1000 True Fans! How Appraisers Can Bank On Their Futures!

​Welcome back to the real value podcast, the podcast about business, life, success; about finding value in anything and everything and about creating absolutely as much of it as you can with the time we have! Good morning my friends and thank you so much for stopping by the Real Value studios again to hang out with me and producer Zero each week. I am truly honored to have your ear for just a little bit of time each week and I hope to be adding some value to your day, your week, your month, your life, and your business. The biggest thank you goes out to each and every one of you that listens to the podcast, takes some notes, and then goes into your business and implements some of the stuff we talk about here and then write me to tell me how well its working and how much it has helped your business and your life. Some of you have written me to tell me that by implementing some of the things we talk about in the podcast that, of course, your business are getting better, but some of you also share that your marriages and relationships have improved because you’re working less, earning more, happier in your business, happier in your life, happier in your relationships, have better clients, more efficient businesses, and on and on the list goes. And while I most definitely appreciate the adulation and the feedback, you are the one deserving of the thanks for allowing me an audience to share the information that we do in the podcast and for testing the information in the real world to make yourself, your business, and your lives better. I know it works because we do all of this stuff in our businesses and because I have students all over the world proving, modifying, evolving, and implementing these principles and practices into their own lives and businesses and then sharing with us what is working for them and their businesses in their markets. With that kind of feedback and input, my life is exponentially more fulfilled as a result and I have all of you to thank for that so a big fist bump, a big bro hug, and a massive thank you to the 1%ers who are taking the tiny little incremental steps each day toward more prosperity, more efficient businesses, and a lifestyle that enhances your business and a business that enhances your lifestyle. 

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​In this episode, I’d like to introduce you to a man named Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, a tech and business focused magazine. I was introduced to Kevin Kelly back in 2008 when I read a blog post of his that went viral and has become the title of several books and has been spoken and written about by writing and business giants like Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, and a slew of others. The blog post he wrote back in 2008 was titled “1000 true fans” and you can simply google that title and find his original blog post along with all of the other authors who have written about Kevin Kelly’s idea and expounded on it. The focus and gist of his post back in 2008 was aimed at creators. Content creators, authors, musicians, YouTube creators, painters, craftspeople, and anybody else who makes things that they’d like to share and eventually make a decent living from. I was really taken by Kevin Kelly’s blog post because YouTube was only a few years old, Facebook was about 4 years old, Amazon’s self publishing business was brand new, and the internet itself was like the Wild West and posing massive opportunity for those who understood it and could use it to get their product or service into the hands of those who wanted and/or needed it. The 1000 true fans concept, at least as it was expressed by Kevin Kelly at the time, was based on the simple fact that everybody who could ever want or need what you were creating was merely one click away from you. This was a revolutionary concept at the time since before the internet there was a complex system of gatekeepers and information alleys, as well as a long slow climb for a creator, to try and get their product or service into the hands of potential buyer, or fans. Just think back to the days of vinyl music albums. For a band to get their music into the ears of potential fans, they’d have to be playing at clubs continuously hoping to be heard by a music scout or A&R guy, to be offered a record contract, potentially sign away their lives and future royalties, tour incessantly to sell albums, and then do it all again with the next album. Today, you could simply have somebody record you singing into a cell phone video, post it on the internet, and you’re the next 100 million dollar man or woman with tens of millions of adoring fans willing to spend almost any amount of money to see you and own what you’re creating. That’s what happened to Justin Bieber. One video posted on the internet that went viral, he was noticed by super agent Scooter Braun and eventually signed by the artist Usher and is now a worldwide sensation and superstar. Say and feel whatever you like about Justin Bieber or his music, he’s one of the richest musicians in the world now a mere 10 years after being discovered at age 13.
 
But Blaine, I’m not a Justin Bieber. I cant even make a play dough ashtray, much less sing, dance, and perform on stage so what’s your point? The point is about potential and what I took away from Kevin Kelly’s blog post back in 2008. I was three years into being on my own in may appraisal business and things were going gangbusters. I had built a nice office with a bunch of appraisers. We had a very collaborative office setting with a nice conference room, flat screen TVs, a bunch of realtors in the lower level, all of the necessary equipment and technology to run a successful and efficient real estate appraisal office. In fact, we were way ahead of the times for appraisers in 2005 when I started my company because we were fairly tech savvy. We had no phone system because everybody was connected via soft phones on their computers, voice over IP as its known, everybody could dial into their desktops from anywhere in the world so they could work remotely, everybody was connected remotely to the big commercial printers and scanners, we all had VOIP 1-800 numbers and remote fax numbers so we didn’t need a real fax machine because the faxes would just come to your email box as a pdf. All of this stuff is pretty common today but back in 2005 it was fairly cutting edge and we were the first ones in our market and our industry to be doing it. Business was really good and everybody was killing it. Well, as you all know, 2007-2008 was heading our way and fast. I wont say nobody saw it coming but, like 9-11, up until that point, nothing like that had happened, at least not in our lifetimes. Needless to say, everybody was blindsided and the lucky of us stayed in business somehow. It was a massive cleansing period for real estate agents, lenders, and, of course, appraisers. The HVCC and Dodd-Frank were ushered in in 2009 and 2010 with the appraiser independence bills following. Again, somehow, some way we all survived and are still at it today. One of the ways that I believe I and several in my office survived, and actually thrived during those dark times was thanks to Kevin Kelly and his 1000 true fans blog post.
 
What Kevin Kelly was proposing in his blog post back in 2008 was that instead of thinking you needed millions of adoring fans to make a living, a content creator really only needed what he called 1000 true fans who would be willing to pay $100 for whatever the content creator was selling. Costs and overhead notwithstanding, if every content creator would just focus on finding and cultivating trust with those 1000 true fans then the math would take care of itself. A small content creator could effectively have a decent living grossing $100,000 per year by simply keeping their 1000 true fans happy and wanting more of what they're making. The math is fluid, of course, in that maybe you only need $50,000 per year to be happy so you may only need 500 fans paying you $100 or 1000 fans paying $50 for your product or service. If your product or service costs $200 and you have 500 fans, that’s $100,000 and 1000 fans means you’re grossing $200,000 each year. Of course, the expanded metrics of the 1000 true fans math means that for every true fan, we call these raving fans, by the way, there are 2 or 3 regular fans that may or may not buy what you’re selling this year but maybe they will next year. The 1000 true fans philosophy however, dictates that the level of product and service, coupled with the level of connection and care you take with those raving fans, has the ability to level up the regular fans into raving or true fans at some point in the future. So 2 or 3 regular fans have the ability to be leveled up to raving fans by an existing raving fan at any time which is why its super important to take care of your fans.
 
Ok, so hopefully this concept it easy to understand and the math makes complete sense. So Blaine, what are you saying? Are you saying I need to start making play dough ashtrays or work on my singing voice? No, I’m not telling you that, although, if you do have a side gig or hobby and it entails making a product or delivering a service, the 1000 true fans idea is speaking to you directly. What I will do for you, however, is explain how I have utilized the 1000 true fans concept and the math and have implemented it into my appraisal business. What the article said to me back in 2008 was that the numbers didn’t matter as much as the idea of a raving fan. This wasn’t the first time I had heard this idea, by the way. I had spent well over 6 figures on high end coaching and business development training at that point and an important concept I learned early on was this idea of raving fans, leveling up your clients, student, or customers, and the power of referrals in your business. The most expensive client to get is the new client when you factor in all of your advertising and marketing costs, the costs of slowing down to learn a new clients way of doing business, the cost of training the new client on how you like to work, etc. The least expensive client is the existing client who has already come on board, knows how you like to work, you know what their expectations are, and they are relatively easy to keep happy while they send continuous business your way. Let me remind you all one of the greatest benefits of a successful appraisal business and that’s that you have to make a sale once and, if you take care of that client well, that one sale continues to feed you for years, sometimes decades. That’s almost unheard of in most of the complimentary industries we work with.  A real estate agent can obviously get referrals from happy clients and raving fans and they should be spending lots of time on that task of getting referrals. However, they typically have to go out each day and hunt to fill their funnel. Lenders are the same way. We have clients that we sold to once when we said, “hey, give us a try and if we don’t live up to our own hype, fire us”, and those clients are still with us today and have sent well over the high 6 figures in business over a 10 to 13 year history with our company. Like you, we’ve had clients that are no longer with us for a variety of reasons but that we only had to sell one time on using our company and then they sent high 5 to high 6 figures in business over a multi year cycle. You have those clients too. That is one of the great things about this business! Since the cost of acquiring a new client is one of the highest costs a business has, we get to greatly minimize that cost of doing business because our return on the investment of acquiring a new client is astronomical compared to most businesses. So what that it takes us 10, 20, or 30 appraisals to equal the commission a realtor may make on a sale. They have a much higher cost of marketing properties, driving buyers around to 10 or 30 homes before they write an offer, hours spent writing offers that don’t get accepted, much longer lead times for acquiring a new client or listing, and then that client is done with the agent for the next 5 to 7 years until they decide to move again and hopefully the agent has kept in touch with them over those years, which costs money.
 
Appraisers get to sell once and then get paid over and over again as long as they are solving the problems of their clients over and over again. And just like a real estate agent, the same is true for lenders who have to make themselves available at all hours of the day, night, and weekends to do pre-approvals, work open houses, be available for crazy hour loan approvals, gather all of the pertinent documentation, clear all the stops on a deal and get it to closing and then that client is done with them until they need some other kind of financing. If you haven’t recognized this as one of the greatest benefits of being a good appraiser who takes care of their clients hopefully now you do. Complain all you want 99%ers, the 1%ers know this and capitalize on that benefit by developing raving fans within their markets and within their businesses. So how does the 1000 true fans idea work in the appraisal business? It works like this: remember when I said the math is fluid? The 1000 true fans idea is just that, an idea, and its aimed primarily at creators. Content creators, musicians, artists, people who’d like to make a living doing what they love and how to leverage the power that the internet provides to do that. An appraiser reading the 1000 true fans blog post by Kevin Kelly may read it and say, “hmm, interesting concept, but I’m not a content creator nor musician, but cool idea.” They put Wired magazine away or close the browser window and go on with their day. I read the post and thought, “hey, I’m an appraiser and I create content. My appraisals are my content. My podcast is my content (I was doing a consumer and realtor focused podcast many years ago), and I can create new content if it will help to get me in front of some new potential clients.” So that’s what I did. I started creating lots of different content and information for my market and that’s when I started offering myself to lenders and real estate groups to educational sessions. I didn’t think much about the 1000 true fans math at the time though, I just took the bigger message of creating fans and keeping in touch with them as a way of doing business and building a market. I did this for a couple years before I started to realize something: the 1000 true fans math and how the numbers work in an appraisal business.
 
Now, before I go into the math and how it works, I need to say that, like appraising a home, there are variables and some of the variables cant be accounted for in every market or in every appraiser implementing the math. Your market and the people that reside there may be a little different than my market. Attitudes and personalities change with environments and the demographics of an area may effect the numbers but that’s all they effect. People are people wherever you go and they all have hopes and dreams. They all want to be treated fairly and recognized for the human beings they are. When they are treated fairly and somebody comes along and speaks to them like a human being, they tend to be more receptive to whatever message you are trying to convey. The other side of this caveat is that the math doesn’t work for everybody when tries to implement it because of the person trying to implement it. I’ve done a bunch of podcasts about getting your internal dialogue squared away and any personal hang ups about money, prosperity, success, realtors, lenders, and anything else that may be limiting your success and affecting what you attract addressed and in the process of getting them cleared. If you have any of these subconscious issues boiling within you, I will tell you that you will struggle trying to make this math work for you and you’ll give up in frustration screaming ‘this shit doesn’t work!!!’ So to recap the 1000 true fans math, Kevin Kelly basically says that you don’t need millions of raving fans, you simply need 1000 people who love your stuff and would pay your $100 for whatever you’re selling each year in order to earn a decent living at $100,000 per year. Set aside your own personal feelings about the $100,000 per year and whether or not that’s enough for you. You can adjust the math however you’d like. As an appraiser, if you simply take your typical appraisal fee, lets say its $500, and you think $100,000 per year is adequate for you to live off of, remember of course that’s gross income so adjust for expenses and taxes accordingly, but that would mean you only need 200 fans ordering one appraisal from you every year. Broken down further, 200 fans (be they realtors, lenders, homeowners, attorneys, estate planners, financial planners) divided by 12 months is roughly 17 appraisals per month or roughly 4 or so appraisals per week. Obviously, if you want your $100,000 to be net after expenses and taxes, well then you’d need to bump that number up a bit. More likely to 300 fans sending you one appraisal per year which, at $500 per appraisal comes out to $150,000 per year in gross income. Back out your expenses and taxes and you’re closer to the $100,000 number.
 
Ok, easy math, right? And every appraiser has already done this part. Every appraiser takes their average appraisal fee times what they can do in a week, multiplies that by 52, 50, 48, or 44 weeks and comes up with what they’d like to or think they can earn. The problem is that all of the magic stops right there! This is where most people, when asked about goal setting, say they’ve set some goals. They have a napkin sitting somewhere in their office where they scribbled out this math and that’s their strategic plan for the year. The napkin says nothing about how to get 300 people to send you business, who those people are (their avatar), what are their hopes and dreams, what problems can we solve for them, what keeps them up at night, what would make them willing to pay a premium to do business with you, and how to get them into your funnel and trying out your product or service. And this is where the 1000 true fans idea really starts to take shape. I took the 1000 true fans idea and I paired it with a concept called future banking, which was like a turbo boost to the whole concept, and here’s how it works. Be sure to have a pen and paper ready to write. If you’re driving, pull over and get ready to write because this may be the most important concept you hear all year. Heck! This may be the most important concept you hear ever! I’ll introduce you to the concept of future banking first and then tie it into the 1000 true fans idea. Future banking is simply a way to look into your crystal ball and estimate what you want, how you want to receive it, and who you want to receive it from. It becomes a way to have a number to focus on and it begins to drive all of your activities in an effort to achieve the number you have in your future bank account. To fully understand the future banking process you have to understand value and equity. As appraisers, these are two ideas we know extremely well so I wont spend even one second explaining them to you. The deficiency most businesspeople have in their businesses is that they are heavily focused on what we call ‘present banking’ or ‘now value’. They look at what they have scheduled for the week, what they produced today, what they anticipate billing out for over the next few days or weeks, maybe they make a calculation of how long it will take to receive that income, but they are focused on their current bank balance and spending zero time on the other bank account which is a virtual account we call you equity account, your value account, or your future bank balance. Income, like health, is temporary and perishable my friends. When it comes to your health, what you eat or drink today may have an immediate effect on how you feel today, but it will most certainly have an effect on your body sometime down the line. Usually in ways you wont even notice or recognize. But how you eat and drink effects your body composition, your brain state, your productivity, and your eventual or future health. We eat healthy and work out so that tomorrow, next week, and next year we can reap the equity and value benefits of our dietary choices. In business, if you aren’t spending at least 50% of your time on building equity and value for your future business and your future bank account, it is time to start! I hate to beat a dead horse but this is the big issue with having all of your eggs in the AMC basket. There is no equity being built, no relationship there, no value other than what they are willing to send you today. You have built zero equity with that entity and there has been no equity created to deposit in your future bank account.
 
So let me give you an easy to understand example of future banking. Every restaurant that understands continuity and future banking has some kind of rewards program and, if they’re really smart, they have a birthday, a holiday, or some kind of program that encourages and incentives their patrons to come in on a certain day and get a free gift. You sign up for their rewards program and they now have your birthday so, not only are you incentivized to go there more to get their rewards points, they’re going to do their best to have you come in sometime around your birthday for your special free meal. The restaurant knows that when you come in for your free gift, you are going to bring at least 4, maybe 6 or 8 of your friends and family. They know not everybody will come in but, after some period of time and with tracking, they know that a certain percentage of the number of people they have in the program will. So, the owner of the restaurant counts up his or her days totals and says, “we served 300 guests at $30 per guest so we’ve banked $9000 for the day minus our costs. However, we also signed up 50 new rewards members, 25 of which will come in and spend $100 on their special day which is $2500 in the future bank account.” So the now account has $9000 from the day which has to cover the costs of goods, payroll, utilities, and rent. The future bank account has $2500 virtual dollars in it that, if they track their future account well, will eventually exceed the now account. When your future bank account exceeds your now account you start to feel wealthy because the future bank account represents the equity and value that you are building. It also gives you something important to focus on which is service, service, service! If you don’t take care of those people they will not be back to spend their future money with you and they will not bring their friends and family. If you do take care of them you are reasonably certain they will be back and you know your metrics of that transaction. Birthdays are celebrated with friends and family so they’ll bring 4 to 8 other people with them and there is the $100 future bank deposit becoming a present deposit. If you’re not focusing at least 50% of your effort on building up that future bank accounts and building equity and value, your present bank account will always be struggling. You must be building equity with your clientele and your market. The biggest way to do that is to first focus on a segment of the market that has the potential to value you and accept your value proposition. If you simply ask the question, “is my current clientele capable of valuing me and the work that I do?” And the answer is “no”, congratulations superstar! You have just taken the first step to transforming your business!
 
So how does this work in an appraisal business? Well, I’m quite happy to share with you. After all, that’s why you’re here, right? First and foremost, you must pick potential clients that have the ability to value what it is you do. This point cannot be glossed over and I wish I could spend the whole episode just talking about this point. Many appraisers have clients that simply aren’t capable of valuing what it is you do. Don’t blame them. This is simply the state of the industry and always has been. If you think there was a day when everybody respected and valued the appraiser you’d be wrong. Everybody has feared the appraiser for one reason or another, but there has never been a time in the appraisers history when they have been valued by everybody they did appraisal work for. In 2019 we know that the AMC model has changed some things and with another layer of bureaucracy and firewalls between us and the client, it is much more difficult to add value to an unnamed and no faced lender for whom you may be doing work for. Again, don’t waste one second of your valuable life energy and emotion being upset about it. You picked those clients, you’ve spent the money they’ve paid you, and you’ve continued to accept their work so until you’re ready to make the leap either to all direct lender and local lending work or to non-lender work, you simply have to accept what is. So the first thing is to have clients that are capable of valuing what it is you do. The second thing you absolutely must do is a deep dive into your value proposition. What is it you are actually offering those clients? Just an appraisal? Just a valuation on their home? Just an accurate measurement of the house with a laser measuring device? Those may all sound like kick ass things to you but those things are commodities in the market. They can get that from 3 or 4 other appraisers in your market. What makes doing business with you so special. If you can’t answer that then that is the next step in your business transformation process and on the path to making your appraisal business bulletproof. What I recommend you do, and we do this with coaching clients and in our events, is to go through our three step process for figuring out who you are relative to your clients biggest problem and develop your master mission message around that. I wont go deeply into the three step process in this episode but the gist is to figure out what your client’s real problem is and then describe what you’re going to do to solve that problem in the fewest words possible.
 
One of the biggest problems all experts have, and appraisers are more than guilty of this, is what has been called the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is that if knowledge was rated on a scale from 1-10 with 10 being an expert, we are all 8s, 9s, or 10s in the appraisal business. In fact, for all of the superstars with letters after their names, it gets worse for you because you have to substantiate the investment you’ve made in your education by speaking like the consummate expert that you most certainly are. It’s built into our very beings that the more education we have the more we have to let people know about our education and the further from them we place ourselves. You don’t realize it but the more letters you have after your name, the more you have made yourself an alien to the widest group of individuals capable of paying you for your services. That’s not to say those letters and the education isnt valuable and that you aren’t an expert. You are! It’s simply to say that the more knowledge a person tends to have the more they want to share that knowledge and in the language of their particular discipline. This is where the curse of knowledge kicks in. We can speak appraising at a level 8, 9, or 10. Our clients can speak it at a level 2 or maybe a 3. A 4 possibly if they’ve taken some courses. The average individual on the street can speak appraising a level 1 or 2 at best and, you know what?, level 1 and 2 is where people make buying decisions. We think we’re doing them a favor by dumbing down our language to a level 6 appraisal speak and they’re still in the dark. And either way, since they tend to make buying decisions at levels 1 and 2, we aren’t connecting with them on any level. So we must learn to condense what it is we do into language that speaks to our most desired client’s biggest problems and then speak in a way that solves that problem. And by the way, hitting a number is not their biggest problem. They may have told you that and its been perpetuated in our industry that that’s all they want. That may be all they want when they don’t know you, like you, or trust you, but that’s not their biggest problem. Their biggest problems are finding ways and the proper words to explain the process to the ones counting on them to get the job done. I’ll do a whole podcast on this concept in the future, just know that if you think their biggest problem is that they just want you to hit a number, you’ve simply framed the issue incorrectly.
 
So first finding clients who are capable of valuing what it is you do. Second is narrowing down your value proposition to a short and concise group of sentences we call your master mission message. We call it that for a few reasons but one of them is because the brain groups and remembers things best in threes and the name master mission message is a three word phrase that helps to remind us of the three step process of developing our mission and message. The third step, and maybe the most challenging for most of you, is to then get in front of as many of those people as humanly possible in whatever ways you possibly can. There are a variety of ways to do that in 2019 and I’ll go over a few of them but since this episode is about the 1000 true fans concept and the building your future bank account I want to stay on message and do some of the numbers for you. We said that the math can be fluid depending on your average fee, what you want to earn, and how well you can develop your true fans. Developing true fans is wholly dependent on your message though which is why I spent some time on that concept. If your message doesn’t speak to their deepest needs, fears, desires, and aspirations, you’re simply speaking a different language. So here’s the math after working on this idea for 10+ years and getting in front of crowds of potential clients during that time. With regard to the ‘true fan’ idea, for every true fan that you cultivate you can place one appraisal fee in your future bank account. If you can cultivate 10 true fans over the next few months, you can put $4000, $5000, $8000 in your future bank account because they will either order an appraisal or refer at least one appraisal client to you sometime in the future. We don’t know when that will be and some of it is dependent on the quality of your message, the quality of your offering, how well they know the menu of services you offer, and how often you are getting that message out there so that you are top of mind when the opportunity arises. But for every true fan you can make one deposit of, lets say, $500 in your future bank account. And I highly recommend that you keep track of your future bank account because part of the explosive power of the future bank account concept is the activating of your subconscious mind to see just how wealthy you are becoming. When you can look at your future bank accounts and see thousands and tens of thousands of dollars or more accumulating in it, you will have something to focus gratitude toward, which just brings more of the same, and you will be more energized to focus on cultivating and educating that crowd of growing fans. ‘But Blaine, how do I know they are going to order an appraisal from me?’ You don’t! But you do! You don’t because we cant make them do anything but you do because we’ve worked the numbers for you over the last 10+ years that we’ve been developing on this idea and the numbers work like magic. Now, to be clear, like all statistics and averages, when I say that for every one true fan you can place a deposit in your future bank account that’s because the numbers are made up from the averages. Some true fans of ours send us private appraisals every single month and some send us one or two every six months. Some send us referrals that never work out to be anything but we still reward that behavior because, of course, we appreciate it and want more of it and we know they’ll keep doing it.
 
Let me ask you a question, if you knew that for every true fan you could cultivate you would attract a full appraisal fee from them, would that inspire you to get out into your market and devise any way possible to talk to, educate, counsel, and partner with as many people as humanly possible? If the answer is no for you, that’s ok, just keep doing what you’re doing. But if the answer is a resounding yes! Then go back and listen to the episode called ‘can we speak like we’re old friends’ and sharpen your pencils because there is a treasure trove of wisdom in there about speaking to people who have the capacity to make you their go to professional when it comes to value. Now, understand, everybody you speak to does not become a true fan. Out of any group, when speaking to them for the first time, you will touch 10-20% of the people in the room with some part of your message. The other 80% may like you and like the information but you will be more or less forgotten about by breakfast the next day. It’s important to have a system to gather all of the names and keep in touch with these people because the true fan process is one that takes time and a continuous drip of information, help, education, and solid messaging. So if you know those numbers, that 10-20% of any group will be impressed, inspired, and turned on to your message then it behooves you to start working the numbers. My goal for this year is to be in front of at least 1000 individuals who have the capacity to value what it is I do and individuals who I have the capacity to help. And by help I mean being a strategic and value added provider of valuable information that helps them be better at what they do. I know if I can help them be better at what they do then they’ll earn more money for their families. If I can help them earn more money for their families they are more likely to become a true fan of mine. And when they become a true fan of yours they will go out of their way to find opportunities to refer you. So if my goal is to get in front of 1000 individuals who have the capacity to value what it is I do and I can turn them on with my message and education, that means that at least 100 to 200 of those people will eventually become a true fan of mine and that represents at least a $50,000 to $100,000 deposit into my future bank account. Let me ask you the same question a different way. If, over the course of the next 12 months, you could make virtual deposits of $50,000 to $100,000 into your future bank account, would that inspire you? I understand your hesitation. ‘But Blaine, that’s virtual money and all my bills are real! I need real money in my real bank account to pay my real bills!’ I get it! But this my friends is likely one of the big problems in your business: you’re focusing on the today business and what you’re working on today, this week, and hopefully what’s coming in next week. Until you take the time to begin focusing on what could be coming in next month and next year, you’ll always just be focused on the during phase of your business.
 
The concept of the 1000 true fans coupled with the turbo boost of the future bank account are ‘digging your well’ activities that are concentrated in the before phase of your business. You will undoubtedly get today business from your activities, by the way. I haven't had one class, one talk, one event yet where I didn’t get some kind of business within one or two weeks of the talk or class. That’s one of the reasons I do them for free. It’s part of our marketing strategy and our master mission message that we educate our clients to help them earn more money, but we always have our time rewarded in the now at some level. The most important thing to me however, is how many of those people in my classes or talks I can continue talking to and educating after the talk or class and work on converting them into true fans. The more true fans you cultivate, the more deposits you make into your future bank account. It’s really that simple. If my goal is to be in front of 1000 individuals this year, understand that many of them have been in my classes and talks before so some of them are deeper into the true fan cultivation process than others which means my numbers are more like 30-40% of any crowd will send me at least one appraisal or referral I the next year. Just do the numbers yourself my friends. If your average residential appraisal fee is $500, and 40% of 1000 people will send you an appraisal or referral in the next year, as long as you can keep them in the fan club, that’s $150,000 to $200,000 deposit into your future bank account. Don’t believe it? That’s ok. As Henry Ford said, ‘whether you think you can or you think you cant, you are right’.  Develop your own numbers then but really think on this concept of developing true fans of your business and opening your future bank account today! Until you start focusing on it, it wont happen. Understand that everything that is created by man is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality. You must begin the process by believing in its possibility and then ushering it into reality by your actions.
 
I want to thank you my friends for spending this hour with me each week. Your time is extremely important to me and I will never waste it, at least not intentionally. I appreciate how much you care about your business, your family, your communities, and your industry. I hope to have added some value for you again this week and I ask only two things from you in return: the first is that you implement some of these ideas into your business and the second is that you share the information with anybody and everybody you feel may get some value from the ideas and the tactical and practical exercises I offer to you each week. Obviously positive Itunes reviews help to spread the message and I really appreciate those who have helped by giving such nice reviews already. Spreading the word in industry social media groups also helps and I appreciate all of those who have promoted the podcast in those groups. A special thanks to Mark Skapinetz for the creation of the 100%ers group and for the all the shit you put up with and give out there. A big thanks to Aaron Chonka, Ernie Ramos, Jason Fischman, Rick Morris, Ryan Lundquist, Dustin Harris, Rachel Massey, Jacob Brewster, Mark Buhler, Jamie Owens, Bill Cobb, and all of you have helped spread the word, said such nice things about the podcast, and also actively help better the industry with your attitude and the work you do! I know I’ve missed a bunch of you and know that I really appreciate all of you! A final shout out and congrats to my friend and friend of the podcast Jamie Owen, owner of Aspen Appraisal Services, and expert author of the Cleveland Appraisal Blog for making it into Clevelands top 100 blogs to follow for information in that market. He’s number 81 on the list but that’s only because of the way they categorized and grouped the blog topics. The number says nothing about how valuable the information is. If it was up to me, Jamie’s blog would be number two right after best places to eat in Cleveland. I joke, of course, because Jamie does an awesome job and definitely one to follow. If you aren’t following Jamie’s blog be sure to go to Cleveland Appraisal Blog.com and show him some love, as well as learn how to write a killer blog and educate your market. Jamie is, without a doubt, one of the best! I am inspired every time I see one of Jamie’s blog posts and also the little video commercials Jamie produces. Simply phenomenal and a true leader in our industry. Congrats my friend!
 
Thanks again my friends and I’ll see you all again here next week! I’m out!