human voice, a real human opinion, a real human teachable point of view, and be in real human contact with each other.

Of all the human emotions we experience on a daily basis, trust has never been more valuable than right now.