In October, 2006, I had a problem. While getting ready for a trip to the Outter Banks, I was bouncing my 17 month old on my lap, drinking a coffee and checking my emails. Fast like lightning, he spilled the Starbucks on my Toshiba…and in an uncanny feat of chance, the coffee had also gone into the back of my Networked Drive, and my Router.
A cleanup made my computer seem to be OK, but it wasn’t meant to be. About 10 minutes later, my Venti Verona seeped into the computer, and it breathed its last. I was using ACT 6.0, nothing online at the time, and it was tweak-figured to my liking. Activity series, word docs, and all. Gone, toasted, busted. A trip to the data recovery center at MicroCenter said it was dead to them, dead to all.
The whole disk.
My backup disk was in worse shape, taking it out of its casing revealed that it had been entirely saturated in coffee. My son in one swoop, used a 1.85 cup of coffee to destroy a $700 laptop and a $300 backup drive. In a lot of ways, I was a proud dad.
But, I had a problem: I was leaving for vacation without a database. My lifelong history of maybes, dids, mights, won’ts and dids-but-with-someone else was gone. I only had my pipeline of 7 deals in the Flagstar pipeline, and the emails that my gmail had archived. And that was it. Nothing else–nothing else at all.
That was about the best thing that ever happened to my throughput. That blessing from Jack doubled my income and my capacity to produce.
One of the things every realtor-mortgage lender (that doesn’t use something like Kaliedico) does is over-report and overestimate their pipeline. The reason for this is the maybes. These are the folks that could benefit from you, but don’t feel a sense of urgency. They may not get the paperwork together for weeks or months. But they close, and they kill your inventory turns because you count ’em in March, April and May. And hey, you are right at the beginning of each Read more
