QR codes must be scanned with devices

Hello and welcome to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Tuesday, 24 May, 2011. My name is Aaron Traffas, and today we’re going to talk about QR codes and Microsoft Tags – the little squares of gobbledygook that, when scanned, take you to a website or display text on your device. We’ll talk about when to use them and, more likely, when not to use them.

There has been a lot of buzz over the last couple of years, mostly from the tech and marketing industries, around the QR code and its slightly less ugly cousin, the Microsoft Tag. Last month, Google ended it’s QR code initiative for Places, opting instead to focus on near field communications. It was an exciting announcement for me, as I feel that it’ll likely start to decrease the number of QR codes that clutter the world around me. Here’s why this fad is over-hyped and why you shouldn’t use QR codes and Microsoft Tags for marketing.

Convenience
How often do you find yourself using QR codes? Sure, I’ve done it once or twice, but just to see if it worked and how easy it was. The result of my test was that it indeed works, but it’s a headache. Indeed, just now, it took me over a minute to test the Microsoft Tag used later in this post. The argument in favor of the codes is that they make it easier for users with QR code-reading devices to get to your website. However, the logic falls over when you think about someone viewing the marketing who doesn’t have such a device or, more likely, isn’t going to have the time to stop, take out a device, spend the 15 seconds or more to find and load the app, get a focus on the image, and use it to spin the wheel to see where he will be taken. It’s rare that I see a QR code that specifies the destination. In this regard, it’s kind of like sending HTML email – the user sees a bunch of junk you’ve presented him but lacks the incentive to click “show as HTML” because he’s unsure of the content or simply doesn’t care enough to suit up and participate in your game.

Branding
I’ve written about branding before, and it was the subject of episode 21 of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. The most important branding your company has is your domain name. The call to action on modern auction marketing isn’t come to the auction like it was in the 1990s and before. The call to action today is come to our website.  QR codes don’t convey your brand. They don’t help drill an image of your website’s URL into the mind of the viewer. I’ve seen vehicles with company magnets with nothing but a QR code. Let’s just say I wasn’t encouraged to take out my phone.

Real estate
No, not real property – real estate is jargon for the amount of area an element consumes on a screen, a web page, or marketing materials. QR codes take up a fair amount of real estate that would be much better used as white space or filled with whatever you’re trying to market – like your website.

Image by hawaii via Flickr

Aesthetics
QR codes are ugly. While the Microsoft Tag is certainly prettier and there are ways to make QR codes more attractive, you’re still dealing with the skinniest kid at fat camp. After making them beautiful, you’ve still got a box, taking up space, with a bunch of gobbledygook in the middle of it that does nothing to convey your brand.

Why are QR codes so popular? The press has over-hyped the importance. Like the possibility of using social media for business, most small business owners are jumping aboard this bandwagon without regard for the appropriateness of the medium. They’re trusting that this new-fangled thing will transform their bottom lines. There is a similar parallel between the social media fad and the QR code fad. Businesses are spending a ton of money to build these tools at the expense of much more important aspects of their branding. Businesses are adding their Facebook vanity URLs – sometimes above their websites – to marketing. I’ve written before about how much more important your website is than social media. Likewise, conveying your website – hopefully an easy-to-remember and short .com address – is the most important thing you can do in your marketing materials, certainly much more important than taking up space with a QR code that few people will use anyway.

Another reason QR codes are sometimes used is for deep linking. Like a lazy web designer uses a sitemap to fix poor navigation, some QR codes take you deep within a site to a specific page instead of to the home page of the site. It’s possible that this is an appropriate use for QR codes, and I’ll address that possibility in a moment, but most of the time this use isn’t as valuable as other approaches to getting a viewer to a specific location. If you’re trying to take the viewer to a specific page on your website, the most appropriate way is to make the page short and memorable. If you’re doing a charity auction for the Boys and Girls Foundation and your website is abcauction.com, rather than using a QR code that doesn’t specify a destination and, as such, offers no incentive to remember a domain or specific page, use the space to advertise abcauction.com/boysandgirls – it’s easy to read, easy to remember, and I believe it will generate a much more valuable response.

Is there a time when QR codes are appropriately used? QR codes are utilitarian tools, not marketing methods, and I believe that we auctioneers can find an appropriate home for QR codes or Microsoft Tags on our item tags or stickers. When we have an item that’s listed within an auction on our site, it’s likely that we have some kind of tag or sticker that has the item’s number. An appropriate use of a QR code or Microsoft Tag would be to include one on that sticker that links directly to the item (not the auction) on our website. Make sure you specify what the code will do, like printing “View this item on abcauction.com” – it’s succinct and also conveys your brand along with the QR code.

Well that’s it for episode 22. Did I miss something? Am I wrong about something? I know there are some QR code fans out there who will object to at least something in this episode. My motto is that if you agree with everything I say, you haven’t paid attention. Please leave comments on the transcription for this episode on auctioneertech.com. It’s much better than replying on Facebook or Twitter – remember, it’s all about unification of the brand.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcriptions, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

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Transcript

Hi, I’m Aaron Traffas with AuctioneerTech. In this episode of the Auction Video Podcast, we’re going to look at the right way to wrap and store cables.

Now, I’ve seen cables stored a lot of different ways, most of which, quite frankly, make me want to cry. Before we get to the over-under method, let’s take a look at the wrong way to roll cables.

The knot method

I have here an XLR cable, sometimes called a mic cable. Some cheaper microphones may come with a cable that’s already attached or one that has a 1/4″ end on it, but all professional quality microphones use the XLR standard. It has a male and female end, each with three pins on the end of it. Now, because it’s a signal cable, it doesn’t carry a lot of current, and so the conductors inside are smaller and more fragile than other kinds of cables, which is why this first method of cable storage is especially hard on signal cables. I call it the knot. You hold the cables on one end and then you find the middle. You fold it back on itself, then you tie it in a knot. This puts a lot of stress on the conductors inside the cable. I attribute this to the high rate of cable failure for those who use this method.

The around-the-arm

I remember being shown this method when I was very young. It’s easy to teach, easy to learn – it’s also easy to end up with a knotted mess. This method adds a natural twist to the cable as you go along so that it’s harder for it to lay straight when you use it. This is the around-the-arm method.

Over-under

We’re now to what I believe to be the only right way to roll your cables. It’s called the over-under, and it’s how professional sound engineers roll and store their cables between concerts. Start with one end of the cable – whichever end has the velcro or wire or string or whatever cable management accessory you prefer. Start with it pointing towards you and grab it like you’re going to stab yourself with it. Take your other hand, and with your thumb down, grab hold of the cable. Then pull it up and in into a small circle. Next, take your hand and with your thumb up, wrap it over. The first one is the under, the second the over.

Now, for most cables, I like a wrap that’s just a little bit less than the size of a coffee can. For larger extension cords, you’re probably going to want a larger loop. For smaller cables like network or USB or some earphone cables, you’re probably going to want a much smaller loop.

Now, remember that if you’ve been wrapping your cables the wrong way for a long time, they’re going to have some natural twists and turns in them. The first time you try this, you might have some knots due to a cable that’s learned the wrong method. If you do it this way enough, your cables are going to be nice and straight and true and you’re going to be able to do some fun things.

Now that second throw was not a knot, it was just a poor job of me throwing it. So, when you throw, make sure that you’re holding on to the end that you started with in the first place that has the cable tie on it. Hold on to it in your hand, grab the cable and give it a nice little under-handed toss and it will fly straight and true every time.

That’s it for this episode of the Auction Video Podcast. If you know of any other bad ways to wrap your cables, or if you think you have a better one, let us know in the comments. Thanks!

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Hello and welcome to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. Today is Thursday 18 February 2010. My name is Aaron Traffas and today I’m going to examine branding as it relates to a web presence, looking at the best ways to configure websites, email and blogs. This content originally ran as a three-part series in January on auctioneertech.com and began with part 1, domain names.

The choices you make for your domain name begin begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy. There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site, and the first is to select a .com top level domain. A top level domain, or TLD, is the last part of the website address. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike some other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with .com, .net and .org without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in California!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and selecting a business or commercial website, .com is for winners.

The second rule when selecting your website is to own the domain that matches your company name. “We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well, right?” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name exactly matches your company name. If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, or add hacks like hyphens or underscores, few will remember it.

Rule three is that shorter is better. If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if my auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, I would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but I’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, I’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that I run John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do I look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now I’m getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. They’ll ask themselves if it was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? They’ll never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Rule four – own your domain name. This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host a website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” I really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with me. This exercise is important. Your website provider can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

Rule five is that CamelCase isn’t for websites. This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but I feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com in all lower case is just as valid as AuCtIoN – you get the picture. Why don’t I write my website using CamelCase with the A of auction and the T of tech capitalized since that’s the way it looks in my logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from earlier – techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you or your company because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing we web users do when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look it up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

Now that we’ve selected our domain name, let’s look at how we can use our email address to strengthen our brand. An email address has two components; the first part is the user name and the second part is the domain name, which usually matches either your email provider or your website.

The worst mistake you can make to turn customers away is to use something other than your name for the user name. This mistake was the at the top of the list in a recent survey, the link to which is available in the transcript for this podcast at auctioneertech.com. sxygrl47 and ladybug_lover worked great for user names in college, but now it’s time to use first.last or firstlast or just your last name. If you have an address that is checked by more than one person, such as a generic company address, then it’s okay to use something like auction or info as your user name, but don’t use that catch-all address for your official company account unless it is actually checked by more than one person. That’s also not the address you should put on your personal business card.

Outside of the above offense, few other concepts seem more obvious than the importance of having an email address that matches the domain name of your website. Nevertheless, I still see some auctioneers who advertise to their customers a generic, free addresses from email providers such as AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Live, Gmail – or worse, from their Internet service providers such as Cox, SBC Global or Comcast.

Using one of these free providers for a personal email account is okay, though it’s much more fun to spend the 10 bucks and register a domain name for yourself or your family to use for your personal email needs. Using an email address for commercial purposes that doesn’t match your domain name is simply unprofessional.

Your website IS your brand. Why on Earth would there be any benefit in advertising an address that doesn’t include your brand? Reasons I’ve heard cited for using a generic email account for business include the following.

• I’ve always used this address
• I have multiple domain names
• Using Gmail makes me seem cutting-edge and hip
• I don’t know how to set up email for my domain name
• I like the tools offered by this provider
• I want synchronized Outlook but don’t want to host my own Exchange server

None of these reasons justifies letting customers see an email address that doesn’t include your brand. The only reason listed that doesn’t involve lack of configuration or simplicity is the idea that customers somehow perceive Gmail users as advanced. This is true, but only in comparison with other free email providers. We all like to make fun of AOL and Yahoo users, but consumers equally ridicule Gmail users who use Gmail for business. It’s assumed that these users are either too lazy or don’t know how to set up their own, branded email addresses.

The solution is simple. Use a service like Gmail – Google Apps for your Domain is a particularly excellent choice – or use a company that provides hosted Exchange server to allow you to have one powerful interface to check all your email accounts. It’s very simple to configure addresses from one or many domain names to have email delivered to one location. Through the use of rules in Outlook or filters in Gmail, you can easily keep track of all your emails from all of your accounts in one central location. When properly configured, each email you send will appear to come from the appropriate account. The methods to this configuration are outside the scope of this podcast and will depend on your registrar and your web host, but there are many free tutorials available to make your email do what you want it to do for you.

I’ve actually met auctioneers who have removed the website from business cards, relying on different colors to make the domain in the email address stand out, thereby conveying both an email address and a website on one line. This leap of faith that customers will recognize this strategy isn’t for the weak-of-heart, but it’s an innovative idea, nonetheless.

When is it okay to use an email address for business that isn’t matched to your domain name? There are two scenarios.

1. You’re unemployed
2. You don’t have a domain name yet

If the first is true, you’re probably not using it for commercial purposes unless it’s to send, and receive responses from, resumes. In this case, a Gmail account – or, better yet, yourname@yourname.com – will lend the most professional impression to a prospective employer. If the second case is true, press pause, think about what I said in the first part of this episode, and buy a domain name. The first year’s registration costs less than having your logo embroidered on a shirt, and it’s many orders of magnitude more valuable and important.

Your domain is your brand. Your email address is an obvious and easy way to promote your brand and show your customers that you run a professional organization.

Now that I’ve discussed domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand, let’s take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.

Like email addresses, it’s really easy to get a free blog. Free blog providers include WordPress and Blogger. These free blogs assign a subdomain, which is the part of the domain that comes before the primary domain name, lik e yourauctionblog.wordpress.com. Some, like WordPress, even allow you to assign a custom domain name to your blog. This free blog approach is really great if you’re blogging about your grasshopper collection or you want to keep a diary of your trip to the museum of bad marketing tactics, but if you’re blogging for business, you need to have your blog hosted professionally.

Your blog should be branded. Your domain IS your brand. Your blog needs to exist on your website in order to be properly branded. This rule means that the free sites are out of the question – unless you actually work for WordPress, your blog shouldn’t include wordpress.com in the domain name. Assigning a separate domain name to your blog is certainly better, but it still misses the target of hosting your blog on your primary domain.

But wait! I’ve been singing the praises of WordPress for years, why would I say WordPress is bad? The answer is that wordpress.com is a commercial service that will host your blog. wordpress.org is a site that hosts the WordPress software that you can download for free and install on your own website. By installing the software, you can leverage the power and ease-of-use inherent to the WordPress package while allowing your customers to go to yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. By having a custom WordPress theme created, the user experience can be seamless among your auction calendar, your static pages and your blog.

WordPress isn’t the only blogging software that you can use on your website, but it’s certainly my favorite. Your web host may have different software that can just as easily and quickly be installed and configured to allow you to post your articles and news by simply logging in and typing.

Internet branding is simple. While it may be easier to simply grab a free account from somewhere, it’s by far more professional to have a comprehensive, congruent presence that is consistently branded to provide a seamless user experience.

That’s it for episode 21. Did I miss something? Am I wrong about something? Leaving a comment on auctioneertech.com is much better than replying on Facebook or Twitter to tell me about it. Remember, it’s all about unification of the brand.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

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AuctioneerTech - Auction Podcast

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Friday, 11 December, 2009. auctioneertech.com – technology, auction and auctioneers, auction tech for the auction industry.

Hello and welcome to the 20th episode of the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. My name is Aaron Traffas and today we’re going to talk about the trends and shifts in buyer behavior that find consumers looking for items instead of auctions and what we auctioneers should do about it.

It used to be easy. Bidders used to check the auctions section in the newspaper for something to do on the weekends. We used to put an ad in the classifieds that listed the type of auction we were holding, trusting that the customers wanted to come to the auction. If you hold it, they will come.

Not anymore. Now, instead of looking for auctions to provide needed entertainment and activity, consumers are taking every opportunity to find a gap in their busy schedules that might provide much needed rest. Weekends are for chores and sporting events and movies, not traveling somewhere in hopes that there might be an item of interest that may or may not sell to a competing bidder anyway. Regular consignment auctions everywhere are noticing a decline in physical attendance, and with a few exceptions due to asset type or geography, it’s becoming clear that the interest consumers have in spending hours at auctions is waning.

What does this trend mean for the auction industry? Does it mean we should pack up our gavels and Half Mile Hailers and go home? Of course it doesn’t. It means we must recognize this change in consumer buying habits and adapt. There is still value in the secondary market. Consumers are no longer looking for auctions, they’re looking for items and they don’t really care how the items are sold. If we present better information about the items to the prospective bidders, they’ll make the effort to make the purchase.

An auction event is a collection of auction items. We auctioneers realize this marketing tactic, and it’s what sets us apart from other one-off competitive bidding sites like eBay. It allows us to more effectively advertise and use economics of scale to keep our costs down and to  do a better job for our sellers. What we need to understand and respect is that we must be more granular in our advertising and extend past the event and down to the item level.

The Internet is the obvious answer as a mechanism to list the items at our auctions. Since traditional media is becoming more expensive and less effective every day, our efforts should be focused towards driving customers from our traditional advertisements to our websites. Only there do we have the ability to convey the amount of information at essentially no cost to our clients.

What kind of information should we present and how should we present it?

Descriptions
The more information we convey, the better we can serve our bidders. Aspects such as year, make, model, style, color and condition are obvious components to a good description. If you list an item and someone asks a question about it, use that question as a tip to add the answer to the description so the next possible bidder won’t have to ask the same question.

Pictures
Digital cameras are cheap, and so is the film. A big memory stick and some freely-available picture processing software makes it amazingly easy to present many pictures of each item.

Sale order
Consumers don’t want to wait. While you don’t have to know the exact minute an item will sell, publishing a sale order on your website will let a bidder know when he’ll need to be at the auction or, in the case of Internet bidding, in front of his computer. Provide a sale order and don’t break from it.

While our websites are the most important places to present all of this information, they are not only places we should post our items. Internet auction calendars such as the National Auctioneers Association’s auction calendar, Global Auction Guide, the National Auction List and AuctionZip provide free or inexpensive venues to list our items. Craigslist, niche forums and bulletin boards are other places that may take a little more work but may generate a significant benefit for our sellers and our bottom lines.

The amount of information we can convey about each item is substantial. The more details we post for each item on our websites and those sites listed above, the more likely consumers are going to be able to find our items through auction- and non-auction search channels. If a consumer looks for an item using Google and we’ve posted that item on multiple websites with a link back to the auction listing on our site, that consumer is more likely to find our item and participate in our auction. If the item isn’t listed in the auction description, the consumer won’t know about it and will make a purchase from somewhere else.

It sounds like a lot of work. We can’t simply string out the items in a windrow on the lawn on the morning of the auction. Picturing, cataloging, data entry and item-level marketing are all important but labor-intensive and expensive components to modern auction preparation.

Buyers are looking for items. Our sellers are looking for buyers. Technology gives us new ways to advertise items to buyers for our sellers. The next generation of successful auctioneers isn’t going to be successful because those auctioneers have the best chant or the longest company histories . They’re going to be successful because they’ve figured out the most efficient workflow to present the most information in the most places about each individual item they’re selling.

That’s it for episode 20. Have a happy holiday season from AuctioneerTech and we’ll see you in 2010 with more episodes, interviews and the continuation of our video podcast series.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

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You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast; today is Wednesday 5 August 2009. My name is Aaron Traffas and joining me today for the third in the Vendor Interview Series is Jeff Johnstonbaugh. Jeff is Chief Operations Officer for BidSpotter Incorporated.  Good evening, Jeff, and thank you for joining me.

Jeff JohnstonBaugh: Hello Aaron, it’s a pleasure.

AuctioneerTech: Jeff how did you get started in the auction industry?

JJ: Well, trading and buying and selling and going to auctions has always been in my family. I started working I was about thirteen in the restaurant business, by the time I was twenty-one I was fairly burned out on that career, and so I was buying and selling a lot of equipment at auctions for restaurants and building restaurants and the auctioneer whose sales I attended most them asked me to come and work for him. That was about 1982 and at it’s been twenty-seven years ever since. So it’s worked out okay.

AT: And you were working in what capacity for that auctioneer?

Oh, I started out as a set up and ended up as an auctioneer and ended up as a sales manager and I actually ended up buying his business when he passed away after I’d worked for him for about fifteen years, just your ordinary local, regional neighborhood business auction company.

And maybe we should preface that a little bit – where are you from, where was this and where are you at now?

I’m still up in the Seattle area where I was there and so I actually purchased Jesse Jones Auctioneers and ran Jesse’s company for several years until I got distracted by this whole Internet thing.

And tell us a little bit about this distraction, as you call it, and what drove you to BidSpotter.

Well, like a lot of people, I saw the allure of the Internet and decided to pursue that dream and I was actually working at nordstrom.com at the time, I was interviewing for a position internally and the president of the company stepped out of our meeting for a while, which obviously made me nervous, he stepped back in and said something which made me even more nervous, said Jeff I’m doing to do something I’ve never done before, I checked with the Nordstroms and we’re going to refer you out of the company, which obviously panicked me. He actually was an angel investor sitting on the board of a little company called LiveBid which was one block down the street and he referred me down to them so I took a walk down the street and it turned out that that was just about ninety days before they were purchased by amazon.com and the fellow who was the sales manager there was well known to me because I had taught him bid calling a few years before, and so I hired on with LiveBid and the online adventure continued.

When was that that you hired on with LiveBid?

I want to say it was 1998. It’s interesting; we got enough experience Internet now that it’s starting to get lost in the fog of time. But yeah, we were bought by Amazon and Amazon had an interesting strategy. Amazon saw that eBay was coming after retail so they took at a shot, Amazon saw eBay was coming after retail, so they took a shot at auctions for a while to force eBay to refocus on their core business and it was very effective and one of the things they wanted to do was make sure that eBay didn’t get to buy LiveBid company nor Yahoo Auctions and we were at Amazon for about eighteen months. I had the opportunity to work with Sotheby‘s and I had the opportunity to help develop the first beginnings of different platforms and sort out how industrial auctions and different from consumer auctions and all that sort of stuff. So it was very formative years and very exiting times.

Sure. How then did that job description segue into BidSpotter?

Well, Amazon decided that its strategic move had run its course and after about fifteen months or eighteen months they let us all go. Some friends of mine, Bill Foot and Jeff Harris, went off to form BidSpotter.com, I took a year off and then later joined them and BidSpotter has grown very steadily from a very small company to what we have today which is working quite well for us. One of the unique circumstances that sets BidSpotter apart from other competition is that there’s never been any outside investments. We’ve been cash-flow-positive and work form within our own means since they started out with their own severance checks and it’s built slowly but it’s built very solid. So we are very proud of that.

That’s very somewhat unique in these days of tech startups and Internet companies and it seems like everybody is taking venture capital from various places and having something that is completely organic and as you put it a cash flow positive entity from the get-go is something to certainly be proud of. You say that Bill and Jeff started BidSpotter and then you joined them shortly thereafter. How did you know them? They were in LiveBid, is that right?

Correct. All of us that founded and originated BidSpotter were from within the Amazon group. We joined with some fellows from Canada, Inet Softglobe was the name of their company and they provided the bidding engine around which all of the BidSpotter website is wrapped. And so it’s grown on that basis and now the fellows from Inet and the original founders of BidSpotter are all partners in the deal, but again, there’s never been any outside investment and there’s never been any debt taken on and so its worked out pretty well.

So how long would you say that you were a bid calling auctioneer, is that something you still do on the side, is that locked away as a part of your past, how long did you do that?

I probably did that very actively with one or two sales a week for a dozen years, and something I still can do and I’m 6happy to do, but for me primarily now its pitching in to help somebody else or for a good charitable cause, I don’t actively pursue auctions although I do still cooperate and consult with friends on big projects and so forth occasionally.

Sure. Well Jeff, tell us about BidSpotter, how would you describe BidSpotter to somebody in an elevator? What does BidSpotter do and what kinds of Internet bidding does BidSpotter support?

BidSpotter.com

Okay. BidSpotter is a website where folks primarily go to buy industrial machinery, plant machinery; I like to say things that make you money. The ways that BidSpotter works with the traditional auctioneers is to provide technology for a Web simulcast where you can bid against the live crowd in the room with the traditional auction, a strong area of growth in future trend, is the timed auctions, the online auctions that are more of an eBay style auction but we still present them as an event as opposed to random items in this gigantic mishmash of offerings. Each of our auctions, whether it’s a timed online auction or a webcast auction, appears in a calendar fashion, it gets its own standalone credibility. The buyers tend to migrate amongst the items there and consolidate their shipping and figure out how to work with one rigger or machinery mover to get the stuff home. They develop a relationship with one auctioneer to buy multiple items at that event and then they package up the goodies, pay the bill and go home. The timed auctions are far more popular with our European clients and we do have a very strong European representation. We also are active in South Africa and the live webcast auctions are really the bread and butter of the American industry although it is a growing segment. I would say that the main reason that BidSpotter trended toward the industrial machinery sales away from its generalist origins has to do with the demands of the industrial auctioneers, the ways that they like to do aggregates and groups and with a privilege and frequently change their mind about how stuff is going to be offered depending on how the crowd receives their proposals of how to give you choice on the next hundred or you’ve got to take the next five or put them all together or what have you, and the BidSpotter platform has always been very facile and very, very quick to present with clarity, those different means of grouping and choosing items and those seem to be a requirement primary of the industrial auction culture.

You mentioned something in that description that kind of focused my attention and you mentioned how you list the auctions as events especially for your Internet only, your timed auctions. You list them all as an event and it is essentially a group of items in an event as opposed to as you put it, individual items in a sea of staggered ending items. Why do you feel that that is important? And I’ve noticed that that’s the primary difference between the way that we as auctioneers market items as opposed to your traditional eBay sellers or eBay style sellers who will list individual items with varying seemingly random closing times, why do you feel its important to list items, Internet only items, in events as opposed to on their own?

Well, I guess for me it goes back to the way Jesse used to run his auction business. My original auctioneer mentor Jesse Jones was an antiques dealer and that’s the perspective he came from, but he was always collecting something, whether it was schoolhouse bells or parish prints or flow blue or Tiffany glass, whatever it was, and he would gather these little bits and pieces together for a year, two years or five years, and when he had enough of whatever it was then he would create an event auction and he knew that by creating an event, the value of the item was far superior to the little bits and pieces and odds and ends that he picked up along the way. So when you had an auction of Maxfield Parish prints, suddenly you drew the attention of Maxfield Parish print collection community. I think that the way we as auctioneers approach the process, especially the industrial auctioneers, it’s generally about a building clear-out. So you have a focal point to begin with. This plant made this number of seats or they made those General Motors cars or they made these plastic water bottles. And so obviously all the items have a cohesiveness to begin with because they all contribute to making that product. But furthermore, you’ve got a geographic focus and you’ve got a timing focus. And an auctioneer works out an advertising budget that’s amortized across might be a hundred lots, might be a thousand lots. He is working on a labor budget that’s focused on getting out of the building in sixty days. So that event focus makes us very different than the person who is trying to sell one antique teddy bear that they found at the flee market and they want to throw it on eBay and find the other antique teddy bear buyers. Our product comes with a built-in focus and therefore it behooves us to go with that flow and maximize the advantages that we have, being so focused.

Remote Bidder

Jeff, BidSpotter recently, relatively recently anyway, came out with the RemoteBidder platform and product and you’d mentioned what BidSpotter did and what its strengths were especially in relation to asset type and market. What then is the cause for RemoteBidder and what is its target and focus?

Well, I think that everyone knows by now that in the end of last year, eBay left the live auctions space. And we had actually had a deal with eBay from 2004 to 2006 and we decided of our own accord to pull out of that deal because we didn’t see them supporting auctioneers as auctioneers in the way that auctioneers need to be supported. So with the news that eBay was leaving and knowing that the primary, the vendors, the most successful vendors, the biggest vendors in that consumer goods, fine arts and antiques kind of space were, by and large, resellers of eBay platform, we decided to go ahead and put up a product to approach the consumer market but approach it with the needs that the fine arts and antiques buyers in that culture wanted. What I’m finding as I pursue this business is that there are distinctive and unique cultures, even though we use the word auction across all of them, the guys that are buying livestock at auction have very distinct different needs and demands than the guys that are buying cars, they are different than the folks that are buying arts and antiques and industrials and so on and so forth. So with RemoteBidder, we partnered with Antique Week and Antique Trading Gazette to try to establish as quickly as we could, the broadest email list bases and customer bases that we could, and then we are actually using technology for the live bidding platform from the folks at ATG Media which we think is superior at serving the consumer good demands, it just – its prettier, it provides bigger images, it provides a different style of presenting the information that the fine arts and antiques folks are more receptive to. And its growing slowly like any new brand and new business it takes a long time to get the thing off the ground but we are very pleased with where it’s at and we are very happy with our partners at Antique Week and Antique Trading Gazette and we expect big things in the future.

And so you’ve kind of mentioned that – first of all, when did RemoteBidder have its first auction, when was it launched?

January this year, January 2009.

Are there any major differences outside of demographic focus and asset type – I guess those are some pretty substantial differences. How close is the technology between BidSpotter and RemoteBidder and what makes these platforms different from other competing products and platforms?

Well, the technology for the RemoteBidder platform has been tested with the saleroom.com in the UK for about the last 18 months to two years. So we know its solid technology, but it is a Flash programming based technology instead of Java which BidSpotter uses; Flash is installed in substantially more home user computers already, so it makes it more accessible to folks. Also its informed by a lot more knowledge about how people pursue personal entertainment or the things that they’re going to buy in life as opposed to the machines in the machinery business. So it is a lot more amenable to enjoyable browsing and sorting out and watching just the items that interest you and that sort of thing as opposed to the machines which are by and large dictated by “does it meet the specs and is it a catalogue item and lets cut the chase and get this done with”.

Something that you want because it is desirable to you not because it’s a commodity that fits your specifications of what you need to buy

Exactly, exactly. A lot of it has to do with just being able to cut through the clutter. At some point, these different auction sites reach a saturation point where you can hardly take it all in and so it’s helpful to have a different channel on the TV so to speak.

Sure. What would you say the biggest benefit is to building a bidding platform for a specific market as opposed to one of the larger more generalized other competing platforms?

Like I said, I just think it’s the ability to tailor to a cultural need. I cannot envision the day for me when I am just as happy having heavy equipment auctions with bulldozers and road graders on the same platform as diamonds and vases. Those different users all approach their computer differently, I mean, for one thing, by and large, the consumer good users are a much older demographic, they are much wealthier demographic and they have just a different set of expectations. The guys that are high tech and very, very dialed in their computers that just bid like mad men on the server auctions and lab equipment auctions, they have a lot less need for support and they have a lot less need for a happy touchy-feely kind of experience than your consumer goods folks who are really buying to entertain themselves, they are buying to have the enjoyment of it. So, the whole thing needs to be a very enjoyable experience. Quite frankly, a lot of our industrial users would get frustrated with the enjoyable parts of the experience, they just want to cut to the chase, they want to buy what they want to buy and move on. And that’s the main difference. The technology underlying it, there is a lot of varieties for technology, there is a lot of ways you can approach it and I just think it all needs to be driven by the nature of the event and the nature of the customer you’re trying to appease.

So what are some differences in the product offering for auctioneers between the two services? If I am an industrial auctioneer and I utilize the BidSpotter service, what kind of advantages do I see either in a pricing model or a feature set as opposed to if I am an antiques auctioneer and I’d like to utilize the RemoteBidder platform?

I would say the primary benefit from the perspective of the auctioneer is going to be the marketing assistance. BidSpotter has an amazingly well-dialed and database of industrial buyer as opposed to RemoteBidder which is accessing that great mailing list that Antique Trading Gazette has throughout Europe and Antique Week has in the US. The technology is going to appeal to the different buyers so they are going to get a smoother and happier customer. I would say on the industrial side, they are a lot more demanding and I guess the primary difference of the BidSpotter platform is not so much the software but the skill and the mindset of the people running the business. The folks that are taking the remote sales or the implementation specialists who are out on the ground and can actually wire phone system or Internet connectivity for a couple of hundred thousand square foot plant without breaking a sweat and make sure everything goes off perfectly. Whereas antique auctions are primarily from a well known venue and auction gallery that’s a lot more controlled situation, the folks with BidSpotter, the BidSpotter auctioneers are a lot more inclined to want to hire our staff to take care of things for them, the folks at RemoteBidder are a lot more inclined to handle themselves and they want an easier interface that is more readily accessible. They want the simplest way to achieve the audio instead of the way that most accommodates the challenges of working on the road. Basically we run them as two different businesses and those two different businesses address the needs of the clients and the clients are radically different. The guys that sell ancient Chinese antiques have a completely different approach than the guys that sell bulldozers from a vacant lot in the middle of the Midwest.

You mentioned the implementation specialists and with the approach that each is a separate business, what are the different implementation options for each one. In other words, if I am an auctioneer, how technical do I have to be as far as the way that I interact with the service, do you offer a turnkey solution, do you offer a self service solution, do you offer a mixture of both? What does it take someone to utilize either service?

That’s an excellent question, and again it all goes to what the auctioneer would like to have. We completely consider our business from the perspective of being in service to auctioneers. We can run the whole thing for you and literally be another staff member on the ground at your sales site with you and that is generally the way that the auctioneers who are running multiple millions of dollars of sales with us a year like to have it be. As a matter of fact, its very, very common for our clients to pick favorites amongst implementation specialists and ask to make sure that James or AJ or Mario or whoever it might be, is in attendance at their event in particular because they work so well with them. That’s going to be the case where we send someone out with a big sachell full of gear and they make it happen, whatever needs to be done to make sure that you can hear and you can connect to the Internet – the whole works. The other end of the spectrum, both platforms are completely capable of being turned over to the auctioneer in-house staff and run completely self-sufficient. Again I would say that the remote bidder platform is easier for an operator within the auction house to run, it has less bells and whistle therefore there is less clutter on the user dashboard and its just a little easier to understand. In the middle of that is a very economical compromised that is something that I originally worked out back at Amazon and has become an industry standard which is the remote broadcast. And the remote broadcast simply is putting a cell phone usually, with a headset, on either the auctioneer – which works far better – or as an alternative, to a ring man or just a clerk on the ground, where the headset can pick up the noise from the PA system. We use that feed from the auction floor to run the bidding from one of our office computers and when a bid comes in from an authorized and approved bidder, we relay that bid back to the auctioneer via the cell phone and the bid is process that way. The advantages are that it saves all that expensive travel and trying to run the auction that may or may not be able to support technologically. The disadvantage is you’ve got a couple more links in the communication chain and that’s why I said it works better if the auctioneer wears the headphones themselves because there’s just a couple less links in the chain because you’ve got this message being passed from bidder to the computer to our computer, our computer to our persons, thoughts and brain and then they say it over the phone and that person using the phone has to relay to the auctioneer and even if all this happens in a couple of seconds, those elements of the chain can be a frustration to getting a bid in very quickly. My recommendation for remote sales is they are best done, and this is kind of standard practice for our bigger clients, if they’ve got a huge auction, they tend to have someone there. If they’ve got a modest size auction, say its going to be under a couple of hundred lots and it’s a fairly simple situation, most auctioneers in that case will be selling a little slower, a little less stress, a little less pressure, and then not bearing the burden of traveling and so forth is a perfect situation to use remote broadcasting. All three have their place and all three are very good tools for an auctioneer to use depending on what their circumstance is.

What kind of pricing structures are associated with each of those three options and is there a difference in the pricing structure between BidSpotter and RemoteBidder? And what kind of volume would an auctioneer need to have to justify utilizing either service?

Well you know, it’s interesting because the volume to justify has been a question that goes back a long ways. I remember when we first started this with LiveBid, the event fee was twelve $12,500 per event, I could guarantee you the Internet wouldn’t keep working, I could guarantee you no one would bid, but I could also guarantee you that every single live television news truck in town would be outside your auction talking about your auction that night in the local news. So the value was a little strange then. You fast forward to ten years later now and the event fee is down to $350 on BidSpotter, the event fee for RemoteBidder is $500, and that’s just a consideration of the fact that we sell so many more lower price point items on RemoteBidder that in order to stay in business ourselves we have to charge a little bit more event fee. The percentage that we expect as a buyer premium bump on both is the same, 3% to folks that win online bids, so that’s pretty simple math. $350 bucks is not a big advertising hit or $500 for RemoteBidder is not a big advertising hit for most sales. Its kind of more of a question of where do you want to push your business. I know that we have several clients – I would say Gallivan Auctioneers is probably the  best example – who readily acknowledged that they used us with the online broadcasting as a very integral part of building their business to make sure that they were investing in reaching further and further and expanding their geographic boundaries every time and as a result, they may have taken a lot of sales early on that other people might have deemed not worth spending money on. So the value proposition isn’t always about does this auction justify it, but sometimes the value proposition is, can I use this as a tool to help build my business and establish myself as a very forward thinking, ambitious and technologically sophisticated auctioneer who is availing themselves with every marketing resource they can come up with. Sometimes that’s the value proposition that an auctioneer needs to consider. I would never put a specific dollar amount on the deal but I will say that it is much more common for our auctioneers doing lower gross volume sales to run the software themselves and my standard description of the person who can best run that in-house is if you have a niece or nephew who is between he ages of seventeen and twenty-five and grew up in the auction business and they play video games all their life and they have no fear whatsoever about a computer, there is no doubt whatsoever they can run any of the online auction platforms very successfully for you.

That’s a pretty good analogy, I know that my years playing Counter Strike probably suited me very well for being able to click the bid receive button. Jeff, I’m going to switch gears just a little bit, I’m looking at a press release from – the published date is very early June of this year – that talks about the BidSpotter.com announcing a dealership liquidation program. Tell me a little bit about what that program is and who that targets.

Well, you know, its been announced with General Motors and Chrysler in the last sixty days at the most, that they are going to be closing thousands and thousands of auto motor dealerships across the country. We started seeing some of these dealerships and they were generally about a $100,000 auction and looking at different resources I’ve noticed that a lot of them are going to local auctioneers who have never done anything online before because the relationship and the business isn’t coming through Chrysler, is not coming through General Motors, its coming through the owner of the dealership who is a neighborhood businessman and knows the neighborhood auctioneer. So what we did is we put together a package that really simplifies the whole process for, especially for an auctioneer who has never used us before or maybe never done an online auction before, and we took the different flavors of implementation out of it, we know from our experience that the best way to run one of these moderate sized auto dealership auctions is to be on the phone and do a remote broadcast, and we know that we can support this very effectively with a discount nonetheless. So it’s a $350 event fee, flat rate, implementation included for any dealership, and it doesn’t even have to be an auto dealership, it would be a John dealer dealership, it could be a moped dealership, but dealership auctions, they’ve got a special featured category on the BidSpotter homepage and that’s something we think that auctioneers across America are going to be busy with for the rest of this year at least and probably six months after that. So we put out a special offer to support our local auctioneers. I think what really drove it home for me was when I saw a couple of dealerships in Casper, Wyoming, and I just know that we don’t have an industrial user base in Casper, Wyoming, amongst client auctioneers and it brought home to me that these are going to come from all different directions and hopefully it’s a chance for these auctioneers to have an opportunity to try it out and see if they like it and we want to keep it simple, and straightforward.

That’s an exciting new program from you. What are some other features from either platform that we can look forward to, to seeing released in the future, what kind of development is going on, on the backside?

The most exciting features we’ve got coming along are along the lines of client integration. I know that for a lot of years a lot of auctioneers have had a strong debate of whether or not they are building our business or building their business and whether or not they want to drive their clients, their bidders to a portal website like BidSpotter. Coming in the future, the technology has come to support the idea that the sale can appear equally well in both locations and bidders who are loyal users of BidSpotter can find the event on BidSpotter calendar, they can log in, register, get approved, all that good stuff, and they will perceive that they found the auction through BidSpotter. But we have coming out shortly opportunities for auctioneers to embed a tool or a page within their website that allows branding with their logos and their colors to be able to traffic from directly within their site and maintain more of the feel that you’re working right within the auctioneer’s website. So really it’s going to be the best of both worlds. And those tools are in development, we except to roll those out in the fall. In conjunction with that, we are also focusing very heavily on back office systems. We have a channel partner in the UK that should allow us very shortly to be able to offer a very comprehensive package of enterprise management software for auctioneers to use that will do all your basic accounting functions and track your consigners and print your invoices and all that good stuff that you need to do, live at the sale site as well as with the online purchases because obviously when you get in these timed auctions and so forth, you have the dilemma where 100% of the bids and the bidders are coming through the website, but you still need to put them through an enterprise management software back office system that allows you to get the invoices out and check your bank deposits and make sure everything is as it should be so you’re running your business properly.

And so, let me jump in there, you’re talking about a web-based clerking and cashiering system, is that right?

Yes.

So someone, and let me form this question, for the real time live streaming auctions where I have a crowd in attendance and I’m taking bids from the floor and I’m taking bids from the Internet, will the system support then the recording of the winning bids for both Internet bidders and on-the-ground bidders and let me generate invoices all from this one spot?

That’s exactly what we are shooting for.

Nice.

On the customer side there’s also a lot of nice stuff coming along. There are new cultural things, new cultural expectations in the realm of the online auctions, some of which are bleeding over from eBay and some of which are kind of driven by the fact that we are event oriented, and people are going to want to be able to manage their favorites and their watched items and their items they are bidding on in a much more focused way. And so we are developing a lot of tools along those lines to allow people to dial in a little more tightly from the bidder perspective what they are interested in. And we think that will lead to more loyalty and better focus and more follow-through when it comes time to finalize the bidding.

One more follow question to what you described as essentially and a combination portal / integrated solution. That will provide auctioneers the ability to have the same inventory set hosted on his website as well as on BidSpotter or is one or the other?

No. The goal is to have the inventory data and the bidding exist in a space between the two and all we are changing is the way it is viewed from one perspective or another. So yes, it should be exactly the best of both worlds and whether it’s a live or timed auction won’t matter. The bidding will be competitive amongst all the bidders but their perception of where they came from and where they are existing on the internet will be colored slightly differently based upon where they began.

One more question on that. Do you anticipate a different pricing structure for an auctioneer utilizing that option and also is there a difference in the pricing structure between a real-time bidding auction and a timed auction?

At this time we don’t. You know, we have never done a whole lot of differentiation pricing-wise because we’ve really just always built whatever tool next seem to be most in demand and it’s a very competitive market and so we haven’t put out a lot of “gee, now we are going to get you to pay more for this and pay more for that.” The a la carte thing is never been anything that’s been a very much interest to us. So instead we are all about trying as best as we can to maintain the pricing structure we have as low as we can and just keep throwing more features out there as they are either brought to our attention by auctioneers, which is where most of good ideas come from, or whether they seem to answer a recurrent problem or a recurrent bidder demand.

What are some of the features that you offer that you are seeing of your most successful auctioneers utilizing? What are some of your most successful auctioneers asking for as far as feature sets, and what are they doing to set their auctions apart from the rest of your client base?

To be honest, I don’t think that the successful auctioneers are dependent upon a technology or something that we are providing. I think that the biggest difference and the most successful auctioneers for online auctions really comes down to their mindset regarding embracing the online bidders as real people, actual bidders who are just as genuinely interested in making good purchases and doing good business as the folks on site, it just so happens that they are at a remove, whether it’s a time management situation because they cant go to the auction because its their daughter’s wedding rehearsal that evening or whether they cant go to the auction because they are twenty-five hundred miles away. The biggest challenge for auctioneers is always about vetting the bidders and making sure they are doing good business. And we certainly appreciate that with my own auctioneering background, I’ve done enough bankruptcy court sales where the building has to be cleared in time and the bills have to be paid in time and I’ve even done sales in cases where I was liable for any deficit if someone didn’t pay their bill. On the other hand, if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I usually have no more guarantees that someone is going to follow through with their purchase when they have registered live in person. We certainly don’t track whether or not people leave the sales site before they’ve paid and we don’t do a whole lot when they register except maybe scan a driver’s license and so, you can draw direct analogies between doing good business in live auctions on site in person and doing good business with folks online. My experience has always been, through the ten years of doing this, that the percentage of people who are flakes online is just about the same percentage of people who are flakes in real life, we don’t see anywhere near the kind of fraud concerns that eBay has and I think that is because we are event oriented and we are focused on a whole package, and its still a process, you have to participate and actively, you cant swoop in and steal a bunch of laptops and swoop out like they do on some of the different online platforms where you can use fraudulent credit cards and so forth, but my advice to auctioneers has always been and the guys that do best are the ones that make the effort to reach out to every registered bidder, pick up the phone, see if they answer the phone, see if they sound like a good Joe on the other end and make that human connection, and the auctioneers that accept the most number of registrants are doing the most business and selling the most items. The auctioneers that have the most prohibitive, restrictive deposit demands and registration requirements and a lot of documents and so forth are the ones who are not seeing very many transactions with their online bidding.

That’s a great point in that the higher your barrier to entry, the less participation you are going to have. I mean, it’s a pretty direct relationship I think, on that. Talk a little bit more in-depth if you would about the various options that an auctioneer might have as far as bidder qualification and what maybe the most permissive policy and the highest barrier to entry policies may be.

Well, its kind of interesting because at the last Industrial Auctions Association Conference, Bruce Schneider with Schneider Industries came to us and said we had restored his faith in humanity, because he approves everyone and he’s never had a real problem. On the other hand, the other extreme, we have some of the guys who stick to the old school New England auctioneer policies where you’ve got to put a twenty-five percent deposit down, but they are not considering that from the perspective of the bidder. If you’re a guy in California and you see an auction for a bunch of audio video movie gear, and you think you want to bid on this stuff and you only know of the auction from the Internet, you go online and you register and you see that this guy wants you to send him ten thousand dollars cash – wire transfer – before he lets you bid. Well from the perspective of the guy in California, the bidder, that sounds like the definition of Internet fraud. You don’t know who that guy in New England is, I don’t care if he’s been in business for two hundred years, his name isn’t meaningful to you in the California market, you just know he’s asking for ten grand upfront before you can buy fifty thousand worth of equipment, or forty thousand. So there is the disconnect. Now, we are working very closely to try to establish something in the realm of a Paypal type payment process that is focused on the needs of auctioneers where you are moving actual money and you don’t have a whole bunch of recourse to cancel the deal after you’ve taken the goods and so forth. Most auctioneers right now are working in the middle ground and what we do on our platforms is, we have all the forms to request whatever the auctioneer requires. So if they wish they can request a driver’s license, if they wish they can request banking references, if they wish they can request credit cards for either just a deposit or for transacting the deal, we do not provide payment services at this time but its certainly something we’ve been in consideration of and maybe in future years we’ll be offering that service, we would certainly never require it but as an opportunity and as a feature for auctioneers that maybe something they wish. At the end of the day, it seems to me the guys that apply some common sense discretion to the folks registering online and the ones that use some of the resources that are there to vet some of the bidders and so forth, they do fine. There is an occasional problem, but my experience is that the occasional problem since 1999 is very much the same as the occasional problem before 1999. You just get a guy who gets excited, gets over his head or he doesn’t understand auctions and you’ve got to deal with the situation occasionally. It’s a rare situation. But nonetheless, when you look at that form of requesting approval to bid, if they haven’t spelled their name right or if they’ve got a phone number with eight digits or what have you, well then you know you’ve got a problem or you want to follow up and investigate a little further. If they are a name well known to you as most of our industrial auctioneers have well known clients they’ve never met in person, then you automatically approve without hesitation and its very much like the same policies you use to vet your auction bidders in the past, its just on a new venue.

How does registration work? If I’m a bidder and I find an auctioneer’s item or inventory set on BidSpotter.com and I decide to register into that event, I obviously have some steps to go through that are dependent on what that auctioneer requires for that event, but once I’m registered into that event, can I then reduce the number of steps I have to go through to bid in another auctioneer’s event? And the follow up question is that if there is a communal buyer set, for lack of a better descriptor, can one auctioneer make comments about a bidder that can be seen by another auctioneer?

You’ve hit on a couple of features that are inherent to what we do. I spoke earlier about the differences between BidSpotter and remote bidder and the ability to have a set of bidders who are automatically approved because they are known to you is one of those nice features that we have with RemoteBidder. Because again, if you traditionally sell duck decoys at all your auctions and you’ve got a buyer who always comes looking for duck decoys, then he’s going to be there sale after sale and there’s no reason for him not to and you’re going to know who he is so you can automatically approve that bidder as someone on your good list so to speak. And that’s a nice feature to have. We are a little more wide-ranging I will say on the BidSpotter side and it is very common for someone to come in completely unknown, buy a few machines, settle the business and go away and not bid again for five years until he needs more machines. On that side we do have a system of auctioneers being able to leave comments about bidders and I would like to see auctioneers use it more frequently because it is a very good communication tool when someone does fail to pay their bill or so forth. One of the comments we’ve had in the past about bad bidders is why don’t you block them and never let them register again based on email address. Well, the easy answer is, because someone goes out and gets another Gmail or Yahoo account address and they become unknown to you. I’d rather keep an eye on the guy in the way that we know him and be able to communicate amongst the auctioneers, you know what, this guy hasn’t paid in the past you need to make sure you get deposit or find out what the situation was. But again, those are uncommon things, I’m very happy with the feature we have with RemoteBidder where you could your whitelisted bunch of bidders because it does save time and energy. And again, in the consumer good space, you have a lot more repetitive buyers.

We talked a little bit about some of the things that some of the successful auctioneers are doing with regard to even a paradigm as it relates to Internet bidding and customer registration. What are you seeing as far as some of the mistakes that some auctioneers are making that had they done things a little bit differently they could have done a better job with the Internet bidding and the relationship with those Internet bidders at their events?

You know, I think the number one area for improvement and the thing that seems to separate most the successful online auctioneers and not just the folks that sell the most online but also minimizing and mitigating challenges and problems after the sale, are the level of cataloguing. And I have catalogued hundreds if not thousands of auctions. I know how much work it is. I know that auctioneers often put out disclaimers that it doesn’t matter what I say or what this catalogue is, you are buying as is under your own inspection. Well, that kind of stands at odds a little bit with the circumstance that an online buyer finds themselves in where they are completely dependent upon the auctioneer for description. There is a trend amongst industrial auctions for folks to go down and inspect and then bid online later and I imagine for consumer goods there is still a fair amount of people doing that regionally as well, but you seriously have a lot of people who need to depend on you, because they’re never going to see the item until it arrives in their possession after you ship to them. So the difference between cataloging table as the whole description, and one small low resolution snap shot as opposed to getting very detailed and saying this is mahogany, Ethan Allen table with four leaves and so on and so forth, and putting in three or four images. One of the biggest advantages we have in our RemoteBidder site is how easy it is to manage multiple images and I believe that multiple images is a level upon which all of the different live auction broadcast sites are competing, because the more that that person can see for themselves, the better it works out in the long run for everyone. And a very good example I know came from a recent auction we did with OK Automobilia, it was kind of a fun auction because we run it on both the BidSpotter platform where they have done auctions annually for the last seven years under the name Vic’s 66, which they recently sold hence the new name, and we ran it on the brand new RemoteBidder platform. And between the two online platforms, we did about forty or fifty percent of the auction total gross and it was split pretty evenly between their folks that knew to come to BidSpotter and the new folks in RemoteBidder. But there was a situation that came out after the sale, a fellow had bought a sign – this was a sale of Petroliana and automobile signs and gas pumps and that sort of thing – definitely those kind of guy toys that a demographic works very well for. And the fellow came in and he looked at this sign which had been a hanging sign and it was two sided. And one side which probably had been against the building for years was gorgeous and the other side was very rough. And not to put it too lightly, the guy came in and basically blew a gasket. He said, “You know, I bid exclusively online, I couldn’t come look here, I’ve driven hours to pick this thing up and now I see you hide the back side from me.” And the auctioneer very calmly said, actually sir, lets go see what we had online, because he knew there were photographs there of both sides. In this case the client hadn’t availed themselves of it but it had been offered to them had they wished to look it over and do a little more due diligence and at the end of the day the guy paid his bills, said, “Golly, you know what, to be honest, I think maybe I saw that other side, I just I don’t know what I was thinking I got caught up in the bidding and you’re right, it was there and I need to pay my bill because I bought it and that’s fair.” So that extra effort by that auctioneer to snap one more picture really saved a situation where there could have been a dispute that was without a good resolution. And so I think that’s the place for most auctioneers can avail themselves best, and if I had a magic want and there was one thing I could say to the auctioneers as my rule, I would say catalog it the way you’re going to sell it, and sell it the way you catalog it. Because one of the biggest frustration we get with bidders in industrial sales is when we have a bidder who carefully pours over hundreds of lots of tooling and drill bits and so forth and picks out the twenty that he needs for his business and leaves very good absentee bids and events at sale, and then the auctioneer comes in and says, put the next twenty together, put the next twenty together. And so all over a sudden who left a hundred and ninety dollar bid for his one lot is outbid by the guy who is spending two hundred dollars for twenty lots. And it really didn’t serve anyone’s best interest but the set up guy wasn’t really in tune with the auctioneer ones and so on and so forth. Its important to remember that these folks online don’t have a good way to holler out and say hey, could you sell out 147 separate, I really just need that one piece. So that would be my magic wand wish. I think that most of the opportunities for improvement and more success and less challenges after the sale fall in the realm of cataloging.

Is this something that you’re seeing improve over time, the diligence that auctioneers are using as far as cataloging their auctions and what are some other overall trends you are seeing in Internet bidding in the auction industry?

Absolutely. I had to go to the auction in 1999 of one of the most preeminent industrial auctioneers in America at the time, who later rolled up his business with DoveBid and then now has rolled it back out again. And he was of the mind that people didn’t need to hear the auction, and they certainly didn’t need a picture of every item because there’s just no point. So I went a day early on my own nickel and I took a picture of the lot. And that was the first auction where we did more than 25% to the online bidders. And we made a believer of him that day. Since then, I think the auctioneers understand that its very important. We have a few holdouts who refuse to offer every lot, we have a few holdouts who refuse to take pictures of every lot, but by and large, everyone now is a consumer online frequently enough that we are all beginning to have a shared set of expectations. And we’ve all shopped at Amazon enough, we’ve all shopped eBay enough, we’ve all done Harry and David online for Christmas shopping and all these different things, and so providing that and meeting that expectation really, really sets a level playing field amongst all the bidders and you’d be surprised. What I’ve found over the years is that the online bidders are interested most in the twenty percent of your merchandise that represents eighty percent the value. So you don’t need a whole lot of action online to generate a whole lot of money. I know that in a recent sale two weeks ago, because of a partnership between their client and my client, we ended up going head to head with one of our primary competitors broadcasting the same auction at the same time and they sold a lot more lots and they sold about $17,000 out of the $600,000 sale, and we sold a $117,000 out of the $600,000 sale. And the difference primarily was a $70,000 lot and a $30,000 lot. So being dialed in the right demographic and the right mailing list could make a really big difference. But also, on the auctioneer end, providing the tools they need to make an intelligent buying decision and if you’re willing to risk spending thirty grand or seventy grand. Or we’ve actually had a single million dollar bid online and it went just fine. So it’s all about providing the information needed and setting it up so they can feel confident when they place their bid.

Well, that’s it for Episode 19. My guest tonight was Jeff Johnstonbaugh, COO of BidSpotter.com. You can find out more about bidspotter at www.bidspotter.com and about remotebidder at remotebidder.com. Thank you very much Jeff for joining me this evening.

Thank you, Aaron. I appreciate the opportunity.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

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You’re listening to the Auction Podcast. Today is Wednesday, 27th May, 2009. auctioneertech.com – technology, auction and auctioneers, auction tech for the auction industry.

Hello and welcome to the 18th episode of the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. My name is Aaron Traffas and joining me today for the first NAA staff interview is Chris Longly, Deputy Executive Director for the National Auctioneers Association based in Overland Park, Kansas. Chris is on the show tonight for two reasons, the first to talk about his role in the association and the second to tell us about the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show coming this July to the Kansas City area.

AuctioneerTech: Good evening Chris and thank you for joining me.

Chris Longly: Thank you Aaron, I’m honored to be the first NAA staff member to join you on your show.

AT: I realize the auctioneers and vendors I’ve had on in previous episodes do a great job of promoting the association but you are the first official and a representative, give me the ninety second elevator speech about what the NAA is, who it benefits and what its goals are.

CL: Well you know I can even beat ninety seconds. To sum up the NAA, there is no better way to describe it that the NAA was built 60 years ago by auctioneers for auctioneers. Simply put, we are here to serve the auction profession and the auction industry, we are the biggest advocate of the auction industry and the auction profession, our role here is to provide auctioneers and auction companies with the tools, training, education and resources that they need to succeed in the ever changing market place. Auctions are different today than they were sixty years ago when the NAA was founded, it’s continued to grow and change every day. So we are here to help provide those tools and resources, so we can move forward. Actions have been around two thousand years and they’re going to be here in the future, but each day they change a little bit and we are here to kind of grow and change with that industry. And so that is our role, is that we are here to provide that, the training, the resources and that networking environment that so many people come to the NAA for, just to network and to communicate and kind of to connect with auctioneers from all over in the United States or even across the world.

Sounds like that snot the first time you’ve had the answer that question.

I am their PR guy so I’m sorry.

So, talk a little bit about that, what are the official job responsibilities for your position which is listed on the website as deputy executive director and what does an average day consist of for you?

You know, when I first joined the NAA, it was two years ago, I came to the NAA as its public affairs manager and as over time my roles and responsibilities have grown. My primary responsibility as the deputy executive director is kind of an extension of those responsibilities which were public relations, government relations and charitable relations. First and foremost, my job for the NAA is to be its advocate for the association and advocate and promoter of our members, and advocate and promoter of the industry. And I do that through the media, my job is to act as a spokesperson, so I will work with everyone from CNN to for instance this week we had a great story on national public radio about auctions and talking about that growth, so I work with the media to promote and push the industry and promote and push NAA auctioneers. On the government relations side, my job is to, one act as an advocate, whether it be in Washington DC, on behalf of the auction industry or as an advisor, kind of a consultant to state associations when they run into issues, since my time we’ve been here I’ve had the fortune of working on behalf of the association to fight some rules in the general services administration that were going to be prohibitive to auctioneers and really box auctioneers out of selling for the Federal government. And so it’s my honor to work with auctioneers and going to Washington DC and stopping that from taking place. And so that’s just an example of the things we work on, working in the state legislatures to educate them about the auction profession and protecting the auctioneers. That’s what we do on the government relations side.

And then on the charitable side, as many people know who follow the National Auctioneers Association, we are proud sponsors of St. Jude Children Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee and so my job is to act as a liaison between the auctioneers in the NAA and the hospital. We have raised roughly about four million dollars for St. Jude’s since we our partnership began in 1995 and it’s something we continue to hopefully grow and build upon and get more members involved in raising money for that cause. But then also with the association of our size, most people will think the National Auctioneers Association is a very large organization, staff size, we are actually quite small. So we get to dabble in everything. So today I worked with the landscaping through our front, I am the office barbequer, so I do a little bit of everything here at the NAA.

Nice. How did you become involved with the National Auctioneers Association, what’s your background, where are you from and what drew you to the NAA.

Alright…well I’m a proud Nebraskan, so I hail from the good life state, I grew up around auctions my entire life, my family, grandfather was a farmer and rancher, so I remember spending time with him at the livestock sales, but as I grew older I kind of moved away from that. And my background is politics, I studied politics and media relations at University of Nebraska, so I’m a big Cornhusker Fan. I’ve done politics and managed Congressional campaigns and U.S. Senate races when I left college, and then I moved to the corporate side and I did PR and government relations, we call it public affairs in the industry. Public affairs is the combination of government relations and media relations and I did that for The Venetian of Las Vegas, if people are familiar with Las Vegas, I did a little work for them and then I also did work for State Farm Insurance. So I could insure your gambling assets in a sense. But then I came across an opportunity in the Kansas City area that I saw there was an association in need of a public affairs professional and knowing auctions and growing up around them, I thought wow, I found somebody who could talk more than me and faster than me, so this is going to work for me. So that’s why I came down here and joined the NAA staff and I handled the public affairs.

Great. Speaking of public affairs, one of the biggest, in my mind, one of the biggest presences that NAA has for the average auctioneer is at Conference and Show. So how would you describe Conference and Show to someone who is unfamiliar with it, either someone who is unfamiliar with the industry and the association or an auctioneer who is just now beginning to be involved in the association?

You know, the best way for me to sum up Conference and Show is just that one spot that every auctioneer should be in July and should make every attempt to be there because this is the one spot where you could go to network, ask those questions that you are needing input on, getting that education to help you remain competitive in the marketplace, its all those things in one week, in Kansas City this Summer, next year it will be in Greensboro North Carolina and so on and so forth, its that one week where we get together and have fun, we celebrate our industry, we compete with competitions, we have education sessions, but most importantly its just that shaking hands in the hallway, asking if you are a new person in the industry, asking that thirty year veteran, how have you stayed in this business for thirty years. What would be the one tip you could offer me as an auction school graduate so I can be in your same shoes thirty years down the road. That’s what’s Conference and Show; it’s that one week where you get everything you need. But at the same time it’s that family reunion and that’s one thing we are going to have this year, is that family reunion thing because if you ask many NAA members, Conference and Show is far more than just business and professional development. It is catching up with old friends, what has happened in the last year since I last saw you at Conference and Show last year. So that’s how I describe Conference and Show.

You mentioned it is going to be in Kansas City this year. Why is it coming home to Kansas City?

Kansas City, its coming home because home is where we are here and it is our sixtieth anniversary. 1949, eleven auctioneers got together and created the National Auctioneers Association, sixty years have passed, its time to bring in the family, come to Kansas City to Overland Park and we are going to get together and celebrate sixty years. I mean, that’s something to hang your head on and be proud, so it’s going to be a family reunion in a sense. And we are going to celebrate sixty years because here in Kansas City this is where we are headquartered, so it makes sense to bring everyone home to the family.

Being based in Kansas City and I assume living there somewhere in the area, you should be relatively familiar with Kansas City and the Kansas City area. What are some things to do, what are some night life attractions and what can we expect for some of the extracurricular activities in Kansas City?

Well, and that’s one thing I think many people sometimes get well, what’s in Kansas City and that’s one thing I love telling our members about is, there is so much to see in Kansas City, its really hard to summarize it, but I tell people if you are a history buzz, if you like museums, we have the only World War 1 museum in the world. It is the Liberty Museum, the Liberty Monument and so that is one of the neatest museums that we have in Kansas City, if you like art we have world renowned art museums in our gallery here, Nelson Atkins Museum. If you like shopping, let me tell you, we have a lot of places where you can spend a lot of money here in Kansas City. We have the world famous popular, a lot of people know of it, is The Plaza. It’s a boutique shop fun area, great restaurants, it’s a part of Kansas City that people come from all over the country just for the shopping and for the experience, if you are looking for fun and speed, we have the Kansas City Speedway one of Nascars race tracks here in Kansas City that we are pretty proud of. But then also we have new areas and new developments like the Kansas City Power and Light District, this is a new evening restaurant establishment that was built up this year that goes with the Sprint Center which is our new TV entertainment district but also right next to the entertainment district at the Sprint Center is the college basketball hall of fame museum. So that’s another museum for people to see. The list goes on and on, museums and attractions to see, but there also are a lot of family fun things. The Deanna Rose Children’s Farmstead, that’s an outdoor park where kids can play with the animals. I went there with my niece and nephew a couple of years ago, they have a fishing pond there that you literally stick your fishing pond and fish will just out of the water onto your hook. It is an amazing experience, that’s my kind of fishing that works for me. But there are all kinds of things to see and do. Food, shopping, obviously when you come to Kansas City we highly recommend that you eat a barbeque, but we also have some great stake houses, some great Italian restaurants, you name it, the cuisine is there. And that’s the neat thing about where we are for Conference and Show, is that there are just a plethora of food selections to choose from and sites to see in Overland Park, Kansas.

There is a jam packed schedule of educational activities and tours, there are several NAA educational institute designation courses that are offered and the day is leading up to where it kind of all begins with the opening night ceremonies on Tuesday evening. Talk a little bit about what we can expect for opening night and maybe what some of the big ticket items and banquets and competitions are the rest of the week.

Well, you know, we always start off Conference and Show with some pre conference education. This is an opportunity for members who maybe couldn’t get to one of our designation courses throughout the year, and so the days before we lead into Conference and Show, we have some pre conference courses. We have the AARE course, we have the GPPA course, the ATS, the BAS, the CES and even this year we have the Professional Ringman’s Institute offering some of their course, all in the day before Conference and Show. So for those members who want to get, or non members, who want to come out and obtain a continuing education designation the day before the conference and then head into the conference for additional continuing education, that’s the place to be. Opening night is one of the events everybody looks forward to, this is when I say family reunion, its amazing to see the members just get excited, hugging, shaking hands with friends who they haven’t seen either in a year or more. And this year, because it is that sixtieth anniversary, we have what is called rock and reunion. And so this is going to be a fun event at the Overland Park Convention Center, Sheraton Hotel area where we will be, we are going to have indoor games, we are going to have outdoor games. Obviously the highlight of the night I think will be the auction idol competition. This is an event we are doing that’s new this year, everybody loves American idol, so we thought why not do Auction Idol. And so what will happen is, we have members who have registered and we still have some open spots for the musician out there who would like to compete, we will have members do their musical presentations and then we will be selling tickets for members to buy to use, to vote for their favorite contestants, and all those proceeds go to St. Jude Children Research Hospital. So it’s a fun way for our members to show their musical talents because we have some of the most talented musicians in any industry, I think, and that’s part of the auction industry, there is a lot of stage performance presence and musical talent I think Aaron you’ve got some musical talent, I’ve been told, so I expect you to be in the Auction Idol. But this is an opportunity for them to show their stuff and raise money for a good cause.

Now, while we have that, we are going to have some kid’s activities. We are going to have the moon walk for the kids to play on, and the key to the whole night is the barbeque. We are going to have the world famous Jack Stack Kansas City Barbeque for everybody to enjoy out in the green space, to enjoy the night, I think we are going to have ice cream, cotton candy, and maybe some shaved ice cones, I’m not sure, but then my favorite part maybe, I don’t know, there are a lot of favorite parts, but this one is new, and this one has been fun putting together for our members, and its Wii World. Everybody has heard of the Nintendo Wii, I haven’t played one once you play you are going to be addicted, we are going to have rows wiis set up throughout the hotel and conference center so people can play tennis, they can bowl, we’ve got fishing, we’ve got race cars, we are going to have all kinds of different games for people to play throughout the week but opening night there is going to be outside of the opening night event. And then the kicker is, at the end of the week, those wiis that everybody has been playing on, they are up for sale. They are going up on the auction in the IAC. Now that brings up a good thing; we talk about what are some of the events and activities, competition. That’s something that people come year in, year out to strut their stuff and to take the stage and hopefully take the title. Obviously the most I guess well known event that we have at Conference and Show is the International Auctioneer Championship. We’ve been doing this for I think 21, 22 years. I guess it will be 21 years this year, because Paul Behr was the first IAC champion in 1988, so we will have auctioneers from across the country, actually we’ve had auctioneers from across the world compete for that world title champion. And so this is an exciting event, you just see talent, unbelievable talent come across the stage on Friday and show their stuff. So we will be picking a new world champion male auctioneer and we will be picking new international auctioneer champion woman and they will be our spokespeople and our advocates for the coming year. Now you have the upcoming International Auctioneer Champions, get their practice in the international junior auctioneer championship and that’s going to go on throughout the week with the finals taking place on Friday morning. And this is where we have young kids, I shouldn’t say kids because it starts at eighteen years and younger, compete. So you are going to have third generation, second generation auctioneers, even fourth generation auctioneers come up and start their stuff and you’ll be amazed when you see the talent that comes across the stage, you would think they could compete just as well in the International Auctioneers Championship. So a lot of pure talent coming across the stage at a very young age.

I remember before thinking that there were certainly some contestants in the IJAC, the International Junior Auctioneers, I definitely remember thinking that they were some of those that could just as well have placed very strongly in the IAC.

Exactly. And this is our third year. Trev Moravec who was our first IJAC winner two years ago in San Diego, the previous year I think he was nineteen two years ago, I think when he was eighteen, he was a finalist in the International Auctioneers Championship. So he is competitive across the board, the talent is amazing, Jacob Barth who won last year, again he is fourteen years old but he sounds like he’s been bid calling, now you know he’s been bid calling since birth but his bid call is phenomenal for only fourteen years. So I always look forward to seeing that just because it’s nice to see the next generation moving forward in our industry. And then finally, we have for the third year, the International Ringman’s Competition. This takes place in conjunction with the National Auctioneers Foundation fun auction and this always an exciting auction where you get to see the real talent out there in the field in the ringman’s industry and so we are always looking forward to seeing the excitement in it, the energy those contestants bring to the competition, and they are always raise for a wonderful cause which is our foundation. And so that’s going to be another exciting event that’s going to just get people involved in the association and the competition.

We are past now the early bird registration deadline, I am sure that we have quite a few of our membership procrastinating a little bit maybe more this year looking at the economy and maybe still kind of deciding whether or not to come. What’s the attendance looking like right now and is it too late to register for discount?

It’s never too late to register for discounts, registration numbers look good, we always want more, we tell people, you come that first time, if you are sitting on the fence right now wondering if you should come your first time, this is the perfect opportunity for you. And if you are looking at it and going well, the economy is kind of tough, maybe business has not been as fast or as strong as I’d want, that’s the perfect example why you should be at Conference and Show. Come here, get some ideas, get some inputs and maybe you’ll make a business connection that will give you new business. When its times like this, that’s more the reason you need to tap into the association. Tap into that network of people to help you build your business, you can survive these tough times and actually more forward and make more money for your business. Trust me if you come to Conference and Show, I think you’ll find that you’ll make more money than would spend on conference far and above.

I would definitely agree with that

I hope so; I think that’s a perfect reason why you’d want to come to Conference and Show. But no, it’s not too late. Actually, if we are going to air this before June 5th, you have one last chance to save money on your registration. June 5th is the last cut off date before we get into Conference and Show. So if you have not registered for Conference and Show and it’s before June 5th and you’re sitting on the fence, save yourself seventy-five bucks and go ahead and register today. Whether it’s the Full Pack, the Super Saver 1, Super Saver 2, get in there before June 5th and save yourself seventy-five bucks.

What’s the hotel and lodging situation looking like, are they filling up, what kind of lodging is there close to the Overland Park Convention Center.

Well, you know, all the hotels are showing up pretty fast. So we tell you to contact NAA Travel and I’ve got their phone number here for anybody who is listening. If you are looking at coming to Conference and Show, get in touch with NAA Travel as soon as possible and book your room and that number is 877-363- 9378. If you want to get in touch with them, go ahead and book your room and make sure you are ready to go. All of the hotel rooms are either connected to the convention center across the street or I think the furthest one is maybe a half a mile away but obviously within walking distance of the convention center, there is free packing at the convention center so don’t let parking prevent you from coming, but there is one thing that you will probably want to do when you come to conference and show this year, is that we’re a little bit further away from the airport than I think previous conference and shows in years past. So we would highly recommend you rent a car for the week, but that’s perfect opportunity for you to go check out a Kansas City Royals game in the evenings or better yet how about you take a trip at the Branson Missouri, see a show, come to Conference and Show. But rent that car. So you’re going to need to rent a car but everything, the hotels are nearby and there is still room, so book today.

I sure I’m looking forward to it certainly because I am very close and kind of familiar with Kansas City but also because, at least in my opinion and experience, the traffic isn’t as nearly as bad as it has been at some of the other locations we’ve had Conference and Show and it is away from the airport but its not like it’s a crazy horrible commute, there is a lot of, its pretty much an interstate straight down from the airport to the convention center and so I would definitely agree with that recommendation to get a car, and its really not that bad.

What’s your favorite spot in Kansas City Aaron?

Well, I’m kind of partial to some of the night life establishments, I’ve seen some great shows in the Kansas City area, I am a big fan of alternative country and music in general and so I always coming over and I get to see Ryan Adams out there and some other really great bands, I’ve actually played a couple of times in the area, so there is a lot of great places. I am kind f looking forward to getting to the Power and Light District; I haven’t had a chance to see that yet.

Oh, there is the PBR bar. If you are looking for country music, there is the Professional Bull Riders and they’ve got a mechanical bull with your name on it. So get down there while you’re in town.

That’s just what I need. So, what was your involvement like in the coordination and planning of Conference and Show this year and what can we expect to see you doing during the convention?

Well, I usually tell people when I talk to members; a lot of my interactions with our membership is over the phone. So when I see them in Conference and Show, it’s really exciting to finally meet them in person. So I tell people I am the guy running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Most of my time is making sure that everything is in order for the members, we have ticket people in place, we have food where food needs to be, a lot of my time is working with the media, one of my favorite parts is taking our IAC champions out to local TV stations and introducing bid calling and the art of auctioneering to the local TV anchors, just because they enjoy it, it’s a great opportunity to showcase our IAC champions talent, but its also a good time to talk about the industry. I remember when we were in Nashville last year, a lot of people wanted to talk about real estate auctions. And so it was a great opportunity to educate Nashville viewers about how real estate auctions have grown. So it’s a great opportunity to do PR there. But overall, my job is just to help facilitate the association move and do business because my job also involves memberships, we’re going to talk about growing the association and building that and what we can provide members to make the association more beneficial and useful to them in the future. So a little bit of business but hopefully a bit of fun; catching up. I’m looking forward to seeing the members.

Yeah. You mentioned at the very beginning of the Podcast that next year, we can expect to look forward to North Carolina. What are some new ideas that we may look forward to seeing at future Conferences and Shows?

Well, you know Conference and Show is something we are constantly trying to build upon and make it a better draw, make it more worthy, useful over time, the last thing we want to do is provide a member with a conference that they don’t walk away going, I didn’t know that. We want you to talk away with a notepad full of ideas, pocket full of business cards from members you’ve met, and so we are constantly looking at what education programs we can provide that will be more beneficial, what kind of activities and events can we provide that are going to be beneficial. But next year, we are in Greensboro North Carolina, we are going to be in Orlando in 2011, Spokane in 2012 and Indianapolis in 2013. So everybody needs to put those on the calendar, you know where you need to be till 2013, and hopefully soon we’ll have 2014 picked up real quick so you can go and put that on your calendar there. But we plan these on advance and we are always looking for inputs. So members of the association, even non members of the association, if there is something that you’d like to see at Conference and Show, please let us know. This is your association is probably something else that another member wants, but we need to hear it from you.

Great. One last question for you Chris and I know that with your background in politics I realize that there is certainly some political implications here about picking sides and things like that but now that you’ve been with the association for a few years, what are your thoughts on some of the things that NAA can do to make itself even better in the future.

Well, let me see which way… I guess I’m trying to understand the question, sorry…

What are some ideas that NAA may, in your opinion, look at pursuing to make itself increase membership, make itself more relevant in the industry and things to make it even better.

Well, you know, things that we can do to kind of build our association to make it better is obviously create our presence. Create our presence in the industry, part of the association’s job is to get out there and promote the industry. So we’ve had a lot of successes over the past year, two years on getting ourselves out there in front of the mainstream media and getting in people’s homes, talking about auctions, making auctions no longer this process that sometimes you hear about but you don’t know the facts or details behind, we are trying to bring it to the mainstream and so we’ve had a lot of success there, but we need to continue to have that presence. But it’s not just the NAA that needs to be doing the PR; it’s our members out there in their local communities. Picking up the phone and calling their radio stations or their local newspaper and inviting them to an auction or offering to tell them about an auction. Together at the grassroots level and at the grass tops level, we are going to increase the PR and make the association and the industry and the membership much more stronger and better in the future. From the membership perspective, one thing we are constantly looking to do for our members is create benefits and enhance our benefits. What are some things that maybe we are not providing our members that may be useful. What are some things that really members don’t see benefit in that we can maybe move to something different. So that’s one of the things I’d like to see in my position, is looking at our membership benefits and increasing those and making those better so members can walk away saving money for their personal business. That’s one of the greatest benefits we can do as an association, is not only save you money, but we want to help you make money.

Well, that’s it for Episode 18. My guest tonight is Chris Longley, deputy executive director of the National Auctioneers Association which you can visit at www.auctioneers.org. You can also find complete information about the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show. Thank you very much Chris for taking time out of your evening to join me this evening.

Thank you Aaron and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from Auctioneer Tech. If you have questions, suggestions or comments or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.actioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode as well as find show transcripts on the Auction Podcast page of AuctioneerTech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something!

The post Auction Podcast Episode 18 – Interview with Chris Longly appeared first on AuctioneerTech.

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Thursday, 26 March, 2008. auctioneertech.com – Technology, auctions and auctioneers – auction tech for the auction industry

Hello and welcome to the seventeenth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast, my name is Aaron Traffas. In this episode, we’re going to discuss starting bids for Internet bidding and why you shouldn’t ever start the bid above your lowest acceptable bid at a live auction. This is a common practice, so I encourage your feedback and discussion of this possibly controversial issue.

Most bid callers in the act of selling an item begin by asking the crowd for a bid at a price that is higher than or equal to the projected sales price. When they don’t receive a bid, and they rarely do at this initially requested price, they reduce the price until someone makes an initial bid. The price goes up from that point until nobody else bids, at which time the auctioneer declares the item to be sold.

Most bid callers have a low bid below which they won’t ask for another bid. This price is usually between $1 and $25 for personal property, depending on the auctioneer and the type of property in the auction. It’s in noone’s best interests to cry for bids below such a threshold, and in the case of items without pre-auction bids, the auctioneer has the option to put an item without bids together with another item without bids in an effort to sell the items.

Most, if not all, Internet bidding platforms allow the auctioneer to specify a starting bid price. When the item is first listed, no bids below this starting price are allowed.

In the case of a successful Internet bidding system, few, if any, items in an event should start without pre-auction bids. The only way to achieve such a system is to ensure that the starting bid is equal to the lowest bid the bid caller will take at the live auction. Why would an auctioneer want to set a start price that was anything other than the lowest bid he would accept?

In the case of an auction with reserves, I understand the logic behind setting this starting or minimum bid price equal to the reserve. In the case of an auction without reserve, however, this practice makes no sense.

If your minimum bid at a live auction is $10, set the minimum bid for the Internet bidding to be $10. For every item. For every category from coins to real estate. For every auction. Every time.

Low starting bids encourage participation. They encourage speculation. Bids are placed by bidders who realize that an item is well under-valued and who have no intention of purchasing an item, only to perhaps do further research and maybe bid again when they get the email hours or days later that they’ve been outbid.

What does setting consistent and low initial starting bids hurt? Absolutely nothing. The auctioneer gets more bids, and if those bids aren’t significant in relation to the value of an item, the crowd will initiate the bidding just as if there were no Internet bids and nothing is lost. Bidders who started bidding at $10 on the John Deere combine may bid again at $100 and $1000 and tell the story to their neighbors who may bid at $10,000 and then again at $50,000. All of a sudden the $100,000 combine finally sells after 30 different bidders have placed bids. The huge increase in speculative bidding means more participants who get outbid notifications and come back to the website. Website traffic goes up and as the visibility increases, excitement about the event goes up.

What do arbitrary or varying initial starting bids hurt? They look like reserves, even if they aren’t. It’s much harder to convince a seller to sell an item absolute – which means with no minimum or reserve – if items without any bids require certain prices in existing listings. Fewer bids are received and the chances increase that an item won’t have a starting Internet bid when it is sold at the auction. The lack of consistency lends further credence to some customers’ mistrust of auctioneers. The combine with 30 different bidders in the above example only receives bids from five people willing to bid from $50,000 to the selling price of $100,000. Fewer stories are told and less excitement is created.

Take another example of an item with an expected sales price of $100. An auctioneer with a rule of thumb to set the starting bids to 60% of expected sales price sets the start bid to $60. A prospective bidder who would have bid up to $50 sees the item but can’t bid on it. No bids are received and at the live crowd the item sells for $40. While an argument can be made that the auctioneer should have made a better prediction, we say that the auctioneer should be in the business of finding value and not predicting it.

Auctioneers with varying starting Internet bids in an event are trying to add complexity where there should be simplicity. Why spend time figuring a starting bid of a percentage of the expected selling price when it’s advantageous to set every item at $10 and encourage more participation from more bidders? Even if bidders aren’t serious, it hurts nothing to enlist their help spreading word of an event to others who may be serious.

Remember, we’re not advocating setting the start bids lower than the price at which you would rather pass on items than ask for lower amounts at the risk of letting the crowd set the pace and tempo of an event. If your base bid is $5, set the starting bids there. If you pass on items at the auction when you can’t get a $25 bid, set the starting bid there.

That’s it for episode 17. Do you set arbitrary or varying starting bids? Why? Let us know in the comments. We have some exciting guests coming up over the next couple of months before Conference and Show, including Tom Clark from Proxibid; Walt Kolenda, also known as AuctionWally; Steve VanEerden from JBS Software; and NAA President Randy Wells.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

The post Auction Podcast Episode 17 – Starting bids for Internet bidding appeared first on AuctioneerTech.

Dwayne Leslie from Global Auction Guide

Aaron Traffas: Hello and welcome to the 16th episode of the Auction Podcast from Auctioneer Tech. My name is Aaron Traffas and joining me today for the second in our vendor interview series is my friend Dwayne Leslie. Dwayne is the President of the Global Auction Guide Media Group based in Manitoba, Canada. Good Evening Dwayne and thank you for joining me.

Dwayne Leslie: Hi Aaron. Thanks for having me on.

AT: What is Global Auction Guide?

DL: Global Auction Guide is basically a network of websites. We started back in 2001 with a site called FarmAuctionGuide.com. As a farmer myself, I couldn’t find the auction sales in a nice aggregate format where I could search for any individual item across many different auctioneers. So, we thought, well, if we couldn’t find what we are looking for, then there is probably others out there looking for the same thing. We had a little bit of background in doing some other web projects and we thought, well, we will build it see who comes. Seven years later it is certainly been a lot of fun.

What kind of growth did you see over those 7 years as far as both the traffic of your visitors and your web stats as well as what kind of growth did you see in your own company? How many people did you start with and what has your staff grown to be today?

Well, we jokingly, refer to our company as a hobby that got out of hand in a very good way. We currently have actually 5 employees, so it works out very well. I actually still farm as well. So it allows me to continue farming in the summer and of course, having people on staff now to look after these things. But It’s a long cold winter up here. Just outside Winnipeg, Manitoba. We jokingly say we get 10 months of winter and 2 months of poor sledding. But its not quite that bad I think most of the times. No, we have come a long way. We originally had the agricultural site and within a year based on the feedback and the growth of that, the auctioneers were ask as to have sites for them as for other industries, you know they may have antique sale or real estate sale or industrial sale whatever the case may be. So we developed niche sites for each of these different types of sales as well and then of course, we branded ourselves as Global Auction Guide Media Group. It just kept growing and growing and growing every year and just 2008 for example, we had 70% growth over the year before and it’s phenomenal. The more we learn about the internet and the more we can harness the power of internet to help out auctioneers it just keeps growing and growing.

So you mentioned why you started to have additional domains. You know, you have started with Farm auction guide; certainly GlobalAuctionGuide.com is the one I use whenever I am going to see, you know, what is in the area. But I know that you have many many other sites, other smaller niche as you call it domains. Are you saying a benefit to that strategy is supposed to and I certainly think, there is may be not the correct argument, but certainly a legitimate argument to be made, that may be 1 site is better. You can focus all of your work to brand 1 site as supposed to many different sites. Why have you chosen the multiple domains and what are some of the other domains that you have and what are you looking to add?

Dwayne Leslie: Well, Probably a good example of some of the other domains we have, would be the one that covers your state, KansusAuctionsGuide.com. The big part of that is when somebody finds a site, when a bidder is looking for an item and they are from Kansas; they find the Kansas site they bookmark the Kansas site and they keep coming back. Because that’s there local access point for the national network. Of course they can find all of the sales across the continent on the Kansas site, but it’s just in their mindset. You know, this is for Kansas and I am gonna keep coming back here. The other important part is for SEO reasons or Search Engine Optimization reasons, where someone is on Google and searches for Kansas auctions it is a pretty good chance that Kansas Auction Guide comes up and certainly in the top 2 or 3. Most of the times our sites are ranked no 1 for what we target. That is a huge thing for us. We probably, average around 100,000 referrals just from Google every month. So the work that we do to get the, set the auctioneer sale bills and get our web sites to the top of the search engine is incredibly important to drive in traffic to the sales. Especially the sale is online bidding or live web casting and these types of things where you need to get the national exposure. A good SEO is so important and domaining is big part of that as well.

You have partnerships with many other companies and organizations. What are some of the more exciting alliances that you have the opportunity to establish? What are some that you are currently working on now?

Partnerships and syndication of our auction sales has been a huge part of what we have done. Basically from our very original business plan that we had back in 2001, we knew this was important, then, it just gotten more and more important as years are gone by. In the agriculture segment we have newspapers like Grass and Grain out of Manhattan Kansas. When you go to their website and look at their auction sales it is actually driven by our database. So it all looks sales on our systems that show up on their newspaper site with their templates and their look. They were able to promote in their newspaper come to their website Grassandgrain.com to see thousands of upcoming auctions from across the continent. We have many other partnerships like that. Brownfield Radio Network is a huge agricultural radio syndication program across the mid-west. When you go to their website, it’s a same idea its driven by us. So, we work with many other newspapers, radio networks and other portal and niche websites and even our competitors basically to get their auctioneers bills to be seen and heard as far and wide as possible. Probably one of the neediest things that come along the industry in many years has been a central auction hub, which actually is, originally sorted out by us I guess and launched by ourselves as auctionzip.com basically to make a central auctioneer or auction sale database. If an auctioneer wants to push his sales to 100 different websites, just with a couple of quick set of buttons, the way it goes. He doesn’t have to do all that work or re-enter it. It just, the way the internet. It really really shines. It’s been able to transfer the information as far and wide as possible.

What is your pricing structure at Global Auction Guide?

We have a very simple pricing structure. We charge 360$ per year for unlimited listings, unlimited text, unlimited photos. Its just one flat annual fee. So whether you do one sale a month or 200 sales a year. You know, it’s very economical. Compared to the cost of one print ad in a newspaper, we feel we are very competitive and well within the price range of small auctioneers as well.

There are, as you mentioned earlier, there are other auction calendars, some of which are free. What added value do I get as an auctioneer from using Global Auction Guide as opposed to one of those other competing calendars?

Well, I don’t really see it as being a competing calendar. I just look at it as it’s an other calendar. Just like, you can’t put all of your advertising into one newspaper or one sale bill or whatever the case may be. You need to be basically on as many different websites as you can get. Many of the free websites out there are actually tide in with central auction hub so that you can come on to it, global for example; and push your sales out all these free calendars and get as much exposure as possible. Using the global system that just gets you that many more people gain your sale. Because we do things and we spend lot of time doing SEO and lot of time marketing your sale bill out to many different syndication partners. We feel that it’s the marketing side of thing for which you are really paying for with us. That’s approximately a dollar a day. For what we do, we feel it’s a huge value for the auctioneers.

You mentioned it before but I just can’t want to rear it as a part of the discussion. When I list my auctions on Kansas Auction Guide that goes into database and so all over the continent for my listing gets listed and can be found on Nebraska Auction Guide, Missouri Auction Guide and Farm Auction Guide and all of those other sites with in your network. As an auctioneer, I need to, when I am looking at my website analytics and looking to see what value I have received from Global Auction Guide, I need to be cognizant that it’s not just the traffic from GlobalAuctionGuide.com, it’s the traffic from Kansas Auction Guide, Missouri Auction Guide, Nebraska Auction Guide and all of those in the aggregate, it’s truly the number of referrals that I am getting from the whole Media Group, when I am looking at the dollar a day cost. And we have been certainly using the GlobalAuctionGuide.com for several years now and I have certainly, you know, always kept an eye on the fairly substantial number of referrals and traffic that we certainly have gotten from the network and I think it’s really great that you continue to add partners and add outlets for syndication of those auction listings.

Yeah and lot of times its not necessarily the referrals that you see come back to your own website because on our system the entire sale bill is there. All of the text, all of the photos. In many cases lot of people won’t even click through or go back to the original auctioneer’s website unless they want to learn more information about that particular auctioneer. I will give you an example. Our top sale of all time was a farm auction in Minnesota and it just got over 30000 page views on our system. There is so much of traffic that doesn’t even come back to the original auctioneer’s web site. Its is the eye balls that see the sale and then hopefully whether they find something there that makes them want to come to the sales site or do proxy bidding or phone bidding or whatever the case may be.

That’s really great point and in my experience as instructing at the Auction Technology Specialist course that’s something we definitely touch on. Whenever you are advertising for any industry, there is always a goal, there is always a conversion, called auction, for the person whether it’s a listener or whether it’s a viewer or whether it’s a reader of that advertisement there is always called auction. There are certainly auctioneers, who that are called auctioneer, to get that person to the auctioneer website. There are auctioneers where they don’t care about, really the viewing the auction content on their website. They just want, you know, buyers and seats of the auction. Would you guess that’s probably the majority of the goes of the people who post on global auction guide just to get physical bodies to auctions?

Absolutely. They want to make that the phone ring with questions or get as much auction in advance and get as many seats filled at their auction house or their sales site wherever the case may be. We have auctioneers actually who, the morning of the sale or the night before the sale, will actually go on to our system and print off their stats for that particular sale so that when they are finalizing the paper work with the client the next day after the sale they can hand this piece of paper and show them the web stats. How many 1000s or 10 of 1000s of visitors have seen their sale bills ob the web sites. The first time I actually had an auctioneer told me this, I just, it just blew me off you know. I hadn’t thought of auctioneers doing it this way and promoting what they are doing to the clients. Many of them actually use this information in their presentations when they are trying to get the client sign on with them to have their auctions. They should be able to say here 60 here 50 and here 100 website that carry the sale bills if you give me the sale. It’s been a huge advantage for some auctioneers and they have told me they have got sales because they advertised with us. It just makes me so proud for what my staff does and what my company accomplished hence 2001 to be able to see the results of all these.

Well, that brings up a couple of questions that I have. Because you allow the posting of what is essentially unlimited amount of media as long as the auctioneer can host pictures and that kind of content on his own server and I also know you allow an auctioneer to upload images and you host a certain number of images. kind of talk if you would about the types of content that are allowed and if you seen a shift the way from may be plain text listing of title, time, date and a paragraph of, you know, may be coma separated list of items. What are some of the other ways the auctioneers might be listing the auctions?

Well, we certainly seen the most successful auctioneers have gone to the model of basically naming and putting every little bit of key word into those sale bill as they can. Because they just never know what it is some one is looking for and probably a great example I know, this is a sale quite a few years ago in Saskatchewan, this fellow had a Minneapolis Moline lawn mover. Minneapolis Moline is not a Canadian brand and it is sold only in US. So the auctioneer expected this to be, you know, a piece of scrap iron. Because of the website and so much huge US exposure there was actually two people came to Saskatchewan from US. The winner ended up buying this lawn mover I believe for 2700$. In old days you might not even detailed the piece of equipment very much because you didn’t think it’s worth your time or effort and certainly not worth the cost of putting that in a print ad. But now a days with key words and so overwhelmingly and the important thing is to put in there. And of course now days we have been able to embed videos and of course pdfs have been added as well and other things. There are other things to get the information. It just attracts more and more people every day to their sale.

What type of content can I upload and how much can I upload straight to your servers to your site that you will host for me in the auction sale bill listing?

We had, basically the only limitation is how much time you want to spend uploading the photo. We never had a limit on anything at this point. Storage space on servers has become so cheap in the last 3, 4 years. We basically, the easiest way to do it is just make it unlimited for everything. If someone wants to upload 400 photos for a sale, by all means, upload as much as you want. When it comes to the video portion of it, we are more than happy to host anything if the auctioneer produces something. But we certainly encourage them to put it on you tube and have it exposed to those100 million people a day who are searching you tube for videos and there is no reason why it should not be in the first place. Any video put in can be automatically embedded to the sale bill on our site. In fact today I just came across one on you tube for a company in Nebraska called stock auction company and they had basically, almost a 10 minute commercial for their company upon you tube. It’s very well done and I am sure they must get some exposure and perhaps even some sales from this piece of media what they produced. It’s a great new medium for getting the message out there.

One of the big position I am advocating on auctioneers tech, on an auctioneers website by far and way the very most important component is the upcoming auction calendar. That is what you specialize in and you know once an auctioneer has that, than the only other super important real requirement to an auctioneer website is an institutional statement. What kind of Auction Company are we and what kind of auctions we do, couple of static pages if you will to provide a basic auction web site. Do you host complete websites for auctioneers using your calendar system? If so, what kind of additional pages and content can an auctioneer host with you?

We have done complete web site design from start to finish for auctioneers who are looking for a new web site or their first web site and things like that. We don’t really promote a lot, mainly because we are so busy doing at what we are very very good at. But we have auctioneer’s website that we done and we have still developing something like that although we do find that many auctioneers have their local person or the local guy they deal with or company in their home town and they kind of, really want to keep that local and keep that money in their own community helping other businesses. So many of them will do that but when it comes to the supplemental marketing, which is the term I like to use, they know they need to advertise in websites like ours to get as much as exposure as possible outside their local area. So we haven’t promoted it great amount. But we certainly do websites and whatever it is an auctioneer needs we can do that certainly for them

Speaking of website design, when are we going to see the update or visual refresh of the global auction guide network of the sites?

Well, we have been working on things last few months and it looks really good. Currently they say at least every 8 years or so we should update your websites. We have been very hesitant to make major changes only because what we have done so far has been so successful. When it comes to SEO and getting such superb rankings on Google and things like that we are very careful not to screw anything up to be honest with you. But it will be coming in next couple of months straight after the April selling season is over. That’s traditionally our busiest month of the year. We won’t be making any major changes when that’s going on.

So you are talking about your busy season. You must be obviously tracking down the number of auctions you are having during times of the year. You mention, you are still saying a very large increase in website traffic. What are you saying about the economy and the number of auctions that are being posted to the calendar, year after year and month after month?

Well, for those who are not familiar with western Canadian auction market place, April is the biggest month. There are many companies who probably do upwards of three quarters of their annual business just during the month of April. Just the crate of time between snow melting and seeding starting. That’s traditionally always been our busiest busiest month. The auctioneers actually will fine up their sales in September, October and November. They take all the pictures and have everything all sorted out. They start advertising at that point. But the sale doesn’t happen until April. It allows one to get huge such traffic numbers and people are already browsing these April sales already in September and October. It’s just amazing the traffic they get in that short period of time early on may be when their spring sale already posted. What we have seen from the convention season that we just wrapped up is most auctioneers are telling us that they are having less sales this spring or this summer. There are many different reasons many even feel, why these numbers are down. In some areas auctioneers are not going to do their own spring catalog but many of them do. For example, In Saskatchewan right now we have I believe around 150 upcoming auctions listed. In past year comparing we had probably 200 or more listings some year. So its, certainly showing that the sales, the number of sales is going to be down this year.

You mentioned the convention season you wrapped up and I know you go to many different conventions. In fact you recently gave a presentation at the Kansan Auctioneers association here in January, certainly good to see you and catch you up. How many conventions you attend each year and how often you get the opportunity to give a presentations?

This is probably been our busiest convention season from mid January to mid February between myself and our sales manager Nicole Smallwood we have done 12 great shows in 7 weeks and that ranged from Oklahoma city to Edmonton, from Denver Colorado to London Ontario. Most part we did anywhere half hour to 2 hours internet marketing seminars at these conventions. It was a great season. Over the rest of the year we will probably do 4, 5 or 6 more conventions. A few in the summer and then November, in different times and different areas. We found it’s been a very valuable use of our promotion budget doing these conventions and getting our name out in front of these auctioneers and explaining what we do and how we do it and all the other things that they should be doing with their own web sites. Actually the title of our seminars was called Internet Marketing, more than just a web site. Because there is so much they must be doing online to get the best bank for their advertisement dollars.

Are we going to see you in Kansas for the NAA Convention?

I hope so. We have a bit of a scheduling conflict that weekend and depending on how we cab get things to balance out with just some of the few things that we have to do in personal life as well and that happen to be on the same weekend. But I certainly hope to see Kansas City and it’s relatively close to us as well.

Many auctioneers are struggling with the question how to use some of the newer type of media. The global auction blog started as far as I can tell in 2005. Tell me a little bit about this and how has this helped your business?

Well, it’s been a very interesting little project. It’s a very easy and convenient way to get information out. As you are blogging as well you know how important it is get the information out. It allows the auctioneers, able to give us stuff that we can help spread that information far and wide as possible. May be I shouldn’t say this because somebody might scoop me on this, but on our new site actually each of the auctioneers will get his own blog right on our site and that will be part of their home page and all these type of things. So just to make a simple system for them to able to start blogging and do these type of things. But calling back to something we talked about earlier that so important for SEO reasons. Being able to have all these huge amount of articles and all these content on our site helps bring in more search engine traffic everyday. To be able to do link dating and things like that for the web site helps very very much.

What are some upcoming new features or improvements to global auction guide that we might see in the upcoming months? I know you are working on a new classified system and new real estate system. So, talk a little bit about each of those if you would and anything else that we may see coming soon.

Yeah, we actually launched a new classifieds platform kind of quietly about 6 weeks ago. Basically we had so many auctioneers who do lot of consignments or private treaty items, basically non auction items. They want deal to get out the same users of our web site. So we developed a classifieds platform and we just this week embedded that into our auction site. So for example if someone is searching our auctions for a John Deere 4020, now they will get a list of course of huge amount of auctions that have 4020 and then will also get, that comes up beside the sale bill is all the matching classifieds ad that also have 4020 in them. So basically we have seen that when farmers, in this example, looking for a tractor, if they are looking for it in auctions they know they have to come to Farm Auction Guide. But then if they are looking for it from dealers or private individuals, they had to go elsewhere on the internet. So we wanted to build a system where they are able to find that piece of equipment no matter where it is or in what manner that they have to approach. So it’s something that we brought out and said about 6 weeks ago. I don’t know if it’s gonna be a huge success yet. But we certainly had a lot of people happy so far. So and then with the new site design we will be having a real estate platform as well. You know, especially in the mid west, many auctioneer are the small towners and they are also real estate agents. They want to basically get their MLS listing out in front of all these same people who are looking at the real estate auctions. We decided to provide them that service as well. We are actually looking at couple of different partners on the real estate side of things because I am not necessarily the one that has to reinvent the wheel every time. If I can see somebody doing a very good job, their business model, lot of times it works better to partner with them rather then starting from scratch. So we are finalizing a few final arrangements I guess. Then we will able to talk little bit more about what we are doing on real estate side of things.

One of the problems that not only we have seen, but I know from talking to many other auctioneers across the country a sense of frustration when listing real estate on traditional MLS systems which require, you know, a price or many of them flat out wont allow auctions to be listed. Do you have the plans to solve those problems where somebody can look for real estate of all kind either traditional or at auction or have it integrated or this only for traditional listing?

No, it will certainly be a hybrid of both. I know from the MLS side of things they kind of, I don’t know the proper terminology, but they are not that happy auctioneer doing real estate. From the aspect we come from we have no hang ups about that. A piece of property for sale whether an auctioneer selling by auction or same person as a real estate agent wants to sell it by traditional method, we will do our best to serve both sides to give as much exposure as possible.

We are about at our time Dwayne. But before we go tell as a little about your farm. What you do in your off season and how much even off season do you get?

Well, I guess my other hobby is I farm about 2500 acres of cereal crops, special crops in the area of Manitoba just west of Winnipeg. I farm with my father and we have a hired man as well. It works out very well. We had one of our best years we ever had in 2007 and then 2008 again. Some days I wonder which my hobby is and which is my real job. But i know when April comes around I will be looking to making some dust and getting out of the office again.

Well I certainly know the feeling.

Well, that’s it for episode 16. My guest tonight was Dwayne Leslie from Global Auction Guide Media Group which you can visit at www,globalauctionguide.com. Thank you very much Dwayne for joining me this evening.

Thank you Aaron, Have yourself a great evening.

Thank you.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

The post Auction Podcast Episode 16 – Interview with Dwayne Leslie – Global Auction Guide appeared first on AuctioneerTech.

Joining me today for the fourth in the Auctioneer Interview Series is my friend Kurt Aumann, CAI, ATS. Kurt is an auctioneer for Aumann Auctions from Nokomis, Illinois, and is currently the Vice Chairman of the National Auctioneers Association Education Institute Trustees.

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Wednesday 28 January 2009. Auctioneertech.com. Technology, auctions and auctioneers, auction tech for the auction industry.

AuctioneerTech: Hello and welcome to the fifteenth episode of the Auction Podcast from the AuctioneerTech. My name is Aaron Traffas and joining me today for the fourth if our ActioneerTech.com interview series is my friend Kurt Aumann, CAI, ATS. Kurt is an auctioneer for Aumann Auctions from Nokomis, Illinois, and is currently the Vice Chairman of the National Auctioneers Association Education Institute Trustees. Good evening, Kurt, and thank you for joining me.

Kurt Aumann: Well thanks for the invite and I’ve been looking forward to this.

AT: We are trying something new this episode and we will try and do it in the future, but we are streaming this live, the recording anyway, from auctioneertech.com, so if you’re listening to this in the recorded version, know that if you pay attention to the website in the future you’ll be able to watch us recording these live. Back to the questioning, Kurt, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be an auctioneer.

KA: Well I grew up in the business and went to auction school at the tender age of 12, so I have been in it my entire life. My dad started a business and it was, I would say a small local business – maybe county wide. And there were a lot of household and state auctions and so on and so forth. After I got out of school, I decided that maybe that universe just wasn’t quite big enough for me so we started focusing the business more on some niche markets. Things have grown since, so it’s been a good ride.

What is Aumann Auctions today and what kind of stuff specifically do you sell?

Well, we have a staff of about a half a dozen auctioneers and we’ve got 16 members of our support staff and we followed several niches, you know, throughout the company – throughout the evolution of the company. We have some things that we don’t sell anymore. Things we’re active in right now are the toy market, the petroliana market – the signs and the gas pumps, gas globes – we do a tremendous amount of business with antique tractors and actually do that world wide. Lately we’ve been getting into intellectual property, selling existing business as on going entities, and some commercial liquidations and of course real estate with the focus on farmland.

Aumann Auctions is one of many members of the MarkNet Alliance. You were involved, I believe, in the creation of that franchise. What is MarkNet Alliance and why did you build it?

Well, it’s legally a franchise, but frankly we operate more like a coop. kind of like the old farmers coop elevator, and it allows us to service national contracts, that we wouldn’t normally have a chance of service on an individual basis. That really creates a distribution network that we can use and it’s allowed many of us to really book some business and do some business that we wouldn’t normally have gotten a chance to do. It’s a best practices group. We share ideas and our resources and a lot of partnerships on different deals form. It’s a little hard to describe in just a few minutes, but it’s been a fantastic experience and we’ve got a really, really great group of guys that are in it and I really look forward anything that I do with MarkNet.

I was teaching the ATS course this last November in Baltimore and we were demonstrating different website technologies when incidentally went to your website and was demonstrating that, among others, when I discovered your Streamline Bid system. What is that and what does that do for you that other existing products do not?

Well, it’s actually it’s an online bidding system like many of them that are out there. The only difference is that it’s integrated into a piece of backend software. So it’s also integrated in the project management and task list and managerial over sight. It’s a piece of a much larger piece of software that serves a function of live capturing and conducting oline auctions.

We delayed the recording of this episode by a few days because you had this big auction that you mentioned earlier a couple of days ago that you’ve been working on for a while. Tell me a little bit about the propriety and kind of how you handled the event and how it went.

Well, actually I have to give MarkNet a part of the credit for this deal because it certainly helped us win the contract, at least that’s what the sellers told us. It was a project of selling an estate and was 3900 acres, almost 4000, and it was all high quality, highly productive farmland, over 99% tilable, and it was over 1600 acres that was contiguous which is very unusual in our part of the world. I know you get out in your country, Aaron, out in Kansas it’s not so unusual, but whenever the farms back here – there’s a lot of farms broken up in forties, eighties and in 160s, so to get 1600 acres contiguous is a pretty big feat. We broke the farm up into 43 different tracks and offered it in a multi-parcel method. The auction took just a little over 6 hours and it brought 24 million dollars. So it was a great day.

I assume you had some help from your MarkNet partners in the actual conducting of that auction – or was it handled exclusively with Aumann Auction staff?

Well, we had all of our staff there, but there were also a lot of MarkNet members that came in and worked the floor. I’ve gotta tell you that I had the likes of Troy Crowe and Bryce Hansen and Brian Beckort and J.J. Dower and Chris Pracht, Joe Burns. I had a team on the floor. As you know on the multiparcel method sale, those floor guys are the ones that make the money, and explain the process and the bidding methods to those bidders and it was a sight to see. It really was, ’cause I mean those guys were just all all-stars and it came off very smoothly. I gotta tell you, and it’s not just because I did the project, but I don’t think we left a dime on the table.

Wow. That was actually the term I was gonna use in describing that crew of auctioneer you just named was all-stars. It sounds like a great team that anybody would be pretty lucky to have on site at an event. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t know for certain that I’ve covered it or that I’ve discussed it a whole lot with any of my guests up to this point. Would you, if you wouldn’t mind, briefly kind of describe what the multipar auction method is, how it works and what kind of software, if any, you used for this event?

The method is actually, in my opinion, the absolute fairest way to sell a piece of real estate because it allows the small tract buyer to bid at the same time with a large tract buyer by allowing the auction to proceed by the cumulative total, not by the individual track price. So in other words, three small tract buyers, the total of the bids for three small tract buyers, as long as they exceed the bid of the large tract buyer, then that’s how the propriety sells. So it gives the bidder the freedom to put together any combination of tracts he wants to put together. So it sounds a little confusing when you see it. I always tell people that the best way to understand it is to just place a bid. You start to understand the process really quickly then.

So did your propriety sell – how many buyers were winners on your propriety and was it broken up or was is pretty big chunks that were bought and how long did the auction take?

Auction took six hours and we actually had 10 buyers, although one of the buyers was a consortium of farmers that elected to bid collectively. So that was the largest bid up on the board which was around $15.5 million and that was about 2,400 acres and 2,400 acres ended up being divided, I think, 16 times, maybe, something like that. So there were 16 people in that consortium.

What technology tools did you use during the sale and in a normal course of multi-par?

Of course we used a piece of multipar software that we’ve modified a little and came off well. Probably the neatest thing we did that we got the most comments on was we really made it a multimedia event; we had a lot of screens. We had video coverage throughout the room and of course we had alternate screens between different bid boards so people can get any kind of information they wanted at any time. It really came off well; it looked like a multiplex theater.

Well certainly congratulations on it, I heard nothing but good things both from you and from other people around you that I’ve talked to since you conducted the event. It sounds like it was done very well and very professionally. You are based there in Nokomis Illinois, a bustling metropolis of a couple thousand people.

Actually downtown Nokomis

Downtown Nokomis. Little smoggier down there than it is elsewhere?

That’s right, that’s right. I mean I just wanted to draw that distinction.

Well, there were you are, about an hour and a half I think northeast of Saint Louis, as an auctioneer of some more specialty kinds of items – you mentioned the petroliana and the toy market and the antique tractor market – what are some ways you’ve overcome the problems posed by geography using technology or other means?

The remainder of this episode will soon be posted.

The post Auction Podcast Episode 15 – Interview with Kurt Aumann appeared first on AuctioneerTech.

Scott Musser, BAS

AuctioneerTech – My name is Aaron Traffas and joining me today for the third in the Auctioneer Interview Series is my friend Scott Musser, BAS. Scott is an auctioneer for Musser Bros. from Kennewick, Washington, and is currently the president-elect of the National Auctioneers Association. He has previously served the NAA as Vice President, Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors and is a past president of the Washington Auctioneers Association. Good afternoon, Scott, and thank you for joining me.

Scott Musser – Hello, Aaron. Thanks for having me on.

AT – You operate the Tri-Cities office of Musser Bros. there in Kennewick, but I know you have locations in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. I know auctions run deep in your family. Who are Musser Bros., how did your family get started in the industry, and how did you branch out?

SM – Alright, thanks Aaron. Well, currently Musser Brothers is a combination of the four brothers, myself the youngest, then Merton in Billings, Randy in in Twin Falls and Harold in Cody. We are four brothers. We do have an older sister as well. She’s actually the oldest in the family. She’s not active in the business; she does participate from time to time. Our company was started back in the mid ’50s by our parents, Bob and Lillian Musser, back in Cody, Wyoming. They started out doing all kinds of sales. They had a little sale barn there. The older kids grew up working in the sale barn, holding up pots and pans and setting up chairs and sweeping floors. It ultimately grew out from that to doing a lot of equipment auctions and some real estate auctions and so forth. We really didn’t have any grandiose plan of growth; it just kind of morphed its way into what it is today. We all ended up in our different areas for one reason or another, but it came together kind of like it was planned but it really wasn’t. I ended up here. We did an auction out in Washington state and I came up here to help and thought it was kind of a neat area and moved up here and worked this area. Our Twin Falls office was really an outgrowth of a man that went to school with dad back in 1956. There was man by he name of Jim Messersmith. He’s actually a past president of the NAA. He and dad went to auction school together, and when he passed away from a heart attack we were in contact with his spouse – his widow – and took over his practice. It just kind of grew by fate and by time and today we do operate in primarily the five northwestern states and conduct farm equipment auctions and real estate auctions and machinery auctions and a little bit of everything in between.

So do you specialize at each of your locations in a specific kind of asset or do you all kind of team up when you book auctions? Do you have your individual specialties or do you all handle everything?

We really all do similar types of auctions. Certainly our bread and butter is still working for the farmers in our area selling equipment and land. That’s certainly our bread and butter, but we are morphing more and more into real estate. Probably one of the neatest things about our organization is that we do have, between the four brothers, we have a lot of expertise and some of us are more capable of handling and dealing with certain type asset groups. So if I get into a complicated real estate auction, well brother Harold out of Cody, he certainly is our real estate guru and has a lot of expertise in that. We’re pretty much all licensed in our respective states, but Harold just has a lot of expertise and is a lot of help when you get into a complicated real estate auction. So he’ll lend his support there. We each kind of bring our different strengths to the table and we’re able to blend that together into a really nice team.

I saw three bid calling titles for you on your bio on your website. You were the Northwest Auctioneer Champion in 2000, you won the IAC in 2001 and were the World All ‘Round Champion in 2002. Did you know always that you were going to be an auctioneer? How did you personally get started in the industry and how did winning the championships help or change your business?

Well I was probably the only brother of the four that I pretty well knew from when I was knee-high to a grasshopper I wanted to be an auctioneer. I loved the business, I loved listening to it, to work the auctions, of course, growing up. I just loved it and when I left high school I went right into the profession. I’ve had a love and an affinity for our profession since I can remember. I like to tell the story that, you know, a lot of kids when they’re growing up they take their toys and their matchboxes and they probably play on the floor and do all kinds of things. Well, when we were growing up we’d line our toys up and have auctions, we really did. We had a lot of fun at it. After that, going through and being involved with NAA and of course the state associations and so fourth,  I think we’re all pretty staunch competitors and like to do things and I think the contests are great things for our profession. They certainly magnify and emphasize probably the most obvious part of the profession and that is, obviously, the auctioneer and the bid caller. I started participating at the national level in the IAC – I actually participated in the very first one in 1988. It was held in Kansas City, Missouri. I made it into the finals, but Paul Behr took the trophy away that year. Then I actually didn’t participate for a number of years. I think the next time I participated was in perhaps in the mid 90s, the early ’90s. Overall, I participated eight times and my eighth time I was able to take the trophy home out of Boise, Idaho. It just so happened that prior to that the Northwest Auction Contest – that’s the contest that’s really sponsored by our home state here in Washington but we invite auctioneers from the four or five northwest states to participate and I was able to win that up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Then subsequent to winning the IAC, NAA put on a joint seminar up in Canada with the Canadian Auctioneers Association, and of course they host the World All Around Championship Contest, so I though, well I’m there, I’m going to enter it and get in. I was pretty fortunate that day and walked away with the hardware.

Has it done anything for your business, having won the championships, having the hardware under your belt, so to speak?

You know I have to say it has, because that was one thing I’m involved with in our profession that a lot of people don’t know is that I work as a contract auctioneer as well, primarily for one company over in Europe. It was them hearing about me – actually I hadn’t one the hardware yet, I had just placed as a runner-up, and they had heard about it and read about it. Just through fate and circumstances we connected. That was clear back in 2000, and subsequent to that I’ve made about 75 trips overseas and currently sell about 12 auctions a year in Germany and North Ireland.

Well you certainly keep on the move. You and your firm are geographically spaced out. What tools do you use – what technology tools or otherwise do you use – to keep you and your brothers and other staff and crew in constant collaboration and communication with each other?

Well, we do cover a vast area. If I was to leave my office and drive to Twin Falls and then up to Cody and to Billings and back to my office, I’d cover about 1700 miles, so it is a pretty wide geographic area. I think the favorite tool that we use is our airplanes. Three of the four brothers are private pilots. We use our airplanes a lot to travel back and forth to the auction sites and between the offices. We’re not 100% weather capable, can’t go in all weather and so forth, so sometimes we still end up behind the wheel driving that long road. The airplanes have been a great tool and we’ve used them and love them and enjoy them and have an affinity for aviation. Outside of that, on a technology basis, just plain old emails and being able to FTP things back and forth and send files back and forth and communicate virtually and have a conversation. We’re all in different time zones, so one person may not be available but the others are so using emails is a great tool. We do a lot of conference calling between us when we’re working on a project together. The Internet has just been a lifesaver for us, without it I don’t know what we would do – probably nothing.

I think you told me once, or maybe it was one of your brothers at one of the conventions, but I heard that somewhere around 20% of all the airplanes are for sale at any given time. Have you been fortunate enough to sell any aircraft at auction?

We have sold some aircraft at auction, not very many and it’s always been kind of a byproduct of another deal – I know we sold out a spray plane operation in Red Lodge, Montana. We had about four or five airplanes on that. There have been some other times subsequent to that that we’ve had and airplane hither and thither, but we’ve never been able to really leverage our affinity and our love for aviation and to really do anything big in selling airplanes. They’re kind of a complicated lot to sell. They have a complicated history, maintenance, etc. There have been a lot of folks who have tried to replicate, for airplanes, what’s done for automobiles and heavy equipment. They’ve never really gotten off the ground. I’m not saying that I think it never would – I think it would be kind of fun. In auctions, we all deal, obviously, in the auction method, and I think it’d be a great tool to give more liquidity to the aviation market because there is always – I think that 20% number might be a little bit high, I think it might be a little closer to 10 or 12 – but there’s always a constant amount of aircraft on the market and people looking for buyers and sellers looking for buyers. The auction would be a great model and maybe in the future something will come along that will make that a little bit better. They are fun to sell and there always seems to be buyers who are looking for them. People like to bid on them.

Scott, I see you are using ZenAuctioneer from RowdyData for your website. Are you happy with it? How easy is it to use? What do you like and dislike about it?

We made the transition to ZenAuctioneer just about a year ago this time – well, we’ve maybe been on it 14 or 15 months. At that time we were looking for a rebuild and, just by happenstance, I ran across the gentleman who owns RowdyData by the name of Joshua Stingle. Joshua is actually a webmaster from the state of Nevada. He’s responsible for about 45- 50 thousand pages of data for the state of Nevada. He has a personal relationship with some auctioneers in Colorado, and I was invited to speak at their convention a couple of years ago down in Colorado and as a byproduct of that I started receiving information, e-mails and so fourth, from their association. One of those happened to be an introduction to Joshua, and so I looked at his product and I really thought it was clean and concise and sharp and he seemed to be willing to try new things. We worked with him. It was really a neat transition and probably the easiest it has ever been to build a website. I think we did some things that are probably good learning lessons and lessons learned to make building the website and I think we all go through this and the first thing is, “What’s the look and feel going to be? What’s the content? How is it going to be navigated? How is it going to be organized?” You know, if you don’t spend a little time doing that background work on those items, then there are a lot of people who go to a web company and say, “Well, gee, I want a website,” when they really have no idea what they want and how they want to communicate it and how they want it to look and how they want their users to navigate around the site. It’s pretty difficult to start based on that. So, in this one, I actually used Apple’s product – they have a product called I-Web. Using I-Web, I designed primarily the look and feel and the navigation structure of our sight. I kind of knew what I wanted for the design and how I wanted it organized. That was a great stepping stone to start from, because we were then able to get that to Joshua and we had that loaded up on a back-end site and he could look at it and say, “Well, gee, we can accomplish that,” and “This here might be a little bit difficult, but yeah we can do that…” It was really a neat process, and, frankly, from the time I turned him loose until I was saying, “Okay, let’s go,” was only about 30 days, so in no more than a month we were live with our new site. We like it. It’s very simplistic. It doesn’t have a huge amount of back-end capabilities, but it does what we need it to do and I think sometimes we get overburdened with trying to do too much. It handles the things we want to do, we’re able to put our Google Analytic in the back end of it, get the kind of data that we want with feedback we want on traffic and users and things like that. I’ve been really happy with our relationship and with the outcome.

Well, I certainly agree with you on the importance of simplicity and having a site that is clean and lean and fast and usable, and your site certainly is. How many other auctioneers do you know who are using this product? Is this something that was custom made for you or is this a product on the market that auctioneers can use?

Well, his product, ZenAuctioneer, actually is an off the shelf deal that he provides as a background or back-end engine for an auctioneer’s website, and he made a tremendous amount of changes to it when we built our site. In fact, on his website he talks a little bit about it. We did a lot of things to stretch his capabilities and asked him to do a lot of changes. Those capabilities have thus been built into a new version of ZenAuctioneer. By accident, I ran across this site just the other day and when I looked I said, “Hey, this is a ZenAuctioneer site.” Since I don’t think he lists, I don’t have any way of knowing how many he has – you know, it might be as few as five or it may be as many as 15 or 20 that are using it today. He is not actively doing a big time marketing push, so it relies on word of mouth. He doesn’t have a big organization to serve hundreds of clients – I don’t think that’s his goal. He enjoys working with us and he does kind of understand us and what he want. He was a joy to work with. It was a lot of fun.

Before this interview started, I was having some technical difficulties and you gave me a little jibe, as you usually do whenever I get the chance to talk to you, about how I should switch to Macs. What software are you using to clerk and cashier your auctions? Did you find something that works on the Mac or on the web or do you have a Windows rig that you take? What is your solution for clerking and cashiering events?

Great question. You’re going to enjoy the answer. One of the nice things that happened on Macs is when they went to the Intel processors and, of course as you know, are able run two computers in one. I can have a Windows or a Mac or actually I have have both, in a virtual environment. So, we had been using a Filemaker-based accounting package for a couple of years and prior to that we were using a small little database program that I wrote. We used that for nearly 20 years for probably 2,000 auctions. It was really quick and dirty and did what we needed, but you know there were a lot of things we needed to start doing better and I just didn’t have the time or resources to dig back in and try to regenerate it. So, we started looking and in just this past year we converted over to Auction Flex. We run that on our Macs, but in a Windows environment and it’s really nice because at the auction sites we actually reboot our Macs into a pure Windows computer, so then the computer doesn’t think it’s anything other than a Windows computer.

So you’re using BootCamp for that rather than Parallels, is that right?

Correct. But, we use both products. At the auctions, we use BootCamp because we want to run the pure Windows environment and we don’t want to have any issues with the Parallels virtualization or anything like that. At the office here, if somebody calls and I need to look up a file, I just have Parallels open and I can zip right into Auction Flex and have my Parallels window open which gives me a window into my Windows computer, if you will. I can open up a report and print something out, or access the database and get any information I need to. But, at the auction we will just restart our computers into BootCamp and run them through a pure Windows environment. It’s been a great solution. We really like it. The girls love it. We went from the program that we had that I had written which was really simple to what I think is a real Cadillac. From having bar code readings and drivers licenses and things like that on registration, it’s just light years ahead of what we were. They think that’s really great. Perhaps, the biggest challenge we’ve faced right now, and Brandon and the staff at Auction Flex are working on some type of a solution to figure it out because we’ve not been the only company that has requested it, is that we’re still running multiple databases. There’s really no way to maintain a master database on a server and then download that and take that out to the auction, do the auction and come back, upload your auction results with buyers and consigners and all that and keep that in the master database in its current configuration. But it’s something we’ve asked them for and they’re working on and I know other users have talked to about, and I think that auctioneers are growing out and they’re opening up other offices, as you guys are, and it would be nice to have one master database, rather than having three, and that’s really the biggest challenge we’ve faced today in that regard.

I certainly know that problem all too well, as we’ve opened our additional locations and faced that same issue. Our solution was a lot more painful, for me at least, and that was to build a web-based system which has it’s benefits in that it’s light and fast and all you need is a web browser to use it, but the problem is that you have to have Internet to conduct auctions. And I know that that is not an option for everyone and we’ve certainly had some challenges with that. You know, the wireless cards and wireless routers that you can get have their limitations as well, so there is yet to be a perfect solution. Are you offering Internet bidding on the assets that you sell and what provider are you using for that?

Yes we are. We offer an Internet simulcast on the majority of our personal property auctions. We haven’t done much in the real estate end of it. We’ve utilized three different solution providers. We’ve used NAA Live a few times. We’ve used Proxibid quite a few times. And then we actually have the ability to run it ourselves, but in the recent past we’ve primarily used ProxyBid. And we’ve done that probably just because of the shear critical mass that they have. There are two different reasons for Internet bidding. One that most people don’t think about is the exposure factor. You know, you get your auction up on a platform in a portal like Proxibid and they’ve just got critical mass and enough eyeballs looking at assets and you gain some new bidders just using that for exposure. And obviously the second reason for Internet bidding is just the enabling technology – well, we’re enabling parties to bid on our assets that we’re selling at auction no matter where they are. So, it’s the comfort and convenience of being able to do that. That’s the primary reason- I think we’ve all gone to that and done that. So, the second reason is almost as important as the exposure in getting more buyers. I know it just kind of depends on the asset group that you’re selling. This fall we did an antique tractor auction, and I don’t think there’s probably a better portal or better exposure than Proxibid. There are a lot of people who are into antique tractors that watch that site a lot. I’ve heard the same thing about firearms and we’ve had some experience in that, too. We did a firearm auction a year and a half ago in south Idaho. We had a neat collection of western firearms and we had, this will be music to your ears, Aaron, but we were about 85% there before the auction ever started. In other words, the prebid that had happened prior to that was, I mean – we were lucky – on some items we didn’t get any more bids at the live auction, and some we did. It was just great participation in the firearms at that platform.

It’s sure nice to have a safety net before the auction begins – to know that you’re going to be at a specific price and to be able to tell your seller, “This is where we are,” and “This is where we’re going to start,” and anything else is additional for that seller.

Absolutely. Yeah. It was a great deal. A great tool. I think it’s a tool that’s just going to get better and better and better because, as more users become comfortable with bidding online and we have more services, we’ll get better at communicating what we’re selling and get better at communicating information about what we’re selling and give them everything they’re going to need to make that decision remotely, then it’s just going to get better. It’s just great technology.

Scott, you’re my first guest whose company is a member of an association or of a franchise or an alliance. I see on your website the United Country logo. What does United Country bring to the table for Musser Brothers?

Well, prior to about two years ago, our bread and butter had historically been farmers and ranchers and selling farm equipment. We have done a lot of real estate, but mostly by accident. Two years ago, in some of our long term planning sessions we just recognized that, you know, you talk to our peers in the industry in different areas of the country, and you talk to somebody who is an auctioneer in Kentucky and 20 years ago they were selling all farm equipment and today they don’t sell any farm equipment. We came to the realization that, even though we are in a big agricultural area and we still have a great agricultural base, that’s going to diminish. We’re certainly doing fewer and fewer auctions today than we were 20 years ago, by a huge amount. The volume of the dollars are, thankfully, greater, but the auctions we’re doing, the individual auctions, are much much larger. The volume of the number of auctions are diminishing, and I think that’s just a sign of the times – of what’s happening to the American farmer and how many are out there. So, we kind of made a concerted decision a few years ago that we were going to spend a lot more time and resources and energy on developing the real estate side of our business and get more of a focus to that. It just so happened that about that same time was when United Country launched with their auction model. We thought there were a lot of things that were a good fit for us at the time, primarily that United Country has made their business and activity has been rural America. That certainly fits with our morals and how we operate and where we operate and what we’ve done. You’re not going to find a United Country in downtown Chicago or downtown LA or anywhere like that. They’ve made their mark in rural America. We felt that was a good fit and we were excited to see a national company, and old and established company really give credibility to the auction model of selling real estate. In my opinion, they were the first real estate franchise company to come along and say, “You know, the auction model makes sense. Maybe not in everything be we recognize its validity.” We felt that we were prime. We’re a year and a half into it, and it’s not been without it’s challenges, I think it’s still a work in progress, they’re trying to do a lot of things, and the challenges that they’re facing as an organization are making their model fit, they’ve had a model fit as a traditional real estate franchise for the last 70 years and it’s been a challenge and a struggle for them to morf less independent auctioneers into their systems in all ways. I think in the long term, I think any deal we do like that is going to be a long term play. I think it’s going to be beneficial to us. They bring a lot of things to the table and some good exposure and we’re just getting involved in some things right now that we would never have been able to get our foot in the door with out them. That is probably the number one reason we aligned ourselves with them. We felt that they could open some doors that we probably could never open ourselves, and we’re starting to see a little bit of that come into creation.

Scott, you are recently featured heavily on the Auction Network. They covered, from what I saw and watched, a very good auction that you conducted here a while back. What was that experience like and has that coverage helped your business?

That was a lot of fun. I am really excited to see what the auction network is doing. I think they are just exposing our industry in ways that we probably never thought possible. We have been fortunate enough to have them involved and come out and film us on two separate occasions. A year ago they came out to Washington and spent a day with us. It was just a typical farm auction and the film crew was just fabulous to work with, they asked all the right questions – very diligent. I am just amazed. Subsequent to that auction in Washington, we actually did a living estate auction for my father, who was a very eclectic collector, and we sold 1,500 items of his, varying from firearms to pottery to Indian rugs and bear traps, antique arcade toys and automobiles – if it wasn’t there, you couldn’t collect it. We had a little bit of everything. So, when they came out to Washington, they thought, “You know, that auction of your dad’s is just going to be a fun one to do.” It was a three day auction. They flew the film crew in there and we started the auction on Thursday evening at 5:00, and they showed up Thursday morning and they were there until we said sold on the last item on Thursday night and they were there before we opened up on Friday morning and they were there until we said sold on the last item Friday and the same thing on Saturday – and I actually commented to the producer, Janice, I said, “I can’t believe you guys just don’t feel like, ‘Gee, haven’t we seen everything and we can get out of here at 9:00!’” because I think Saturday night we went until 10:30. “And I thought surely you thought you got everything,” and she said “Well, we just don’t know what we’re going to miss. We don’t want to miss any opportunity.” So, they got a tremendous amount of footage and they very successfully put that footage together into what I thought were really great segments about auctions. They were fun to work with and exciting. We’ve tried to leverage that exposure a little bit by putting links on our website so our customers can see it and see the features. We really haven’t seen any outgrowth or anything that has come of that, but there are great pieces that we’ll treasure. There’s a segment that’s got a couple of my kids in it and I’ll treasure it for the rest of my life. I know in 20, 30, 40 years I’ll look back and won’t have a dry eye when I look at them. They’re really warm segments that they do and they really cast our auction industry in a really positive light. I was excited to have them.

Scott, you’re a CAI designee candidate with this coming year being I think your second out of three in the course, is that right?

Actually, I will be in class three. I’m on the home stretch.

You’ve been very active in the NAA for a long time, holding some very important positions. Why did you wait so long to enroll, what are your thoughts on classes one and two and what would you say to other auctioneers who questions the value of CAI?

Well, we waited so long, three of the four brothers are in the same class together and, as I’ve said a couple times in conversation, our bread and butter has been farm and ranch auctions and it has not been uncommon historically for us to do 60-70% of our annual volume in a two and a half or three month period. Now, that three month period is February, March and April. And, as you know, CAI happens in the middle of March, so we just never felt we could really make that type of commitment. It’s kind of harvest season for us. But now that the auctions are getting fewer and from the days of 20 years ago, we might have 25 auctions in a months period, where now that’s not happening. Now, there’s more time in between and so we felt we could blend it in at the same time, since we wanted to get a little more serious about the real estate. We just felt it was time. So, we went through some planning sessions with Joe Calhun, our priority advantage guy, and he helped focus us on what we needed to do. That was one of the out-goals from spending some time with him. We needed to make commitments. So, three of the four of us did and we’ve been through class one and two. Class one, for auctioneers who have been in the business a long time, was pretty elementary. It’s kind of a homogeneous class where you’re trying to get everybody at the same level. Then class two you get into some more accelerated type things and we’re excitedly looking forward to class three. And it’s not just what you learn in a classroom, and I know it’s cliché, but you build some lifelong friendships and relationships with people. At CAI you’re going to school with 60 people who you’re spending a lot of time with, both during class and after class. It’s a great experience. Great networking capabilities. And certainly some great higher learning. We’ve certainly taken some things away from class two and even in class one. *****Paper resource*** bring that back and apply it. We need to do that. A lot of learning is not necessarily learning things we don’t know, but being reminded of things we know that we should be doing but we’re not. That was a good exercise for us in class one and two and we’re really excited to be going back to three.

That’s a good way to put it, too, about not so much learning new things but learning the importance of doing things that you already know that you should be doing. Your term as president of the NAA begins this summer at the NAA conference and show in Kansas City. What do you hope to accomplish during your term and what is your vision of the future of the auction industry?

Well, I think in a nutshell I want to do everything in my power to make NAA as relevant as possible for American auctioneers. The needs of American auctioneers are changing and there are people who are scared. They are concerned – you know, when ebay came on the scene ten years ago, everybody was concerned and worried that perhaps they were going to just shut down all the ma’ and pop auction galleries and pretty much, to some extent, that probably has happened. But there have been some by-products of ebay that have probably made auctions stronger. I think ebay has introduced 300,000,000 to auctions and the power of what an auction can do, and what competitive bidding can do. I want to get NAA to be as relevant and user friendly to get some member auctioneers as much as possible. We’re going to try to add some tools and some devices and some things on our website that become useful tools. My goal is to create some tools or things that NAA can provide that become not just nice or not just warm and fuzzy but virtually become necessities being an auctioneer. I think the other thing I would like to spend some energies and times on is to try to see where we can make NAA more relevant to just your contract bid callers. Not wanting to diminish their importance or anything, but there are a lot of them who are not members of NAA. Livestock auctioneers and auto auctioneers and contract bid callers out there who really don’t see a need or what NAA can do for them. Hopefully, we can create some scope of work or some offerings that they’ll see that are beneficial to them – our training and our classrooms and things in our magazine that maybe are just a little bit more relevant to them. We should get them more involved there are a lot of them out there who are not members. And right now I can’t say that there probably is a lot that NAA offers, so hopefully we can add to that and make it a little bit more beneficial. In a nutshell, I want to make NAA relevant to all auctioneers and not just a select few.

Well, that’s it for episode 14. Thanks so much for joining me today, Scott, and I look forward to seeing you this March in Bloomington at CAI.

Aaron, thanks for your time. You have a great new year and, again, I look forward to seeing you in Bloomington as well.

My guest today was Scott Musser, BAS, from Musser Bros. To learn more about Musser Bros. or to contact Scott, visit www.mbauction.com.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

Special thanks to Erica Traffas for helping with the transcription to this episode.

Remember that you can listen to this or any of the previous podcasts from the podcast page.

28:06

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You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Saturday, 6 December, 2008. auctioneertech.com – Technology, auctions and auctioneers – auction tech for the auction industry

Hello and welcome to the thirteenth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast, my name is Aaron Traffas. In this episode, we’re going to discuss Internet and absentee bids, agency, fiduciary obligations, and how best to represent the client when accepting absentee bids. I’ve witnessed several heated discussions among auctioneers concerning the various aspects of this speciously complicated issue. I intend to show that the only way to consistently obtain higher prices for all an auctioneer’s sellers is to execute absentee bids competitively.

One of the first lessons an auctioneer learns is that his clients the seller. For the purposes of this discussion we’ll assume that auctioneer means the bid caller, the sales crew, and any other employee or agent of the auction company. It is the seller who has hired the auctioneer to work on her behalf, meaning that the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This definition of agency carries with it the obligation of the auctioneer to act in the best interests of the seller. These best interests, in most cases, involve obtaining the highest sale price possible for an asset. This goal isn’t always the case, as sometimes the best interests of the seller could involve a lower price but grant the seller fewer responsibilities or legal liabilities regarding the transaction. For the purposes of this discussion, however, we’ll assume that the fiduciary obligation carried by the auctioneer for the seller implies that the auctioneer wants to get the highest price for the client.

For a traditional auction, the relationships and roles are black and white. The auctioneer, acting as an agent of the seller, finds the highest and best sales price available from the bidder pool in front of him and executes a transaction between the highest bidder and the seller at that price.

An absentee bid is a bid left from a bidder with the intent for that bid to be executed by the auctioneer at a time when the bidder isn’t present. It doesn’t matter if an absentee bid is delivered verbally, on paper or over the Internet, it’s still an absentee bid. This absentee bid can be executed one of two ways, the first of which is direct execution.

When a bid is executed directly, the auctioneer immediately begins the bidding at that price. Similar to a hand being raised at an auction, the bid is implemented one time only and the auctioneer doesn’t have knowledge of the bidders possible intent to bid more. This method offers little if any departure from the example described earlier where the auctioneer simply accepts bids from bidders and maintains his position as exclusively an agent of the seller.

The second way that bids can be implemented is by competitive execution. With competitive execution, an absentee bid is treated as a maximum bid with the assumption that the auctioneer will bid only as much as necessary for the bidder to win the bid up to but not exceeding that maximum bid. In this case, the auctioneer must actually make decisions on behalf of the bidder. For the auctioneer – and remember we’re including all staff and associates of the auction firm – to act on behalf of both a bidder and a seller at the same time results in a condition of dual agency.

Dual agency can be a bad for an auctioneer, as an absentee bid executed competitively could result in a sales price less than that maximum absentee bid. A seller could correctly argue that the auctioneer failed to satisfy his fiduciary obligation to her because he had information that a bidder was willing to pay more than the final sales price of the transaction. In many, if not all cases, the law is on the seller’s side in this case.

So if dual agency is bad, why wouldn’t an auctioneer simply execute absentee bids directly to avoid assuming that position? Many do. The downside to the practice of direct execution is that it discourages bidding. A bidder doesn’t want to pay any more than necessary for an item. If an auctioneer’s policy is to directly execute the bids, the bidder has an incentive to bid as low as possible because he doesn’t want to risk paying any more than necessary to win an item.

If an auctioneer’s policy is to execute bids competitively, a bidder no longer has an incentive to bid low. A bidder can bid higher, resting assured that the auctioneer will bid just enough to win the item, just as the bidder would do were he at the auction himself.

It seems clear, then, that direct execution is in the interests of the seller and competitive execution is in the interests of the buyer. Since the auctioneer works for the seller, and since there is a possible legal issue with preventing the dual agency found with competitive execution, why don’t all auctioneers execute bids directly?

Within the scope of one item for one seller, the choice is clear and the auctioneer has the obligation to obtain the highest price possible. Suppose, however, that the seller has 10 items. A competitive bidding policy encourages several absentee bids to be placed on each item. While some of the items may sell for less than the maximum bids, the aggregate sum of all the items is more because of the increased bidding activity. When the scope is expanded beyond one item for one seller to include all the items from one or more sellers in an auction, it is clear that competitive bidding encourages participation and more, higher absentee bids, eventually resulting in a higher aggregate sales price for the seller.

What about the legal argument? It is important to precisely define how the bids will be executed in both the contract with the seller and on the absentee bid form or website terms in the case of Internet bids. With proper disclosure, the legal issues regarding dual agency are negated. Any reasonable seller will understand that the increased bidding activity generated by a competitive execution of absentee bids will result in higher prices, even if there is a possibility that the item will sell for less than the maximum bid.

I sold a truck at auction a few months ago. The absentee bid was $10,000. The final sales price was $7,200. I have no doubt that without the policy of competitive absentee bidding, the $10,000 bid would never have been left. I also believe that the final sales price would have been hundreds if not thousands of dollars lower without the absentee bidding activity.

I routinely work auctions with hundreds if not thousands of absentee bids for the items in the auction. That bidding activity often results in sales of greater than 50% of the items to absentee buyers. If the bids were executed directly, the absentee bidding activity would plummet, and our sellers would receive lower prices.

That’s it for episode 13. I hope I’ve successfully made the case that only by also serving the interests of the buyers can the interests of the seller best be served. If you disagree with me, as I’m sure several if not many auctioneers will, please leave a comment or feedback on the website.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to https://auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

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Hello and welcome to the twelfth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast for the week of 17 November 2008. My name is Aaron Traffas, and now that I’ve baited you with the catchy and possibly controversial title, lets examine the importance of local marketing as it relates to Internet bidding as well as a couple of shipping options if you find yourself in a situation where local marketing has failed and you must convey an asset to someone else who can’t make it in to pick it up.

Many auctioneers who turn to Internet marketing, especially Internet bidding, have the expectation that the items will sell to a foreign bidder, and for the purposes of this netcast we’re going to use foreign to mean someone outside of regular driving distance, perhaps even out of state or out of the country. While it’s possible to construct an advertising campaign that will accomplish this goal of selling items to foreign bidders, a much smarter play is to advertise locally first.

Let’s use the example I used in Auction Podcast Episode 2. If a car is worth $1000 and someone from another state has to spend $200 in time and fuel to come get it, he’ll only spend $800 at the auction. Someone across the street can bid the true $1000 because there’s not really any cost associated with item acquisition.

The ability for an Internet bidder to come in and pick up the asset from the auctioneer or the auction location is worth a lot. Part of the reason we see declining attendance at auctions, as well as a continued decline with eBay’s auctions section, is that people don’t want to wait. If I place a bid on item and wait for it to sell and then have to wait for the auctioneer or his agent to pack it and ship it to me, I’ve done a whole lot of waiting by the time I finally get the item.

However, if I’m a bidder and the advertising for a local event with Internet bidding has made me aware of an item in which I’m interested, I’m still probably not going to go to the auction, but I’m willing to bid more if I can go get the item immediately once I’ve been declared the winner.

I will concede that there are some niche asset types that have such a small or geographically foreign prospective buyer pool to which my examples and principals here aren’t applicable. Take, for example, the 40 Years of Star Trek auction that was conducted by Christie’s a few years ago. Because Trekkers are so geographically diverse, the global Internet marketing was crucial for the success of this event. Another example of the importance of global niche marketing can be found in some of the antique tractor auctions conducted by Aumann Auctions. The buyer market for antique tractors is so small and spread out that many times the only buyers who are willing to pay fair market value for the antique tractors are from far away. Without the global marketing, the tractors would sell for a much lower price because there probably aren’t very many serious antique tractor collectors in the greater Nokomis metropaulatin area.

The point is that its much better to use your Internet bidding as an option to entice local bidders to participate. Advertise to your local buyer base first if the items you’re selling are appropriate, because that local buyer base doesn’t have the costs of time, fuel and/or shipping that someone from far away will incur.

If you do have a high sell-through rate to foreign buyers, there is still an argument to be made as to whether to pack and ship the items yourself or turn to a third party such as the local UPS Store. Many auctioneers outsource the shipping, arguing that an auctioneer’s best time is best spent landing sales and working for his sellers. Some auctioneers have elected to hire additional staff and operate a shipping division, turning it into a proffit center. In either case, there are a couple of companies worth noting that can ease the pain of shipping larger items.

Navis at gonavis.com specializes in difficult-to-ship items like furniture and powersports. They have the ability to crate and palletize the items for you, so it essentially becomes a turn-key operation.

Uship at uship.com is an interesting business model that merges a reverse auction with the classic load-finding trucking dispatch service. They allow shippers – either auctioneers or bidders – to post loads that are bid on by service providers – trucking companies. They have an eBay-style feedback system for both shippers and service providers. They offer revenue sharing for their partners and they make it easy to include a widget on your website to allow prospective bidders to get their own shipping quotes based on average costs for like-kind items shipped similar distances at similar times.

Well that’s it for episode twelve. The last two episodes have been fairly short, but don’t worry. We’ve got some exciting interviews in the months ahead.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

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One of the reasons AuctioneerTech exists is to make life easier for everyone, including auctioneers. One of the ways this goal is accomplished is by reviewing software that performs a novel or important function. Most of the software covered is open source, and in this episode, we’re going to discuss open source software, explain why it doesn’t necessarily mean free software, and argue why there is an imporant difference.

What is open source?
At the heart of all software lies a programming language. For web programs like phpList, WordPress or Gallery, this language could be a scripting language like PHP or Perl. For programs on your computer, like Notepad++, OpenOffice or the GIMP this language could be Java, C, Visual Basic or .NET. There are many, many more. For programs on your computer, for the most part, they have to be compiled before they are executed. That simply means that a program reads the source code and produces an executable program that your computer can understand.

The concept of open source derives from the user having direct access to the goods and knowledge of a product. What this concept means for software is that you, as a user, can acquire the source code and read it to see exactly how a piece of software works. What this concept means for hardware like routers is both that you can install your own software or firmware on the device to chance its functionality as well as access the design schematics and plans to make changes to produce different devices.

Now, before you start with your email client or the feedback form on the website to tell me how this is another netcast that is too technical, let me say that we’re pretty much done with the complicated part. I think it’s safe to assume that noone listening to this podcast, nor I would argue the vast majority of users of open source software, has any interest in changing or modifying in any way the source code for any software. What we’re interested in is the other aspect generally found with open source software, the price.

Open source is free, but some of it costs money to buy or use. To understand this concept, we look at the difference between the latin words gratis and libre. In English, we use free for both of these terms, but there really isn’t a word to distinguish between free as it relates to liberty and free as it relates to not costing anything. Because of this, the open source movement has adopted the two phrases free as in speech and free as in beer as way to concisely describe the concepts behind the two uses of free.

Free, as in beer, software serves a purpose. It lets us perform tasks that would otherwise be significantly expensive. Most of us initially turn to open source software because we’re looking to get away from paying for Microsoft Office or Photoshop, for example, and we turn to OpenOffice and the GIMP, respectively. Neither OpenOffice nor the GIMP costs any money, but neither is very easy to modify as ameteur programmers.

Free, as in speech, software also is important. Commercial open source products, such as KnowledgeTree document management and SugarCRM customer relationship management, allow access to the source code but have a fairly high monetary cost. Most of these commercial open source products offer a free, community-supported edition that works for non-commercial applications and offer a premium business product to companies who can pay for support and advanced features. The advantage is that you can purchase a piece of software and hire someone to make customized changes to that software so that it works better for you. You can’t make changes to proprietary software like Microsoft Office because the source code simply isn’t available.

The one other distinction that’s important to make is that there is proprietary software that is free as in beer. Products such as Google Picasa and the Opera web browser fall under this category. The advantage of this approach is if you can monetize your product through alternative means to outright purchase price such as advertising, and an increase in product adoption caused by offering it for free means an increase in revenue.

How can open source software improve your business?
It is possible to be 100% effective as a computer user and use completely open source software. You can use Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows. Use the GIMP instead of Photoshop, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, Scribus and Inkscape instead of Adobe Pagemaker and Illustrator, Evolution or Thunderbird instead of Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, Notepad++ or Nvu or BlueGriffon when it’s released instead of Microsoft Frontpage or Adobe Dreamweaver. Many of these open source products are arguably superior in functionality than their proprietary counterparts. Most have release cycles much faster than their counterparts, so they’re improving more rapidly. They all have price tags that are superior to their counterparts.

There are a couple of places you can go to find open source software that performs a specific task or serves as an alternative to your current proprietary solution. Two sites I frequent are sourceforge.net and osalt.com. SourceForge serves as a repository, or central storage and meeting place, for a large open source development community. There are thousands of products there that can be downloaded or  discussed. osalt.com, which is short for open source as alternative, provides simple comparisons of software by function. For example, when I look up the commercial package Steinberg Cubase, a popular multi-track music editing package, I see that the open source Cubase alternatives are Rosegarden and Ardour. When I look up the open source finance application GnuCash, I see its commercial equivalents listed as Microsoft Money and Quicken.

That’s it for episode eleven. I’m sorry I’m running a little behind with this episode; things are a little hectic in my world. I’m going to try to have another episode ready to release next week while I’m in Baltimore for the Auction Technology Specialist course.

One change I’d like to note is that the podcasts and their transcripts will now be included on the main page of the website. They will still be available on the auction podcast page, but I think the content is also appropriate for inclusion in the main feed.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

The post Auction Podcast Episode 11 – Open source auctioneer appeared first on AuctioneerTech.

Darron Meares

AuctioneerTech – Joining me today for the second in the Auctioneer Interview Series is my friend Darron Meares, CAI, GPPA. Darron is Chief Operating Officer, auctioneer and lead asset appraiser for the Meares Auction Group. He is also a member of both the National Auctioneers Association and the South Carolina Auctioneers Association boards of directors. Good evening, Darron, thank you for joining me.

Darron Meares – Hey, Aaron, how are you? I appreciate the invite and I don’t know if I’ve ever had that good of an introduction anywhere.

AT – Well, introduce yourself to us. Tell us a little about your yourself and your background and how you came to be an auctioneer.

DM – Well, my name is Darron Meares. I am the Chief Operating Officer, now, of the Meares Auction Group. We had a little bit of a change in our company here lately and I don’t know if I’ve moved up the ladder or down the ladder, but still. I started in the auction business full time about six years ago. I’ve been in it all my life. My dad started a company in 1972. I think I worked my first auction about 1977-1978 running bid cards, the clerking tickets, things like that. I think I moved up from there to concession stand and then on up the ladder and I finally said, “Look, it’s time for me to get up in front of the crowd.” So, one of the first auctions he let me ring was with Ivan Broadwell and the PTL auctions. If you remember Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, that was probably one of the first auctions I stood on stage in front of a large crowd and I was probably 10 or 11 years old. I traveled the country with the NAA. Probably my first convention was Las Vegas, 1981, and then Houston and on down the line. Being from an auctioneer family, my parents followed the NAA and the South Carolina association, and throughout the time in the profession I have been able to meet, greet and work with a good number of the leaders in our profession and I appreciate the opportunity that everyone has given to me to serve on the auctioneer boards in South Carolina as well as the national association. Other than that, I just do everything that I can to advance the auction profession and try to find new ways to advance our company and the profession. I teach a lot of CE seminars. As a matter of fact, I’m leaving November 20 to go to Cabo San Lucas to speak at the Industrial Auctioneers Association convention, so I do a good bit of traveling. My wife doesn’t like that part, but I think I’m setting a firm foundation for the next generation of auctioneers coming up.

Wonderful. What kind of firm is Meares Auction Group and what kind of assets do you specialize in?
Well, the Meares Auction Group is an umbrella for three companies. We have Meares Auctions Inc. which specializes in estates and collectibles, namely coin and firearm collections. We do a little bit of commercial and industrial. The second part of that company is headed up by my father, Larry Meares. That is Meares Land and Auction Company. And then we all join forces for Southeastern School of Auctioneering. It’s the only full-time auction school in South Carolina.

Well, I tell you that was something that grew out of the CAI class that you and I attended. We had had some discussions about some directions with the company and some things like that and one of the biggest things that I had seen in our area is the benefit, fundraising and charity auctions. The bow tie came along with the southern gentleman, which I don’t know how well I fit that bill, but, still, the southern part works. I went ahead and said, and most people that know me know that I’m a little bit different from the crowd, so with everybody wearing long-neck ties I decided to go a different route and pull some of the southern roots out and learn to tie a bow tie, thanks to my wife, and start wearing those. The Bowtie Benefits end of it came about because I needed a catchy title and bowtiebenefits.com was available on the web and I just added those two together. My goal for 2008 was 10 benefit auctions. So far this year I have either booked or conducted 22. One of my favorite events I look back on was the Gary Player Invitational. Gary Player, the professional golfer, moved his golf course design devision to Greenville, South Carolina. I had a chance to work with him this summer and they hired me to become their auctioneer for 2008 and 2009 and possibly 2010. So we’ve grown by leaps and bounds, there’s no doubt about it, and I love every minute of it.

Boy, it sounds like it. With all of these different venues that you are pursuing, I’m sure that you are not the only one involved. It’s great that you come from a family business. What are some ways that you keep your sales associates and your auction managers and everybody on the same page in collaboration and communication with each other?

Well, I believe in weekly staff meetings. There are some people that don’t believe in meetings. You know, they say that if you meet for 30 minutes in house you save an hour in the field. You meet an hour in house you save up to three hours in the field. So, I believe that if everyone is on the same page with the meeting schedule and we keep a standard operating procedure in place for different facets of the company, everybody’s on the same page. One of the things that we’ve instituted is, even though if somebody comes up and says, “Hey, I’ve got to have this auction right now”, we don’t do anything until we’ve meet at the weekly staff meeting. We bring proposals to the table, we talk about marketing, we talk about the structure of the auction – inside, outside, online, on-site, whatever it is – and everybody has a chance to voice their opinion. One thing that I like to make sure of is that anybody can voice their opinion. Now, of course, some people won’t do it. Some people like me do it more often, but everyone has a chance to do it in an open, non-threatening atmosphere where if somebody comes up with something off the wall, absolutely, let’s try it. If it’s something we’ve done in the past that hasn’t worked, we’ll bring it up and say, “Hey that didn’t work” and we’ll tweak it a little bit. But I think to keep everybody on the page you have to have standard operating procedures written down that everybody can look at and follow.

What are some of the main ways that you handle the marketing for your events? What are your favorite marketing venues? What are some things you have tried that have worked and some things that you probably won’t try again in the near soon?

Well, one that I will not try again is a billboard. It did not work for us. We got a little bit of traffic here and there to the website, a couple of phone calls – but nothing like a billboard should do. A billboard is mainly a reminder. You drive that venue every day, and – just say it’s on a main thoroughfare to somebody’s work – they see it, they see it, they see it – well, bam, it disappears. Literally and figuratively it’s still there, but in their mind it’s disappeared. It’s blended into the landscape and they don’t see it anymore. Of course – you and I have talked about this many times – the Internet. That is one of our biggest advertising medium that we use. You can stretch a dollar further…that the best way to stretch a dollar. If you got marketing dollars – just say you throw out a thousand dollar marketing campaign – you’ve got the Internet and various sources on there that are absolutely free. Craigslist is one. We advertise on realbird.com for some of our real estate auctions. I think it’s a $89-$99 dollars a year for as many listings you can put on it. The cool thing about RealBird is you take those listings and it gives you the HTML code to paste into Craigslist so that you don’t have a text Craigslist listing, you can have a RealBird flyer into your Craigslist listing. eNeighborhoods is coming up big for researching real estate neighborhoods and demographics. RealBird has a section on there that they can pull the school district information and things like that. eBay – the $150 classified listings – has worked for us. There are a thousand other websites out there that we’ve used from time to time. The AuctionServices email blast of one of the big ones that we’ve used for our collections when they’ve been online through Proxibid. We’ve also used the Proxibid slider adds that appear on the Proxibid homepage. We’ve done that and we’ve had good traffic from there. I’m trying to think. Email blasts, definitely. We try to send out at least one week. I like the way – there’s a company out there and of course I’m not going to hawk companies that don’t use – but there’s a company out there that always sends out an email blast that says there’s still time to register for you know, whatever event it is. I think that pretty cool and I’ve sort of tweaked that just a little bit, you know, registration’s open for this auction. Marketing with email. If you do it the right way and you use the first couple of lines of text that appear in Outlook and Zimbra and Eudora and however many client you have out there, that first couple of lines is the most important because that’s your attention grabbing part. You know, I could go on and on and on about this, but I don’t want to go too far because I’m teaching part of this in CAI II this year and I don’t want to go too far with it.

No worries there. What’s your position on on on print and traditional advertising – newspapers and direct mail – is that something that you continue to pursue? Are you reducing its importance?

Reducing it. Absolutely reducing it, and I’ll tell you this. What we found is – and you look at some of the [unknown] that are out there for print media – every everything in print media’s going down right now because people are looking more and more to their emails. You know if you carry a Blackberry or a Treo or an iPhone – something that gathers emails – you’re going to look at that and use that as a marketing tool more often than print. Now one thing that we have done, we sort of tweaked our print a little bit. We have an advertising contract with one of our newspapers here in the area and we go ahead and, you know, block off X amount of dollars per year so that we get a better rate. Problem with that is, you get a better rate per line but that means you got put in more lines to make that goal. Well, what we did, we looked into it a little bit further and found that the newspaper also does two magazines, they do fifteen different publications, four more newspapers – so what we’ve done is used our advertising contract to advertise in other areas. There’s an ad…it’s a 2×3 ad in a Wednesday paper in our main paper and it gives you a display ad for one day that you can put pictures, a whole lot more information in than any classified ad. So we’ve reduced it but we tweaked it a little bit. Postcards? We were doing the 5 1/2 by 11 size colossal post cards. We reduced those to the 8 ½ by 5 ½, and now we’ve gone all the way down to the postcard rate postcards and we get gang runs of those and send those out for $70-$80. And everything that we do, we drive it back to the electronic media. Everything that we do has our website at least two time on there so that it drives it right back to that media and we’re getting 15 to 20 to 30 new email addresses on our list every week because of things that we’re doing to drive people right back to it. I’ll tell you another thing I did at the auctions. I went out and did Vista Print – they give you 250 free business cards. I think it costs you about $7 or $8 to ship them to you or something like that. Well, anyway, we put our website on there. For free auction updates, login, put your email address on and we give those out. Another thing we do, we drop those in box lots at the auctions, in drawers in furniture just so that people will pick them up and login to our email. So to go back and answer the question, we still use print because of the age demographic here in our area, but we’ve reduced it.

You bet. Whenever you advertise, there’s always a desired action that you’re trying to get the reader to perform, and I’m squarely on your side where that action isn’t maybe necessarily anymore to come to the auction, it’s to go to the website to get more information because it’s so much cheaper to put the details on the website and use the more expensive traditional media to drive them there and to use it as lead generation for the website. Until recently, Darron, you maintained your own website. You relatively recently launched a new one. Who does it now and what prompted the switch?

Well, AuctionServices does it now. I went ahead and I gave it up. That was my baby for a while and it got to the point to where I wanted to keep up with everybody else in their websites and put some more out there and all of this. Well, I went ahead and I learned FrontPage. Well, FrontPage didn’t do what I wanted it to do, so I thought about buying Dreamweaver. Well, with the learning curve and things like that I decided not to. So with my Apple I used iWeb. I put something up, it looked good, but I still didn’t really want to maintain it. So what I’ve done is I’ve pretty much given it all over to Rick and his crew with AuctionServices. They maintain it. If I’ve got any changes I just shoot them an email, they change it. Based on the cost structure that we put in place, you know, any major changes of course we pay for those – but we went through and said this is what we want, build us a beta, let us look at it. They hit the nail on the head and it was what we wanted. Well, the main reason behind it is that you have to look at two things. You have to look at your time and your money and you got to figure out which one’s more important. Well right now, with me running the company and trying to take it in a different direction, my time is more valuable right now so I would rather go ahead and put the put the money in it, put the investment in it, and then take my time and put it elsewhere to replace that money and grow the company.

What software, Darron, are you using to clerk your auctions?

Auction Flex. We’re using Auction Flex now. We started with it after the convention in San Diego.

We’ll I won’t press you too hard about it as the last podcast episode was the interview with Brandon Harker who makes Auction Flex and you can find that at auctioneertech.com/auction-podcast or just go to AuctioneerTech and click on the links. But I am curious to know from you, as a user of Auction Flex, what were a few of the aspects that influenced your choice and what do you feel are its biggest strengths and what do you wish it would do better?

Well, a little history. Back in about ’82-’83 we started with CUS with one of their first systems. We started using it. We moved forward. We outgrew it. Now, of course, these programs have evolved, but at that point we outgrew it, went to another system. Wound up 10 years ago, I guess, with MAXA from JBS. We outgrew it and wanted something that had a little more expandability to it and actually we started talking with Brandon and Kris with Auction Flex in Madison, Wisconsin, I guess four conventions back, and trying to kick around some ideas and things like that. Well, we got to the point, we said, you know, it’s time for us to move on, we want a Windows-based system. I loved the DOS aspect of MAXA because it was a stable platform, there’s no doubt about that. But, this way we can go in and have the, you know if we decide to do multi-par, it’s on there. If we decide to catalog a different way, it’s on there. We can do the PDF catalogs and things like that are built into the system. The radios have been upgraded. We’ve got a hand-held unit we use now to clerk the auctions, and we’ve got a taller antenna mounted on our trailer now, on our clerking trailer, that allows us to move around with a handheld. So, positives? The Windows. I like the way it interacts with Windows, and I can go from from Excel and some other programs right back into it. The expandability – the ability to have a handheld. There’s a couple of cons. There’s a lot of updates that have come out here recently and, you know with each new update something changes on the interface and my clerks and cashiers have to go back in and relearn part of that and, you know, figure out what that new update is. They do a good job sending out a book, the problem is all of my support staff are not as computer literate as I am and it takes them a little bit longer and they have a steeper learning curve to to get to the point to pick up on those updates. I’m trying to think. That’s about the negative that I have seen here lately. Now I know updates are generally to make the program better to respond to a request from auctioneers, things like that, but I think that it could be expanded out, you know, two or three months or four or five months out before new update comes out. Other than that, we’ve been very happy with it. Customer service is very happy. What I wish it would do? To be honest it’s almost like the human brain. They say you use 20% of it. I would say we probably use 20 to 30, 40% of the software. There’s plenty more expandability that we haven’t tapped into yet. So at this point, I don’t know what else it would do or what else I would want it to do differently.

So you’re pretty happy with it.

Yeah, oh, absolutely.

So what then kinds of Internet bidding platforms do you use and what types of Internet bidding – as far as pre-auction only or Internet only or real time – have you used and will continue to use and how has the Internet bidding affected your business?

Well, I’ll tell you this. Proxibid is the only Internet bidding that we’ve used – of course outside of eBay. We were power sellers on eBay at one point and, you know, we went to – about five years ago, I guess, Proxibid had done an auction here in the area with another company and stopped by and justed asked us about it. We jumped on board and we’ve actually done – I believe we’ve done over 100 auctions on Proxibid now. Mainly we do live, online bidding, like we did today. I call it a hybrid where we started out with prebidding and then moved to the live platform. We did a coin auction today, about 300 lots on there. Now one thing that I have introduced a little bit in the past three or four months, I’ve been doing more than timed auctions on there for some of the ones where we don’t want to devote a full crew to  run a live auction so we’ve done timed. Another thing that I’ve done – well, actually, you and I both did – with the CAI fun auction. Putting it online, that was actually the first live benefit and fundraising auction that I had done on Proxibid and since then I’ve done three live, Internet auctions for benefits and fundraisers and I’ve got several timed auctions that we are adding to the mix now with some of the benefits of fundraisers. I’ve got an article coming out – should be in the next month or so – about how to use online bidding to sell the items that may not have sold at a silent auction in a fundraising auction. I’ve just seen that that has been a key to our business. We’re directly between Atlanta and Charlotte on I-85 corridor and we’re about 20 minutes south of Greenville, which is the second-largest city in South Carolina. The problem is, we’re in one of those areas that everybody says, “you can’t get there from here.” So even though we are really closer than people think, we don’t have as many people that come in the door. So we have to drive our marketing to get people in our door. So the Internet allows us to pull in bidders from all over the country. We’ve had bidders from Italy, Belize, Germany, Canada, Mexico – one or two more countries I can’t think of now – but that has been a key to us because, you know with real estate you look at location, location, location – well ours is country, country, country and people don’t really want come out to where our building is. We’ve been here since 1972 so we don’t really want to spend the money to move so we spend the money to do the Internet auctions and bring the people to us. I think the last coin auction we did – not the one today, but the one we did a couple weeks ago – I think we shipped to 26 different states. So that is the key to us using the Internet and it’s been a big push to our business.

What are some other cool and unique ways that you’re using technology to improve your business?

Oh, let’s see. Well, the funny thing is, and I just put my son son into bed, I work from home four days a week now. He just moved to a new school so, in doing so, my wife teaches at that school so she can’t be at home. So I said, well I’m 500 yards from the office, if they need me I can go in, so I’ll just change my schedule and I work four days from home. So, I’m doing a lot of instant messaging, MSN instant messaging, I do some iChats every so often on the Apple iChat. I’m doing a lot of emailing, doing a lot of conference calls through remote offices, GoToMeeting, Apple eMeeting – I think that’s the title – anyway…not Apple, the Adobe platform that they’ve got out now, I’ve done it with two different companies. And then e-faxing. So I’m trying to do everything I can to reduce the amount of extra hardware items that I have to buy for my home to move my office out here because one once he gets to the point where to he goes to four-year-old kindergarten then he’s going to be there all day and I’ll be able to move back to my office. But now that I’m here at home, I had to use technology to allow me to get out of the office. The funny thing about it, I communicate. I did three coin auctions – catalog and inventory – here at home and I did every bit of my email and communication through my Blackberry. I kept my computer on Excel. I didn’t turn on my email because I didn’t want it to flash up and get me distracted, so every time I got 50 items logged in, I checked my Blackberry, send email – so I did everything as a total, remote office at that point. It was cool. I liked it. I get more work done at home than I do in the office, there’s no doubt about it.

You teach at the Southeastern School of Auctioneering. You mentioned earlier how you speak at conferences, and you and I are both slated to teach at CAI this coming year. When you ran and were elected to the NAA board of directors, I remember you running on a platform of education and that was your main driver. What drives you to be so active in the auction industry and how does being active in the industry affect your business?

I tell you what, you start looking back and Derek Bok, the Harvard University president, said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” And on the flip side of that, Mark Twain said, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education,” so I’m seeing it from both sides. I said that in Orlando. I said that I wanted the education classes to be in all four corners of the country so that you wouldn’t have to travel all over the world just to see an education class. The Education Institute – I don’t know if I helped with that or anything, but the Education Institute has absolutely blown that up and they’re all over the country in different places. I feel that education is the key to this industry in a lot of ways. And let’s look at it from the Millennials and generation X. If you look at that, they are going to have an advantage on technology, but a disadvantage on face-to-face. Face-to-face communication right now is not going out, but it’s slowing being faded out to text messaging, emails, IMs, cell phones, things like that. So, if you go to the midrange – I said generation X, I meant generation Y – with me generation X, I’m right in the middle. You know, I’ve got my dad who’s been in this business for thirty-something years. I’ve got some of the ones coming up behind me that are the Millennials and generation Y. I’m in the middle because I grew up with technology. My first computer was a TRS-80 back in the early ’80s, and I picked up on that. But, I’m also in the middle to where I would rather sit down and record this in your office in Kansas than doing it over the phone, because I like face-to-face communication because I can read that person and see what they’re thinking, especially in negotiations. Start looking at the other end of the spectrum. You start looking at some of the more seasoned and veteran auctioneers, they are the ones – this industry is 55 to 57 years old range on average – so they are totally in face-to-face communication. They are totally into writing hand-written notes. They’re totally into a lot of these things, which is not a bad thing because I love that part of the business. But when you start looking at the education of the technology and the speed and things like that, they’re saying “Hey, wait. I got here by doing all these other things, why do I need these?” Well, the education bridges all three of those. It’s like a string of islands that are bridged together. And if you start looking at it from that point of view, you’re going to see that education is going to pull Millennials up and tell them what they don’t know and it’s going to help the more seasoned, veteran auctioneers at the other end to pick up some of these things that the Millennials know and it’s going to move back and forth. I love the fact that I’m right in the middle of all of this because I see it from both sides and I get it from both sides, which I think is great. My dad was the first one. He said, “I don’t know why in the world you want to do an auction on Proxibid.” And I said, “Look, they’re giving the first one free. If we don’t like it, if we mess up – we’re going to do our job the way we always do it – but if it doesn’t work, who cares? We’re not out any money and we go back to where we were yesterday.” Now 100 auctions later, he’s asking me, “Hey, are we putting this one online?” So the education part of it – I don’t think you can be in this business without the education part of it. There’s a lot of people out there that say, “No I’m not getting a designation,” “I don’t need it,” “I’m at the other end of the spectrum,” or “I can’t afford it” or whatever it is. Right now – and I’m not pushing anybody into spending any money on classes – but right now, as fast as this profession is moving, as dynamic as it is – I say that it looks like an anthill from the top down – you’ve got to have some type of education or some way to communicate with the other auctioneers so that you can go in and pull what they know. The way you’ve always done it may keep you at a level. It may be a baseline. You just may be at the perfect place, you’re making enough money, you’re putting enough money back, you’re giving enough money. Whatever it is, you may be there, but the education is going to tip you over that threshold and it might put you in another direction to where you might be able to accelerate some of those and also you might be able to pay it forward for the next generation that’s coming up, whether its your family or the next generation. Obviously, I’m very much in the education end of this as you can tell. But one thing that I did, I went in and I started in college in 1990, joined a fraternity – my grades and the schools grading scale didn’t match so I went home and I started working. I said, “You know what? I can work, I can work, I can work but I want something else.” So I went back 13 years later, finished up my bachelor’s degree, and I said, “Hey, I’m on this education kick.” And I went in and I went ahead and finished my master’s because I wanted to go in and figure out what the world was doing. I wanted to know what other businesses were doing. I’m reading Richard Branson’s new book, Business Stripped Bare, and it’s talking about how he’s taken the Virgin brand out there and some of these different businesses that he’s involved in, and that’s why I’m looking at taking our business in new directions. Without the education that the NAA and the South Carolina association and some of these other places I’ve been and picked up education – without them and the education they provide, I would probably be stagnant in this industry. The problem is, as fast-moving and dynamic as this industry is, if you’re stagnant somebody’s going to step right over you like a speed bump and move right on down the line. Now, I’m not saying that this is for everybody. There’s people out there – there’s auctioneers out there that are so happy with what they’re doing – that’s great, you’ve made it. And you know you’ve made it when you can say, “I can say no to this auction and still be OK,” “I can say no to this and still be OK,” “I can go for two weeks without having an auction, I don’t have to worry about it” – you’ve made it. But there’s some of us out there that feel like we need more. We need more. And it’s almost like having a pocked guide, Success Secrets of the Super Achievers and I feel like I’m writing a chapter in that because I’m trying to move forward. But the education part in my opinion is absolutely essential to what we’re doing.

Meares Auction Group logo

Well that’s it for episode 10. Thank you very much Darron for joining me.

Not a problem!

My guest tonight was Darron Meares from Meares Auction Group, which you can visit at www.mearesauctions.com – that’s meares auctions dot com.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

The post Auction Podcast Episode 10 – Interview with Darron Meares appeared first on AuctioneerTech.

Brandon Harker - Sebae Data Solutions and Auction Flex

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast
auctioneertech.com – Technology, auctions and auctioneers – auction tech for the auction industry

AuctioneerTech – Hello and welcome to the ninth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast for the week of 27 October, 2008. My name is Aaron Traffas, and with me today is Brandon Harker from Sebae Data Solutions, makers of Auction Flex and the guys behind Bidopia. Hi, Brandon, and thank you for joining me.

Brandon Harker – Hey, thanks for having me.

AT – Before we get to Auction Flex – and tell me, is it Bid-opia? Is it Bid-o-pia? How do you pronounce your bidding platform?

BH – We pronounce it Bidopia, kind of like a derivative of utopia.

Sure, and that’s how I pronounced it but I want to check and be sure that I wasn’t going to make a fool out of myself by pronouncing it incorrectly. Tell us a little about Sebae and how you became a vendor for the auction industry.

About ten years ago I had the fortune to get introduced to the live auction industry. It was about that time I was kind of ending my job before I was starting this. So a few years after, I was introduced to it and just came to survey the software that was available at the time and kind of decided that we could build a better moustrap. So that’s what we set about doing and here we are eight years later now.

What is Auction Flex?

Auction Flex is full auction management software for the live auction industry. We work for cataloged, non-cataloged, Internet and multi-parcel auctions, and we do all that without modularizing the software which was kind of one of our basic tennants when we got started.

Right. Because other solutions will charge a base price and then if you want to add, for example, inventory exporting and importing capabilities or your multi-parcel – they will piece it out and charge accordingly, which has its benefits, but it also certainly gets a little frustrating as an auctioneer having to, once you’ve decided to add something to your business model, then you say oh now I have to go and buy the software in addition to what I already have, so that’s certainly impressive. Talk a little about the inventory management capabilities of Auction Flex, as far as the integration with Bidopia, your Internet bidding platform, as well as other platforms and how you can get inventory in and inventory out.

One of the reasons we decided to call the software product Auction Flex was, you know, flex stands for two things which was flexibility and power. And so we actually have a bunch of different ways that you can get inventory into and out of the system. You can get into fully detailed inventory management where you’re managing inventory outside of auctions with bar-coded labels. You can have user-defined fields where you could capture information, like in the case of antiques it might be providence, dimensions, weight. In automobiles you would collect VIN, year, make, model. In heavy equipment it would be hours, model, you know, et cetera. The whole point is that you can create your own inventory types and the types of information that you want to collect and get as detailed with that as you want to. Or, for the other side, you can just start entering a catalog with a lot number and a quick description and leave it at that. You can import as many images as you want or attach images directly to the inventory or to the catalog. We actually have a really cool tool that will actually read bar codes off of an image. So that means that if you take a picture of a barcode on a piece of inventory, our software can actually recognize that barcode and assign the subsequent images to that particular lot automatically. So we have a bunch of really cool tools to get as detailed as you want to be or as quick and brief as you want to be.

So you can, for example, based on a category – in other words if I go in and say that for antiques I want to capture these three specific data types – I can specify that so that anybody entering inventory in the system is then required to enter those custom types?

Exactly. And that’s a good point you bring up. A lot of times, in larger auction companies especially, you have more than one person entering your inventory. And what the inventory types help you to do is kind of standardize the information you’re collecting. So instead of ending up with three variations of how somebody enters, let’s say an automobile and maybe one person enters it 2000 Ford F150 but the next person enters it Ford F150, 2005, and you can imagine all the different variations.

Oh yes.

Well by standardizing those user-defined fields, it then forces those descriptions into whatever you’ve defined. So it really helps the catalog be more professional looking.

Very nice. While we’re still on inventory entry and management, what kind of user tracking abilities, if any, do you have. In other words, can I tell what user logged in and entered these items or maybe the last person who edited them?

I’d have to dig in. I want to say a workstation is recorded. A lot of our customers actually don’t even force users to log in so we have mechanisms behind those things to track what workstation things happened at too. I’d have to dig into that some more to know exactly to what detail you could get that.

Sure. I supposed it’d probably be fairly easy if you can provide custom fields. That’s a question there in that can you specify when you’re entering inventory if one of your custom fields is displayed to the public or if it’s for internal use?

Absolutely. That’s a great feature. We actually have a few user-defined field captions that you can use that are specifically for internal use. One is a consigner item number. A lot of times, a consigner will consign a whole truckload full of inventory and they’ve already attached their own inventory numbers, if you will, to that merchandise. And so when they get their consigner settlement out, they want that information relayed back to them. Well obviously our bidders don’t care what number our consigners have assigned to an item, but we can capture that information and give that back to the consigners on the settlement sheet. Another feature like that is something called auctioneer notes which is something the house wants to record that they might want to announce during the auction but not necessarily want to put on the catalog. Well, that would show up on the auctioneers’ copy and also on the auctioneers’ screen.

Very nice. How then are those fields – when you look at exporting the data out of Auction Flex into whatever bidding platform the customer utilizes – what kind of capabilities does the auctioneer have as far as specifying the schema or the arrangement of those fields in the output files?

They have complete control over what fields should be included with an export and in what order. With that export routine you can also export the images. Our software automatically takes your higher resolution image, automatically copies that to a web-enhanced image – so it’s going to be a lower resolution, a smaller size – and so as part of that export routine you can choose whether or not to export the original, high-resolution image or the optimized web image. You can choose whether or not to export all the images or just the first one and then you have a whole slew of the standard file types – Excel, CSV, DBS, et cetera.

Right. As far as images go, first of all where are they and how are they stored? Do you have any standardized directory structure or anything like that? And secondly, when you look at exporting images – and that’s very neat, I didn’t know that it resized and batch-processed the images – in that processing, will it allow you to rename it according to a specified schema, rename those images?

We actually handle the images internally. We rename them. The software renames them internally to keep track of them. It’s not according to – it’s actually a random filename, and it does that for uniqueness. Obviously if we named the image for lot one 1.JPG then the next auction we would have a duplicate 1.JPG so we keep track of all the inventory through our own folder mechanisms and through our own internal tracking. But, when you export, it gives you the option to rename the image as the lot number or as the inventory number so it takes away all the manual renaming that people are used to doing. Obviously if you have multiple image it will give you the option of what schema to use to handle those multiple images.

So when you enter the description, and by description I mean your auctioneer-assigned item number and the category and all of the custom fields you’ve specified that are appropriate for that kind of item – when you enter that, do you then go and say let me assign the pictures and open a dialog box and select the images that you have take for that? Is that kind of how the system works, then?

You can. At that point, you can actually drag and drop images right onto the item. That would be the manual process of doing it. We also have the batch image import which tends to, I think, be used a lot more than the lot-by-lot. But certainly it’s up to you. Again, flexability is the key. Everybody has a different way that works best for them, so we accomodate all those different ways whether it’s batch image import or just one at a time.

Very nice. We’ll talk a little bit when we talk about Bidopia, and I certainly want to cover that here in a little bit, we’ll talk about how that integration process works. But one of the things that I have personally salivated over when I’ve looked at Auction Flex is the handheld capabilities. Talk a little bit about the handheld devices that you have integrated and the range and what an auctioneer can do with those handheld units.

Sure. When we were researching handhelds, probably five or six years ago now, there were a couple things that standard PocketPC-type handhelds didn’t do for you. And a PocketPC-type handheld is kind of like a smartphone. It’s got the color screen and you can get them with the little keyboards or you can get them with just numeric keypads on them, but typically they all going to be consistent in that they’re going to use Wi-Fi, which has a limited range, and secondly they have a color screen which completely washes out in sunlight. Thirdly the battary live when you are using Wi-Fi tend to not last as long as an auction, so now you have to start worring about having hot spares avaliable. So we wanted to find a hand held solution that resolved all of these issues. So the hand held that we found and that we have implemented into our software A) has a screen that does not get wash out in direct sunlight, no matter how bright it is you can still see the screen. B) It uses a RS signal that is at a lower bandwidth than WIFI which allows it ,its just a measure of physics here, that allows the signal to travel further without breaking apart. So our typical range with our hand helds is about 1000 feet. And then lastly the batteries, its just three double A batteries nothing fancy and they will last over 24 hours of continuous use. Wow. So we kind of resolved all three of the issues we have with the hand helds when we found that unit and made it work with our software.

Very nice and with the hand helds you can obviously clerk an event what other, are there any other things you can do?

There are, there are a couple applications for the hand held. The first and most often used of course is the clerking capablility. It can be very handy especially in a catalog sale to just walk around and clerk the auction, in that mobile sale where you do need that ability to walk around. It also comes with an optional built-in barcode reader. With that bar code reader you can actually scan lot labels that you have printed out with barcodes. Another function you can use the hand held for is lotting an auction. What auction houses and some heavy equipment and other types of auctions that manage inventory. What they have to do is they kind of have a multi step process that means they take the inventory in they give it an inventory number but they are doing that before they know necessarily they won’t know what lot number they are going to give the item, they may not even know what auction they are going to sell the item in. They have to have a means to track inventory. So they may go ahead and barcode the inventory stick it in the warehouse, stick it on the lot, whatever the case may be. So what the hand held allows them to do is lets say later on they get the auction lined up and in the case of let’s say an antique gallery they pull items out of the warehouse till they have enough for an auction they can walk the line, if you will, with that hand held and scan the inventory labels and assign that to a lot number for the sale, so that the catalog is in order.
Another thing you can do with that built-in barcode scanner is you can decode VINs. So as inventory is coming in, in this case vehicles and I want to say it is from ’94 on, I may be a little off with that, but there is a barcode label on newer vehicles that you can scan with a hand held, and our hand held will then decode and say hey this is a 2001 Ford F150 XLT with a V8 and the automatic transmission. So it can really make the inventory entry in the case of scanning VINs much faster, and obviously less prone to errors. And then the last option it has relates to the multi-parcel software thats is built-in to Auction Flex. The hand held allows you to what-if queries on the fly, so that your ringman can be walking around if somebody wants to know “what-if” for a new contination the ringman can just enter it right there and tell them without walk backing and for to the computer.

Very Nice, While we are on the subject of Multi-par, a couple of the guys that I work with, who when they found out that I had an interview with you, made me promise to ask you if it was in your plans to ever consider releasing a stand alone mulit-par package. Is that something that has ever crossed your mind?
You know we are, again we stay away from that, if for no other reason than it lead to the perception that we offer the software in modules. We are priced competitivly and we have many customers who use Auction Flex only for multi-parcel. So you know it is one of those things that you can get the software and only use the multi parcle or you can get the software and only use the regular auction management stuff or you can use them both. Its up to you, but we won’t be spliting that out, that’s not in the plans.

Sure. Talk a little bit about your customer database, as far as possible multiple registrations per bidder, per seller, per event.

There are obviously there are certain instances where a bidder wants multiple bid cards and of course that is an option in the software that you can assign the same bidder multiple bidder numbers for the sale, but in most cases we don’t want, we want to prevent duplication and in fact when we allow a bidder to check in multiple times we’re not duplicating their information we’re allowing them to check in more than once. Like an alias. Exactly, and we do have functions in the software that when you check somebody in, if you have duplicated a record it will automatically find that duplication and ask them right then and there is this the same person. In fact one of the improvements for 6.02 was the improved, that is version 6.02 of Auction Flex, which came out probably about a month and a half ago or so. One of those improvements was an improved algarhythm for duplication checking.

Very Nice, that has been something that we have faught in the past was, when we have our internet bidders and our live bidders how we handle those. And so that is certainly something that is very near and dear to me is making sure that we, that the software has the capability of doing that. There was also a question posed recently on the NAA forum about the need to register seller under different live numbers, without the duplication. And so your software allows that on the seller as well as the buyer side.

Yeah absolutely, and what that topic was related is some auctioneer that do, typically it’s used a mulit-consignor non-catalog sale, non-catalog meaning we haven’t pre-entered any lots ahead of time, we are just going to clerk it on the fly as we go. So we have to tell the software what it is, who we sold it to, for how much and how many there were. In that instance it is common for customers that have multiple consignors non-catalog sales, to want to give, to want to reuse the same range of consignor codes for each auction, so let’s say they want to reuse A-Z. And they like to do that for a couple of reason, obviously the first is if we have to give every consignor that ever comes in our auction house a unique different number then pretty soon we are going to start having some very consignor codes. You can imagine if you are trying to clerk a sale with four digit consignor codes the probability of the clerk having tranposition errors goes up greatly. So the desire there is to A) keep the consignor codes short and B) alot of times we don’t want the same consignor from auction to auction to always have the same consignor code, cause our bidder for whatever reason may start to identify that code with that bidder and the consigner wants some ability to be annonoymus with what they are selling. So it serves those two functions.

Sure. You mentioned you released version 6.02 a month and a half ago or a couple of months ago, I noticed on your website that you just release 6.03 and so what’s in the latest and greatest release and maybe what are some future plans, what you’re looking forward to after that release.

Well 6.03 is pretty much, kind of just a roll up to version 6.02, 6.02 was really our last big release. A couple things came out with 6.02 is a new enhanced check out form, we also came up with this new idea we had, called an auto back up tool. I don’t know your familiar with the trail printer auctions, and what a trail printer is for those who don’t know is when an auctio is being clerked on the fly or in a cataloged format, if the auction house chooses to clerk that auction live and not keep a hard copy, the trail printer can serve as that hard copy, and what it does it is automatically prints a trail of the auction as it is being conducted and so we wanted to take that one step further and we came up with an auto-back-up tool. And what that does is every “X” minutes, obviously for flexibility purpose you define X, we recommend somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes. So every 20-30 minutes the auto-back-up tool automatically makes a back-up of all the data to that point and includes it on another machine that is not serving, that is not the server. And what that does for you if at any point in time, luckily computers are very reliable now a days, but in the instance that your server computer should die on you in the middle of an auction, you could actually re-purpose a secondary work station or a client work station as the new server, use that back-up and be up and rolling.
Very nice. Is that just the back-up of the event in progress or an entire database back-up?
It would be an entire database back-up.

Wow. Very Nice. What’s next on the development list is there anything that you’re looking at?

I’m actually working on a really cool tool right now, that we’re going to be rolling out here probably within the next week or two. One of the challenges our customers have had, particularly our auction galleries is generating a phone bid schedule. If you can imagine, higher end antiques typically have a lot of phone bidders that will want to be called when their particular lots that they are interested in come up. Well when you get a few hundred to a hundred to two hundred phone bidders that are wanting to be contacted on maybe an average of maybe a dozen or so lots each, generating a schedule for a bank of phone employees can be quite a task. And obviously your phone bidders have to have things like so many lots between phone calls so they have time to establish the phone call with the next bidder they need things like maybe some clients only speak a certain language so we have to restrict who they can talk to in the phone bank. There are alot of variables that go into the phone bids, generating the phone bid schedule, and up to now it has been a fairly tedious process to generate that schedule and I am actually almost done with a new phone scheduler that takes that multi-hour process that the auction house is manually doing now and making it completely automatic.

Wow. You had mentioned earlier about how you have a fee structure that you want to keep it all together, I know that you have a rental option, for lack of a better term, why don’t you talk one time a little bit about the fee structure for the Auction Flex product.

Sure, sure early on we, you know, I have always kind of compared buying software to getting married, in essence at the time when we got started, basically everybody wanted you to buy their multi-thousand dollar software with out really giving it a test run. And I kind of equate that to marrying somebody on the first date, you know what I mean?

Absolutely, Aaron McKee’s anology for that It’s kind of like a mother-in-law you have to take it home and learn to love it once you made the decision.

Yeah, I like that. So we kind of had a different approach to that and that was that we were going to offer our software as well as that typical out right purchase we are also going to offer it on a rental plan. And the way that that rental plan is different, is it is literally month to month which means that if we don’t make you happy for any way shape or form you can cancel and you will never get another bill from us. And essentially thats the put up or shut up mentality. And so we think if we do our job and provide the service and provide the software the rest takes care of itself.

The rest of the transcript for this podcast will be posted just as soon as we can find time to type it. For now, give it a listen and let us know what you think by posting a comment or using the form at www.auctioneertech.com/feedback

The post Auction Podcast Episode 9 – Interview with Brandon Harker – Auction Flex appeared first on AuctioneerTech.

Hello and welcome to the eighth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast for the week of 20 October, 2008. In this episode, we’re going to cover two recent topics from auctioneertech.com, DNS and Google AdWords.

Over the last several months, there have been many security bulletins about the vulnerabilities found in one of the fundamental technologies that makes the web work called DNS. DNS stands for domain name system. It’s a fairly complex system, but abstractly it’s fairly simple.

Every device on the Internet is accessed by Internet protocol, or IP address, which is a dotted quad, or sequence of four numbers separated by periods like 208.67.222.222. We remember websites and services and companies by their website domain names. I’ll bet you can name the websites for Google, Amazon, eBay and AuctioneerTech off of the top of your head, but I’ll bet you don’t know what the IP addresses of the servers are that your computer talks to when you visit those sites.

DNS exists to convert the domain names, like auctioneertech.com, into IP addresses, like 67.210.98.40. It’s like a phone book. You know the name, you need the number.

When you type the website www.auctioneertech.com into your browser, you computer first checks its cache memory to see if it has visited the site before. If it has, it further examines the record to see if that record is still valid. If it’s valid, it directs your browser to the computer at 67.210.98.40. If the TTL, or time to live, on that record has expired, the computer recognizes that the information is too old to be valid so it contacts a DNS server to find out the correct IP address of the domain. The DNS server is usually owned by your Internet service provider, or ISP.

Your ISP’s DNS server has a bunch of address records in its memory, each record with its own TTL or time until that record expires. Each time a subscriber requests a site it doesn’t have, it gets it and adds it to memory so it doesn’t have to get the same record again before the record expires.

The problem that’s been in the news recently relates to what is called DNS poisoning. Essentially, it’s possible to intercept the requests made by the DNS server for a domain name’s IP address and reply to them with incorrect addresses. For example, when the record for PayPal expires and the DNS server goes to update that record, a malicious person could catch that request and reply with an IP address for his server, causing the DNS server to tell the requesting subscriber that the IP address to PayPal is a malicious computer rather than the PayPal server. Now that malicious computer would serve a website that looks just like PayPal and have paypal.com in the browser address bar and the subscriber could be tricked into entering his username and password, providing access to his bank account to the malicious person. This attack is not Paypal’s fault, it’s the fault of the original DNS technology which was far too trusting.

Recently, patches and updates have been made to many DNS servers from many different ISPs. The problem is that you may not know if your provider has updated its servers. There is a test located at DoxPara, a link to which is posted on the transcript to this podcast, to tell if your DNS is vulnerable to the latest attacks, but by far the better choice in my opinion is to use a free service called OpenDNS.

OpenDNS makes Internet faster, safer

OpenDNS is a distributed network of free DNS servers that are faster and more secure than your ISP’s DNS server. Because they have so many users, the odds of them having the website you’re looking for are much higher, allowing them to return the IP address immediately rather than to have to look it up. They’re on top of their game, which means you can always trust that they’re running the latest updates and patches.

They have a fantastic control panel which not only provides statistics showing total requests, unique domains, unique IPs and more, they will allow you to block categories of websites or specific domains or IP addresses. You can block dating sites, gambling sites, auction sites, adult sites, gaming sites, religious sites, blogs – the list goes on. If you’re an auctioneer, you probably want to allow auction sites but block adult sites. If you’re a school, you probably want to block dating sites and religious sites as well. OpenDNS lets you block these categories and more. I have music sites blocked, but my staff likes to listen to Pandora Internet radio, so I can block the music category but specifically allow Pandora.

OpenDNS automatically blocks known phishing sites, which means that if you try to visit a site that is known to be malicious or to try to extract personal information from you, it will block it until you specifically allow that site in the OpenDNS control panel.

If you manage a network, simply enter the free OpenDNS server addresses in the configuration of your router and rest assured knowing that your router will cause all the computers on your network to go through the OpenDNS servers. If you manage multiple networks, the OpenDNS control panel will allow you to block and allow specific website categories for each network or all at once. If you have a notebook computer and are accessing the Internet at a wireless hotspot, you can use the OpenDNS servers specifically on your notebook to ensure that you’re really going to the sites you wanted to go to rather than hoping that the DNS servers used by the hotspot are not vulnerable or already poisoned.

One final feature is intelligent redirection. If you type example.cm on a normal DNS server, it will take you to either a page not found 404 error or a scam site or ad site hosted by a domain squatter. Type example.cm on a computer using OpenDNS and it will recognize that you probably meant example.com and correctly take you to the site you meant to visit.

How can OpenDNS provide such a fantastic service for free? When you enter a site like example.cm and it doesn’t have a good guess as to what you really meant, it will display a page of Google-powered search results as if you entered that website into the search bar rather than the address bar. OpenDNS takes a percentage of the ad revenue generated if you end up clicking on one of the sponsored links. You can customize the logo using the OpenDNS control panel so it looks like search results from your company, which is a particularly nice feature if you manage a network. The address bar search is so nice that I’ve found myself getting lazy and entering everything in the address bar because I know that OpenDNS will cover for me and convert the malformed website address into a search query.

With all the baddies on the Interwebs, OpenDNS provides peace of mind that when you type an Internet address in the browser’s address bar you’ll end up where you wanted. It provides an increase in browsing speed which translates to an increase in productivity. It makes you safe and boosts your bottom line. And it’s absolutely free. For instructions to start using OpenDNS, visit www.opendns.com.

Now, a question was posted on the page for last week’s podcast by Joe Abal from Florida who asked if I thought Google’s AdWords is a profitable marketing tool. The short answer is yes, but I thought it would be good to discuss what AdWords is and in what context it works best for auctioneers.

Google AdWords logo

Google is a mammoth company, slowly weaving its way into every corner of the Internet by offering free services that are better than the competing for-pay services. The development of these free services is not cheap, especially when Google allegedly requires only 80% of their employees’ attention through their Innovation time off program which encourages each Googler to spend one day a week on projects that interest him or her.

Google makes the vast majority of its money through advertising. Google owns advertising on the Internet, and one of the most prominent advertising services it offers is AdWords.

When you search Google, there are two kinds of results returned. The organic results are those listed on the left while the paid ads, or sponsored links, are listed in a block on the right and sometimes above the organic results on the left.

Eyetools eye tracking map of Google search results

When test subjects perform searches and their eyes are tracked, the results are pretty clear that the vast majority of the time the subjects look first at the top of the organic results list. There is a very intriguing study from a company called Eyetools showing this concept, and a link to that study is posted in the transcript for this episode. These data confirm that it’s much more valuable to have a high organic ranking than to rely on paid ads.

The problem is that you can’t strong-arm your way into ranking high on an organic search, especially if that search is fairly common. A modern-day snake oil industry has built itself around SEO, or search engine optimization, but the fact is that auctioneers seldom have the time to wait for the tweaking and testing involved in a targeted campaign to rank higher for queries relating to items in an auction.

Google AdWords allows you to buy placement of links on Google search results and on websites using Google’s AdSense product which lets site owners display relevant links and get a portion of the proceeds. AdWords customers are charged based solely on how many users click on the ads. Your ad may be displayed thousands of times, but if nobody clicks on it you’re not going to be charged anything.

For customers, AdWords is an auction requiring three pieces of information. You tell it which keyword you want, how much you’re willing to pay for each click, and how much you’re willing to spend per day. AdWords will display the ads with the highest price first until that customer’s per day limit is met, at which point it will no longer display the highest priced ads, displaying instead those of lesser value. You also have the ability to target specific locations, so an ad can run in Kansas and not in Minnesota, for example.

Let’s say you want everyone in North Carolina searching for auction to be shown a link to your website. AdWords displays about eight sponsored listings per search, so you have to outbid all but seven other AdWords customers. With competition from eBay and Overstock.com, two large companies among many with a vested interest in the term auction, a campaign for such a generic term can be quite costly.

Take the keyword phrase combine auction. Because there are fewer companies targeting that search phrase, it’s going to be cheaper and easier as an advertiser to put that link in front of people searching for that phrase. The downside is that there are many fewer people searching for combine auction rather than auto auction or just auction.

AdWords shines when we try to advertise niche merchandise, and organic returns are more valuable for institutional marketing. It’s far better for a weekly auto auction to work to build a frequently-updated website to rank higher for organic returns for auto auction and to use AdWords to quickly advertise antique or unique automobiles as they come in using AdWords to target those people interested in such vehicles.

We auctioneers have fairly unique needs. We usually have a short time to market specific items. If we had an abundance of time, we could build a website for each item and build the ranking over time. Most times, however, we have a marketing window of a week or two, and AdWords gives us the ability to provide exposure of the specific items we have to specific demographics interested in those items.

That’s it for episode eight. I have three guests who have accepted my invitation to participate in interviews over the next several weeks. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, help promote it by telling your friends or auctioneers you may know or writing a review on iTunes.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

The post Auction Podcast Episode 8 – Google AdWords and DNS appeared first on AuctioneerTech.

Robert Mayo, CAI, ATS, AARE, CAGA

AuctioneerTech – Joining me today for the first of the Auctioneer Interview Series is my friend Robert Mayo, CAI, ATS, AARE, CAGA. Robert is an auctioneer and broker with Mayo Auction and Realty in Kansas City, MO. He is also the 2007 and 2008 Kansas State Champion Auctioneer. Good morning, Robert, and thank you for joining me.

Robert Mayo – Good morning Aaron. I appreciate you inviting me for this podcast.

AT – We’re pretty excited about it. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to be an auctioneer.

RM – I came from a background of health care and health care information management and kind of stumbled upon the auction industry. I’ve always been an entrepreneur and had been studying different businesses and different industries and discovered the auction industry merely by chance and once I got a taste of the excitement and the very diverse aspect of it – no two days are the same in the auction industry – once I got a taste of that, it really suited me very well, my personality and my make-up, if you will. So I was drawn to it immediately. It’s been eight years now we’ve been in business – about nine years in pursuit of our business and eight years in business. We have an auction business in the Kansas City metropolitan area and serve parts of Kansas and Missouri, primarily in real estate and firearms, coins and collectibles, and we do some estate auctions and business liquidation auctions and also some benefit and fund raising auctions as well.

A couple of years ago, I don’t remember the exact date, but you moved to a new facility there – I think it’s on Wornol there in Kansas City.

Yeah, it’ll be two years this February.

Mayo Auction and Realty

What was your business like before then and how has having that facility changed or altered how you conduct business?

Prior to moving to our new facility – we’ve been there for almost two years – we had a brick and mortar office in a suburb of Kansas City and we focused primarily on real estate. The main focus of our business was real estate, both at auction and traditionally or conventionally. We recognized that we were turning down some opportunities because we did not have, well, basically square footage to operate and conduct auctions off site. All of our business was done on site, whether it be estate, business liquidation and, of course, real estate is mostly always on site, unless we do a multi-property auction. Having the opportunity to open – we have about 7500 square feet at our facility – has given us opportunity to take consignment of items that we focus on, like I said earlier, primarily firearms, coins and collectibles – things of that nature. Before, we didn’t have the ability to take those items on consignment and to conduct consignment auctions where maybe a seller only has five or six pieces. But you put those all together and it’s easier to conduct a four hundred, six hundred lot auction and have the ability to do our inventory management and photography and everything in a secure, safe location without having to move the items too many times.

Now that you’ve expanded into the personal property, and you still do a lot of real estate, I know, how do you keep everybody on the same page? What are some tools you use and your procedures to keep your real estate crew and your auction managers and your sales associates – everybody – talking to one another without just having all day long meetings everyday?

That’s a good question. We’re fortunate that – and it’s a moving target – we’re fortunate that we’re still pretty small so the management oversight of that allows us to communicate effectively using pretty common technology like using Outlook and email and your run-of-the-day technology that we all use, whether it be cell phones and whatnot. It is a challenge to keep everyone on the same page. Probably the biggest thing that we’ve done is to try to give those who are in charge of those projects the ability to make the decisions they need to make to manage their project individually and not have it too much of a micro-managed situation. That probably would create more headache if we had. I can see a need for that if you had more employees and a bigger staff where you had to micro-manage that more because you’re going to break up those tasks into more job-like, more individually-tasked where someone’s just doing one task and this person’s just doing this task. That would require a lot more management oversight and we just don’t have that challenge yet.

What’s the average marketing campaign at Mayo Auction and Realty? What do you do for real estate and personal property for marketing and print and electronic media? What’s your focus?

You mean from a dollars and cents point of view?

What’s the break-up? Do you do mostly print advertising, mostly Internet-based, neither, both?

It’s a combination of print advertising, direct mail and Internet or web-based marketing I would say would be the main focuses of our marketing.

Do you see trends as far as an overall reduction, maybe, in mailers or an increase in certain different…

Well, when we started out…within the first few years of our business, we really cut back on the mailers because we saw the big push for everything to be more Internet or web-based, and what we’ve recognized is that through kind of an experiment a few years ago, what we did was we started to do a small mailer – a postcard mailer – to some of our buyers in our database to see what kind of a response we would get from that. What we’ve seen is, in our opinion kind of a renaissance back to the old school of marketing. People appreciate getting those mailers and we’ve had people that have come to the auction who’ve said that they wouldn’t have come if they didn’t receive that mailer. So we’ve kind of gone back to some old school techniques. There’s no doubt that those mailers – our goal is to push them to our website where we can put more information on and have an extensive catalog with more photographs and more detail of the items – you just can’t put all that in the mailer or on paper without spending a ton of money. So the goal of any marketing is still to get them to take action, whether it be to come back to our website and register for the auction or to come back to the website to get the additional information that they need so they’re compelled to come to the live auction if it’s a live auction or register if it’s an Internet only auction.

Who does your website?

It’s self-maintained. We do it ourselves. We had an individual that helped us develop it in the beginning phases and we’ve taken that over and we manage it ourselves now.

What are the pros and cons of doing that?

Pros less money, cons less time. [laughs]

Sure.

And actually I think you’d probably add a few more to that. Some of the cons might be that we’re obviously not experts in web design. We know enough to be competent, but there are people out there who obviously spend a lot more time staying abreast of the latest not just trends but the latest policies and latest standards, if you will, and it’s good to have professional people involved to make sure you’re not going in a direction that’s going to take you a lot to overcome once you realize you’ve gone down the wrong road.

One of the other big pros, though, is that you have not only total control but immediate ability to update that and you don’t have to rely on a designer or someone to post that information. There’s not that disconnect where you have to call someone and say “would you please update the site to say this now.”

Absolutely. And the other thing about that is that nobody will ever care about what you do as much as you do, so the quality control issue is a big factor as well.

Let’s talk a little about some of the tools that you use. You are using AuctionRPM to clerk your auctions, is that right?

That’s correct.

What factors affected your decision to choose RPM and what do you feel are some of the most important strengths and weaknesses in that platform?

We were an early implementor of RPM. I think we signed on with them in 2002 when there wasn’t a lot to choose from. AuctionFLEX was just – I don’t know if they were on the market, I don’t think they were a player at the time. Really all you had to choose from was RPM or JBS and SOLD II, CUS – there were a few other system. We analyzed it pretty heavily, and at the time RPM was definitely the leader when we made that decision. It’s a pretty strong product. We had some early challenges with them. One of the reasons that we chose them was they were Windows-based when so many others were DOS-based, if you can believe that in 2002.

Oh, I remember it.

Yeah. [laughs] That was one of the reasons we chose RPM. Some of the challenges that we had early on were that, as a software company they were not real thorough in their testing of new testing of new features before they would release those to their clients. As a result, if you were downloading those new releases and using them, you became the test. Sometimes that could be quite frustrating if you downloaded those releases the night before an important auction and you were testing them at that time during your auction. In fact, that caused a few significant problems early on. I will say though that they really tightened up on that. They improved their infrastructure a couple years later and they became less reckless, if that’s a good way of saying it, in their releases. And maybe just because they probably don’t put out as many releases as they used to, things have become tighter and the products become tighter. If I were to start over today, I’d probably look at a couple other products pretty hard, but overall we’re satisfied with RPM for our needs right now. There’s obviously some limitations in regards to database integration that when you get into more enterprise management type implementation there’s not a lot of control over the product if you want to integrate it into other systems that you might have.

And that’s the biggest key is that you pick a product that fits your firm because all auction firms are different, and so you want something that’s a good fit and a good match.

Correct. And at this time we’re still out-of-the-box usage of that product, so it works really well for us. There are things that we wish it would do better, but overall it’s a pretty strong product and I’d recommend it for a lot of auction companies – not for some, but for a lot – they would find it to be a good product.

You are actually one of the few auctioneers, if I remember right, that has experience with both Proxibid and Maxanet as an Internet bidding platform. What are your experiences, why have you elected to use two different platforms, are you still doing it, and what are the pros and cons of each?

We were also an early user of Proxibid as well. Proxibid is a great product, they’re a great service. We did our first Proxibid auction in 2002 – no 2003 we did our first Proxibid auction – and I remember those days. You know, we only had like six bidders online. It was certainly a different time in regards to online auctions. There’s been a lot of development since then. Proxibid has been a really good service. The reason we chose them, of course, is because it’s so easy to implement live-broadcast auctions using their service. Because of that, it’s an out-of-the-box type situation. Now the problem is, or the challenge is, with Proxibid is that it’s branded, which is fine when you’re conducting an auction through their portal they can bring traffic to your auction. But when you’re marketing in other publications and bringing traffic to them you have a chance of losing those clients to competing auctions on the same day. So there are some limitations there that I think are going to limit their usage in the marketplace in the future as more auctioneers develop their own niche markets and decide that they need a non-branded solution. That’s one of the reasons we started to use the Maxanet product. The Maxanet product is a non-branded solution. It allows us to integrate into our website that static – I know you don’t like that word static…

[laughs]

…that timed auction or that online only timed auction that is non-branded and we’re not competing with other auctions on the same day because we’re not going through a portal. We’ve only just started to use Maxanet. We probably conducted, I believe, four timed auctions using Maxanet through our website. Three of the four have been successful, I’d say one of the four has been sort of mediocre. We’ll continue to use it and build and develop that as a solution to our clients to provide them a timed auction solution. I do see the future, though, of non-branding being essential in live auction webcasts.

You haven’t experimented at all with the live bidding module in Maxanet, have you?

Not yet, no, and that’s certainly something we’d look at as we’re building our non-real estate auction business, we’re continuing to build our buyer pool and will be navigating towards that non-branded solution so we’re going to be looking at a lot of different options for that.

What are some other – this will give you a chance to talk about anything you think is cool right now – what are some other ways that you’re using technology to attract more bidders and buyers and sellers and help your business?

Boy, you know some of the grassroots guerrilla marketing techniques have been what’s been exciting recently, and it’s not anything new, but Craigslist is a good example. I was looking at my Google Analytics account the other day, and I don’t know if I want to – well, I’ll share this it’s not that big of a deal.

[laughs]

I was looking at my Analytics account the other day and looking at my traffic sources, and still direct traffic to our website is the largest percentage, people who type in our domain name directly. Until a week and a half ago, believe it or not, Google was the largest referrer of traffic to our website, so we feel pretty good about that. But until a week and a half ago, Craigslist was number three and now it became number two behind direct traffic.

Really?

Yeah, and it made us wonder if we’re not getting enough Google traffic [laughs] or are we just getting that much Craigslist traffic. It’s probably a combination of both. It’s a constant battle, search engine optimization, to basically keep your pages optimized for those search engines and make sure that you’re constantly staying in touch with the standards that the search engine algorithms are making sure that your pages get ranked. So we were surprised to see that Craigslist is driving so much traffic to our website. That’s just a grassroots guerrilla marketing technique, and we do it on an item level and sometimes we do it on an event level. The key is not to over-spam or to put too much on there where people get frustrated and start blacklisting, or flagging, your listings, but certainly it can drive traffic to your website. Now, the next question is is it quality traffic. That’s debatable.

I didn’t think about it, but something that may have had an impact on that isI know that in the last month or so there has been some chatter in the tech industry about some Craigslist search products – websites that people have developed that will allow you to search Craigslist with some more advanced filtering that isn’t necessarily locked down by location. And so I wonder if maybe an increase in the use of those newer services might have contributed a little bit to that. I hadn’t thought about that.

That is a good point. The limitation of Craigslist is that its by location, and in a world of buyers that are bidding online and it doesn’t matter where the product is, that is a limitation of Craigslist. I’ll tell you though, we did have a buyer who came to the auction we had two Saturdays ago at our facility, who came to us and said that they found us on Craigslist when they came to pick up their items they founds us on Craigslist and they made purchases, so we know it’s bringing actually buyers to the auction. And that’s just time, it’s not money to do that, it’s just time. Well, time is money but it’s not a hard expense in that regard.

Do you have someone set up on a regular basis to put listings on Craigslist? Is that something that you do on an as-needed basis?

I do it on an as-needed basis and my auction center coordinator Chris does some on an item level as we’re getting closer to the auction. We’ve been playing around with what’s the effective time, you know, how many days before the auction. I don’t think we’ve really figured out that forumula, but that’s certainly a consideration. Too soon you loose the impact and too late you don’t get them. I don’t know that we have an answer on that, but we certainly play around with it to see where we might get some activity. There are some other things that we’ve done. Other discussion groups, discussion boards on specific types of – we had some really nice Lalique  glass in an auction two Saturdays ago and we posted on a Lilique discussion group, a Yahoo group, that these items were in the auction. Sometimes it’s hard to track where the bidders come from, but with that auction we did have a bidder from Israel, which we thought was pretty unique to have that bidder from all the way across the world to participate in that. So there’s no doubt that our markets are not – we’re right here in the heart of Kansas City, 82nd and Wornol, but so much of our buyer participation comes from so far from here. That’s the future of our industry, and the more we can make that easy for people to participate and the more that we can build our reputation as being someone that you can trust when you look at the picture and know that the item is described properly and that any flaws are disclosed. Those kind of things are important to making sure that we’re building buyer confidence and building our buyer pool and making it a good transaction for everybody – the buyer, the seller and us as the auction company.

I think you’re so right that that is the future of our industry and it’s so important that auctioneers who offer Internet bidding and who use technology do get it right, because one bad experience with a competitor may dissuade someone from participating in one of your auctions. I know that you are quite an active member in the National Auctioneers Association and you’ve been involved with the creation of the course material and the instructional level with the new Auction Technology Specialist designation offered by the NAA. What are your thoughts on the designation? Who would you recommend it to? Talk a little bit about that if you would.

Sure. I’m very excited to have been a part of that. It’s, I think, a program that should have been done three or four years ago or maybe even longer. I think it’s far past the time. We really need it. There are a lot of people in our industry that need to catch up, for lack of a better term. The program is hard to kind of describe. There’s so much we go over in the four day period it’s hard for me to describe it completely. The program is, in my opinion, designed for auctioneers who maybe have a basic understanding of technology and are using some technology in their business but really haven’t figured out how to have a strategy that is comprehensive. So by going through this course, you may go through things you already know, but it’s going to be all tied together and give you an opportunity to be able to take what you learn and maybe improve on some of those things that you already knew about and create a strategy that will get you making money using technology. Not just having a website, or not just understanding what a blog is, or not just understanding those items individually, but how can you tie that all together to have a use of technology that will allow you to offer your items to the world and for the world to be able to purchase your items and for your seller to be able to make money and for you to be profitable. I think that’s proably in a nutshell – I think the people that should be taking that course are anybody that doesn’t have it all figured out. And that’s going to be a lot of us.

Probably pretty much everybody.

And there’s no doubt that there are some people that are pretty tech-savvy, and they’re doing online bidding and they’re conducting online auctions and they’re doing those things, and for some of those individuals this course might have a fair amount of information that they already know, but I can say with a certainty that there is a lot of information that can help them be more efficient, more effective and in the end probably get them to look at some things they weren’t thinking about that might improve their bottom line.

Absolutely. Even those people who are using that, like you say – you and I co-taught that course in April and I know that I learned a wealth of information both from you and from even the attendees in the class who ranged from a very low level of technology to a very high level of technology and experience in using technology for auctions, so I would echo that it’s good for anybody who, like you say, doesn’t have it figured out.

And the great thing about that is that, like so many courses that the NAA offers, a lot of education is not just in the classroom, although I would say this course is probably as comprehensive or more than most in regards to actual content. A lot of it is learned from those who are in attendance and just through that sharing of information. And because technology is the fastest changing element in society today, it requires the content to be updated constantly. I remember when I attended my first COMDEX – I don’t know if it’s called the same thing, but it was the big computer convention in Vegas in the early ’90s. I remember the standard then was that whatever is happening right now will be different in three months. It almost seems like whatever is happening right now will be different in a week. That change is just so fast that it requires us to really be on our toes and to really keep abreast of what’s going on and that constant evolution will create so much opportunity for increased knowledge and ability to continue to improve what we’re doing.

Well that’s it for episode seven. Thank you very much, Robert, for joining me.

Thank you.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

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