MAKE 2020 YOUR YEAR!

If you’ve listened to the episodes we did specifically on how to start a podcast, I talked about one method of creating seasons for your show with a specific number of episodes in each season. That way you don’t have to commit to 52 episodes or even 26 episodes. You can say a season is 8, 10, 0r 12 episodes. And I did exactly that at the beginning of this show. The first 15 or so episodes of this podcast were for my specific market of homeowners, agents, and lenders. It was a way for me to produce content for my market and supplement my speaking and teaching activity to Realtors, lenders, attorneys, estate planners, and homeowners. It worked great in that regard and then it stopped. We were so busy building the direct lender and private work side of our company that the podcast fell by the wayside for a bit. I was podcasting in some other industries during that time and building some of my other businesses so I was still active in the medium, just not for my appraisal business.

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Then, a few years later, I revived the show but made it appraiser, agent, and lender business focused instead of appraisal or market specific since I had been doing a lot of business coaching for appraisers and agents at that point. Thus season 2 was born, which was half of 2018, a weekly show from July of 2018 until December 31st. Then season 3, which was a weekly show almost every single week of 2019 right up until our last episode of the year, posted on New Year’s Eve. Season 4 will be another full year of shows but with some changes. I mentioned this in the last show but will state it again here that season 4 will be filled with even more content than season 3. I’ve added the diamond mining series which is a shorter show with some interesting stories about business, customer and client service, and entrepreneurship, not specifically about the appraisal business. We’ll be adding an interview series this season with some very successful people in a variety of industries. And we have plans in the works to be doing some video shows as well. We do video record most of the episodes so that we can pull snippets of shows and make additional content for linkedin and other platforms, but we have some things in the works that we hope to be more fun and interesting that take us out of the studio and into the world, so we’ll announce that when we launch.

Why do I tell you all of that? Simple, as always, I want to be transparent about what I am doing so that you can see how to do it yourself, if you’re interested in doing so, so that you have an idea of how we use our information, talents, and equipment to get our thoughts and ideas out to the world, so that you have some idea of where we’re going so you have something to look forward to, and, maybe most importantly, you can hold me accountable for the things I say we have planned. We talk a lot in this show about goal setting and accountability and I am not above being held accountable for what I say I’m going to do. I do this show because one of my passions is sharing, teaching, coaching, and always growing myself and that means setting some stretch goals for myself and the show as well. It has to be evolving or it will be dying. Nothing stays the same forever and if you’re not pushing it in some way, it atrophies and eventually dies. I want to make sure this show is continually adding value for those willing to invest their most valuable currency so I am pushing myself and the show to continue growing and evolving. So that’s what we have planned for 2020, as far as the show is concerned. I will also be sharing with you, periodically, what we are doing to evolve the Coaching Academy, since we have some big plans for that as well this year. We are building a nice website that will have lots of information, lots of free content, this show will be over there, the blog will be there, some free tools for your life and business will be over there, more information about coaching, of course, my teaching and traveling schedule as I have some live workshops in the planes in different places around the country, if I will be speaking or teaching at an event somewhere, it will all be in one place, and some fun stuff like the videos I mentioned earlier, so be on the lookout for that coming soon. With that said, lets get into the show!

So after doing our end of year recap show last week where we chose the top five episodes of 2019, we got lots of feedback from that show from people saying things like, ‘loved it and didn’t even realize I hadn’t listened to these episodes’, or ‘I totally forgot about that one, I need to go back and listen to those again, or, ‘I liked those episodes but I wish you’d do a recap of these episodes’, and then they’d list some of the shows they got the most value from. Wherever the feedback was, I just really appreciate the input and you taking the time to listen to the show so thank you my friends, I appreciate you! What we decided to do for this week’s show was go back and recap some other popular shows on the list. I think I mentioned in the last show that picking only five shows out of almost 50 last season was super tough because I know there were a bunch of shows with a ton of valuable info in them. I know that may sound conceited and arrogant, but there were shows where we literally laid out, step by step, what to do to improve your life and business in some way and those are valuable episodes, in my opinion. So, I’m going to take this episode and recap several more shows we did in both 2018 and 2019, but instead of ranking them based on listener feedback, I’m going to rank them based on which shows held tremendous value in terms of info, recommendations, and step by step guides so lets jump in!

The first episode that I think deserves another listen is an episode called ‘So You Wanna Be an Appraiser’. This was an episode that I did back in 2018 and it was aimed primarily at those looking to get into the appraisal business, those searching for a mentor, and those maybe already in the business but still considered a newbie to some degree. I talked all about adding value and how to look at the value proposition you’re presenting to a potential mentor. We get resumes, calls, emails, and messages from new appraiser, and seasoned appraisers, asking about mentorship or employment. In an extremely rare couple of instances, we’ve had a couple people indicate what they would be bringing to our organization in terms of added value. However, in a very deep 99.% of inquiries, its almost always the same request: wondering if you can mentor me, I need to get my hours in, or, wondering if you’re hiring, I’m looking for work. Of course, they state their qualifications and experience and all of the other things a resume typically contains. Let me share a little bit of advice my friends: a typical resume is a throwback to the Stone Age or the stuffy corporate arena where, if you aren’t using the absolute most recent suggestion for font, layout, or spacing, your potential career is cancelled by some HR person immediately. That’s how most resumes are sifted through in corporations. Smaller organizations, maybe not. Maybe in a smaller organization they’ll take the time to actually read through and then make some notes on the resume. My point, however, is that in the age of Google, social media, YouTube, and content creation, sending a standard paper resume with all of your qualifications as the first point of contact is absolutely ridiculous. It may get you something, but it’s the wrong way to go about things, in my opinion.

My suggestions in that episode were simple, make what I call a ‘wealth inventory list’ of all your life skills and experiences, sift through that list for connections, experiences, and insights you might be able to bring to a potential mentor that you believe will help that person or company be better as a result of hiring you. Simple idea but not easy for most people and I’ll tell you why. Very few people, and by very few I mean almost all, aren’t thinking deeply about value. They’re thinking about what they can get, how they’re going to get through the day, how they can maximize revenue and lower expenses, how to get more business, how to utilize their people more effectively, how to pay their taxes, whats right in front of them, what they have to do later, tomorrow, next month, etcetera. Even savvy business owners aren’t necessarily thinking about how they can pile on the value over and above what their product and service costs the market. Especially appraisers. Appraisers think about the orders they have in front of them, for the most part, and a few 1%ers focus on building up their businesses so that they can have a better life. If they all thought about adding value and being the best in their business and in their markets, it would be much more difficult to compete in any market based on expertise and value. Instead, what most appraisers compete on in any market is simply price and turn time. So, a new appraiser coming into the business has a big challenge in front of them: find somebody willing to take them on as an apprentice. The best way, as we suggest in that episode, is to come at it from a different angle. Don’t waste your time sending resumes. Spend your time building your inventory of skills and value you can bring to a potential mentor and make them an offer they cant refuse. Most appraisers believe that training somebody else in the appraisal business means training their competition, and to some degree they’re right. If you train somebody to do what you do, and it’s relatively easy to get a license into the industry, then you very easily could be training somebody that will leave you and take potential business from you. This is all true.

However, what I would also suggest to a new appraiser, is that you think in terms of helping a mentor build up their business so that they don’t have to worry about you taking their business. Add enough value for the mentor that, should you leave at some point in the future, you’ve helped build their business enough that there is adequate compensation left within the mentor’s business to offset your leaving. When I left my mentors company I left a company that I helped build considerably bigger than when I started there. I helped add offices and markets, started an appraiser training course, added almost 20 new appraisers in 7 offices, and added a bunch of new clients. I also left vowing not to touch even one of my mentor’s clients while building up my own business, and I didn’t. In no rational world could somebody say that I didn’t add considerably more value than what I was paid and what it cost my mentor’s company to train me. I also came into my mentor’s business with an offer he couldn’t refuse: let me work for you for 6 months for free. You train me to do this kind of work and, while doing so, I’ll help build your organization bigger, more profitable, more efficient, and add new business to cover my cost. In return, if I do what I say I will do, after six months you pay me all of the back pay based on an agreed upon salary, plus any bonus you feel reasonable based on what I’ve accomplished. Not only could he not refuse my offer, but because I even made the offer, he brought me on, paid me from day one, trained me, gave me a BMW 5 series as a company car, and eventually a nice office and ownership in the company. Is that a unique situation? Maybe, maybe not! I saw opportunity, he saw moxy, chutzpah, confidence, and somebody who believed in what they could bring and I brought it! I busted my tail for that organization and wore the logo proud. We built something I feel was unstoppable and a killer business model. An offer for which the owner, my mentor, profited from for many years after I left.

Now, you might say, “see Blaine, even you left so an appraiser’s fears of their apprentice leaving are justified!’, to which I would say that I’ve already granted you that fear. It’s a very real thing. But as I spoke about in the follow up series called So You Wanna Be a Mentor, I didn’t leave to start a competing appraisal company, I left because my mentor and I had a falling out about some business practices and some things I uncovered in the financials that simply couldn’t be remedied by anything under my control. I left because of an uncorrectable situation. I left because I couldn’t add any more value to that organization. In essence, I left because of a very common issue with mentors, not the apprentices: the mentor simply doesn’t have a viable growth plan or greater options for the apprentice. Where there is a ceiling, there will always be somebody wanting to break through the ceiling. Where there is a dead end, there will always be a human desire to want to break through the wall at the end of that street. Where there is a mentor who cant, or doesn’t want to grow in some way, there will always be an apprentice or employee who simply says, ‘I can do better.’ However, I don’t believe most apprentice appraisers begin that way. The problem though, is that most come at it that way. Most apprentices seeking mentorship seek it out in a way that screams, ‘TRAIN ME SO I CAN EVENTUALLY LEAVE!!!’, even if that’s not what they mean. Stop going about it that way and you’ll have greater success finding and actually helping a mentor than those who simply send out resumes hoping for the best. Go back and listen to the episode called So You Wanna Be an Appraiser to hear more about this topic.

The next episode I think added tremendous value for appraisers was an episode called Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone. I recorded that episode in October of 2018, so, again, not necessarily a 2019 recap, but in scouring they archives I found this episode to be an important one and for the reasons I’ll share. In that episode I introduced you to a man named Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker was a brilliant management consultant and author. Drucker passed away in 2005 but he left a legacy of deep thinking about management and entrepreneurship. One of the concepts, or questions, Mr. Drucker forced people to ask was whether they were a real entrepreneur or merely a proprietor of a business and he explained what that meant. In essence, what he said is that a proprietor is somebody who adds nothing meaningful to a particular business category. They merely siphon off market capital and wealth from the market without necessarily creating any value and offering that back to the market. I talked in that episode about a Drucker concept called economic value added, which is adding more to the market than the cost of your product or service. A restaurant, auto shop, grocery store, Realtor, Lender, or appraiser that does things the same way everybody else does it, and the same as the thousands that have come before them, is adding very little, if any, real value to the market. They’re simply doing things the way they’ve always been done, more or less, and taking an income from the market. They are extracting energy, oxygen, and money from the market by providing a necessary service, but not really adding anything more to the market for the fee paid. Appraisers take the order, produce the work, send off the file, get paid. Rinse then repeat. Great! Good business model for many. Nothing more required…until it is. And you’ll know when something else is required in and by the market because you will see and hear appraisers all around the country bitching and complaining about fees, order quality, shitty clients, shitty realtors, shitty homeowners, how people have no clue, and on and on the rants go. Rest assured, these are the proprietors my friends. These are the ones who think they can just make a basic hamburger, offer it to the market, and demand filet mignon fees. You know what? Change that! Its not even that they demand filet mignon fees, its that they complain they’re entitled to those fees! Mr. Drucker would simply say that the market will tell you whether or not you’re entitled to those fees. If there is no EVA, or economic value added, you wont receive those fees and your clients will eventually leave you for a cheaper faster version, another basic proprietor of the same commoditized service that the previous proprietor was offering. 

Then, of course, there is the entrepreneur, the one who sees opportunity everywhere. In that episode, called Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone, I go through the comparisons between a real entrepreneur and a mere proprietor of a business and I also introduce you to a few valuable questions that Peter Drucker taught in his management seminars. These questions are questions that should be asked by everybody in business all the time. Of course, I cant give you the questions here, you have to go back and listen to the episode so that you get the full context of the questions and the concept of economic value added.

The last episode that I’ll talk about here that I think is worth a go back and listen is the one called Love Letters From The Grave. I did this episode in January of 2019 and its title comes from a couple exercises that we do in the Coaching Academy whereby we have the coaching members write out their own eulogy first, which I actually detail in an episode called Don’t Fall Off the Cliff. In the write your own eulogy exercise you have to imagine you’re sitting in the pews at your own funeral and you are listening to whomever is leading the ceremony, along with the parade of friends and family members who step to the podium to share a kind word and memory about you. In the exercise, you are asked to write the eulogy as if you were a spectator and listening to all of these people talk about you. What will they be saying about you? What will they be saying about the legacy you have left? Will they go on and on about how you helped as a leader, as a giver, as a father or mother, as a teacher, as a brother or sister, as the kindest most uplifting person they knew, or will they have to really scratch for a couple fun memories of you to make you sound like a better person than you really were, as people sometimes have to do at funerals. The real value in the write your own eulogy exercise is that when you write it as if you’re listening to your eulogy today, not 20 years from now, you may find some holes in the way people would remember you today versus how you really want them to remember you when you actually do pass away, which is hopefully many years from today. The great news is that when you realize that what people would say today is nowhere near where you’d like them to be speaking about you, you can begin to change your legacy. The exclamation point on this whole topic is that you come to the understanding that we are all creating a legacy whether we like to think we are or not! When you become intentional about it you have an opportunity to shape your legacy instead of it simply happening as a result of happenstance. The question is not ‘will I leave a legacy?’, the real question is ‘what kind of legacy will I leave?’, and the follow up question, ‘what kind of legacy do I WANT to leave?’

The follow up exercise to the write your own eulogy exercise, an exercise I introduced in the Love Letters From The Grave episode, is one where you write what are called Legacy Letters. Legacy Letters are letters that you write to your dearest friends, family members, colleagues, those you’ve mentored, and anybody else you’d like to imagine speaking at your funeral, and then write a statement that starts with, “I would like my wife to remember…”, and then you go on to write in detail what you want to be remembered for. You go through this process with everybody on your list and intentionally imagine how you would like to be remembered. Again, you may find when you go through this exercise that there are some holes in how you would like to be remembered and how they might actually remember you if you die today. The beauty being that you still have time to create the intentional legacy that you want by being deliberate about the actions you take from this day forward. Of course, there is much more in that episode that I’d like you to listen to and work through so, of course, I’m going to encourage you to go back and listen to that one.

Now, of course, as I have said several times, I like to think all of my episodes are bangers that drop tons of value. For some, maybe not so much if they’re not ready to hear certain things, or maybe they don’t like my voice or the way I might say something, and that’s ok. I am always speaking to the one who has ears to hear and a willingness to learn and grow. I learned from 25 years of teaching martial arts that you simply cant speak to and get through to everybody. You can have people sitting right in front of you listening to your words but, for whatever reason, they don’t really hear what you are saying or whatever you are saying is not resonating with them in that moment. Either because they’re not ready to hear it, I’m saying it in a way that doesn’t have meaning for them, they already know the information I’m speaking, they have some issue with me personally, our egos clash, or whatever the hundreds of other reasons somebody may not resonate with me. Its ok and I’m ok. That is real life and I’m ok with that. I am always only speaking to those who want to listen and can get some value, sometimes in spite of the messenger. Nevertheless, as I was going back through many of the past episodes to put together the year end recap episode, I came across a bunch of episodes that I believe are episodes they need another mention lest they be missed, especially by newer listeners and subscribers. As I looked back I was reminded of episodes like Top 3 Ways for Appraisers to Add Value where I go over just that, ways to look at your business with new eyes and deliver more value in the market than the cost of your service. There was an episode I mentioned in the recap episode called Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty where I go over the techniques and processes we use to build a bulletproof private appraisal work business. Those of you interested in growing that side of your business absolutely need to listen to that episode and take some notes. Do I know everything and do everything right? Nope! But I am both an experimenter and a benevolent thief. I try things and I steal ideas and processes from outside the appraisal industry and make them work in my business. I leverage as many ideas, technologies, and concepts from the best businesses in the world to build a fan base of raving clients dying to pass on our company name and phone number to somebody looking for our services and we’ve done it in ways that the vast majority of appraisers don’t even think of. If you find value in that, great. If you don’t, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.

There was an episode called The Secret to Getting More Business, Pay Yourself First, Can We Speak Like We’re Old Friends, Develop Your Master Message, The Value Ladder process, and a bunch more episodes where I literally spell out for you the exact process we use to build a bulletproof business that serves our lives instead of a business that just makes money. Both are great, I’ll always take the former over the latter though so I try to offer that to others as well. I’ve had a bunch of money making businesses. I haven’t always had money making businesses that served my life. Most of them were businesses that took more of my life than what they gave in return. I can say that now at 49, the halfway point in my life. I couldn’t necessarily say that at 25 because I hadn’t been through all of the life challenges yet at that point. What I can tell you now that I couldn’t necessarily tell you then is that making money can be rewarding and it’s a hell of lot better than not, but living a life that is intentionally imagined and then created and served by the business is far more rewarding than the pursuit of income alone. The irony in all of this is that the pursuit of income alone actually pushes it further from you. The pursuit of a life intentionally imagined, deliberately executed, and purpose defined attracts and creates far more opportunities for income and prosperity to flow into your life than the other way.

As always, I thank you my friends or investing your most valuable currency, you time, listening to this show. I am interested in delivering the absolute most value I possibly can in these episodes and one of the ways that can be multiplied is by having you take action on the ideas and exercises. Do the work! Its free! I give you the exact processes I use in my own life and businesses, as well as my coaching program, to design the life and business of your dreams. If you just listen and don’t do, you wont profit in the same way you will if you take some action. I don’t want to come off like Tony Robbins by continually saying take action, but it’s a fundamental truth that action must occur before change can begin. It doesn’t happen the other way around. As the author Jerry Sternin wrote, “its easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than it is to think your way into a new way of acting.” Take some action in 2020, commit to doing that thing that you’ve been putting off for years. Commit to getting help in your business if that’s something you’ve had on your mind. Commit to making the change. Make 2020 your year my friends and until next week…I’m out!