What will it take for consumers to love you, advocate for you, refer you, and engage with you? It won’t take vanity, a sense of entitlement, or a know-it-all attitude. Tom Ferry says it takes; trustworthy brand, a hyper-local presence, online savviness, and a demonstrated ability to negotiate (a future topic in the #MBAre series).

What I present you with is an intangible, yet incredibly powerful concept to explore in addition to the items mentioned previously. It won’t hurt and it won’t cost you a dime.

Make People Matter. A professor of mine says “People volunteer their best thinking, their hearts, commitment, willingness to adapt…or not“.

Paul Spiegalman totally transformed the way I thought about company culture in a talk he gave last fall. Tom is the CEO and founder of The Beryl Companies which operates a call center for the hospital industry. It’s consistently ranked a “best places to work” has enjoyed a 95% client retention rate and a 400% lower employee turnover rate than competitors (leaving them in the dust). People love working for Beryl. They’re doing incredible things to encourage employee engagement. We’ll explore some of the ways they’re doing this, but I know that Paul will simply tell you: they put their people first.

Technology changes, vendors go out of business, marketing mediums shift, and budgets grow or shrink. But people remain constant. A positive culture attracts positive people who are willing to tackle the challenges of today and solve the problems of tomorrow. Culture also attracts customers. Are your people excited about what they are doing? Are you excited? This is the foundation of any great business. Think more like Google and Zappos and less like American Airlines (nice article here by Paul).

Empower your people (and yourself) to be their best and they will surprise you. They will surprise themselves too. Stay ordinary – and your results will be ordinary (or worse).

Forget for a moment about Zillow, about blogging, about your website, about social media.

Lead your business like the future depends on it. Because it does.

Note from author: This is part 1 of a series of posts related to my experience in the MBA program at TCU in Fort Worth. Learn more here. Topic 1: Managing People

Realtors don’t often have the luxury of scheduling photos for a home in perfect weather, with a perfect sky, especially in south Florida where the conditions are so variable. That’s when a skilled photofinisher comes in very handy.

Here is a perfect example of less than ideal conditions: sun behind the house, behind the clouds. Therefore there is no light on the front of the house and the sky isn’t exactly screaming picnic today! The camera lens that took the photo also distorted the house, squeezing the top inwards and stretching the bottom out. It’s a very dull and uninviting photo.

My software of choice is Photoshop. I am now using CS6 Extended, that was just released and it is just amazing what the programming geniuses have come up with. This was an update that was well worth the cost, which is always considerable with Adobe products. Many tasks that formally took several minutes to do are now possible with just a couple of mouse clicks.

The first thing I do when I get a photo is correct any lens distortion and general crookedness so that I’m working with a properly laid out photo. I then balance the colors so that true colors are shown as opposed to the biased colors that all cameras create that don’t shoot in a RAW format. If you don’t know what that is, your camera isn’t shooting RAW, most likely JPEG. I then adjust the exposure value, if necessary, and bump the vibrancy of the photo generally to brighten things. I also used exposure values and brightness to put a light on the front of the house and bring it out.

In the above photo, the biggest problem is the sky. There is no way to ‘fix’ a sky such as this and have it look at all real, so I cheated. I used a photo that I took at Jupiter Inlet beach by Jupiter Inlet Colony homes one afternoon when I had perfect conditions. I made sure to make the top 2/3 of the photo the sky. It was one of those perfect days, gorgeous blue with just enough white, puffy clouds drifting by to give everything some perspective and contrast.

I took the sky portion of my photo and put it in place of the sky that the photo originally had. The whole thing took me less than 5 minutes. You tell me, which sky do you like the best and can you tell that it’s not the ‘real deal’?

In short, he decided to focus on his personal sphere and created a systematic approach to touch base over the phone with each person on his list at least four times a year.

Yes, I completely understand that this is not anything revolutionary that you haven’t heard before, but that is the beauty of it.  You can improve your business through extremely simple and inexpensive means if you simply apply the most important fundamental element of success…..CONSISTENCY.

This particular agent has over $6,000,000 currently in escrow and is on pace to more than double his production from a year ago.  Did I mention he has only been in the business for three years?

Consistency is typically accompanied by Focus.  The two together are almost impossible to stop.  Because he has both consistency and focus, he is able to come up with innovative ways to maximize his phone conversations.  One example is that he puts together a number of categories that nearly anybody will fall into and he uses that to spearhead a good conversation.  People who have children about to leave the house for college, getting married, new baby, and empty nesters still living in a big home are all examples of the type of categories that he puts them in.

But this post is not about how to effectively call your sphere.  It is about deciding what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, and go do it over and over and over again.

If you are going to call expireds , you must call each and every day consistently.  If you are going to send out mailers it must be over a long period of time with consistent intervals between mailings in a systematic and planned way.  Or perhaps you want to become an REO agent and so you must put together a comprehensive long term plan to attract attention from banks and asset managers.  Simply sending out a few inquiries and applying for an REO account here and there just won’t cut it.

The trouble with real estate and why so few agents make the big bucks is that they are the ones that are willing to treat this like a real business and follow through on a concrete business plan.

Do you have consistency in your business?  If not you are just hoping for a miracle.

I personally absolutely love the “Did you know that McMillin Realty can also help you with…” call to action. Just the other day, I mentioned via email to the geek build participants I’d love to see the home page design with JUST search and a call to action that says “Not interested in searching homes?” that directs the user to a landing page with calls to action for everything contained on the site EXCEPT search (market stats, CMA, blog posts, etc).

And it’s certainly no surprise that Virtual Results is behind this masterpiece. Few other website providers in the real estate industry have the balls to put out a design like this so different from the norm. Well done Jim and team.

Once we had the .psd in hand I realized we still needed numerous changes to size and position of elements, so I did some further work on the design myself. I found that easier and faster than trying to communicate so many changes back and forth.

Here is the what we ended up with. I’ll call this a semi-final since we have time for one more round of changes before we move forward to development.

Keep in mind that the header, images, fonts and colors will be customized by each participant after our WordPress theme is built.

How can we improve this design?

Note from the Editor: Not sure what Geek Build 2012 is? It’s building a few real estate websites from scratch publicly with the help of the Geek Estate Community and overseen by an experienced steering committee. Read more about Geek Build 2012 here, or view all posts related to Geek Build 2012 here.

**Geek Build logo designed by Dominic Morrocco at M Squared Real Estate.

Surprisingly, I didn’t hear much back from the real estate community about who to feature in this article. But, it doesn’t matter – the Young Guns have already infiltrated the marketplace (like a wild west ninja brigade!) and they won’t be slowing down anytime soon. In fact, it was harder to narrow this list down than it was to create it.

The Young Guns

These 3 talented individuals each have several years of real estate related experience (which means they must have all started their careers as teenagers) and I suggest you explore what they are up to.

Kendall Schiffler

Kendall promotes the Dallas Design District through LowerOakLawn.com. She also serves as President for the Social Media Club of Dallas, and builds custom websites in her “spare time”. The story of LowerOakLawn.com was recently highlighted in a must read article by Brian Clark. Kendall started blogging about a relatively undeveloped area in Dallas where her employer, Pegasus Ablon, planned to develop over 1000 multi-family units, and dozens of retail spaces. Ultimately, her efforts helped turn what was once a sparse warehouse district into a vibrant urban setting chock full of antique dealers, furniture showrooms, art galleries, and restaurants. The Lower Oak Lawn story is a prime example of how to build an audience, listen to what they want, and deliver it. Look, Jay Thompson is an incredible real estate blogger, but Phoenix existed when he started writing about it. Kendall started blogging about Lower Oak Lawn before it was even considered a real community!

Dominic Morrocco

Dominic brings a solid background in real estate technology to his current role as a partner at M Squared Real Estate – a successful and budding DC real estate brokerage. Dominic started a loft and condo search site, Urbanspan, in 2000 and has already served as Chief Technology Officer at two major real estate firms. Regular readers of this blog are no stranger to M Squared’s digital mastery. Their website is a robust, organized, and powerful resource for Washington DC real estate. Dominic’s value proposition to the company is huge; by taking the technology, graphic design and marketing burden off its agents, M Squared’s agents can focus primarily on selling real estate and delivering quality insight to their valuable client relationships. M Squared provides their agents with websites that put most brokers sites to shame. I would bet that you will see something new and exciting from this company in the coming months.

Jimmy Mackin

Co-founder and Chief Frugylist at Frugyl, Jimmy tours the country as a speaker for Agent Reboot, and is an all-around Facebook guru. He is probably best known for his creation of several popular Facebook groups for real estate agents. What most don’t know is why he does it. In his own words Jimmy explains “I’ve always been drawn to building communities and solving problems for real estate agents”. Sounds pretty powerful to me. Jimmy’s latest venture, Frugyl, provides crowd sourced recommendations on real estate productivity tools and is a place to share in unfiltered feedback from peers about different products and services. Jimmy is working hard to “provide simple, practical technology training” to real estate agents. I have a feeling one day he will end up on this list too.

These 3 have set the bar quite high.

The Young Guns of Real Estate

It really was difficult to narrow down this list (which is a good thing) so I wanted to be sure to mention a few more Young Guns who are worth checking out. For incredible use of video check out Minneapolis agent Danny Dietl (and please start by watching this). There must be something in the water in the Upper Midwest because Greg Dallaire is also making great use of video and has established an excellent hyper-local presence at Green Bay Greg. Chris Smith demanded he be included in this article so please tell him you saw his name here (which is kind of like including Dr. Dre on a list of up and coming rappers). In the tech world you should absolutely check out Andrew Machado who developed Open Home Pro (interview w 1000Watt). I think it would be wrong to forget mentioning the curator, antagonizer, wordsmith, and mastermind behind Geek Estate – Mr. Drew Meyers. Drew is the straightest shooter out of anyone I know. He simply loves real estate technology/marketing and enjoys thought provoking discussions about it. Drew has detailed hundreds of strategies for real estate agents to use in growing their businesses – because he likes to. Very cool my friend. Thanks for hosting us.

Challenge

I’m challenging The Young Guns and The Guard to continue driving innovation in the real estate industry. We can do more. I’m also challenging every reader of this blog to light a match, throw a brick, or just write a nice blog post – but please…go do something! Start (or join!) a real estate blog or Facebook group, improve your technology offerings, or think of new ways to provide our services to the public. Just don’t complain about not knowing where to start – Drew has created a great resource right here at Geek Estate! Let us know who else should be included on this list and why in the comments below.

• I’m fascinated by education. I’m a terrible student though – I don’t do all of the work, attend every class, or get really good grades. I did ok on the GMAT. But I love the experience.
• My competitive nature. My brother is an attorney and we have been competing and fighting our entire lives. I can use an MBA against him. Seriously. We are best friends by the way.
• Networking. TCU is Fort Worth. The city loves the university and many business owners, professionals, and philanthropists in Texas bleed purple.
• It’s free. I served in the Navy for six years and earned a benefit in which the Department of Veteran’s Affairs pays my entire tuition. Cool huh?

I mainly decided to take on this endeavor to improve my real estate business (and for free football tickets) and I think it would be beneficial to break down the concepts I have learned this year and apply them to real estate. And since I am not paying tuition – neither will you. I’m going to create a series of posts based on every class I’ve been in this year and apply the theories to the real estate industry. I’m going to explore:

• Managing People – Why people are your most important asset.
• Financial Accounting – How earning money keeps you in business.
• Managerial Accounting – Your pricing models are broken. Fix them.
• Marketing – Why early innovators don’t always succeed.
• Negotiations – Prepare. Study the opposition and always aim for win/win.
• Supply Chain – How planning can save you money (and just makes sense).
• Educational Entrepreneurship – What we can learn from the disruptive innovation happening in education.

It has not been easy to juggle the launch of a new business with the discipline needed for the rigor of the MBA program, but so far – I’m extremely happy. I’m hoping that by taking my experience and translating it into real estate – we can all benefit. Let me know if there is anything specific you want to hear about. Look for the first post next week on Managing People and how “you can’t jump a large gap with a lot of small steps”.

SAD DAY today when I was looking for one of my favorite real estate blogs (FOREM), and it was nowhere to be found.

Where have the bloggers gone?

I suspect  two things: mother companies like Inman or Zillow want to go in a different direction.  Or blogger cannot be sustained by the current business model.  My hunch is it’s usually the second one.  Bless you Drew, for trudging forward (and successfully.)

I have been blogging for five years and I’ve stopped twice, for a combined 1 year.  It cost me a lot in lost opportunities but I had to go back to the profound vision when I first started in ’07 — I need to blog or I will go hungry.

I’m still not in the Teresa Boardman or Jay Thompson league, (no offense to the author, but I just don’t think I have “it”.) They’re the best to emulate because of their market-reinforcing popularity and, in effect, a continual trickle of links.  What’s popular becomes more popular.  They deserve it.

But I’m doing alright myself.  My site has generated 35% of my business last year.  It’ll be a few points higher this year. And frankly as much as I love to blog, those numbers are the only real reason why I can still blog after five years.  It’s my business model.  It’s built-in me now.  And yes, I’ve grown to liking it as well.

How do we build our blog to support us? The answer is easy.  The question is, are you willing to follow-through? I hope you do. Because we need you to continue; out-of-state home buyers need local real estate bloggers for the juiciest information. You do make a difference even if your site traffic is on heart-breakingly double digits day in, day out.  Who cares? That’s ten people a week who is getting golden information on the biggest investment of their lives.

So, how to support it:

• If you are licensed agent, you get leads. Commission based business model.

• If you are licensed but don’t have the appetite for sales.  Refer it to an agent or broker for a 35% commission.  Lead-gen business model.

• If you want a consistent cash flow…do an ad-based model. Now, don’t be scared.  It’s not hard as you may think.  The best advise I can give is copy another industry blog who has an ad-based business.  I suggest copying domain bloggers.  If they can make it, you sure can.  My buddy Domain Shane makes high five figures a year!  Pick up the phone and call local businesses/real estate specifically.  Call 100 people.  If you get 10, you’re in business.  While waiting to fill the spots, put ads there for free, so you look successful and you look “legit”

(*Many will say you cannot have advertisers or leads with puny traffic.  Baloney. Pick up the phone.)

I really want you to make it, PM me if you need any more information.

FYI that you can request an invite for the new version for your own site from this link.

Cloud CMA is by far my favorite new toy I have come across, not just this year, but in the last several.

Why?  Because it gives me two things I desperately want.  Efficiency (time) and professionalism.  In an industry that sometimes stinks of cheese, Cloud CMA reports look great, professional, and best of all, they take only minutes more than printing out a sad little basic CMA from your MLS.  The extra minutes look like hours to your clients, making you look like a superstar.

So what is Cloud CMA? In simple terms, it allows you to generate a great looking branded report for home sellers with all of the relevant comparable property data simply by inputting the MLS numbers you want to include in the analysis.

However, it is so  much more than that.  You can add custom pages to your reports, the system will automatically map out where each home is located, you can include showing and open house tips, your resume, marketing plan, and virtually anything else you can think of.  It essentially allows you to create a personalized marketing presentation for home sellers.  Makes them feel nice and fuzzy, and that’s good for you!

By the way, it also works great for buyer tours.  Just input the MLS numbers you plan to show the buyer and out pops out a great looking report and map for your tour with all the property data you could want.

So here is the short story behind the home that it helped me win the opportunity to market (list, though I try and say that word as little as possible).  I was called to interview with a home seller that was getting ready to put his Scripps Ranch home on the market.  The appointment was set for the following morning and I had a jam packed schedule ahead of me for the day showing property.  I was in a bit of a bind.

Suddenly, I remembered that I had just heard some people in my office talking about Cloud CMA and one of my buyer agents had recently used it with a client and received favorable feedback.  I decided to give it a whirl and hope for the best.  It seemed like the best possible presentation I could possibly put together under short notice.

The potential home seller’s reaction was exactly what my associate had described with his client.  The seller literally said, “You must have spent hours on this.”

We are now in escrow