SILENCE IS NOT A SUCCESS STRATEGY

Let me say something that might sting a little; appraisers have done a pathetic job of making themselves really matter in the marketplace. You’ve got decades of knowledge, real market insight, and the kind of expertise that could command premium fees... and yet most of you are hiding behind forms, hiding behind made up rules, hiding behind appraiser independence rules, and, overall, simply afraid to be seen. Meanwhile, louder, less qualified voices are taking your opportunities. Sorry if this hurts, but If you’re not visible, you’re not really that valuable. And if you’re not building a personal brand and becoming known, you’re paving your own path to extinction. It’s time to stop being invisible and start becoming undeniable.

In this episode, I’m going to give you some things to think about as we continue to move as a profession into uncharted territory. Things have been changing for a good while now, but the change has exponentially accelerated with speed of innovation, expansion of artificial intelligence, machine learning, software tools, changes in lending standards and requirements, and all the changes in the world in general. I say it all the time on this show, but if you need me to say it again: things are never going back to the way they used to be, so get over it and get after it.

The first thing I want you to think about is this: silence and invisibility is a strategy for survival, but not for success. Silence in any business or profession is a strategy for staying broke. If I was teaching you how to survive an active shooter scenario, silence and invisibility become superpowers, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

We’re touching on the very reasons you decided to start a business. It’s doubtful you got into business because you wanted less freedom, less independence, less income, less recognition, and less opportunity. It’s likely the exact opposite. You went into business to have more of all those things, not less.

I get it, as appraisers, we’ve been taught from the beginning to be neutral and objective, which often translates into silence and invisibility. The irony of all of this is that many of those silent and invisible appraisers are the loudest and most obnoxious ones on social media forums when they’re complaining about something they have zero control of, and they’re screaming to people who have no capacity to change things for them. Sheer stupidity!

Bottom line: if you’re not building brand equity, you’re building a path to your own obsolescence. In any business, one of the goals is to build demand for what you’re offering. If you’re silent and invisible, you’re not creating demand, you’re just waiting to be picked. Most appraisers are simply waiting to be picked and typically by someone who doesn’t even know or care who you are. If you’re not picked, they’ll quickly move to the next one.

Visibility equals control over your leads, which translates into demand for you and your offerings, which is called leverage, and leverage leads to income. If people don’t see you, they can’t choose you.

The next idea to chew on is that, if you truly want to be in control of your business, it is imperative that you get out of the technician mindset and spend some time in the CEO and business strategist mindset. To be clear, I’m not saying you have to abandon the technician mindset completely. What I am suggesting, however, is that to build a successful asset you have to become an asset builder, and that doesn’t happen when you’re working on technical stuff.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve built, or helped build, several businesses over the past 30 years, two of them being a large mechanical contracting business and a large martial and cultural arts business. In both of those businesses, we had technicians. In fact, in both of those businesses, I was one of the technicians. In the mechanical contracting business, among other roles I had over time, one of them was as a literal technician installing and repairing HVAC systems. In the martial arts business, I was the chief instructor and in charge of building up all of the other instructors in that business.

I know what it feels like to be stuck in technician mode in business. Sometimes it’s fun and very fulfilling to be the one doing the work. The challenge is when that’s ALL you want to do in the business. In fact, as Michael Gerber talked about in the E-Myth, it’s one of the big reasons most small business owners got into business in the first place. They realized they were decent at doing that kind of what, they had what he calls an entrepreneurial seizure, and they suddenly decide to start a business doing the technical work they just happen to be good at.

In both of the businesses I mentioned, we hired technicians. Why? Because we could. Technicians in both the HVAC business and the martial arts business are always looking for a place to trade their expertise and time for dollars, and there is nothing wrong with that, unless you’re the business owner.

Unfortunately, rarely is the technician equipped to wear all the hats and fill all the roles required to successfully run a business. Friends, you’re not just a technician, so stop always thinking like one. There is a time to be the technician and a time to be an architect. When it’s time to be the tech, be the best damn tech you can be. But when the business is starving for an architect and a CEO, it’s time to shed the technician hat and put on the CEO hat.

Friends, your knowledge and experience is rare and your insights into the market can command a premium. The problem for most appraisers is that they present themselves like generic data processors with an attitude problem. The age we’re in now, one bursting with digital noise, AI content overload, and the ability to solve a host of problems without a human, is rewarding real human educators with deep insight, advisors who have compassion and understanding of the real problems people deal with, and thought leaders who aren’t afraid to give their opinions on topics even when those opinions are a bit controversial. Learn where the line is between technician and strategic advisor because one will pay you exponentially more than the other.

The third thought I want to share with you is this, either you will build a personal brand and elevate yourself or you will fall further into the commodity black hole. When you’re a commodity, you have 2 tools with which to compete: speed and price, and not in the direction that favors a higher price and slower speed. It’s the exact opposite. A commodity is chosen for being the cheapest and fastest solution. When you have a respected personal brand as an authority in the market, you get to set your price.

If you want to have some armor around your business model, you have to build some moats. Many castles had moats around them to make attack from the outside more difficult. Some were dry moats, some had water filled moats, but the purpose was the same: to slow down or completely prevent an advancing threat to make it inside the castle.

Your business is your castle and your armor and moats are your personal brand; your content; your authority and expertise in the market; the recognition and respect you have from your market; your lead generation machine, and your sales strategy. Notice I never once mentioned how good you are at appraising homes. Not that being good doesn’t matter, it’s simply not a defense. I know lots of really great appraisers who can’t survive in this profession because they have no other business skills.

If you’re tired of being a commodity, it’s time to extract your cranium from your rectum and start to recognize which skills the market will pay for and which one’s they don’t really care about. Start building your personal brand today or suffer the consequences of ignorance.

The next thought and piece of advice for not being silent and invisible is that content is your new resume. I know, I know, whenever you sign up for a new AMC, they ask you for sample files, your license, your E&O policy, and your resume. Resumes are like business cards in that they are an outdated form of pandering for scraps from somebody you probably shouldn’t be doing business with in the first place.

Every piece of content you create is a digital asset that is working for you 24/7/365. Content is any form of information you put out into the world that gives somebody a good idea of what you think, what matters to you, who you are, what you offer, and why they should choose you. Blog posts, podcasts, videos, Facebook groups, presentations, and anything else you can put out into the world on your behalf becomes leverage for you.  If you aren’t showing up online with value driven and value-added content, you are remaining invisible and silent by choice.

Start making content today! Start with one medium like a blog or podcast. Pick 2 or 3 topics you want to become known for and then go all in on showing your face, speaking your thoughts and opinions, and sharing real stories that can help somebody, even if its just with a new perspective on something.

I’ll offer an additional thought on this one for those of you who have a script playing in your head and your identity that continues to lie to you and say, “that’s just not me! I’m not somebody who speaks out, or makes videos, or writes blogs”, it’s time to rewrite that script. I don’t really care what your excuses are; quite simply, if you’re not creating content in 2025 you are a silent and invisible contractor waiting in the corner to be called by somebody searching for the cheapest and fastest. If you’re ok with that, you’re not the one I’m speaking to. If you’re not ok with that, then its time to change the tape playing in your head that says ‘that’s just not me’.

If it’s not you, it will be somebody else like me who will do it. I don’t care if you’re 75 years old and all this tech stuff is new to you. If you’re still in the business and want to have some agency over your future, you simply have to do it. Content is the new resume.

Here’s something else to chew on while you’re mustering up the courage to turn on your phone camera: if you’re thinking that confidence comes before doing something scary, again, you’ve been misled. Confidence is a byproduct of doing shit that at first scared you but did anyway. If you’re waiting to feel confident before posting your first video, you’ll die silently and invisible. Confidence doesn’t come before action, it comes FROM action.

By the way, we were all beginners at something at first. You were a beginner appraiser at some point. I was a beginner martial artist, hockey player, father, drummer, mountain biker, skier, snowboarder, podcaster, coach, appraiser, business owner, and a half dozen other things that, because I stuck with them and was not afraid to look stupid and awkward, eventually moved out of the beginner phase. That doesn’t, by the way, mean that I’ve mastered all of those things. It simply means I’m not a beginner anymore.

Mastery isn’t always the goal. In most things I undertake, learning the thing to see if I enjoy it or it enhances my life in any way is the goal. If there is some joy or benefit, the goal becomes an infinite game whereby mastery and winning isn’t the goal, just continuing to do the thing is. In those cases, mastery is a byproduct of continuous doing of the thing with continuous improvement. Eventually, somebody else can call you a master at that thing.

If you’re scared to create some content and then post it, good! That’s a good sign that it matters! Your first 10 or 20 of anything will be cringe worthy and embarrassing, but that’s not the reason not to do it, in fact, it’s the very reason to do it. It’s like standing at your bedroom door on the second floor looking out at a raging fire in the part of the hallway. You cant jump out of your window, you’ll die. The only way to safety and survival is to run through the fire in the hallway to the point where there is no fire and make your way out of the house. You jump out the window, you die. You stand too long in the doorway, you die. You stand in the middle of the fire, you die. The only solution is to run through the fire if you want to survive.

Making those first 10 or 20 posts or pieces of content can feel like staring at the fire in the hallway. You know what you need to do, but you’re afraid of taking those first steps because making those pieces is like feeling the fire licking at your arms and legs. It might hurt a bit and may even leave a scar; at least an emotional one. But, I assure you, those scars heal quickly, especially once the additional market recognition and income starts to come in from your efforts. You have 2 choices for how to experience the cringe: jump into the hallway of fire and deal with the cringe of making a few bad videos, or the cringe of being broke, burned out, and forgotten. The choice is yours.

The final bit of advice from this episode is this, if you truly want to future-proof yourself and your business, focus more on your intellectual property and your unique business model as your armor and the moats that protect those assets. And, make no mistake, those things are the real assets, not you. You can’t be the greatest asset in your business because what if one day you can’t be that, either because you’re sick, weak, dying, or burned out; or because the market doesn’t care about you and what you do any longer.

Let’s face the hard truth, friends, artificial intelligence and machine learning is most definitely going to eat away at low level appraisal work. AMCs and outsourcing of data collection will continue to drive down the cost, and therefore the fees, of the easiest work. Yes, you can specialize in a particular area of appraising that will help buy you a certain number of years before technology creeps up into those areas as well. Or you can build authority, a killer brand, and deep relationships as armor against those things.

Friends; intellectual property, content, your voice, your face, your unique frameworks, and your unique insights are your moat. They are your defense for what is already here and what is coming. They may not protect you forever, but they will at least slow down the encroaching threats to you and your livelihood.

The next 3 to 5 years will not reward the most technically skilled. They will reward the most visible, the most valuable, and the most vocal. I encourage you today with one final thought: you are not here to be somebody else’s commodity, you are here to become a category of one!