Overworked and Underpaid as An Appraiser? Look In The Mirror!

​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, my name is Blaine Feyen and I am your host for this and every episode of the Real Value Podcast and I am so happy to be back in the Real Value Studios this morning hopefully spreading a message that is positive, to the point, success focused, and aimed directly at you because you are the hero of this story my friends! I don’t talk about this often but somebody thanked me again this week for something I tend to forget about and that’s that the Real Value Podcast is always sponsor free. We are approached all the time with sponsorship offers and I’m extremely flattered that those of you who have approached us think there is value in our listenership. As our numbers have grown, the offers for sponsorship have increased to the point where, not only could the expenses of the show be completely covered and then some, the show would be a profitably monetized podcast whereby I have an additional income from the show. However, my goal from the beginning was, and always will be, to add value for you, not promote somebody else’s product or service because they are paying me to do so. I have mentioned products, people, and services before on the podcast and its because I have used, or do use, those services and I’m speaking from my own experience. I also value freedom over many other things and I want to have the freedom to speak on whatever I want to speak on and it can become tough to do that when you have somebody paying you for something. I will not waste your time promoting products or services because I am being paid to do so. I will promote products and services if I use them personally and think they may help you in some aspect of your life and business. I value you and your time too much to do that and am very proud to say that the Real Value Podcast continues to be sponsor free. 

---

You, my friends, are part of a syndicate, an elite group of individuals highly skilled and highly trained to seek out value, promote value, assess value, and add value in a 360 degree 5 dimensional arc all around you. What I am saying when I talk about adding value is taking this concept to a completely different level than most understand and definitely further than most are willing to go. Typically, when people hear ‘add value’, they think I mean be a nice person, smile, give a few compliments, be reasonable. Heck, some appraisers think adding value is simply not bitching at somebody today. That is not what I’m referring to when I talk about adding value my friends. The fact that most don’t truly understand how to add real value is the good news my friends because with all the talk about the phasing out of an industry or the disappearance of a profession, I can assure you that there is always a place for people who go above and beyond the norm and actively seek out ways to create more value than the cost of the product or service. The good news for you and I is that if our numbers really are shrinking, the pie is bigger for the real professionals and the elite in any industry. Last week’s podcast was about appraisal waivers and nasty people and I shared with you the actual statistics about how many of the appraisal waivers offered are actually accepted and exercised and it was approximately 7 out of 1000. Personally, I haven’t a care in the world about waivers, the reduction of fees by AMCs, or the slew of bifurcated products and business models that have come out in the past several years. Do you know why? Because I focus on adding value for those who want what I have to offer and are willing to pay for it. Do you know what has happened to my business in the last 10 years? It has grow exponentially every year, our average fee has increased, our pain in the ass clients have been fired, and our mix of business from all lender work to now more private work has increased exponentially as well. Not to mention, my hours worked number has gone down considerably and my profitability has gone way up as we leverage technology and the internet more and more each day. I’ve seen discussions and commentary about how many hours are worked each week by various appraisers and I have to say I wasn’t at all shocked. I was appalled and sad, but not shocked. Some Appraisers say they’re working 60, 80, 100 hours per week doing appraisal work. I can understand being up doing and creating stuff 100 hours per week. I am awake and creating things from 6 in the morning to midnight almost every night. I guess I could claim I work a 90 hour week. Of course, there are meals in there, drive time, meditation time, time with family, workout time, hockey time, errands, writing time, recording time, problem solving time, and a variety of other things accomplished in that 90 hours so it wouldn’t be fair to claim all 90 of those hours. And I don’t ever think about or feel like I’m working a 90 hour week because most of the stuff I am doing I enjoy and is just part of living this life. What I can tell you however, is that a 60 or 80 hour week doing appraisals, in my opinion, is too much. I don’t question your estimates of time inside of your business my friends, I’m simply saying that something needs to be done. As a 48 year old appraiser, multiple business owner, and somebody who has worked 60-80- and 90 hour work weeks in the past, I can assure you that it is all for naught. Let me be clear, if you’re just saying that you’re working 70-80-90 hours per week and by that you mean that all of those hours include simply time you’ve been awake, fine, you’re excused. That’s not working 70-90 hours per week just as I cant say I work 70-90 hours per week even though I am awake and working ‘on’ various things that many hours sometimes. But if by working 70-90 hours per week you mean you are actually in the act of developing appraisals that many hours I can guarantee that you are overworked and way under earning.
 
Now, I know what some of you are saying already because we see it and hear it all the time. “It takes me 6-8 hours or more per report and I’m doing X appraisals per day or week, you cant possibly be developing a solid report in less than that!” To which I say, ‘ok’. If you live your life just making statements and assumptions instead of asking questions, there is nothing I can say to you that will help. Keep working your hours, keep earning less than you could be, and keep bitching about it. You’ll keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll eventually quit or die, and there will be more work for your competitor. You can’t create and evolve by telling the world what you think is. You only create and evolve by constantly asking questions. Not just any question, but the right questions phrased the right way. We work with people all the time who ask lots of questions and their questions often sound like, “why does my life suck? Why cant I ever get what I want? Why is everybody else so stupid? Why do I have to work with such idiots? Why am I so fat? Why cant I make ends meet? Why is this business so shitty?” Understand that when you ask a question, silently or audibly, you will get an answer. Your subconscious mind doesn’t know or care how or why you are asking. It’s job is to fulfill your requests and find the answers. It’s the same as a computer system, crappy data in guarantees crappy data out. We must always be on the lookout for ways to change crappy questions into questions that will return positive action answers. That means simply turning ‘why’ questions into ‘how’ questions. ‘Why does my life suck?’ Turns into how can my life be better? ‘Why cant I ever get what I want?’ Turns into ‘how can I get what I want?’, ‘Why is everybody else so stupid?’ Turns into ‘how can I attract and work with the kind of people I value and respect?’ and ‘there’s no way you can complete a solid appraisal in less than 8 hours’ turns into ‘how can I develop a solid report in less time than I am currently?’ Ask the right question and the answer eventually falls into your lap. Ask the wrong question and you get what you’ve always had. I’m not going to step too deeply into the ‘how long does it take to develop a solid appraisal report?’ debate because it’s a debate that cant be won. It’s subjective and based on a variety of variables, just like an appraisal. It depends on your location, your drive time, your information availability, your process, your scope of work, your clients, your training, your standards, your belief system, and a bunch of other factors. However, with each of those variables and factors lies an opportunity to start asking the right questions. With each one of those variables you have the opportunity to begin asking, ‘how can I speed this up without sacrificing quality?’, or you might start asking, ‘how important is quality in this particular step?’ We’ve worked with appraisers who insist on doing certain things in a certain way in their data gathering steps that are simply time wasters and add absolutely no value to the process whatsoever. Yet, they insist that ‘this is the way I do it because it’s the right way to do it’ with no explanation whatsoever as to how or why it’s the right way. Or, the worst one ever, ‘that’s the way I was taught!’ My friends, we were all taught how to do everything we do and think by somebody else until we developed our own ability to think and question rationally. At that point there was no excuse for doing or thinking certain things or certain ways just because that’s the way you were taught. Some of you type your reports in all caps because that’s what you were taught. It’s one of the most ridiculous things we’ve all ever seen on an appraisal yet some of you still do it. You are effectively screaming at the readers of the report and your response is simply, ‘that’s the way I was taught’. Great, now ask yourself why they did it and then ask yourself if it is adding any value or even necessary and you’ll get a better answer. The answer is NO! It adds no value whatsoever and does not conform to any other method of documentation in the business or personal world, accept the world of texting when you want to make an emphatic point or scream at somebody. Stop doing it! We have coaching clients who insist on going to every assessors office of every report to research the subject and comps when all of the data is online. Why? Because that’s the way they were taught, that’s the way they’ve always done it, that’s what they feel comfortable doing, they don’t trust the online info, or whatever excuse they try to use with me and it makes no sense.
 
Don’t worry, I know somebody is already formulating a response to this one, “the only way to be thorough and correct is to see the information first hand, never trust the info online”, or some other asinine response to absolute time wasting activities that add no value and cost you a tremendous amount of money. Ok, if that’s your response, keep wasting your time. Keep taking 6 or 8 hours to produce an appraisal because those are your systems and you are unwilling to evolve. Some of you say that you just have to do everything because you’re the licensed appraiser. You cant even imagine having somebody else do the research because you’re the type of person who says, ‘if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself!’.  It should be noted that I am not referring to commercial reports, complex reports, rural properties that may take hours of drive time, and the like. I’m referring to more typical appraisals where you have good info, you’re not driving for 2 hours just to get there, you have relatively good comps and comp information available to you, etc. I have reports that take me more time than others as well but they’re balanced out by the ones we can complete rather quickly because of the quality of the information available to us or already in our system. And again, some of you simply have a number in your head that says, if an appraisal doesn’t take this long than I’m not doing it right. Again, ok, if that’s what you think then you will always be working inefficiently because time expands to fill whatever void you create. If you’re flying through a report and its going too quickly, you’ll start to slow it down simply because you’re programmed to think that a report must take 6,8,10 hours or whatever your number is. My friends, it is imperative that you rip your business down to the chassis and examine absolutely every single process in it and look for the opportunity to save and shave time without necessarily sacrificing quality. And you also need to re-examine the parts of the process that you think quality is necessary. Nobody cares that you like to go to the assessors office instead of pulling the information from the internet. Nobody cares that you like to waste an hour or two of $10 per hour activity when you could be working on the $100 or $200 per hour tasks that you, as a highly trained professional is paid to do. We live in the most technologically advanced times ever in history. We can hire people from across the globe to do things that are time wasters and low tech activities, and we can pay them a fraction of what it would cost you to do yourself or pay somebody in your town to do, and they’re thrilled to be paid that! We live in a time when manually typing is almost obsolete. If you’re not using Google dictation tools or dictation software like Dragon to dictate your narrative, you’re wasting valuable time. There is simply no way you can type the length of narrative that you currently type as fast as you can speak it and have it going directly into the report. I don’t care how fast of a typist you are. I can talk faster than you can type and the dictation software can type it faster than you. Using those tools alone saves me at least an hour per day, easily. And I can type pretty fast. If you’re still clinging to your clipboard and pencil because you just feel more comfortable doing that, fine. Keep them! Just know that you are double and triple entering data and wasting extremely valuable high paid time doing low paid work. You don’t get paid to double and triple enter your sketch and your observation data. You get paid to walk through the home, drive the comps, and write the report. You might think you’re paid to do all the research as well, I get  it. Some of you cling to that with all your might. Understand that research is low paid, low skilled work. You can pay somebody $10, $12, maybe $15 per hour, maybe less if its all online, to do all the same research you are doing except that that is time when the high paid executive is supposed to be doing the high paid work of developing an opinion of value, writing narrative, and working on making your business better.
 
I’ve been doing this business longer than some, as long as some others, and not quite as long as a few of you. I’ve worked in and helped build big companies with lots of staff, equipment, 10’s of 1000’s of square feet of brick and mortar, and lots of appraisers. We knew our numbers, what we could gain and what we could save by hiring a $12 an hour researcher versus having our highly trained, highly skilled, and highly paid appraisers doing that kind of work. We knew what it would cost us to have a 6 figure per year guy or gal working on $12 to $15 an hour tasks. This was long before virtual assistance, upwork, Elance, scriptlance, and the plethora of outsourcing sites that have popped up since the advent of the internet and the evolution of the internet economy. I have also been a one man shop, a 3 man shop, and a 9 man and 4 woman shop and I’ve worked those kinds of hours too so its not that I don’t get it, I do. What I know from running those businesses, as well as a big martial arts business, an SEO and SEM business, several online businesses, a content business, a coaching business, a marriage business, and the business of raising a family is that its almost impossible to do it all well, be profitable, live balanced, enjoy life, prospect for new and better clients, hire staff, be creative, think strategically, be well rested, exercise, travel, take vacations, and see the sun rise without blurry pissed off eyes. It’s just not possible. I don’t care what Gary Vaynerchuk says, its not all about hustle, hustle, hustle, and work your effin’ face off. That’s not the way life works. Maybe if a solid 90 years of life was guaranteed to every human being we might have something more formulaic and a roadmap to study. But those years are not guaranteed my friends. We just buried a good friend and former aikido student of mine who I’ve known for 20 years or so. He’s my age and was diagnosed with ALS a short 2 years ago. A local police officer with a beautiful family, outstanding career, a man of strong faith, one of the most positive and squared away dudes one could ever meet. Gone at 48. We’re not guaranteed 90 or 100 years my friends. We’re not guaranteed one damn day. Today could be your last and if you’re lucky enough to have some conscious time to recognize that you’re about to expire, I seriously doubt you’re going to say, “I should’ve put in 70 hours last week instead of 60!” For those listening that say they’re working 60-80 hours per week or more, pull your head out of your rectum, step outside for a minute and stare directly at the sun for 60 seconds. Don’t close your eyes. Prop your eyelids open and stare directly at it. Let it burn your retinas a bit. That’ll make it that much more difficult to sit back down at your computer and start working again because you’ll have a big red spot in your vision and a good reminder of what its like to do stupid stuff! Not only are you killing yourself. You’re killing your family life, your vacation life, your personal life, your financial life, and a whole host of other opportunities that could be staring you in the face but you cant see them because your face is staring at the computer screen working on appraisal files.
 
Here’s what I also know. There’s just no way you’re that profitable at it. You cant be working 60-80 hours at that one thing and be profitable. You might be making money but when you back out the lost opportunity time, the lost future banking opportunities, the lost new client opportunities, the lost networking opportunities, the pending medical events that are going to befall you, the pending divorce, the pending child behavior issues, and the host of other unknown and unseen real costs associated with that kind of insanity and work schedule, you have to subtract all of those things from todays cash flow. Just as we talked about your future bank account in the 1000 True Fans episode, what I left out of that discussion is the debit side. What’s the debit side? Well, if you understand basic accounting, balancing a checkbook (if anybody still has one of those), or your bank statements, there is always a ledger with a left side and a right side. One side is credits and the other side is debits. One represents positive additions to the ledger, deposits you’ve made to the account, and then there is the debits side, or reductions, withdrawals, expenses paid from the account. In that episode I talked about making deposits to your future bank account from each fan you can create. A fan can be a realtor, lender, attorney, homeowner, relative, or basically anybody who truly values what you do, thinks of you whenever the topic of appraisals or value comes up and refers you when the opportunity arises. On a quick side note, a fan is not just somebody who is satisfied with the work you did on their appraisal. In future episodes, I’ll be going in depth on the topic of client satisfaction versus client loyalty and building a true fan. Let me just throw out there for you this morning that If you think your clients are satisfied with your work, your service, your effort, and your product, you’re screwed! Satisfaction is the lowest level of loyalty one can possibly aspire to and too many appraisers, lenders, real estate agents and businesses in general focus on customer or client satisfaction. They do surveys that ask stupid questions like, ‘How satisfied were you with our service, our staff, or our product?’, or ‘How did we do?’, ‘Did we meet your expectations?’, or ‘would you recommend us to somebody?’, and then they post their numbers on their marketing materials and say things like, ‘we have a 97% satisfaction rating’.
 
Satisfied means everybody involved in the process did the absolute minimum. Asking if your client is satisfied with you and your service is like asking them if mediocre works for them. Satisfied means they’ll go anywhere if the opportunity arises. Loyal means they’ll fight if you try to take it away from them. Which one are you being on any given day? Are you looking for opportunities to solve problems for your clients and potential clients? Or are you looking to avoid these issues to keep your 97% mediocre rating. Is your head in the sand while patting yourself on the back for how satisfied your clients are? What you don’t see when your head is in the sand is the exodus of clients walking right past you to the individual or company solving their problems, doing it creatively, following up with them, seeking out the problems and fixing them and then, instead of asking, ‘would you refer us?’, the 1%ers ask, “How will you refer us?’, meaning, what will you say about me and my company when you do refer us? Your clients are either the hero of the story or you are and the difference is like night and day! And when you’re working 60-80 hours a week working on appraisals and telling yourself, “look at me and how busy I am, I’m killing it!” Sorry, you’re killing you and your business! It is possible you’re building some true fans in those 60-80 hours if you’re maniacally focused on client service like we are, but I’m doubtful. I’ve seen it way too much in working with appraisers and other businesses to think that those of you working 60-80 hours or more per week are delivering killer client service and building a solid true fan base. You might be cranking out reports and watching the accounts receivable side grow, but you simply cant be seeing all of the future debits hitting your future bank account. Those debits include all of the things I mentioned earlier. They include taxes, health issues, divorce, disease, unforeseen costs and expenses and time you simply cannot get back. I like to think that I’m having some positive effect on those who say they’re working that many hours but I know the reality and I know the human condition. Some of you are already lost and think you’ve got it all figured out so I’m probably really speaking to the new generation of appraisers who have maybe only been at if for a few years, those who are just about to get fully licensed, those who are working for one of these workaholics and think that’s just normal, or maybe somebody from a younger generation thinking about getting into this field. It’s not normal. It may be normal for them but its not the best way to do it. It’s not necessary and not the most profitable way to operate a business, despite the adage that you have to ‘make hay while the sun shines’ or what appraisers love to say, ‘we never know when it might just stop so we have to take it and make it while we can!’
 
This is true of every business and every job, for that matter, but its also true of life in general. You have to live and experience life while the sun is shining too. You have to take it and make it while you can because you never know when your last day and your last breath will be. You last order? Screw that last order if that last order comes one day after you’ve taken your last breath. Screw that last order if your wife, husband, brother or sister take their last breath and you’re not there to say goodbye because you have to make hay while the sun is shining. I’m sorry my friends but I say it in every episode, your most valuable currency is your time. You can lose money and gain it back. I’m a master at that! I’ve lost more real estate and investments than most will ever own in there lifetime. Divorce is an expensive proposition. There’s a somewhat funny saying in locker rooms and amongst people who’ve been through a divorce that sounds something like, ‘do you know why divorce is so expensive? Because its worth it!’ It’s not just men that say it, although they’re probably the biggest demographic of fans of this saying because statistically men tend to lose more money and assets in divorce than women do so the saying becomes a sort of salve to ease the pain of giving up almost all of your assets to your former spouse. I’ve been there and can relate to the saying, although I’d love to have all of the time, money, and years invested back in my virtual account more than anything. I don’t care about the houses, the cottages on the lake, the cars and vans, the commercial properties, and everything else forfeited to the other side. Those are all things that can and have been earned back to some degree. Money is easy to make, lose, give away, and make back again. Time, once gone, is never coming back. It is your most valuable currency my friends and this business is simply not worth working your most valuable currency away, no business is. Most of the people saying they’re working 60-80 hour weeks are doing so out of ego. They may have some kind of martyr complex, which is common, or maybe they simply think it’s normal because that’s what they saw their mentor do. Maybe you grew up in an appraising family and you saw mom and dad working those kinds of hours. It’s not normal. It might be typical, but so is smoking. So is drinking. So is drunk driving and the opioid epidemic. Those are all typical for the times, but its not normal my friends. I know some of the excuses and quips that follow this, by the way. Some of you are saying, “well appraisers aren’t normal Blaine! They’re a special breed!”. Right, I get it. Everybody thinks they’re special in some way and it becomes the story we tell ourselves just like the funny saying about divorce being expensive because its worth it. The story helps soothe and ease the pain of poor choices and bad decisions. I’ve met lots of people from every walk of life and from dozens of countries. Every single one of them thinks they’re special in some way. They think their flag is special, they think their skin color is special, they think their family heritage is special, they think what they do is special, and they all tend to separate themselves from the rest of the world by telling this story. ‘Oh, we’re different!’ No, you’re exactly the same as everybody else who thinks, acts, does, and believes just like you.
 
We see and hear this all the time in the appraisal, real estate, and mortgage businesses. ‘We’re different from everybody else because we work until the wee hours of the morning making our clients happy. We do loan approvals at midnight. We’re writing offers at 10pm for our clients. We’re doing appraisal work at 11pm on a Sunday night because that’s just what we do. Ok. If you say so. And for every 40 or 50 of those people, I know 1 person in each of those industries that says, ‘that’s crazy and unnecessary’. They do as much or more than all of those other agents, lenders, and appraisers and in 30-40 hours per week working what would be considered more normal business hours. When I was a real estate agent, one of my mentors was the absolute king of real estate in the state of michigan. His moniker on all of his advertising and promotions was Mr. Real Estate! And he was producing 10’s of millions of dollars in real estate sales every single year and he worked, at most, 40 hour week. He never held an open house, never prospected for new business, never drove buyers around, and never lifted a finger to type up a document. Do you know why? Because he paid somebody else to do those things for him. He paid college kids to come in from 6-9pm and make prospecting calls using his precise script. He had a full time assistant that did all of the document prep for him. He had a team of buyers agents long before teams were a thing and he had agents that were clamoring to hold open houses for him (I was one of them, by the way). He knew something that most of the other agents didn’t. His highest paid activity was listing homes and negotiating deals and he knew it. And he made millions! I’m very thankful to know this gentleman and have had him as a mentor back in those days because I got to see how he did it versus everybody else. He knew that it was extremely profitable for him to hire and train a $10 per hour college kid with a personality to call up and down every street in a neighborhood and say the same thing to every one of them. A lead to him was worth $1000’s of dollars and it may cost him $100 to get. He knew that holding an open house was a great way to get new buyers and potentially new listings, but he also knew that his 3 hours on a Sunday were far too valuable for that kind of activity so he had other agents in his office hold them. He ended up with a high paid deal out of it no matter what. What I will also tell you about that real estate mentor of mine, a man named Scott Carlson, a man who fairly quickly became a personal friend of mine and we’ve played hockey together now for almost 25 years. In fact, in becoming friends with Scott I also became friends with his father Mike, a first class gentleman that also played on our hockey team for many years.
 
The lessons that I learned from Scott Carlson back in the late 1990s and into the 2000’s have not only made me lots of money, they’ve saved me lots of money and far more importantly, lots of my time and even more of my life. To give you a little context about this mentor of mine, Scott has an older sister named Shannon and a brother named Todd. While they were all in high school, Scott’s brother and sister were in a horrific car accident that left Todd a quadriplegic and Shannon with a traumatic brain injury and in need of some care. Todd and his story alone is one of triumph over tragedy but I’ll save that for another episode. Todd and Scott were best friends. Back in 2009, Todd, Scott’s father Mike, and Scott’s mother Jane were all riding in a van traveling to one of Scott’s daughter’s dance recitals when the van was sideswiped and run off the road. Scott and Todd’s mother was sadly killed in that accident. Scott’s quadriplegic brother Todd had his back broken yet again and Scott’s father Mike was badly injured as well, but alive. Nursed back to relative health over some time, Scott’s father Mike began showing signs of early onset Alzheimer’s. He was barely in his 60’s. Scott eventually made the decision to retire from real estate to take care of his father for whatever remaining years he had left, which turned out to be about 7 more years. Tragically, last year Scott’s brother Todd was killed in yet another tragic car accident. In the short span of 10 years Scott lost three of the most important people in his life; his mother, his father, and his best friend and brother Todd. I don’t want to, but couldn’t even venture a guess at the emotions Scott has had to deal with in losing three of the most important people in his life in such a tragic way. What I do know about Scott is that he has no regrets because he made some early decisions to spend a lot of time with those most important people. As I mentioned earlier, Scott never worked more than 40 hours per week while running arguably the most successful real estate business in West Michigan at the time. The people that worked for him may have worked 60 or 70 hours per week, which is a choice they made, but Scott never did. Scott has 4 great kids, an grown son and 3 daughters, and prioritized coaching every one of his kid’s sports teams from the first time they stepped onto a court or field until they graduated high school. Scott would often leave the office around 3 o’clock to go coach one of those teams. He might have a listing appointment at 7pm that night and may have collectively been doing something for 70 or 80 hours per week, but those hours included coaching his children, taking care of his family, spending time with them, and eventually taking care of his father up until his passing in 2016. I’m honored to be able to call Scott Carlson a friend and mentor of mine, not because he taught me that the smartest deal you ever do may be the one you walk away from, but because I got to see as a 24 year old young man what it looked like to work smart, be successful, and make time for the important things and people in your life. I didn’t know it at the time I was learning it, none of us, including Scott did, but we were all learning about regret and how not to have it. I can guarantee you that Scott Carlson does not regret not working 60-80 hour weeks back then. I can guarantee you that Scott Carlson does not regret losing that listing so many years ago because he had to go coach his son’s basketball game. He doesn’t have one regret that he should have been there to negotiate that offer when he was at his daughter’s state championship basketball game. Not one regret because he chose early on what was important to him and it was his time. He was teaching me about the most valuable currency, which is, of course, our time. He didn’t know back then how much time his mother, his father, or his brother Todd had left on this planet but he knew that there was no deal, no offer, no hour spent at the office that was more important than they were and he let the world know it all the time by his actions. Scott Carlson is a wealthy man. He worked hard and smart and made some smart investment choices that allowed him the opportunity to spend that time with his family. But I can also guarantee you that Scott would give back every dollar he has to his name to have his mother, his father, and his brother Todd back for even a short period of time. We don’t know how much time we have my friends and not one hour is guaranteed to us. I can assure you that working until midnight on an appraisal report that nobody cares about is not making a good life choice. It may seem like it in the moment when you have a deadline and you fear losing a client because of arbitrary turn times and deadlines, but its not.
 
I am friends with and mastermind with some of the most successful individuals in all three of those industries and one thing is true for every single one of them: they aren’t working asinine hours. What I should really say about all of them is this: the three main things they are all focused on is efficiency in their businesses so they can enjoy their lives, attracting the absolute best people so that they can deliver the best product or service, and giving. Every single one of them is working on those three things all of the time. None of them typically works more than 40 hours per week and a bunch of them are high 6 and 7 figure earners. Now, you might say, “of course Blaine, they’re already millionaires, they don’t have to work that hard anymore”, to which I’d say that is the myth that keeps you on the treadmill. And every single one of them would tell you the same thing: we didn’t hit these levels of profitability and growth until we started to work less, take time off, take remodel and recovery days, and started giving a portion of our profits back. Every one of them! It’s not normal my friends. Working 60-80 hours per week is a death sentence. Maybe if its your absolute passion and you don’t think of it as work, ok, but even then I would caution you against spending your life doing something that has little meaning in the greater scheme of things. My friends, cranking out one more report, while sacrificing time with friends, family, communing with nature, taking time for yourself, exercising, or working on something you’re truly passionate about has little to no impact on anything anybody could even scarcely call important. A real estate appraisal is an important part of a real estate transaction. But as we scale outward from the transaction like the camera in a Hollywood movie pulling back from the cul de sac in a neighborhood to slowly reveal the whole neighborhood, then the city, then the whole state, then the whole earth and eventually the cosmos, that silly little appraisal report you’re slaving over at midnight, it means nothing. The people in the other room, they mean something. There will always be another appraisal report due by end of business on any given day, but there wont always be an opportunity to say I love you one last time to your mother, your father, your brother, sister, husband, wife, son, daughter, or best friend. Tomorrow may be your last day or it might be theirs. We don’t know and we don’t get to choose. What we do get to choose is what’s important to us and how we spend the limited time we have. Spend it wisely my friends.
 
I’d like to thank you for spending your most valuable currency with me again this week my friends and that is, of course, your time. You don’t get to choose the return on that investment but you do get to choose how you invest it and I appreciate you choosing this show each week as an investment. I hope to give you a good return on that investment but it is always and ultimately up to you what you do with your time. Doing appraisals on real estate can be a great business and can give you an awesome lifestyle if its done right. There isnt an appraisal report, client, or deal in the world worth working yourself to death over. As the adage goes, nobody says while on their death bed, I wish i’d spent more time at the office. The adage assumes, of course, that we will have a death bed and have time to contemplate our existence and how well we lived it. Many don’t even get that. If you’re listening to this episode right now, you still have time to make the right choice and the right choice will entail making time for yourself and the important things and people in your life. When you do that, you actually become better. Your business, your life, and the lives of those around you get better. I’d like to give a special thanks to my dear friend and mentor Scott Carlson for all the lessons that he likely doesn’t even know he was teaching me. What I can assure you though is that Scott will know in a short period of time because I will be calling him up after this recording to tell him exactly how I feel about him. I don’t want one more hour to pass without letting him know because we don’t know how much time each of us has left. Until next week my friends, I’m out.