THE MILLION DOLLAR APPRAISER PLAYBOOK

Most appraisers will never make a million dollars—not because they can’t, but because they won’t. They’re stuck thinking small; they’re stuck in the lack thinking paradigm; they’re stuck thinking everyone is out to get them and put them out of business; they’re working too much; and they’re pricing themselves like amateurs. What if I told you that working harder is NOT the way to build wealth? What if there’s a better, smarter way to scale your appraisal business in 2025?

Let’s first define what I mean when I say ‘million-dollar appraisal business’. Is it a business that grosses at least one million dollars? It certainly could be. After all, if you’re grossing a million dollars, most people would say, ‘that’s a million-dollar business’. The problem I have with this kind of thinking is that, grossing a million dollars does not mean keeping a million dollars, nor does it mean living a good life, having time freedom, financial freedom, or really any other kind of freedom. In fact, it could mean the very opposite of that for some. Running the proverbial ‘million-dollar business’ could mean working way too much, earning way too little, having no free time, sacrificing your health for a little bit of money, dealing with way more headaches than necessary, and no enjoying any of it.

So, one of the first principles we have to address is the one that says, ‘it’s not how much you make that matters, it’s how much you keep and can invest that matters’. Grossing a million dollars, to me, is not a million-dollar business, especially if it costs you $700,000 to earn it. I know, some of you will say, “I’ll take it!” After all, $300,000 left over at the end isn’t chump change. That’s a 30% gross margin, which, depending on the business, isn’t bad. I believe most of you would take that…unless…

Unless the personal cost of earning that amount was so great that almost no amount of money would be worth it. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in several situations over the years where things looked really good on paper, but after all was said and done, I looked back and said, ‘that simply wasn’t worth it’.

If sacrificing your integrity, your humanity, your ideals, not to mention your valuable time, health, relationships, and goals is part of the trade to build a million-dollar business, that’s not a business you want to build.

So, for the sake of this episode, a ‘million-dollar appraisal business’ does not have to gross a million dollars. It doesn’t even have to net a million dollars. In fact, nowhere in your business does one million dollars have to show up or be counted to build a million-dollar appraisal business. For this framework, one I call, ‘The Million-Dollar Appraisal Business Playbook’, having a million-dollar appraisal business, or any business really, isn’t about earning a million dollars, but is instead about building a business that lets you live like a million-dollar entrepreneur. And no, I don’t mean by buying fancy cars, houses, and living beyond your means.

A million-dollar business is one that buys you time freedom, relationship freedom, financial freedom, energy freedom, health freedom, and a freedom that I’ve learned really matters as much as the others; integrity freedom, which is the freedom to not have to sacrifice your ideals, standards, and personality in exchange for some perceived benefit like money, security, or comfort. If your business is robbing you of any of those 6 freedoms, it’s time to make some real changes.

The Million-Dollar Business Playbook formula can essentially be boiled down to these principles:

1. High profit margins over high revenue
2. Leverage and automation over never-ending and useless hustle
3. Wealth building strategy over short term gains
4. A principles-based business model over following industry norms
5. Solving bigger problems that people will pay for over solving minor annoyances that are a commodity

Friends, success is not about working more hours to create more revenue. Revenue alone is a vanity metric that smart entrepreneurs easily see through. The most successful people I know, interact with, partner with, and try to surround myself with are not working 70-80 hour weeks because they’ve built businesses (often multiple businesses) that generate revenue beyond their direct labor.

The Million-Dollar Playbook begins first with a mindset shift, which essentially says that your income is a reflection of your business model, not the market. If you think your income is due to the market, your income will always be variable and out of control. If, instead, you realize that your income is a reflection of your business model, your systems, and your processes, you’ll place more time and effort refining your business model to create repeatable days, weeks, and months and less time worrying about what everyone else is doing.

The other mindset shift that is required by the playbook is a wealth over scarcity mindset. The wealth mindset is one that believes in looking at the world through a positive lens instead of a negative one; it stays informed about what’s going on in the world and in the markets so that opportunities can be spotted early; and it doesn’t waste precious mental and emotional energy on things that it can’t change and don’t bring some kind of positive return.

Let’s talk about some of the pillars of the Million Dollar Playbook:

Pillar 1 – Stop thinking like a technician and start thinking like a CEO

If you’re an appraiser and you own and run your own company, like it or not, you’re a business owner. One of the big problems in the appraisal profession, however, is that appraisers have been taught to value their technical expertise over their business acumen. This mindset has been crammed down our throats by our biggest industry organizations, instructors, CE courses, conferences, and almost every other aspect of the profession.

There is nothing wrong with being good at what we do. A continuous growth mindset should always be part of your personal playbook. But when it’s the only thing you ever hear about, you get what the appraisal profession has now: a big dilemma on its hands! The vast majority of appraisers have been spending their time processing regurgitated nonsense taught in CE classes about USPAP, and almost no time spent learning how to build a business that doesn’t rely solely on the appraiser for its survival.

If you want to be a master technician, I applaud and support you. I also very strongly encourage you to step back for just a minute or two and survey the landscape to see where that path leads you over the long-term. I’m saying this in 2025, where technology and AI is getting exponentially better in exponentially shorter time frames. If this was 1995, I’d tell you to become an expert in your field and then become the authority in your field while hiring a bunch of experts to work for you. In 2015, I’d tell you to become good at what you do (no expertise required), find a niche you can be an authority in, leverage technology and other people to buy back your time, and build a business around the ones who want to focus on being experts and not business owners.

It's 2025 now and almost all of the expertise you would have sought out in 1995 or 2015 can be plugged into a software program or an app by a non-expert with almost imperceptible differences in output. Is the technology, the software, and the apps perfect? No, but they’re getting better by the day.

Does the world still need human appraisers? Personally, I think it does, but that’s based on a paradigm that is rooted in what the financial system says is important for managing risk and those risk models, as well as the paradigm, are changing. When you hear me say that I don’t think you should be focusing on becoming an appraisal expert in 2025 and beyond, it’s not because I don’t value what we’ve been doing for the last 50 years, it’s because I see what is already here and what is coming in the very near future, which is a shift in risk management tools in the financial sector. Since most appraisers are heavily weighted on the lender side of the appraisal order equation, it’s something of a losing game. Not only are the easy, cookie-cutter appraisal orders disappearing, so is the margin of risk in the lending models.

What that means is that, 20 years ago, the risk models in lending weren’t sophisticated enough to predict predictable outcomes on loans, so they turn to the human to tell them what the market value is on a particular piece of real estate, which allows them to offload some of the liability of that risk onto the human that said what it was worth. Today, their risk models are infinitely better and predicting the upside, the downside, and worst-case scenarios. They have billions more pieces of data and market information at their fingertips with which to make lending and risk decisions that don’t require a human.

So, the question to all of you who are looking to beef up your Excel spreadsheet skills and add a few more letters after your name is, do you think that the technology and risk mitigation tools the lending industry has are going to get better or worse over the next 5-10 years? Will they get faster or slower? The answers are simple enough that we can call those questions rhetorical because you knew the answers as soon as I asked the questions.

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To be clear, you still need to know what you’re doing! I’m not advising you to get dumber or less skilled at the thing you do. I am encouraging you to shift your mindset from one that says everything in your business is dependent on you, including all of the income, to one that says, ‘I don’t necessarily need to be the expert because I can leverage expertise’, which includes understanding how to leverage technology, artificial intelligence, software, and the variety of different tools that are coming online almost weekly.

You’re a business owner, not just a technician. Start to shift some of your focus from the technician side over to the business owner side and see what can happen for you. Stop thinking like a technician and start thinking like a CEO. By the way, I didn’t say don’t ‘be’ a technician, I simply said stop ‘thinking’ like one. There is still a time and place for the technician to shine, but the technician mind seeks only to solve the technical issues it has expertise in. Start to become more of a technician in business, in systems, in leverage, in wealth building, and in freedom. Start to treat your appraisal business like a business and less like a job.

Pillar 2 – Maximize your fee structure

What does maximize your fee structure mean? It means to maximize your fees based on your desired wealth goals, which will help you decide what type of clients you want to work with, but also relative to your systems and overhead structure.

In the last episode I talked about raising your fees and what that means, so go listen to that episode before emailing me and telling me I’m contradicting myself. ‘Maximizing your fee structure’ is really a command to focus heavily on your systems. The command to ‘raise your fees’ can also mean what I’m about to tell you, it’s just that the principle of ‘raising your fees’ also entailed a bunch of other life and business-related things, where ‘maximize your fee structure’ is speaking primarily to leverage.

There will be a bunch more of you who hate me after this one because maximizing your fee structure, of done properly, means you can be the lowest bidder in any market and still be more profitable than those you beat out. I’m not encouraging you to be the lowest bidder, by the way, I simply understand business, leverage, and efficiency. I know lots of appraisers who can take a $275 appraisal and make it more profitable than somebody doing a $500 appraisal simply because of the first appraisers’ systems and leverage.

While my company doesn’t do any bidding for work (blessed!), we certainly could bid for it and probably win every bid by being the lowest bidder with the fastest turn time. Again, I know it pisses many of you off, but if you have the systems, the processes, the help, and the leverage, you can turn what many consider a low fee into a profitable bit of work.

Let me be clear on this point: if you are a one-person appraisal shop, this is not for you because time is your most valuable resource in that scenario and opportunity cost plays a bigger role for you. If you accept a $300 order when you could’ve accepted a $500 order, you’re now stuck using your hours to complete a less profitable piece of business than you could be. When you accept a $300 order because you have nothing else, I get it.

This pillar of maximizing your fee structure speaks to the whole process of developing the systems within your business that make accepting a lower fee order more profitable for you than it is for somebody who absolutely has no choice in the matter. I can do that because we have the systems, the people, the processes, the software, and the leverage to make both the $300 order and the $500 order profitable and we don’t have to choose between one or the other. We can do both and have them be profitable.

The goal with this pillar is not to have you become the lowest bidder in the market, it is to shift your focus onto your systems so that you have more options and more opportunities. The underlying principle of all these pillars and of the Million Dollar Playbook is having the freedom to choose. If your systems, or lack of systems, pens you in to having to take low fee work, you have no choice and that is not where you want to be as a business owner.

Maximize your fee structure relative to how efficient your business operates and give yourself more choices, more options, and more opportunities. Of course, this pillar also speaks to gravitating to markets and business segments that allow you to increase your fees while spending the same amount of time, or less, on similar work. What that means is, be careful of the $300 vs $700 fee argument. If everything is equal, take the $700 all day long. However, it’s not uncommon to have the $700 order take twice as long to complete as the $300 order. Even if it only took one and a half times as much as the $300 order, it very well may not be as profitable once you factor in the lost opportunity of the additional time spent on the higher fee order.

I talk to appraisers weekly who don’t understand this concept and we see them all the time on social media expounding on their business smarts when they exclaim, “I don’t get out of bed for less than $X!” What they’re saying when they say that is that, either they can afford to turn down certain types of work because of their position in life, their resources, their spouse’s salary, or low living expenses. What they’re not telling us is anything about their systems. What they might be saying is that they simply can’t accept anything less than that number because they have poor systems and high overhead. So, instead of taking a $400 order, they wait for the $600 order without calculating that the $400 order might only take them 4 or 5 hours while the $600 order takes them 6-8 hours.

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Whatever your specific numbers, don’t be lulled into thinking the higher priced business is always the better business. You MUST factor in your time, your resources, your overhead, and your opportunity cost, which is the sum total of all the things you can’t choose because you chose something else.

I’m going to give a quick shout out to pillar 3 and then move on because I talk about this one ad nauseum.

Pillar 3 – Leverage high profit niches

What’s a high profit niche? Non-lender work, legal work, specialty work, and relationship-based work. Keep in mind what I just went over with pillar 2 though; higher fee work isn’t always higher profitability work. I don’t care if you’re getting a $2500 fee on a residential deal, if it takes you 4 days to complete all the research and writing time to complete, you have to factor in how many $500 or $600 pieces of business you could have completed in that same time. If the latter is less, ok, you’ve got a decent comparison. But, if you could’ve completed 5-$600 pieces of business in 3 days’ time,  not only have you made more money with the latter scenario, you’ve saved a whole days’ worth of time.

The keywords in this pillar are ‘leverage’ and ‘high-profit’. Profit means what you take home after all expenses, including the time factor. If you aren’t including your time in your overhead expense, you’re missing one of the most important calculations possible. That’s why leverage is so damn important! We all only get 1440 minutes each day, so we all have to apply as much leverage as possible to maximize the use of those hours.

The appraiser mind is so rooted in fee over finances that they quite often throw the baby out with the bathwater. You must get leverage over your time, and you must focus on the profit over the fee. As we just talked about with pillar 2, there are many appraisers who can do more profitable at a lower fee than you for a variety of reasons. It’s not an argument for lower fees, but instead an argument for greater efficiency and better understanding of how profit is made.

Take a look at what the highest profit niches are for you based on your setup, your systems, your efficiencies (or lack of), and maybe most importantly, what you enjoy doing. What good is profit if you hate how you earn it? You don’t have to love what you do, but you should at least have some enjoyment in how you do it. Part of being profitable is doing something that doesn’t take all of the joy and your soul along the way. High profit niches are ones that are more profitable, not just in bottom line accounting numbers, but also in how much of your life they give back instead of take from you.

Pillar 4 – Build scalable systems and automation even if you never intend to grow

If you want to build a million-dollar business (remember, that doesn’t mean $1,000,000 in revenue), you have to think about scaling all the time. What is scaling? Scaling a business is different than growing a business, and this is a very important distinction.

Growing an appraisal business might scare some of you because growth connotes getting bigger, using more resources, having more overhead, which means more headaches, more people, more payroll, and so on. Scaling, on the other hand, is asymmetrical increase in revenue relative to resources. That’s a fancy way of saying that scaling is figuring out how to make more profit with the same or minimally increased resources.

Scaling can be thought of first as doing everything you do now but figuring out how to make more money in the same or less time with no significant increase in resources. When you implement a new system that saves you an hour per day, which increases your dollars per hour, thus increasing your profitability, you’ve just scaled your business. You had to spend $100, or maybe even $1000 in cost for the software, but by saving an hour per day from this day forward, you have exponentially increased your profitability. You’ll have the software cost recouped in a matter of hours or days with the time savings alone. The cost of the software is gone, the profits live on into perpetuity.

That’s a very simplified understanding of scaling, but hopefully it eases your mind when you hear the word. When I say to coaching clients, ‘let’s work on scaling your business’, the pushback I almost always get is, “but I don’t really want to grow it much bigger.”

Growth and scale are different, friends. To scale your business is to free up more of your time and resources while exponentially increasing the bottom line. Yes, sometimes building scalable systems means hiring an assistant at $5, $10, or $20 per hour. But, if that assistant is freeing you up from working on lower dollar, repeatable tasks at your hourly rate of $50, or $150 per hour, you’ve just freed up those hours to work on more important and higher value things (maybe also more enjoyable for you), and you’ve just created your first scalable system.

A scalable system is a system that helps to increase the bottom line exponentially without adding a commensurate cost or drain on your resources. That’s the first phase of scaling I like to call ‘micro-scaling’. Micro-scaling is simply analyzing everything you do in your business and how you currently do it to find some of the big inefficiencies that, if changed or eliminated, immediately have a positive effect on your life and business.

Yes, scaling can definitely infer growing the business bigger as well. It can mean wanting to add some appraisers, some assistants, and some data entry talent; but scaling the business means growing the profits exponentially with the same or minimal increases in resources. The reason to add some appraisers to your company would be to exponentially grow the profitability without a commensurate increase in your time, expense, and hassle. The reason to add some assistance or data entry talent would be to exponentially increase your bottom line without drastically increasing your costs.

Building scalable systems and automation simply means doing more and earning more with the same or maybe only slightly more resources. The goal with scalable systems and automation is to free you up to do more of what you enjoy doing, make more money while you’re doing it, and effortlessly start to remove yourself from having the sole responsibility for every single dollar brought into your company.

If it helps to remember the concept of scaling your business using a little word mantra, the mantra is ‘exponential versus incremental’. Exponential increases in revenue with only incremental increases in overhead or expense.

Pillar 5 – Stop doing it all alone!

You’ve probably heard the proverb, ‘if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, travel together’. The saying is often attributed as an old African proverb, but it’s actually what we might call an ‘anti-proverb’, or a proverb created to counter faulty wisdom from a different proverb. The saying that this one rails against is a line from a poem that says, ‘he who travels the fastest travels alone’, which comes from the Rudyard Kipling poem entitled, ‘The Winners’.

Whatever the saying, the wisdom is simple: if you want to go far, you’ll need some others. When it comes to having a blueprint or playbook for building a million-dollar business, this pillar is as important as all the others.

There’s a simple truth, which is that time is all of our most valuable resource and asset, with attention being one of the most important aspects of our time. What we give our attention and energy to expands. What we don’t or can’t give our attention and energy to withers and dies. We all only have so much time in the day to focus on the things that will bring us the most return for the time and energy spent.

When you work out, you want to do the exercises and workout that will give you the greatest benefit in the shortest amount of time and will have the greatest benefit over the longest time into the future. If you care about what you eat, you want to consume the most nutritionally dense foods that give your body the greatest benefit in the near term and long term. And when you’re building a business, you should be doing things that produce the greatest return in the shortest amount of time, as well as the greatest return over the longest period of time.

Of course, at the beginning, making money paying your bills is at the forefront of your mind and activities. However, the longer your attention and focus stays on only that aspect of your business, the longer you keep yourself in the cycle of simply having a job instead of a business. Again, this goes back to the idea that, if all of your income relies solely upon you forever, you’ve built your castle on sand that can shift and crumble at any time.

I won’t dictate to you in this episode what going far means, relative to going fast, nor what ‘not doing it all alone’ means for you. For many of you, simply leveraging the talents of others for simple, repeatable tasks like data entry, accounting, client follow-up, and so on is your first ‘not doing it all alone’ hire. For others, it may be rethinking your processes and figuring out how to grow with additional revenue producers over the long-term. And yet, for some of you, you’re at the point in your journey where the question is, ‘what else can I build, with the help and leverage that others bring as gifts into my life, that will help me grow, add to my purpose, passion, and profits, and make the world a better place?’

I’ve taught before on the 4 levels of business and personal growth known as the ‘Four S’s’, which I’ll be going much deeper on at a small, high-level retreat Dustin Harris and I will be co-hosting together in California in May of this year, of which the levels are survival, security, success, and significance. The longer you go at things alone, the longer you stay in the survival level even if it feels like you’re at the security and success levels.

 I would change the line from Kipling’s poem that says, ‘he who travels the fastest who travels alone’, to ‘he who travels the fastest picks the right travel partners’. Speed is relative to distance, meaning that we judge speed based on how quickly something moves from point A to point B. If you’re only going for a very short distance between point A and B, fine, do it alone if speed is most important to you. However, since distance is an important variable in that calculation, my recommendation is to gather others around you as early as possible in your journey and stop doing it all alone.

If you’re ready to stop doing it all alone and want to learn what some of the most successful of your colleagues are doing in business, give the Appraiser Increase Academy a look. You can check it out free for a whole month at www.coachblaine.com/freemonth. If you’re interested in learning more about the high-level business retreat I mentioned, you can find out more at www.coachblaine.com/retreat .