Hero or Guide? Which one Are Appraisers Being?

​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 welcome back to the Real Value studios in beautiful Grand Rapids, Michigan, one of the top 10 cities in the US to live, raise a family and produce a podcast. Producer Zero is in the booth today and barking orders at me from time to time but that’s what makes him the best damn podcast producer in the business! My name is Blaine Feyen and I am your host for this and every episode of the always fresh, sometimes painful, Real Value Podcast. Very excited to be back in the studio again this week after a nice long memorial weekend and I hope you too are relaxed, refreshed, and ready to make a difference in the world today, this week, this month, and for the rest of 2019 and beyond. In my opinion, making a difference is where it all starts. You can have all of the tactics and techniques you desire, but if you have no interest in actually making a difference at some level, you are simply just like everybody else who has a bunch of techniques and tactics. The difference maker when you have techniques and tactics is heart. You can have the best website in town but if you don’t truly care to be different or make a difference, eventually your website burns itself out. You can have killer SEO and marketing tactics but if you don’t have any interest in truly being different or making a difference, your SEO and marketing eventually catches up with you and consumes itself. I’ve seen it happen hundreds of times over the past 20 years in a variety of industries. It’s what has people randomly scrambling from time to time to get in on the latest marketing tactic or technique. After a while, your technique loses air because its not filled with any real substance that can keep it aloft. The magic ingredient that acts like helium in your marketing, your message, your techniques and your tactics my friends is heart and having a strong ‘why’. If you have no ‘why’, no reason for being and getting up in the morning except to crank out yet another appraisal report, take yet another listing, or close yet another home loan, there is only one direction you can go and that is down and out. Eventually burn out is the result and its followed by a big ‘of course’ from me! Of course you’re burned out my friend, of course its no longer working for you because you had no guiding principle behind your techniques and tactics. By the way, when I talk about techniques and tactics I am referring primarily to the methods you use to attract and obtain new business or keep your existing business. I am generally referring to marketing techniques and tactics. I am referring to things that I and others may suggest to you over time as a method to get another appraisal order or another listing or loan application. The problem with techniques and tactics is, and will always be, that eventually they wear themselves out, they become commonplace and accepted as the norm and eventually no longer carry the same weight they once did in the market.

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Website SEO became all the rage in the mid 2000s as people figured out ways to game the search engines and use black hat and gray hat techniques to fool Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines at the time. Eventually, the search engines all figured it out and effectively ‘slapped’ all of those websites and millions of sites became invisible overnight. This has been a continuous game of cat and mouse ever since then and companies like Google have continued to tweak their algorithms so that only sites with high quality content that actually speaks to the topic and purpose of their website get listed and might have a chance of showing up in the search results over time for a given keyword search. Right now, in 2019, video is all the rage and for very good reason. Video helps tell a much richer story than text ever will. Video helps to humanize a message or a topic in a way that no amount of typing or graphics ever could. Video allows the viewer to see, hear, emote, get context, and more visual and auditory data than any other form of delivery, except of course, in person. I’m a huge fan of video, by the way, and although this episode is not about the hows and whys of using video, I will plant the seed as we do have an episode coming up that is all about video. I’m not planting the seed because of an upcoming episode, however, I am doing the upcoming episode because of how important video may be to your future. We use a variety of services to create and deliver video to and for our clients and it has made a huge difference in our interactions with them. I’ll talk in that episode how we use services like BombBomb for video emails and follow up, how we have a video studio set up just to make educational videos for our own people and for our clients, how we use easy to create explainer videos, how we use YouTube, how we use screen capture software like Camtasia and SnagIt for training and appraisal review videos, and a host of other ways that video helps to deliver our specific message and story in a way that no other medium can. Basically, the message is if you are not into video yet, you’d better start getting familiar with it because it is one of the difference makers in business. It is not THE difference maker, although it can help tremendously, because THE difference maker is and always will be having a ‘raison d’etre’, a reason for being, a very strong ‘why’ for your business and life. Absent a strong ‘why’ and we drift aimlessly. We may think we’re being really productive and getting things done but 10 or 20 years pass and we look back and say, ‘geez, that went fast! What have I really done with that time?’ ‘Have I made a difference?’ “Why have I been doing what I do every day?’ ‘Is it just to pay the bills?’ ‘Is it because I’m not trained to do anything else?’, ‘What else could I be doing?’ All very valuable and important questions to be asking in order to get closer to that ‘why’ that gets us out of bed in the morning and drives or pulls us forward.
 
I know what it is for me and I’ve said it many times on this show, its education. I love learning and I have a passion for teaching which means I tend to learn differently than many. When you think like a teacher you are always listening and learning with an ear and an eye to be able to teach it to another person. This mindset tends to help me focus on things in a slightly different way than the average person learning something just for their own benefit. I talked about this idea in the episode on Appraiser Wisdom Keys where one of the wisdom keys is to see everybody as a teacher. When you see everybody as a teacher and start thinking like a teacher, you tend to dissect information in a more methodical way so that information can be grouped and modulized in a way that allows our brains to integrate the lessons more quickly into our daily lives and also associate those lessons with other similar things in our brains. We make associations between the new information and existing information so as to make it more readily available and also more easily taught to somebody else. So education is my ‘why’. Being a guide and a mentor, and being guided and mentored, are two of the highest values I have. It’s how I frame the world I live in, its how I frame my work, its how I frame all of my projects, and it’s the paradigm through which my universe reveals itself to me daily. I’m always thinking, ‘how can I share this information with others for their benefit?’ and so it’s how I’ve structured my appraisal business. I could focus on the service we provide as real estate appraisers, which is essentially what everybody else does. I could talk to potential clients about what we do, how we do it, what our fees are for those services, and why we’re the best. But I decided that I get bored very quickly with that game. It’s boring and uncreative, in my opinion, and burned me out relatively quickly before I had a strong ‘why’. Once I realized that I wanted to educate instead of sell, my whole world changed and my business changed along with it. Once I realized that I was much better at educating people on ideas, concepts, and processes than I was at trying to sell them something just for the sake of selling it, things changed for me and my businesses. Once I figured that thing out, everything else fell into place and I had a reason for doing what I was doing. Now, we don’t just appraise real estate, we’re an education company that happens to provide real estate appraisals as one of our services. Appraisals are just one of our services because, as an education company, we have so much more to offer our market than just appraisal services and that all arose simply out of asking a few vital questions and figuring out our ‘why’ and what role we should be playing with our clients and our stakeholders, our apprentices, our families, and those we may feel in service to.
 
So how does this all pertain to you and what you do? Well, what I am hoping you get out of this episode, and all of the other episodes where I talk about the power of good questions, is to push you to start asking some of those vital questions of yourself and your appraisal or real estate business. Ask yourself, ‘why do I do what I do?’, ‘why do I do it the way that I do?’, ‘why am I the one doing this thing?’, ‘could somebody else be doing this thing while I do something else?’, and the list goes on and on. The power of questions is one of the most important life skills, in my opinion, and its rarely taught or talked about outside of the academic world. Of course, we ask questions all the time inside of our businesses. We’re always asking questions about a particular deal or property or comparable sale or purchase agreement or USPAP or whatever it may be that we’re working on at any given moment. But rarely do we ask the hard questions that start with ‘why’ and get followed up with ‘how’, as in, ‘how could I do this differently?’ The reason I’m so adamant about this never ending process of questions is because it’s the language of growth. The only way to truly grow and evolve is to constantly be asking questions and then be willing to accept the answers that bubble up, even when they may at first be unwelcome to you. Remember that from the last episode? Learning to embrace discomfort and accepting answers that may be contrary to what you are currently doing or believe in is a sign of maturity and really the only way to grow and be better each day. It’s the process of the 1%er. What I’d like to encourage you into in this episode is asking some vital questions about your appraisal or real estate business in order to more simply clarify what it is you do for your target audience or clientele. What happens during this process, of course, is that you begin asking questions of yourself while also asking questions of your business. So this process becomes extremely valuable, not only to your business, but to your personal life, your professional life, your business operations, your home life, your relationships, your clients, and everything that you and your business touch along the way.
 
The process I’m talking about is part of something we call developing your Master Mission Message, or your Master Message. I’ve mentioned this in prior episodes but never went through the process with you so my goal with this episode to share with you a little bit about two processes I teach that are intimately and vitally related. As I mentioned, its called the Master Mission Message process but its actually two separate but related processes whereby we first come up with your master mission. This is something like the traditional mission, vision, values statement exercises that corporate coaching and business training loves to promote, but vastly more important because its not just an empty statement that nobody buys into or believes. Developing your master mission is the very reason you get out of bed in the morning. Its why you do what you do. Its what you train your people the way you do. Its your reason for being, or not being, who you think you should be being on any given day. Without it you are simply a drone and a zombie walking through the motions of completing yet another boring appraisal report or writing yet another offer to purchase or taking yet another boring loan application. Without your master mission, you are just simply doing and not really being. If you say to me, and many do at first, that your master mission is to produce credible and non-misleading appraisal reports, or to be the best appraiser in your market, or to be the most respected real estate agent in your area, these are all statements about you and they say absolutely nothing about those you serve. In developing your master mission, we pull you out of your conceit and narcissism and push you into the world of thinking like a potential client of yours, likely somebody who doesn’t give two shits about your company plaque for being in the million dollar club or how many appraisals you completed last month or last year. Of course, once you’ve developed your master mission, the thing that gets you up in the morning inspired to do what you do, then we can work on developing your Master Mission Message, which is how we communicate what it is we do and why we do it in a way that speaks to our clients in their language and it speaks to their greatest fears and desired outcomes when dealing with somebody like us and a service like ours, be that appraisal services, real estate, loan origination, or drywall installation. It is quite simply the message you send to the world about what it is you do, why you do it, how you do it, the problem you solve, and who you do it for.
 
We call it your master mission message or your master message because, not only is it the ultimate message you are sending to all those whose problems you purport to solve, it eventually becomes the guiding principle of your business. You’ll end up practicing this phrase and dialogue so much that it eventually becomes part of your DNA and everybody in your office or your business can recite it at a moments notice. On its face, it may end up just seeming something like an elevator speech. If you aren’t familiar with an elevator speech, its the short condensed version of what it is that you do that you would give if you only had, say, like 30 to 60 seconds in an elevator with somebody and they asked what it is you do. If you’ve never thought about this, good!, we’ve got something to work on! If you have thought about it before and have actually done something along these lines, good!, we’ve got something to refine and keep working on because its not likely you‘ve refined it down to words and language that have meaning to the very people you think you’re speaking to, or want to speak to. Now, I am not going to go through the three step questioning process we use to help members develop their master message in this episode because it takes some time to fully understand the whole process and just how important it is. If I give you the steps right now you’ll simply use the three steps to come up with a catchy statement for your business but you will not have fully embraced the Master Mission process which is the supremely important process that requires you to dig deep and figure out who you are and what it is you want to be doing in your business and ultimately who you want to be serving. As I mentioned earlier, you can have killer hacks and tactics to accomplish something, say, on your website. You can have a cool logo, a killer catchphrases, and great SEO to get traffic and potentially phone calls, but if your business sucks, if you don’t know why you’re answering the phone, if you don’t know why you even got out of bed this morning, than all of that other stuff is just deceptive business practices. The irony is that you are not necessarily deceiving your potential clients, you are likely deceiving yourself into believing if I can just get the phone to ring 6 more times each week I’ll be happy. If I can add two more appraisal reports to my week I’ll be fulfilled. If I can just get three more decent AMCs to start ordering from me, all my problems will be solved. I can assure you my friends, none of those things will happen. Those are all externalities and are all about you. They have nothing to do with guiding principles, your very reason for being, what you ultimately want to be in life, and how you are going to convey that message to your clients and potential clients. I promise I will teach you the three step process for developing your master message in a future episode but I want to be sure you know where this process comes from and why its so important. By the way, I am going to very strongly recommend that you read or listen to the book by Donald Miller called ‘Building A Story Brand’. It’s required reading for all of our coaching members and mastermind group because it gives extremely valuable insight into how consumers think, and remember that we too are all consumers, and how they want to buy. Without giving away the whole story brand process, I’ll share with you what it is based on and then touch on how we use it and encourage you to use it in your life and business. 
 
A very common theme in story telling is what’s called the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is based primarily on writings of Joesph Campbell and his great work called the ‘the hero with a thousand faces’, which I also highly recommend reading, and the hero’s journey is typically a 10 or 12 step story arc that includes some kind of introduction to the hero, his or her ordinary status in an ordinary town in Nowhersville. The hero is unwittingly called into action somehow and goes on some kind of adventure. Maybe its to save the girl or guy, retrieve something (like a golden ring), destroy a Death Star, or some other very dangerous but heroic act. Of course, part of the hero’s journey story arc is that they have to refuse this call to adventure. They don’t believe they’re cut out for this task, they’re too ordinary and weak, and they just don’t want the disruption to their ordinary life. When the hero refuses the call to action and adventure, of course, the scared human being inside of all of us begins to bond with this person because we too can recognize the issues this reluctant hero is grappling with. Of course, if the story ended there it would be an extremely boring story. It cant end there, there has been no adventure yet! Somebody new has to be introduced into the story and that new character in the hero’s journey story arc is the mentor or the guide. Its this hero’s Yoda or Obi Wan. It may be grandpa Joe, the tin man, the scarecrow, or the on again off again dreamy image of a deceased relative that pops in at crucial moments to give advice and encouragement. The guide helps our hero cross the threshold, which is one of the steps in the hero’s journey story arc, and this is where the adventure begins. Our hero makes the decision to go beyond their fears and accept the call to action. They metaphorically ‘cross the threshold’ into the world of becoming the hero, however reluctantly. Of course, the adventure includes all kinds of tests, internal and external, maybe some new allies and members of a growing band of heroes, finding out who the hero can trust and who they cant, and we get to learn more about the hero through these trials. The next step in the journey is the big test or ordeal whereby our hero is supremely tested. This could be an actual physical battle, it could be some massive internal conflict, it could actually be where the hero is killed and has an opportunity to be reborn into a new, stronger version of him or herself. Of course, what adventure story would be complete without the reward? The reward is mandatory to begin bringing the story arc of the hero’s journey to someplace where we can feel some relief and some resolution to our hero’s struggles and battles. We can relate again because we WANT to relate. We too want to believe that there is some kind of great reward for all of our own struggles and battles. The reward in the hero’s journey might be mountains of gold, it may be getting the girl, it may be receiving some great knowledge and insight, it may be recognition by the hometown, or simply the recognition of having overcome some great challenge. Whatever the reward, and by the way, many Hollywood stories end right here, but in the full twelve step process of the hero’s journey, our hero cant celebrate too long on his or her success and rewards because they must make the journey back home to their once ordinary life and kind of ‘cross the threshold’ again, this time back into their old life. On the journey back home our hero is typically confronted with one final, and maybe the most dangerous encounter. The importance of this final battle is that our hero is confronted with something much bigger than him or herself and has much greater consequences for those who may be left behind. Sometimes the hero has to die to fulfill the story arc and make an impact and sometimes the guide or mentor has to die (think Saving Private Ryan or Star Wars). The hero comes home with the prize and the story arc comes full circle. Of course, when a sequel is in the works, there’s a lingering question left unanswered so that we can tag along with the hero once again on the next big adventure and its wash, rinse, repeat for every sequel after that.
 
Now, once you hear and understand the hero’s journey you will see it in almost every movie and story to some degree. You may not necessarily be able to clearly identify all twelve steps of that format, but they’re there even if only for a brief moment. Nevertheless, the importance of going through the hero’s journey with you is twofold: to get you thinking about who your are being and what role you play in your life and business. Are you playing the hero? Are you the guide or mentor? Are you the reward? Are you the hero before the hero becomes the hero? Have you been unwilling to cross the threshold and take on the call to adventure? Where are you in the story arc both in business and in your life? When you think you have that part figured out, ask yourself what it would look and feel like if you were to change roles, say from the hero to the guide or the mentor. Then, the second most important part of introducing you to the hero’s journey is to plant the seeds so that we can start to build the story of your business and what role we are to play with our clients and our people to get the absolute most optimal results and outcomes from those two players in our businesses. Using the template of the hero’s journey that I just went over with you, this process of developing your master mission and then your master message is the part where you’re the reluctant hero and you’ve been refusing the call to adventure. You’ve been presented with the opportunity and you know you need to do it but you keep saying, ‘nah, its not for me, I’m just not up for the challenge. I’m comfortable in my life, my business, and on my journey so no adventure for me.’ If this is you, ok, you’ve got some thinking to do which can be the most valuable and highest paid activity you ever do.  If you feel that way and don’t want or need to do anything, that’s ok. By the way, I’ve been there many times in my life and career. I have been what I and one of my own business mentors call a victim of my own success in that I’ve been fat and happy and didn’t really need to do anything to get more business, make more money, make any changes, or do anything different in my life and business…or so I thought. Then one day something changes. The market changes, a relationship changes, rules and regulations change, or, and this one is scary, you wake up one day and realize you’re miserable. The money, the business, the activity, the process, the reasons or lack of, the people, the day to day, the grind, whatever it is it isn’t enough. You wake up and realize that the things you thought were important are not really that important any longer. You realize that now that you have food, clothing and shelter taken care of and you’ve moved on to jet skis and more expensive wine, all of those things don’t matter because you haven’t taken the steps to move through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs up through belonging, self respect, unselfish giving, and to the top of the pyramid all the way to self actualization. This is the part of the human experience where we’ve developed some understanding of the meaning for our lives.
 
‘Whoa Blaine! You’re getting pretty damn deep there brother! I just want to know how to get some more appraisal orders coming in so I can pay my bills and maybe take a vacation in 2027.’ I get it. But that’s the whole point of this idea. Without a true master mission for your business you’ll always just be trying to get that next appraisal order or take that next listing. Those are called sales and are vitally important for a business to survive. But those who just go after the sales will ultimately always just be going after the sales. When you know what your mission is, and your mission is much bigger than you, the sales part takes care of itself. Some of you are just going to have to trust me on this one for a bit. I make a promise to you and a complete and 100% full money back guarantee of your free listening experience that when you embrace this idea and eventual process, your life and your business will change for the better. I’ve said it before on this show, some of you will go through this process and will shut your business down shortly afterwards. I’ve had people completely change careers after going through this process and some of the other questioning processes like the Value Ladder and the Legacy Letters exercise from a previous episode called Love Letters from the Grave. Some people do the exercise I had you do where you write your own eulogy and they realize they are in the wrong business, life is too short, and they move on. I think that’s awesome! Not because it means more business for you and I, but because like that one little starfish in the parable, it made a difference for them. If you have moments where you think to yourself, ‘maybe I’m not right for this business or this business isn’t right for me’, chase that thought! Follow it, question it, use the Value Ladder process to hunt it down and figure out where it lives. It could be the difference between life and death or the difference between suffering and happiness. We’re not here to suffer my friends. Suffering may be part of the human experience and is one of the things that allow us to ascribe meaning to certain things. Suffering gives us an opportunity to grow and evolve. And suffering gives us the challenge of learning how to not label things as good or bad, but instead just experience things as they are with no labels. Suffering is simply struggle laced with emotion. Remove the emotion from it and its simply struggle and we all struggle at times, but we don’t all have to suffer.
 
The point I want to leave you with today my real estate and appraisal bothers and sisters is that most of you see yourself as the hero in the hero’s journey story and, therefore, as the hero in the story of you and your business. As Tina Turner says, we don’t need another hero. Your customers and clients are not looking for a hero, they’re looking for a guide and a mentor. We tend to talk about ourselves, our skills, our qualifications, our training, how many three and four letter designations we can pile after our names, our importance, our value in the marketplace, and we flaunt our hero status at every opportunity. Customers and clients are not looking for a hero in their own journey or when they seek us out. No, my friends, they are looking for a guide, a trusted friend, a mentor who will look out for their best interest and, instead, make them the hero of the journey. At the end of the story, they get to bring back the reward, get the guy or girl, get recognition from the village for making the right choice, and flaunt their hero status, not yours. At the end of this movie, you’re the quiet and humble guide standing off to the side as your client is surrounded by friends and family cheering on their victory and new hero status. As they’re being hoisted up onto the shoulders of the adoring crowd they slowly turn to see you standing way out of the way of all the commotion and frenzy, your eyes lock in recognition of their thank you to you for your guidance, you give them a nod and a wink as an acknowledgment that it was always about them, they’re the hero of this story and because of them, we all win.
 
I want to thank you my friends for investing your most valuable currency with me again this week and that is, of course, your time. I take very seriously your investment of time with me each week because, for me, you are the hero of this story. I try simply to be the guide. What I hope to have encouraged you a bit today is that when you turn my voice off and go back into your businesses and lives, you rethink the story arc and see if you’ve been trying to be the hero or if you’ve truly been the guide making sure your client is the hero of their story. If not, great, we’ve got something to work on. If you have been the guide and making your clients type hero, great, we’ve got something to work on and that’s asking how do we elevate our game and take this thing to the next level. I promise I will be giving you the tools to write your own master mission and then your master message but I need you to really give this idea some deep thought and consideration. Your mind, body, and soul must be in the right place for all of this to make sense and some of you may need a little time for this to sink in before going right into tactical and practical with yet another exercise. I know most of you don’t do the exercises on your own anyways but let a man dream once in a while, will ya?! I share with you for free what we coach others on every single week. I know how valuable the ideas, concepts, and exercises are but it’s ultimately up to you to determine if there is value there for you and where you are in your own journey. Thank you so much for letting me be your guide for at least this hour my friends, your little Value Sherpa, if you will, and I look forward to continuing this conversation again next week with each and every one of you and maybe a few more. Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to spread the word on social media, comment on our posts, and pass around the message that the Real Value Podcast tries to spread each week which is all about seeking, finding, and creating value wherever and whenever we possibly can. Until next week my friends, I’m out