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Category: Group Therapy (page 80 of 81)

February 13, 2008

Stash that cod-piece: I’m not waxed fruit and you are not a rock star

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I should probably stop picking on this little nebbish, but he’s such a champion at leading with his chin that I find him hard to resist. His theme? “Rewriting the book on how to kick ass.” I wish I were joking. I’m gonna guess that he wasn’t among the first picked on the ass-kicking team in grammar school, and I’ll bet a large dollar he wasn’t even in huge demand for the coloring-outside-the-lines squad. I just love it, though, that he’s so completely dysclued that his ass-kicking theme song is entitled — wait for it — Unchained. And before you trouble yourselves trying to imagine Kevin Boer and Noah Rosenblatt in day-glo-hued spandex tights with huge cod-pieces — these two being Davison’s envisioned rock stars of real estate — stop for a moment to consider that we are talking about marketing in the world of Web 2.0. Rock stars are all about “Me, ME, MEEEE!!!!” This role belongs to the customer, not the vendor — this according to this same mental midget a few weeks ago. Brian Brady and I are rewriting the book on real estate marketing, an iterative endeavor that will see its next big advance at the real Unchained. But if you want to find a Web 2.0 star, it’s not me or Brian or Kevin or Noah. If I were to pick one person who best expresses what consumers are looking for in a Realtor or a lender, I would pick Dan Melson. There’s is nothing of a rock star in the man, but if “fiduciary” had a face, it would be his — and that comes through in everything he does.

I, very much on the other hand, command attention. The words I, me and mine are sweet on my tongue, and I have to admonish again and again that what I am teaching and what I am doing are two different things. One of the persistent delights of my life is how well Teri Lussier understands this, and how much she is able to pull out of the things I say. Dilberts like Davison live a Read more

January 15, 2008

40 Tips for a Powerful New Year

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

In late 2001 when I had cancer one of the most interesting things I learned was while I was talking to the other people in the chemo room. It was just a room in Making Happythe doctor’s office where we were all sitting in comfortable chairs while our particular poison (mine were Gemzar and cisplatin) was going into our bodies via a tube into our arms. We would talk. One of the remarkable benefits I had, that they didn’t, I was was in Los Angeles, three days a week, receiving Scientology Spiritual Counseling to get rid of all of the grief, fear and “deathfullness” I had. The one thing I found that each and every one of the other patients had was an upset on one particular thing: they didn’t know when they were doing to die.  When they found out that they had cancer they then knew that they might (or might not) die. And they didn’t know when. I was in exactly the same boat. I didn’t know if I would be dead in six weeks, six months or six years. It was interesting that I could cheer them up by just by asking, “When was it that you did know when you were going to die?” I could get them all laughing on this point, as they would eventually realize that there never was a time when they knew.  What had happened is, as a result of knowing they had cancer, they had discovered that they didn’t know. It was step up in awareness.

I considered myself very very fortunate at the time. If indeed, I was close to the end, I had been given the most wonderful opportunity to do all the things that mattered most. Even with the chemo and the surgeries I still had time. I could call the people who mattered most and tell them I loved them. I could go and see them. And I did too. Each day, every day was another wonderful gift that I was grateful for. That was six years ago. I had over 200 people praying for me every week. Read more

December 28, 2007

Thank You Seth: “Why not be great?”

by

Mortgage Banker

Author website

In his last post of the year, Seth Godin visits the archives to pull out a piece of encouragement that has never rang more true in our industry until this year.  Read his whole post and get excited about 2008.

From Seth’s post on Why not be great?

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?

December 10, 2007

Marketing Firms — Any Chance of Ever Hitting Above the Mendoza Line?

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

First, for those of you now wondering what the heck the Medoza Line is, here’s the short version.

I come from the Mario Mendoza school, not Minnie Mendoza, as Mario was actually a major leaguer for nine years. Anyway, all it refers to is Mendoza’s consistently inept performance at the plate. His career batting average was a miniscule .215 — which included the year that produced The Mendoza Line — 1979 — in which he hit .198. Using sports hyperbole, Greg Swan could hit .198 — and I’m not positive he knows which end of the bat to hold. 🙂

Seth Godin wrote a piece Sunday morning letting the cat out of the bag.

Marketing people worship at the altar of The Mendoza Line.

Quoting Seth:

Marketers have lots of ‘bullets’ and they don’t notice the ones they miss (I usually miss 99.5% of the time online, and more than 99.999% of the time selling books). We just reload and blithely continue on.

Surely, he’s being overly modest — yet, even discounting his humility, he speaks basic truth.

Yep, that’s my experience with marketers. They aspire to the Mendoza Line.

My opinion of most marketing people is about the same as it is for most real estate agents or mortgage brokers — most of them couldn’t find their asses with both hands, a map, two helpers, and a GPS.

Yet, hypocritically, I’m using two of ’em to make my point. Guys like Seth and Richard Riccelli, stick out like sore thumbs because in my opinion, they actually produce results. Go figure.

Let’s pause here to be clear and forthright about my understanding of marketing.

My definition: It’s their job to generate more chances for their client to succeed. Put another way — if their ideas work, the agent/client finds himself in front of far more prospects. In baseball-ese, those are at-bats. The agent who gets 20 more opportunities a month, and hits at The Mendoza Line, makes a ton more money each year.

That’s how I define marketing.

Let’s quantify those additional 20 opportunities in today’s terms. If your market’s median home price is $200,000 and Read more

December 2, 2007

Turning 2’s Into 10’s — Learning In Interesting Times

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

It’s been an interesting year, in the sense of the old Chinese proverb about interesting times. Interesting in this context meaning hard times. Mortgage brokers are scrambling, trying to give great service while simultaneously discerning between serious borrowers and serious time wasters. Real estate agents, many of them in he business since 2000 or later, never having experienced even a normal market, are being harshly introduced to reality. I’ve recently learned some of the agents with whom I’ve become friendly during the great times, have taken 8-5 jobs. Many of them are wondering how long they can hang.

Turns out real estate, lending, blogging, marketing, and all the other jobs, require expertise and hard work. Go figure.

Another surprising development has been how experience has also quickly risen to the top as a quality attribute the last couple years. (Think my tongue almost penetrated my cheek on that one.)

Because there is not nearly as much business going on these days, the small things are creating big problems. I don’t mean by themselves though. It’s because, in my opinion, people are reacting poorly under pressure. A small problem, a 2 on the 1-10 scale, will arise. They respond though, as if it’s a 10. They do this because even a small threat to their acutely reduced income, scares them silly. Over time, their credibility suffers, as nobody around them takes them seriously. No matter how it’s framed, a problem worthy of only a 2 rating, doesn’t become a 10 just because it’s treated that way. People aren’t stupid — they notice — sometimes. In an alternate scenario, others become infected by this overreaction virus. Now all around are behaving as if the 2 is in reality a 10. I’ve seen easily solvable problems become deal killers — they died from the dreaded, ‘2 into 10’ fever.

It can get ugly when that happens. Egos get involved, emotions take over, and before anyone realizes it, the elevator has crashed thunderingly into the basement.

My first really tough market when everything went to hell in a hand basket, began in the last quarter of ’79. Read more

November 21, 2007

Click the button one more time as an expression of Thanksgiving

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

It’s Thanksgiving, a fact of the calendar that sneaks up on me every year. By Friday, the Salvation Army Santas will be setting up their buckets outside stores, since no one has told the Salvation Army that Americans switched to debit cards in 1995. It’s all one to me. Cathy loves to give money away, but I despise indiscriminate charity. I’m all but certain we’re subsidizing vice, and I have zero doubt that we’re dulling the edge of husbandry. Of all the problems we might name in the modern world, a shortage of indolence is not one of them.

But I do believe in putting out fires, pulling drowning kids out of the drink, even rescuing trapped kittens. Life is a beautiful rose festooned with a few thorns, and stanching the flow of blood, when someone gets stung, is a job we each need to do for each other.

In a week or a month, all of the buttons we put up for Aaron Anglin’s family will come down.

Before they do, we should hit that “donate” button one more time. It’s not enough. There will never be enough we can do. They’ve lost more than we can ever imagine, and, in the long-run, they’ll have to get along without our help. Life goes on. This is but the first Christmas Aleisha and her girls will have to live without Aaron. But if, as an expression of our own productivity and prosperity, we can help to make their Christmas a little easier, that seems like a good way of expressing thanks for all we have.

October 30, 2007

Twittering on a wing and a prayer

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I Twitter. Therefore I am? Twitter appeals to me, although I’m wondering if that makes me a Twit. It seems so Web 2.0 lite. Blogging has weight. Facebook, LinkedIn, they have some business attire to them. Twitter is just casual Friday, isn’t it?

I’m not an expert Twit. I still need to learn all the little nuances like the tinyurl and how to reference another Twitter account, but I’m not caring about that at the moment. Right now I am simply trying to remember to Twitter and in order to be an interesting Twit you have to leave it open and just Twitter away. I Twitter on about the minutiae of life and work, but I also post my blog urls. That’s where the tinyurl comes in handy, since each Twit is limited to 140 characters. This being Bloodhound, I’ll anticipate your question- does it bring you leads? Goggle has picked up my Twittering for a keyword of some sort and pointed someone to my home blog, so, in other words, no leads. What’s the point, I hear you asking.

There’s this movie that I adore, “Wings of Desire“. If you are not familiar with it, two angels hover among Berliners. We watch the angels watch the humans, and the angels can hear human thoughts, so we get to hear what other people are thinking. One angel decides he no longer wants to watch, he wants to participate in life- as he says “At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say “ah” and “oh” and “hey” instead of “yea” and “amen.” This is one of those movies that people seem to love or hate- it’s not for everyone. My husband, Jamie, for example, can’t stand it. To him it ranks high on the list of most boring movies he’s ever seen, and my guess is that to him, Twitter would be the same.

You have the opportunity “follow” the twits of other people, and that’s where Twitter gets interesting, or really boring depending on your point of view. Twitter asks “What are you doing?” but it could ask Read more

October 24, 2007

San Diego Fire Update: Email from Jeff Brown

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

On 10/24/07 10:44 AM, “Greg Swann” wrote:

Are you okay? Talked to Brian and he indicated the danger now confronts you.

Thanks — we’re not in danger, but the air quality sucks.  The fire is about 15 minutes or so mostly east and a bit south from us.

It’s so bad, the Fire Captain said they were confident they could successfully have it surrounded on or before NOVEMBER 4TH!

Not good.

The fires in the north, as I said earlier, are now working, much of the time, in concert with each other.

The wild card is the now fickle winds. We’re apparently transitioning from Santa Ana to normal weather. It makes it far more dangerous for the firefighters. An example in the last few minutes was a fire engine that had to back up at emergency speed from a home’s driveway, as several firemen jumped literally into a small brushfire threatening to trap and destroy the engine.

The winds’ velocity has slowed, but are now unpredictable. Again, not good.

Bottom line — looks like we won’t gain the upper hand on this thing for another week maybe.
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October 23, 2007

San Diego Fire Update: Podcast with Brian Brady — Big Mother? Who needs her?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I heard from Brian Brady, who also seems to have escaped harm in the fires. His home came closest to being singed, and, while he has not yet been back to see it, he thinks it should be okay.

The podcast linked below is a free-ranging discussion of the fires, the response by individual citizens, and the kinds of structures that might replace those that were destroyed by the fires.
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October 23, 2007

San Diego Fire Update: Podcast with Kris Berg — staring down disaster with a lithe sense of humor and a glass of Chardonay

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

As you might expect, Kris Berg’s take on the San Diego fires is phlegmatic and funny. She phoned just as I was posting the podcast with Jeff Brown.

Cliff’s Notes: Life is mostly back to normal in Scripps Ranch except that the air is grey with smoke and ash and the kids are off from school. Kris is as funny on the phone as she is in person.
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October 23, 2007

San Diego Fire Update: Podcast with Jeff Brown discussing today’s events

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was able to connect with Jeff Brown, and we spent a few minutes on the phone talking about today’s events in battling the fires in San Diego.

I was unable to get through to either Kris Berg or Brian Brady, but I’m hoping this simply means their cell phone batteries are dead.

Jeff spoke with Brian earlier today and wrote about it here.

Lani Anglin was able to talk to Kris, which you can read about here.

From Jeff’s point of view, they’re over the hump, and we can only hope he’s right.
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