DON’T BE A FANCY VICTIM!

I don’t now about you, my friends, or how your 2019 turned out, but I am happy to share with all of you that my 2019 turned out as expected, and better than planned. By that I mean that we expected the successes we had this year because we do goal setting, vision planning, and tracking and measuring of our numbers and activities throughout the year so nothing was a big surprise to us. What we are also happy to report is that things turned out better than planned, which simply means we plan for success, we plan for contingencies and adjustments that may be required along the way, and we have certain expectations. All the way along, with a regular monthly P&L, a budget, tracking and measuring of our key activities, we make micro adjustments along the way to ensure that we’re on track to meet our plans, at the very least, but what ultimately happens when you plan out your year and adjust along the way is you pave the way for better than expected outcomes. Even though we typically set stretch goals in a bunch of areas that push us to do more than initially thought possible, when you engage in that type of ‘deliberate future creation’, you create unintended space for even greater opportunities to reveal themselves, which is exactly what happened for us in 2019. Was 2019 our best year yet? In many ways yes, but I’ll share with you how we qualify that metric.

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This being my 20th year in the appraisal industry, I have definitely had years that were up, years that were down, years where we were building, years that we coasted, and years that I call remodeling years, which were the years where I started to get more creative about how I operated my business, how I implemented new projects, how I looked at the business and started to ask some really important questions about the kind of life I wanted to live and how my business would help fulfill that mission. What I can tell you is that I definitely had years where we did considerably more business just from a numbers standpoint. But I can also tell you that it was a time in my life when I was the least happy I have ever been. We were producing big numbers as a company and I was making an income far beyond what I ever imagined and far beyond 99% of appraisers around the country. I was also running my martial arts and leadership academy, traveling around the world, and just generally flying by the seat of my pants.

My marriage was failing, I wasn’t as present for my kids, and, to be honest, I didn’t really care. In my mind, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing which was to be building my businesses and that was my way of providing, or so I thought. It wasn’t until my world came crashing down and my personal life essentially imploded that I started to really think about what was important to me, how short life is, and how valuable it is to have a business that is imbued with your personal values instead of a life that is imbued and run based on your business goals and values. This is really when things began to make sense to me and I made some drastic changes to my life and business. That was 10 years ago and today, I’m quite happy to report that my life, and my business, look completely different and both are considerably more profitable than I could have ever imagined. By the way, important to state that we don’t produce near as much as we were producing back then but are making considerably more as a result of implementing the things that I have been talking about in this podcast for the past year and a half. Our fees have gone up considerably since then, we don’t do any AMC work, we pick and choose who we work with, we have a backlog of private clients who would like us on their exclusive lender appraiser panels, we have a backlog of private clients who would like to be using us for their divorce, estate, pre-listing, investments, and a variety of other appraisal needs. In essence, with no specific special skills, no prescient vision or knowledge of the future or things to come, although I can say with confidence that I saw the writing on the wall back in 2008 and 2009 (at least some kind of writing even if I didn’t know how it would all play out, and still don’t, for the lending side of this business), we built the kind of business that many dream about, many complain about, many exclaim that it’s the type of business they’d like to have, and some even say its just not possible. It is possible my friends, and I’m living proof that it’s possible. And in fact, if it wasn’t possible you wouldn’t be listening to my voice right now because if I hadn’t started making the changes I made back in 2009, I wouldn’t have had the success I’ve had and I wouldn’t have had people seeking me out for private coaching. If I hadn’t been coaching others to be more successful in this specific business, as well as a variety of other businesses and industries, I wouldn’t have started a podcast to teach more people the same principles and methods that have worked for us. But we did, and I did, and we’re here now talking about it.

 What I’d like to share with you in this episode are some of the questions I asked myself back in 2009 that lead to a reinvention, if you will, of my business, but more importantly, a reinvention of my life. I have stated many times throughout these episode about just how important questions are to any growth process. And the quality of those questions determines the quality of the answers you get. The quality of questions and answers ultimately illuminate your path and direction for the next moments from there on out. The most important factor in that process, however, is not the necessarily the questions you ask or the answers you get, but the actions you take based on the questions you ask and the answers you get. You see, my friends, I learned something long ago about myself that I didn’t really know how to explain so I used to call it ‘being a victim of my own success.’ What I meant when I used to say that is that, in some sense, I had become as successful as I wanted or needed to be so I had little motivation to do much more. That is until something changed and then I found myself scrambling to shore up what was lost or what changed and get back to the previous level of income or production. We’d find ourselves scrambling to replace a lending client that switched to an AMC we weren’t signed up with, or to add a new client or two to make up for the fee reductions from current clients. In essence, we had a business that was completely out of our control and we were what my friend, and fellow business coach, Wayne Salmans from Hero Nation Coaching calls being a ‘Fancy Victim.’ A fancy victim, in his words, is a high achiever who complains or beats themselves up when things don’t go as planned but they didn’t take action on the things they knew may have prevented the loss or failure. I’ve never really beat myself up over things like that, but I have been caught many times relaxing and basking in the glow of success only to have something change and, BOOM!, I’m scrambling to fix or replace what was lost. I’ve been caught making excuses for how I didn’t see it coming, or bitched about disloyal clients, and just generally engaged in behavior that made me a fancy victim: a individual essentially wearing a tuxedo and exhibiting some level of success, but complaining about things seemingly out of my control.

So the first question I have for you before getting to the questions I asked myself back in 2009 is, how many of you are just fancy victims? How many of you wear nice clothes, drive nice cars, have nice homes, and a nice life but stand around screaming to the world about how bad things are? How many of you know what you’re supposed to be doing but don’t? How many of you have ever used the phrase, ”…but my market is different.” How many of you have found yourself rooting around in the shit with all the other complainers in the various social media forums? How many of you found yourselves over the last year or so complaining about your software, or the AMC’s, or the homeowner, or the Realtor, or your market, or the fees in your market, or the competition, or the you fill in the blanks about whatever you were complaining about. If you raised your hands for even one of those in that list, you engaged in fancy victimhood and you should be ashamed, even if for one small minute. You’re not a victim of market forces or circumstances. You’re not a victim to the AMCs. You’re not a victim to technology or software monopolies. You’re a victim to your own base instincts to roll around in the shit and listen to other victims exclaim how proud they are of their own victimhood. Victims who hang around other victims feel better about their situation because there’s strength in numbers. If another dude in a tuxedo is bitching about his bad experience and dumb luck then there must be something to this bitching stuff, lets jump in and get dirty with him. Shame on you! Do you know what happens when you jump into the shit pit with a bunch of fancy victims? You become one yourself. You start to adopt their victimhood and their way of thinking and when you’re a victim you give up control of the outcomes. By the way, just because there are 10, 20, or 100 people all complaining about the same thing, it does not mean that it’s a real thing. This is a fallacy called an argumentum ad populum which basically concludes that a proposition must be true because many, or even most people believe it. Sorry folks, that’s not how the world works. Just because there are a bunch of people wearing suits and dressed in the cloak of success bitching about something or other, doesn’t mean its true, right, or even a real thing, they very well might just be fancy victims and I’ll strongly suggest you not become one of them.

So what questions did I ask myself back in 2009 that ultimately changed the way we do everything? Here they are and in no specific order of importance. These are questions I wrote down at the end of 2008 on a yellow legal pad when I was trying to figure out what the future held for me, my business, and the people that worked for me. This was, of course, during the mortgage meltdown and the massive changes that were just beginning to take place in the appraisal, real estate, and lending industries. The first really valuable question I wrote down was:

1. ‘why am I doing what I do every day? What I wanted to stir within me was some kind of justification for doing the work I was doing up to that point. I had worked in a variety of industries by then and I had always moved on to what I considered to be better opportunities for me and better suited to my personality and my specific gifts. Now I found myself in the appraisal business, running my own business, and at seemingly the lowest point possible for appraisers. Was I married to this business? What was my driving motivation to keep doing it? Why are you doing what you do every day? Is it because you aren’t trained or qualified to do anything else? Is it because you’re a multigenerational appraiser or teacher or realtor and there is some family pressure to do that thing? Is it because you love the money? What if you love the money but hate the work? Why are you doing what you do every day?

The next question I wrote down is:

• What if I fail at this, how would I recover and what would that look like? In essence, I was asking myself a question that has become a staple in my days since then, a form of risk assessment and risk management, a tactical question that often sounds like ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen and what would I do about it?’ What would failure look like and how would I recover from the worst possible outcome? Do you ask this question of yourself? If not, why not? If you say to me that you don’t ask the question because you’re a positive person and you just have confidence that you wont fail, I’ll say you’re lying. Most people don’t have the guts to ask this question because its much more comfortable to assume bad things wont happen and, even if they do, you’ll just figure it out if and when they do. I can assure you my friends, its much better to ask the question and have some contingency plans to back up your escape route than to have to adjust on the fly and try to recover from disaster. This is no different than if I was teaching a tactical applications course and going over the plans and tactics for executing a specific tactical mission. We’d have a primary plan, a plan that delivers the best outcome in the best conditions assuming everything goes our way. Then we’d have a secondary or contingency plan and assume some screw ups or where things could go pear shaped. Then we’d have a tertiary plan assuming the worst case scenario and its basically every man and woman for themselves. Its great to be a positive thinker and I don’t encourage focusing for very long on the negatives of any situation. However, I highly recommend taking some time as we head into 2020 to think about your secondary and tertiary plans for success or change. Ask yourself, ‘what if I fail, what does recovery look like? What’s my backup plan? And what else can I or we be doing to create the best possible circumstances to ensure we don’t fail? If you don’t ask the question, you will not build the plan.

The next question I asked back then when things looked pretty damn bleak was a question I got from the blogger and author, Chris Guillebeau, which was:

• What’s truly worth doing, regardless of whether I succeed or fail? This one is simple but deep. I dare say that most of you wont have the guts to plumb the depths of this one, but if you do you’ll be a much happier person for undertaking the challenge. Asking yourself what’s truly worth doing, regardless of whether or not you succeed or fail is a question about values. It got me thinking about important things. It got me thinking beyond just the numbers and beyond income goals. It got me thinking about what was truly important to me and whether or not I wanted to spend my time doing things I didn’t really enjoy but paid well, or did I want to do things that gave me joy, even if they didn’t pay as well. By the way, this question also lead me to the next question I asked of myself, but it also lead me to a very important couple of realizations which were that the two ideas did not need to be mutually exclusive of each other and that one could be making lots of money doing things that added value to the world. There are definitely some instances where we might sacrifice happiness because of the money, but that’s a choice we make inside. The thing itself is not causing us the unhappiness, its an internal conflict we have with the thing. Its like saying money is the root of all evil. First of all, that’s not the real saying, and second, money is an inanimate object, an energy, a means of survival and trade, it does not have the ability to be evil or good. The real saying comes from a couple passages in some versions of the Christian bible which said the love of money is the root of evil, not money itself. It’s the human being holding the money and their motivations to get it or use it that may have the ability to cause some kind internal struggle, but the amassing of money and wealth isnt in itself mutually exclusive to happiness, just as having lots of money doesn’t correlate to being happy. We have to decide what is worth doing in this life and what we are willing to trade for that choice. Asking yourself what’s truly worth doing regardless of whether you succeed or fail is simply a way of opening the mind to potential. What’s truly worth doing for you, regardless of whether or not you were to succeed or fail?

As I mentioned, the last question lead to this next one which is a two part question and is simply:

• What would you do for free, even if somebody was willing to pay you for it? What do you love to do so much that you’d be willing to do it for free, even if there is a market of people willing to pay for that thing? The second part of that question is, if somebody is willing to pay for that thing, how could you profit from doing it and still retain your absolute joy of doing it. You see, this question touches on the part of many of us that says I need to keep my hobbies my hobbies and my business my business (or my vocation my vocation). I don’t necessarily disagree with this, by the way. This is the E-Myth concept that says just because we’re good at something and might love doing it, we’ll also be good at running a business doing that thing. We know, of course, that this is rarely the case. The amazing car mechanic is rarely the most amazing car mechanic business owner. The two things are different. The best appraiser is not necessarily the best appraisal business owner. This is, in fact, why so many appraisers are one man or woman shops. They’re good at being appraisers but have no interest or aptitude for running an appraisal business with others working for them. Running a business doing that thing requires a whole different set of skills most don’t have and even more aren’t willing to acquire. However, this question is not necessarily asking you how you can capitalize on your greatest hobby or passion, although it could be asking that, its also asking about what it is that gives you the greatest joy and what it is about that that drives you. Once you have an answer to that you can then ask the follow up question, ‘how could I imbue or inject my current work with that same joy? How could I have the same joy and passion for what I do for income? And what would I have to change to make what I do for income more closely aligned with what I have a passion for?’ Of course, the ancillary benefit of asking a question like this is that it actually could lead to another business doing the very thing you have the most passion for.

The last question that I’ll throw at you from my business remodeling exercise from 10 years ago is one that I initially got from my teacher, Mr. Toyoda, and subsequently revised a few years later when I saw a similar idea and question expressed by author Warren Berger in is book, A More Beautiful Question. The question has three parts and goes like this:

• What do I want to say? Why does it need to be said? And How could I say it in a way that’s never been expressed or done before? What do you want to say? What do you want to tell the world regarding what you do? Be careful! If your answer is just a loud exclamatory bitch session about how bad things are and what to stay away from your business or profession, save it, the world has heard it a million times. If you have a problem with the way things are being done, how could you do them differently? That’s what this question is asking. What do you want to say and why does it need to be said? If you say it, can you then implement that into your business. Can your business become a living example of this statement or exclamation? And then, how could you say it in a way that hasn’t been expressed or done before. I can tell you from personal experience in a variety of industries, after we asked this question we found very real, very creative ways to say what we wanted to say in the way we wanted to say it and we started doing business differently. And yes, this most definitely pertains to the appraisal industry. I’ve said many times how we refer to our company as an education company that also does appraisals. This came out of the answer to this question and became our ultimate identity which has lead to being in the position we’re currently in, which I stated at the beginning of the show. What we wanted to say to the world was that we’re different in that we exist to educate. We educate our market with our appraisals and valuation consulting work. It didn’t stop with just a catchy phrase or concept though. It actually began there! It was he start of a whole series of questions like: how do we show our market that we’re committed to educating them above and beyond everybody else? How do we set ourselves apart in this regard? How do we show this in every interaction with our organization? How should it affect how our people speak and act? How do we go to market with this idea and why is this important. This has become a never ending question, by the way. I still ask it today and will be asking it again this week as we go into our own business and vision planning sessions for 2020. What do you want to say to the world, or even just to your market? Why does that need to be said? And how can you say it in a way that’s never been done before.

5 questions to start asking as we end the year 2019 and head into 2020, a whole new decade with lots of promise and potential for those with eyes to see it and the guts to ask the tough questions. Let me assure you that there were many more questions I asked of myself and my company back then, but I don’t want to overload you with too many right off the bat. I also know that only an extremely small percentage listening will actually ever take action on free information and that’s ok. If I did this podcast hoping that more people took action on my very detailed suggestions for success in life and business, I would have quit long ago.  I’m not going to quit though because when I asked the last question of myself a back in 2017 during our business and vision planning, I came up with an answer of what I wanted to say, why it needed to be said, and how I could do it in a way that nobody has every done before. I also know a secret, most people will never do anything until they absolutely have to! These last 5-10 years have been really good for appraisers and, in a sense, have also been the worst in that many of you haven’t had to do squat in your business. You’re like skinny fat people who look in the mirror and see a lean healthy body, but you eat and drink anything and everything you want because you never gain any weight. Then one day you go to the doctor and he says you have heart disease from your shitty diet. You thought you didn’t have to do anything special because you’ve always been lean regardless of what you ate. Most businesses thrive when things are good and getting business is easy. These are the businesses and individuals who laugh at changing things, doing business planning, hiring a coach, or looking at their P&L statements. Why should they? Its like taking candy from a baby! Until its not… that time is coming and those of you who are planning, taking care of business, asking the important questions, minding the numbers, and being creative will ultimately be the market leaders when the inevitable market cycle changes. Those who aren’t and don’t, my guess is they‘ll end up becoming fancy victims. Until next week my friends, the very merriest of Christmases and happiest of holidays to you and yours. I’m out…