The Lifeblood of Your Appraisal Business!

​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 absolutely thrilled to be back behind the microphone again hanging with some of my favorite people, the 1%ers who care about themselves, their own wellbeing, their growth, their businesses, their clients, and being just a little bit better each and every day. Thanks so much for being here each week my friends and for hopefully bringing into existence some of the ideas and practices that we talk about on this show. The stuff we talk about works and I know it works because I’ve built several successful businesses utilizing and implementing these ideas, principles and practices and, maybe more importantly, these ideas, principles, and practices have helped me build businesses that give me more life and the ability to enjoy it and experience it to the fullest. That IS one of the most important and powerful business concepts floating around the business-sphere today. It’s been around for eons but revived and put into probably the best language a business person can understand by the author Michael Gerber who wrote a book called the E-Myth. In it he says, “a true business opportunity is one that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on.”

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Now, you could take this linguistically in two ways. You could take this that Michael Gerber is saying that a true business opportunity is one that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself, meaning that you created your business as a way to grow as a person, or you could take it to mean that a true business opportunity is one that an entrepreneur invents to grow BY him or herself. Meaning, you exploit the business opportunity as a challenge to grow it yourself with no help. Given the overall context and message from the E-myth being one of developing systems and processes to have a business that gives you more life, I believe Michael Gerber’s message is spot on! A true business opportunity is one that allows you to grow as a person and you cant do that when you feel stuck, or overworked, or that the business is happening to you instead of because of you. Your business absolutely must be giving you more life and opening more doors than it closes or you simply cant call it a successful business. You might be able to say that you have a decent job as an appraiser if you’re paying your bills and have a reasonable life, but you cant say that you have a true business. The problem, for most appraisers, of course, is that it is just a job and when you have just a job you tend to feel out of control. Not only of the business, but of your life to some degree as well. One of the goals of this podcast is to help you take some control of your appraisal business and, in the process, take a little more control of your life as well. By the way, if you haven’t read or listened to the E-Myth or the E-myth revisited yet, its mandatory reading or listening to be a small business owner so get on it. If you tell me you’re not a reader then I’d say get the audiobook and listen while you’re typing up appraisal reports. Harry Truman said, “not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” In 2019, we can say that listening to an audiobook is close to the equivalent of reading and better than nothing so I’ll allow it. But I would strongly encourage every listener of this podcast to become a reader if you are not. There is still a difference in what happens in your brain when you take information in through your eyes versus the information you take in auditorily. Different parts of your brain are activated when you read than when you are simply listening to something and more of the information is processed during reading than during listening. A good friend of mine taught me a trick that has helped me to process more information in less time and that’s to buy the book and the audiobook at the same time and then listen at twice the speed while you’re reading the book. So you are listening to the audiobook at 2X speed while you are following along in the actual book or on your kindle. This way, you are getting the information coming into your ears at twice the speed of normal speech while also taking in the information visually so you’re getting information immersion. This allows me to get through lots of information and still take notes on the information I’m reading. I just stop the audio and make notes in the book or on the kindle and then crank it up again when I’m done with the note. By the way, I’ve said it before, the act of writing takes the information to a whole new level in your brain.
 
This is one of the downsides of talk to text and the proliferation of technology, on a side note, and I’m as guilty of it as the next person. I use dragon software for report writing because I can narrate tons more than I can type in the less time and I find that I’ll explain and summarize a lot more and in a deeper way when I’m talking to text than when I’m typing because its just much easier. I use talk to text on the phone and I dictate emails the same way. It’s just more efficient than typing either on the phone or computer keyboard. However, the more we tend to do this type of dictation, the less we tend to actually write and researchers are finding our brains to be less developed in certain areas of cognition as a result. Something magical happens you put pen or pencil to paper and start writing. I guess Apple Pencil to ipad works too. It’s the act of writing period that is the magical activity and I’ve said it before in previous episodes. In fact, I did a whole bonus episode called the law of the onion where I went in depth on the benefits of writing. So, if you find yourself not to be a reader or a writer, I am strongly suggesting you take those two hobbies up as a way to make yourself a better everything. As I said in the last episode, taking time off and away from your business is not a reward for hard work but instead a necessary precondition of success. I feel the same way about reading and writing. Reading and actually writing, not typing, are necessary preconditions of success and two of the things that are almost always cited by authors and researchers whenever they put out one of those articles or books that talk about the habits or secrets of millionaires and billionaires. Reading and writing are almost always on the list and usually in the top 5, along with a solid morning routine.
 
Speaking of necessary preconditions of success and taking time off, as many of the regular listeners will know, I just got back from one of my extended time off vacations away from my business. It was a spring break trip with Jolene and my youngest son and we spent it in beautiful North Carolina. To all of the listeners who live in North Carolina, congratulations! I’ve been there many times in the past and have never had a bad view or a lousy time. We stayed in a little town called Old Fort in the Black Mountain region and had a literal 360 degree view of the mountains. We rented a gorgeous log cabin at the very top of a mountain range and spent some quality done time recharging our personal batteries, getting to know one another that much better, and doing what we love to do which is eat and adventure. When we weren’t laying around the cabin reading or writing we were out in the Pisgah or DuPont forests mountain biking, white water kayaking, zip lining, rappelling, and scouting the area for future events where I will hopefully meet some of you and we can grow together, learn from each other, and do it in some of the most beautiful areas of the country with some of the most hospitable people. While I find some of the southern speed limits to be extremely and annoyingly slow, at least in that area, I find the speed of life to be a reflection of the driving speeds and found the people from those areas to be very appreciative of one another and of life in general and it helped me to slow down a bit in all areas, which is what we take vacations for. As I mentioned, one of the activities we chose to do was to hire a professional mountain bike guide and take us through some world renowned mountain bike trails and see some gorgeous mountain regions, waterfalls, awesome mountain bike trails, and everything in between. Now, mind you, Jolene, my son, and myself have all been on bikes before, both road bikes and mountain bikes, but none of us has ever been real mountain biking where you’re riding over roots, rocks, rollers, jumps, bridges, in between close trees, and around tight corners in the trail. Since we’re all avid skiers, I kind of decided for us that we were going to get into mountain biking this year as another fun sport to do in the spring, summer and fall months while we wait for the next ski season to arrive. We love the outdoors and we love adventure so I figured what a great way to do all of that while working on some new skills. For those of you who are not familiar with real mountain biking, its not just riding a little more beefed up bike that you’d buy at a sporting goods store on some trails in your local woods, although it certainly can be. The mountain biking I am referring to is the kind where you have to learn and practice moving your body around the bike, standing balanced on the pedals and using your arms and legs as shock absorbers, moving your body back over the rear tire on steep sections and over jumps, learning to ride over technical terrain like tree roots and rocks and just basically how to maneuver through hairy trails with some dangers along the way.
 
Needless to say, I have spent the better part of the last couple months doing what I do which is research the heck out of something I’m interested in. In this case, mountain biking! I’ve watched 30-40 hours of mountain biking videos on YouTube, visited a couple local bike shops grilling the experts on what to know and look for in a bike, picked out a carbon frame full suspension bike that I want to buy, and have a list of accessories that I’ll start acquiring when its time. I figured the trip to North Carolina would be the perfect place for all of us to try out this sport and jump start our new activity, no pun intended. We hire a professional mountain bike guide to take us on a private tour, show us the ropes, teach us some of the fundamental skills, and guide us through some of the trails. It was awesome! I can tell you we were not prepared for how much work is involved on the ride up to the tops of some of these trials. Jolene and I work out regularly; we swim laps, we lift weights, we run sprints, we ride the spin bike, and we were absolutely gassed with some of the vertical ascents on the way to some of the trails. I mean, we knew it wasn’t just get on your bike and head down a trail. You have to get some elevation before you can do that but it was hard! What I liked about it though was that it was part of the whole experience. With skiing, you are always being delivered to the top of the hill, more or less. You hop on a chair lift or gondola and it drops you off at the top for the fun ski down. With mountain biking you are always propelling yourself and working to get to the trails for the ‘fun’ part. The reality is that if you look at it that way, you’d probably decide mountain biking is not for you because the ride down may not be worth all the work it took to get there. Not to mention, its kinda dangerous. I couldn’t help thinking the whole time how much it was like being a business owner. The slog up as you’re building your business, the occasional thrills as you hit some cools trails, the slog back up on a new climb, the desire to give up at points, the view as you’re climbing higher and higher, the breakdowns and repairs along the way, the questioning process and saying, ‘is this right for me?’ Or ‘am I right for this?’, but always getting an answer that just says, ‘keep going, it’ll be worth it!’.
 
Now, I need to add a little bit more color to this story by telling you all that I didn’t have the most successful experience my first time out. After about 3 hours and 50 minutes of riding and killing it, and not 5 minutes from the parking lot trail head where we began our journey, I came up a little hot on my son who was in front of me on the trail and heading into a little dip and turn so I mashed on the brakes a bit and probably stood up too much and was too far forward so when my tire went into the dip the handlebars turned 180 degrees and you can imagine what happens next. If you cant, I’ll tell you. The mechanics of almost any 2 wheeled machine require both wheels to be facing the same direction for it to propel in that direction. If the front wheel is turned slightly to either the right or the left, the machine, in this case the bike, will head in that direction, that’s how you turn. However, if the front wheel turns 180 degrees, or perpendicular to the rest of the machine, the wheel, which is designed to continually transfer energy over its structure as it moves forward, now becomes a very effective braking system. As the front wheel turned 180 degrees and perpendicular to the rest of the bike at 15 miles per hour, the rest of the bike, which wants to keep moving forward in the direction its supposed to, all of the sudden says “oh hell no!” This in itself is not necessarily a problem. After all, its an inanimate object and feels no pain. The problem is the 200+ pound superstar on top of this machine that is about to pay the price for all of his life choices up to this point. Thankfully, the fact that you’re hearing my voice is a testament to bike helmet technology and sheer luck. I went over the handlebars fast and hard, which, by the way, isnt in itself necessarily a problem either. The flying through the air part is easy. Nobody has ever died from jumping off of a building or out of an airplane. They die because their parachute doesn’t open or because they didn’t have one to begin with. It’s the rapid deceleration of the body coming into contact with the unforgiving ground that causes the problem. In this case, it was my face, head, neck, right shoulder, prescription sun glasses, watch, and front teeth that acted as a braking system for the rest of my body. While very kind of them to do that for me, I am in some pain at this very moment. The helmet was completely shattered and unusable afterwards, my face was all scraped up on the right side, my nose bleeding, my front tooth broken, glasses broken, and absolutely stunned beyond belief. I just got my tooth fixed yesterday, thanks to Doctor Strobel for the excellent job on that, and I have several weeks of advanced chiropractic and massage work ahead of me before I’m fully healed. Needless to say, I’ll be picking up my new carbon frame full suspension mountain bike next week and on the trails by the weekend!
 
Ok my friends, this episode is not about my stupidity on a mountain bike, although I hope you enjoyed the story and, by the way, I’d really love to hear from those of you who are skilled mountain bikers and can relate to my experience and probably have some even more harrowing stories of your own. I am a life long learner and would love to get your advice on how to stay safe and have fun while growing in this sport. But this episode does have some tactical and practical for you as you build your appraisal business and hopefully in a way that has you commanding the fees you desire from the people you want to be working with and done in a way that builds a business that gives you more life instead of sucking it out of you. My goal with this podcast is to help you grow in whatever way I can and at whatever point you may be at in your life and business. I feel very fortunate to have had some amazing mentors along the way and to have had some successes in a variety of businesses over the last 30 years with which I have been able to transfer many of the lessons from those businesses into my appraisal firm. Of course, many of the lessons that were transferred were lessons from failures but they were lessons nonetheless. In these episodes, I have been giving you the system that we have cultivated over the past almost 20 years to build what I would consider a wildly successful appraisal business. Now, wildly successful means different things to different people so I have to qualify that a bit. Wildly successful to me is a business that allows me and my staff to work what I would consider to be normal hours, 30-40 hours per week, if that. A business that has a steady flow of business from existing clients and a steady flow of new clients being introduced to the business. A business that allows for creativity and an opportunity for the owner and the staff to grow as people. A business that affords the owners and staff an income to work ratio that exceeds what they might accept in something else. The income to work ratio is an important ratio in my business development system, by the way. Income always has to be run through the filter of effort and how much of it is required to earn and attract it. Income by itself is a meaningless metric just as weight loss alone is a meaningless metric. People with diabetes, those who suffer from bulimia or are anorexic experience weight loss with no problem but the weight loss in those instances is not a meaningful metric unless its coupled with more information. Income alone is not meaningful until I know how you earn it, how much it costs you in actual hard costs and also in the soft costs of time, family, stress, anxiety, and life energy. And a business that is fun. There are a few more parameters that I use to categorize something as wildly successful, but those are the main ones.
 
Since the focus of my business and what I teach and coach others is on building an appraisal business that enhances your life which, at least for me, means working primarily for direct lenders and ones that I know, like, respect, and trust and who know, like, trust, and respect me and, of course, non lender business which entails work for attorneys, homeowners, real estate agents, estate and financial planners, and a variety of other entities that need appraisal and value consultation work done by a professional. My friends, with all of the talk about the doing away with appraisers in the lend-o-sphere, which is most likely to happen in the coming years, I am 100% confident that there will always be a need for highly qualified experts giving their opinions of value for specialized purposes. For all the talk about lenders doing away with appraisers and using cheaper products like desktop and bifurcated appraisals, there is a magical world where qualified appraisers exist and thrive on fees they dictate themselves and work for people who know, like, respect, and trust them. This is a world I live and thrive in and have for some time and would be just fine existing here for the rest of my days quietly cherry picking the business that I want and like to be doing. There’s one big problem for me in that regard and it’s simply that, not only am I not wired that way, I know something that many don’t know, which is also one of the pillars that I teach and encourage and that’s that you have to help others achieve what they want to achieve as a fundamental part of a successful business and life strategy. I don’t mean that you have to give to others as a sneaky technique. No, I mean that it simply has to become part of your overall mindset and belief system that helping others with their problems, goals, desires, and needs is a life affirming activity and makes life and business considerably more fun, enjoyable, and worth doing. If it ends up attracting you more of the kind of business that you do like to be doing, great! Then it turns into an effective AND worthwhile strategy for attracting the kind of business you want and will help you be more in alignment with the definition of a wildly successful business. If that kind of stuff doesn’t matter to you, no problem. Typically the ones for whom this kind of stuff doesn’t matter are ok with whatever AMC work they get or they have already built the kind of business that I am referring to and simply nod along with me saying, ‘yep, you’re absolutely right Blaine.’
 
So, with that being said, todays tactical and practical is part of our system of follow up with both lender and non-lender business, although today I am only focusing on the non-lender follow up. In upcoming episodes, I will be going into some deeper detail about various marketing strategies for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, SEO and SEM, Google AdWords, targeted mailers, and some other techniques and tactics for attracting the kind of business we’re talking about in these episodes and one of those areas of focus is your Google My Business page. How to set one up, how to manage it, and how to get and manage reviews. One of the areas that is directly related to the reviews side of things is your follow up system. One of the big fears I always hear from the agents and appraisers I talk to and coach is that they are worried about bad reviews. Talk about focusing on the negative! This is like saying the reason you don’t travel is because you’re afraid the plane will crash or somebody will go through your luggage at the airline. You simply cannot live your life focusing on the negative my friends. If you aren’t building out your Google My Business page and asking for reviews from your lenders, your non lender clients, your private clients, your friends, and your family members, you are missing the boat on a big part of getting found on the internet. Any time I hear about an appraiser who received a bad review on facebook or google, of course, most of them are due to an upset person who didn’t get the value they wanted or maybe the other half of a divorce scenario, but in either case, most of these scenarios can be mitigated in advance with a follow up system that very few appraisers have in place based on the number of appraisers I speak to on a weekly basis. By the way, the term ‘follow up’ system connotes something occurring after an activity or service, thus the follow part. Follow up entails following something that came before up. However, in any good follow up system, there are activities that occur prior to the activity and the follow up that helps to seed the process. By seeding, I mean that you plant seeds along the way that all lead to the outcome that you would consider to be ideal for the situations we deal with as appraisers on a daily basis. And by that I mean, if you will take some time to think through the whole process from before a client ever even meets you until the time when the appraisal has been delivered and you are in the after phase of the process, you can develop systems to implement throughout every phase of the process. Every business has a before, a during, and an after phase of their product or service and appraisers are no different. Taking the time to sit down and think through the before, during, and after phase of the appraisal process is literally a million dollar thought experiment and business practice.
 
Most appraisers are heavily, nay, singly focused on the during process. This is the part of the process when you have visited the subject property, you’ve pulled comps, you’re writing the report, and you’re developing your opinion of value and sending off the report. Once that process is done, you’re on to the next one and just hoping the last one doesn’t come back with any silly revision requests. For appraisers, out of sight is out of mind and no news is excellent news! If we never hear back about that last appraisal, all is well!! While this may be absolutely true in the AMC and even direct lending world, it is absolutely NOT in the non-lending appraisal world. If you want to build up a bulletproof non-lender appraisal business, it is absolutely imperative that you have a before, a during, and an after system in your business. Most appraiser start focusing on the before part only when things get slow because the before part includes the prospecting, the cold and warm calling, the stopping in to banks, attorneys, realtors, and financial planners offices, etc. There’s more to the before part than that but all of that stuff falls in the before part of the process. What also falls in the before part of the process is thinking through all of the scenarios that your next potential appraisal deal may entail and what would potentially lead to either a negative or a positive review for your on social media or in Google. If you know in advance that a value that is lower than the homeowner, attorney, or anybody else you may be doing an appraisal for is going to upset your client, then the smart thing to do is develop a system whereby you are first learning what the expectations are from that client, educating them a bit on what to expect from you and what the appraisal process entails, prep them for the worst case scenario so as to modify their expectations, and then reassess their understanding and expectations. What this might sound like (and I know this will make some of you cringe but if you do cringe it is only because of your ego and nothing else) is to simply ask the homeowner, realtor, attorney, estate planner, or whomever you may be dealing with if they had some particular idea of value in mind. Find out! Find out what they’re thinking so you can then follow it up with “Why?”. You don’t have to be a jerk about it, you simply have to ask them how they came up with the number they did. They will give you extremely valuable information about their thinking; how they got it off Zillow, how the big house down the street is selling for $750,000 so theirs should be around $650,000, how their neighbor thinks his is worth $550,000 which simply bolsters their belief about theirs being worth $650,000, how they need $650,000 to pay down some debt, the second mortgage they want to pay off, the PMI they want to stop paying, the new BMW they want to buy, the credit card debt they want to roll into their mortgage, the HELOC they need to take out to make payroll on their business, the current listing for $850,000 a block over that has been on the market for 364 days, and a slew of other very non scientific reasons their home should be worth what they want it to be worth. Now, would knowing that info help you in the overall process? I don’t mean would it affect your opinion of value, I mean would it change what you say to those people and how you prep them about the appraisal process, what to expect, what they’ll do if the appraisal doesn’t come in where they want it to, etc.
 
The great thing about the non lending side of this business is that your client is somebody you can speak to. Once you know their expectations you can mold and shape the experience for them so that they become a little more educated about the appraisal process, what goes into an appraisal, what our role is as the appraiser, what comps really are, what they aren’t, why we might use certain homes in the report, and a variety of other scripts that we’ll go over in future episodes and in our coaching, if you’re one of our coaching members. Having a ‘before’ system in place helps to set the expectations and learn a tremendous amount about their thinking. It also helps us plant seeds for the during and after phase of the appraisal process which includes some follow up and eventually asking for a nice review. It’s in this whole system that you are sewing the seeds of an awesome review on social media and/or google and what you are also doing is mitigating the potential negative review due to unmet expectations. Most negative reviews, as we’ve already stated, are due to a lower value than expected by the client. We see negative reviews that will bring up other things like an appraiser being late for an appointment, their dress, being unprofessional or rude, not taking off their shoes, not retuning phone calls, and things like this but we also know that sometimes these ‘other’ things as we’ll call them are ancillary complaints that are generated out of frustration because of unmet expectations, usually pertaining to value. If you came in at or above the value they wanted or expected, none of those other things would have likely crossed their minds. That is unless you truly are rude, unprofessional, don’t return phone calls, etc., which we know is the case for some appraisers in the world. But we know this isnt you so the only reason for a negative review will be unmet expectations by the client. It is our job as business people, as 1%ers, as the best in our markets to know the expectations or our clients, to mold and shape them closer to reality when they are off, and then to follow up with them and the follow up accomplishes a few things. One, it is simply good client service. I’ll tell you that our follow up system came about out of sheer frustration with what I call the private client phenomenon. The PCP is where you finish a private report, you send off a nice email with the attached report, you say ‘please don’t hesitate to call or email with any questions whatsoever, we’ll spend as much time as necessary to go over the report with you’, and then you never get so much as a ‘thanks, I got the appraisal’ email in return. This was happening so much that I finally said, ‘this is ridiculous, at a bare minimum I want to know if they received my email!’, so we started putting into the email a line that simply says, please let us know that you received the appraisal so we know its not in your spam box. This at least generated a response email so we knew they got it.
 
However, I wasn’t completely satisfied with that process so I developed our follow up system which is simply a one week phone call, a 30 day email, and then an email request for a nice review on google with a quick link directly to our google review page. We set this up in the before and during phase of the process and by that I mean we advertise and promote that we follow up so people come to expect it. We let them know that we will not run and hide from an upset client and that we don’t consider a completed appraisal the end of our job or our relationship. In the during phase of the process, which includes the site visit and meeting with the client, in the conversation I mentioned earlier where we ask the client what their expectations are, at the end when I am molding and shaping their expectations and telling them what to expect from me I end the conversation with a, ‘we should have a finished appraisal for you in 3 or 4 days which I will promptly email to the email address you gave me. Once you’ve received the appraisal and have had some time to review it, do not hesitate to call me with any questions whatsoever, we will spend as much time as necessary to go over the report. If I haven’t from you in a week or so I will give you a courtesy follow up call just to make sure all of your questions have been answered.’ Once we’ve delivered the report their name and number is entered into a simple follow up calendar. It can be as simple as written into your paper date book or more sophisticated like a google calendar or tracking software. After one week, we make our follow up calls and they sound something like this, “hey Bob, this is Blaine from Real Value appraisal and, as I promised, I’m just following up to make sure everything made sense in the appraisal and to answer any questions you may have had about it’. The easy calls end up with the client basically saying, “yep, you guys did a great job and everything was very clear.’ Are these the best calls? I am hoping to train you over time to think NO, they aren’t the best calls, their merely the easy ones. My friends, we get paid to solve problems and where we can uncover a problem or question, our income goes up by way of direct business, referrals, reviews, and by gaining a client for life which is something we heavily focus on. The lifetime value of a client in our business, depending on the client, is literally in the millions in some cases, and in the thousands to tens of thousands with private clients. When you use a follow up script and process like this one and can uncover clients with questions or problems, you get to head them off and potentially solve those problems which usually earns you a client for life and the right to be referred. Until then, you simply haven’t earned the right to be referred. They might anyway because 10% of people just do that anyway, but the remaining 90% need their referrals to be earned and just doing what you’ve been paid to do is not enough. You must go the extra mile and that mile includes a follow up. By the way, I said we’re only focusing on private appraisal business in this episode but I’ll say that if you are not following up with your lender clients on a regular basis, you’re dropping the ball. Your clients and their referrals are the lifeblood of your business and need to be take care of like nobody else is doing.
 
So, that’s the simple 1 week follow process and script and then we simply follow up 30 days later with a quick email asking if any questions have come up since we last spoke. We sincerely thank them for their business and leave it at that. Once we receive an email back from them we send off our request for a positive review. We make it super easy for them and I recommend that you do this as well. You can google how to do this with a site called White Spark, but there are other ways as well, and that is to make a direct clickable link directly to your reviews page. Not just to your google business page or facebook page but directly to the reviews page. I wont go into detail here how to do it but if you shoot me an email or direct message on facebook I’d be happy to show you how to do it. When they click the link you send them it takes them directly to your google business page or facebook business page and up pops the review block for them to give you a rating and a review. If you don’t ask, you wont get them so start asking! I’ll share with you that we haven’t always done everything right and, as I’ve said many times before, I have learned much from my failures. One of those mistakes in the past was a tragic failure on my part to make sure my business URL and all of my web properties were my own and that I had complete control of them. In one case I didn’t and I lost all of my business reviews which were in the hundreds. You do not want this to happen to you once you’ve created so much equity and business karma from doing good work. We haven’t let that slow us down or change any of our processes though and I just chalked it up to lesson learned.
 
Of course, the question needs to be addressed: what if I get a negative review, what do I do? This is a simple question and the response is simply to always respond back and follow up with them. You absolutely MUST respond to the review in a very positive way. Don’t become unprofessional or rude. Simply thank them for their feedback and respond with as much information as you can so that other readers of the review and your response can learn more about why this happened and how professional you are in your response. I would go the extra step and follow up with a phone call. Less than 1% of appraisers will and I don’t fully understand this unless you have already spoken with them by phone and they still write the review. But if you have already spoken to them by phone then you can explain that nicely in the review response and any reasonable readers of the review will see the steps and distance you went to explain and make things clear. At that point its all you can do. It is also the reason you want to get as many 5 star reviews as humanly possible because those make any negative review look like outliers and likely just disgruntled trolls.
 
Systems! Having systems in your business, however sophisticated or basic, is one of the fundamental keys to success in almost every business. It’s is one of the primary principles of what I teach and preach because without systems like the basic follow up system we just discussed your business is subject to the whims of your mood, your schedule, your life disruptions, and whatever areas you might be weak in. If you want to build a bulletproof appraisal business, heck, these methods work for every business; real estate, lending, car sales, HVAC sales, high end products, massage therapist… it doesn’t matter… these are principles that will lock up your market and make you the absolute leader. If you want to build a bulletproof appraisal business that is not dependent upon AMCs and fickle lenders pitting appraiser against appraiser in a race to the bottom or bidding in a reverse auction with the winner being the lowest bidder, the minimum cost for entry are these systems that we’ve been talking about over the last 6 months. Of course, you have to be a good appraiser. I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention that you must know how to produce a quality appraisal report. Unfortunately, we already know that in many cases, you don’t have to know much about appraising real estate well to get business. There are thousands and thousands of appraisers producing suboptimal appraisal reports and many of us review them every day. I don’t get upset when I see those shitty reports though, I get excited! I get excited because its simply a reinforcement of what I have know for a long time, the bar is very low in the appraisal business. The bar is very low in the real estate business. The bar is very low in the lending business. The bar to be good has been set very low. Getting educated is easy. Learning how to produce a quality appraisal report in the internet and social media age is relatively easy. I cut the umbilical cord with my mentor 15 years ago and I have never stopped learning. The most important lessons however, have been the lessons I learned about developing systems, about how to communicate effectively, both in the appraisal report and to my clients and potential clients, about the before, during, and after phases of my business, and about who my client actually is and what their deepest desires really are. Once you know that you can more effectively communicate in a language that speaks to their needs directly and in the language they speak. Until then, you’re simply an alien speaking some foreign language that turns them off, tunes them out, and sends them looking for somebody who speaks their language.
 
I’ll end this episode with another quote from Michael Gerber and the E-Myth revisited, ‘The work we do is a reflection of who we are. If we’re sloppy at it, it’s because we’re sloppy inside. If we’re late at it, it’s because we’re late inside. If we’re bored by it, it’s because we’re bored inside, with ourselves, not with the work. The most menial work can be a piece of art when done by an artist. So the job here is not outside of ourselves, but inside of ourselves. How we do our work becomes a mirror of how we are inside.”
 
Thank you my friends for investing your most valuable time with me again this week and that is, of course, your time and life energy. I take very seriously your investment of that time and will always do my best to give you a hellacious return on your investment but it is ultimately up to you with what you do with what I offer. Take some time to set up a simple follow up system and don’t be afraid to reach out to clients, especially the ones you know may not be happy with some aspect of your work, right or wrong. The bigger the problem we solve, the more we get rewarded in life and business. What do you say we meet back here again next week and do this all again except with some new stuff to share. I have a huge vault of stuff I’d like to share with you that I think may help you grow your business and enhance your life along the way. I look forward to hanging with you all again next week my friends. Until then…I’m out.