The Secret To Saving the Whole Appraisal Industry!

​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 Blaine Feyen and I am your host for this, and every episode of the Real Value Podcast. Very excited to be back with all of you this week and hanging in one of my favorite places to be, the Real Value studios. Its my creative space and the place where I get to turn nothing into something. Here I get to turn thoughts into ideas into words into actions, which is the order of creation and one of my most favorite activities. I truly enjoy taking something from the ether, a kernel of thought or the glimmer of an idea, and develop it, nurture it, feed it, do some research on it, expand it, and grow it into something that didn’t exist before. At some point you get to look back and see what’s been created and, to one degree or another, will live forever. As always, I thank you for the opportunity to do a show like this each week and know that its having a positive effect on those who will allow it to. 

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I hope all of you are well my friends and have all made it safely, prosperously, and happily into this week with a few things checked off of your list, a few new things added, a few notes of recognition for things you’ve accomplished, maybe a small list of things you’re grateful for this week, and a growing list of things you’d like to accomplish this week, month, or year. One of the reasons I so strongly encourage everyone to be engaged in the activity of journaling, note taking, tracking activities, goal setting and monitoring, and just simply thinking and planning is not necessarily because I want to turn you all into journalers and note takers, although I do want to turn you into goal setters, planners, and activity trackers, it’s because those things are common threads among the most successful people and businesses in the world. Thinking and creating is some of the hardest, but often highest paid, activities one can engage in. Production is important for cash flow and keeping things going, paying your bills, feeding the kids, and staying afloat, but the act of thinking and creating is what keeps things growing, innovating, seeing new opportunities, new markets, new customer segments, new ways to use and apply your product and service, and recognizing when its time to pivot and when its time to reboot. I have students who have said, and I see responses on forums from some appraisers who will say, when asked if they are going to an event or if they prospected for business this week, ‘nope, I’m too busy producing’, as if that’s an excuse for not doing some of the most vital work in building a business. I get it, busy is busy. But if you’re so busy that you cant do the 4 or 5 key things that every appraisal, real estate, and mortgage business absolutely needs to be doing each week, then it means we need to take a hard look at how you’re operating on a daily and weekly basis and where you can offload some things so that you CAN do the most vital work. Everything we do each day is, at some level, an ingrained habit and habits, as you all know, can be difficult to break. Harder still is replacing an old habit with a new one, but this habit of taking time, even if its just 10 or 20 minutes each day, to think, ponder, reflect, and then write, track, and measure is one of the habits that, if you and I were working together in this moment, I’d be hammering you to start doing. If life is worth living it is worth documenting. And if you don’t have exactly the life you’d like to be living yet, then documenting exactly how you’d like it to be is the surest way to get there. Its also one of the least participated in activities I know of amongst business people. Why? Because most of them, most of you, are simply too busy doing the busy work that brings in the cash to take any time to do something like that… and I get it. As I’ve mentioned in other episodes, I too have been a slave to the tyranny of routine at different times in my life. It is so much easier to put nose to grindstone and plow ahead than to take time to ponder. Thinking is hard work. I’m not talking about the thinking that each and every one of you does on a daily basis to complete an appraisal report or take a listing. I’m referring to the kind of creative thinking, day dreaming, and imagining that always precedes some kind of growth and change.
 
If any of you are already writers or journalers, you know what its like to stare at a blank page. A page that’s taunting you to come up with something to write or draw. Creating new things is difficult work but work that leads to other things, other benefits, often unseen at the time we’re doing them. If you are a person who has some basic discipline then you also know that the easiest way to overcome the proverbial blank page is to just do, to employ the power of habit and to simply start. If you hate working out but know you need to do it and you always feel better afterwards, you create habits and routines that are non negotiable and ensure that you make it to the gym, or the basement, or the garage, in my case. If you know that you drink too much soda and you know you need to stop, you simply stop buying it and bringing it into your house. You identify the psychological triggers that lead you to desiring the taste, the feeling of the ice cold drink hitting your mouth, the fizz, or whatever it is that triggers your brain and sets you down the path of eventually doing that thing that you know you probably should or shouldn’t be doing, at least if your health is important to you. For me personally, I have had issues with diet sodas over the years, I have had issues with food over the years, I have had issues with not doing the things I know I should be doing to improve myself, my business, or some aspect of my life that I knew could be better but just couldn’t muster the energy or discipline to do those things on my own. That’s where last week’s episode on accountability comes in and gets applied because most of us simply don’t have the ability to stop ourselves from doing moderately destructive things to our bodies, like drinking soda, overeating, eating bad foods, smoking, drinking too much beer or liquor on the weekends, or whatever it is that we all do that we know we should probably moderate or stop altogether. That is until we find some compelling reason to either stop doing the destructive things and/or start doing the things that make us better like working out, eating healthier, quitting smoking, taking time off, recharging our batteries, focusing on family or charity or some other thing that could help expand who we are and what we are becoming on any given day.
 
If you listened to the past episode where I discussed your arc of activities and where your arc is pointing to, you learned how to look at the trajectory of where your daily and weekly activities are eventually leading to. Is your arc headed downward, laterally in a straight line, or upward in an arc of growth? This is one of the things that I employ in my own life and business on a regular basis to at least put myself on notice of where things will end up if I stay on the same path. Sometimes the arc is a positive one and I can say, “Blaine, if you stay on this arc and trajectory, in 6 months you’ll be in a better place than you are right now”, or “Blaine, if you keep on at this pace with this particular activity, you’ll likely be as big as an outhouse and regretting some of your decisions in six months and will be working twice as hard as you are now to reverse the effects of your decisions, so get after it!” I teach and preach all the time about structure in and for your business, about not overworking and taking time to recharge, remodel, recover, and how that helps when it comes time to get results. Well, over the past few months I have found myself doing some of the things that I always promise myself I wont be doing. Primarily, working too much in my business, or at least more than I promise myself that I’m going to so that I can do other things that I know are extremely valuable to my chosen trajectory. I cannot stress this enough my friends, we all get into the habit of making hay when the sun is shining, meaning, when we get super busy we take everything we can, maybe we have the benefit of cherrypicking the best orders and turning down the work we don’t like, but we tell ourselves some kind of story about how its going to be short term, just gotta do it while its busy, gotta make that money while its coming in because it may slow down at some point and then you’ll be complaining that its slow. This is one of the myths that has plagued this industry, and really the whole real estate industry for decades. At times, I too have uttered those words and have used them to justify to myself why I’ve been working more hours than my heart, soul, and schedule tell me is too much. The last several months in particular have been this way in our company. They have been record setting months for many of you, many of our students, and definitely for us as well.
 
As you well know by now, or should, we don’t take any AMC work, its all direct lender, realtor and lender referred, attorney referred, financial planner referred, and homeowner generated work like all cash real estate deals, divorce, for sale by owner, settling of estates, etcetera. Many of our direct lenders work through some of the AMC portals like AppraisalLinx, Xome, AppraisalPort, Mercury, you name it, but we never have to bid on work or take random orders from people we don’t have a relationship with, which is a wonderful place to be in in this crazy time in the appraisal business. One of our rules for taking on new business is that we have to know somebody in the business that we can call and have a conversation with. We must have a direct line to people within the organization so we can pick up the phone and talk about important topics or we simply aren’t going to take the work. I say it all the time and its not a humble brag that we turn down almost as much, sometimes more work than we take because we simply don’t want it, its out of our wheelhouse in terms of complexity and competency, its potentially sketchy in some regard, or we simply cant service them in the way they need to be serviced. Super rush orders, people we know don’t appreciate the way we work, etcetera. Nevertheless, we are busy enough to keep multiple appraisers scheduled weeks out, and our staff fat and happy with the amount of work, spiffs, and bonuses they get on the regular. By the way, I know I don’t really talk about it on this show because, as of yet we haven’t done an episode on employees, independent contractors, virtual assistants, office structure, and those kinds of topics, but what I will say is that, when you find somebody who’s good for your business, and we’ll talk in future episodes what that might mean, you want to treat them like the vital key people that they are and I‘m not necessarily referring to appraisers. I’m talking about assistants and staff people. We talk in a roundabout way about leadership on this show and its one of the main topics that I love to speak and teach on whenever I get the opportunity, and one of the secrets of good leadership is recognizing talent and giving them the credit. We do something in our company that might not get us any awards for having the lowest cost staff and assistants and that’s that we tend to overpay for some of those services. By that I mean,  I know what I can get a good low cost virtual assistant or staff person for in the market. I know the parameters and skill sets to look for and demand, and I know what the market rates are for those services. However, I also know the cost of training somebody, of finding good people, the low cost of keeping good people and the high cost of keeping the wrong people too long or in the wrong positions. We regularly overpay our people when you add what we pay them per file, their bonuses for production and catching mistakes, spiffs for certain client service activities, being on call, etc. If you were just looking at a monthly P&L statement out of context and devoid of any explanation, you might say, ‘geez Blaine, your staffing and employee expense could be a bit lower’, and you’d be right. Because what you cant see in that statement is how much business our staff and assistants have gotten us, kept for us, saved for us, and quality control functions that where they’ve caught small things on reports or in the MLS that maybe I or one of our appraisers wouldn’t have caught. Take care of your people and take care of them better than anybody else will because they’re worth 3-5 times what you invest in them each week.
 
Nevertheless, its a different topic for a different episode, the point in me mentioning it is that sometimes I have to remind myself why we’re in the position we’re in with my appraisal business and it would be very easy to let my ego win the day and think it’s because of the quality of our work. And, in fact, that’s what most appraisers say, tell themselves, and tell me when we have our initial interviews for coaching and mentoring. The reality is that, independent of quality, our business is where it is because we follow several key principles and practices, one of which is the one I just mentioned which is to take care of your people better than anybody else can or will. Recognize talent, cultivate it, develop it for the long term, reward it handsomely, and then give them all the credit for your success. The other principle is one I talk about in some form or fashion almost every episode and that’s that we get face to face with hundreds, if not thousands over a year’s time, of real human beings. We are doing talks and classes almost every week, we are breaking bread on a regular basis with realtors, lenders, attorneys, financial planners, and business owners. We are on the phone following up with our list of contacts each week, writing at least 10 thank you cards, sending videos to clients, past clients, and potential current clients, calling and thanking people personally for the business they’ve sent or referred, and the list goes on. I’ve talked about all of these things so none of this should be new or groundbreaking. Its groundbreaking to some degree for the appraisal business, but not for this show. The quality of our business is directly related to the quality of our interactions with real human beings each week and our constant effort to stay in front of people and not get bogged down inside of the business. We can talk all day long about the E-Myth and the concept of working more on your business and maybe a little less in your business, but at the end of the day, what most appraisers default to is the working in the business. In fact, many of you pat yourselves on the back so much that you must have scars back there about just how much you are working in your business. How many files you have piled up on your desk and just how late into the evening or early morning you’re working to get those files out. Silly! I’ve talked about it enough so I wont keep harping on it in this episode but, for all the new appraisers coming into the business that may be listening, these are not the ones to be looking up to! Work life balance is one of the foundational principles we teach and preach and working all hours day and night is one of the quickest and surest ways to becoming a broken human being. Those appraisers should be congratulated for cultivating a business that has a lot of business but should be karate chopped in the clavicle for perpetuating this dumb ass myth that that is what’s required to run a successful appraisal business. Real estate and mortgage has the same problem, by the way.
 
I just had a coaching session with one of my business coaches and mentors who is a long time friend and colleague, but also one of the nations top producing loan originators and founder of one of our areas best mortgage companies. They follow very similar business and life principles as what we talk about on this show all the time, which is why we’re still friends and he’s one of my coaches and mentors. This is a guy who is closing around 1000 loans per year between himself and his team of 3 production assistants. This is not the whole company numbers, those are just his and his team’s numbers. They have dozens of loan originators doing various levels of production on top of that. As you can probably imagine, he’s also one the nation’s top coaches of loan originators and mortgage people, not because of his personal production, but because of his personality and discipline that leads to that kind of production, which, by the way, is growing each year. As we sat and chatted about various points to work on, I asked him about his current schedule. We’ve talked about it over the years as he’s grown his business and expanded his company, but I asked him again because his personal business has been growing exponentially each year and I wanted to see if he was still happy with it, what his work life balance was like, if he was working more hours now with so much production, and how profitable he was at these higher levels of production relative to his lower levels of production but maybe with less staff management and fewer headaches. Here’s what he said, “Blaine, theres no point in growing and expanding if its taking more of your life with less return. The point of growth and expansion is to create more opportunities to profit, help more people who will refer more people, and build something sustainable based on the ‘belly to belly’ relationships that we create.” When I asked him how many hours he’s working in his business, he said, “I work about 50 hours per week. I’d work less and can work less but I don’t know what I’d do with the extra time.” Now, to break down those 50 hours a bit so that there’s some context, when he says he’s working 50 hours, he means he’s at the office or engaged in some kind of business activity for around 50 hours per week. He blocks off between 11 am and 5 pm every Wednesday for his coaching calls and training, he’s out in the community having breakfasts, lunches, drinks, and cigars with clients, past clients, potential clients, realtor partners, and business owners. He’s at his desk several hours per week making prospecting calls, follow up calls on potential clients, update calls for loans in process, and so on. His 50 hours consists of some of what we might call more like 30 to 4o hours of actual working in the business because part of that time is working on the business type work. Every single week! And of course, he has production staff that are involved in that process that take some of the load off of his shoulders for producing those 1000 loans per year. Do they cost him money? Of course they do! Do they earn him more money than they cost? Of course they do! But they all share in that process and collectively produce hundreds of millions of dollars in loan production and millions in personal income.
 
One of the interesting exchanges we had during this session was when he showed me his phone. He wanted to make a point about his work life balance so he showed me his phone and said, ‘flip through the call log, look at the calls, the time stamps, and the number of calls.’ I was expecting to see hundreds and hundreds of calls all hours of the day and night. What I found was something he was extremely proud of! His personal cell phone had less than 10 calls in then call log from the previous day to the time we were meeting, which was between 4:30 and 6:30 in the evening. There was a call from one of his sons, a couple calls from his wife, a few more calls from big realtors in our area, some random 1-800 numbers, likely spam, and that was it. The latest call in the log was 8pm from his son. No late night pre-approval calls from realtors, no late night calls to put out fires on loan files, and no weekend calls to solve problems. Now, to be fair to the story, he has staff and they’re all paid well to take some of those calls, but they’re also trained really well to be sales people as well and talk to the clients in almost exactly the same way that my friend would if he was speaking to them personally. They get new deals as a result of the way his staff handles transactions, they get tons of referrals as a result of the way his staff of 3 handles things, and they basically pay for themselves many times over as a result of the way they’ve been trained and the load they take off of his shoulders so he can live his life and be the production and prospecting machine that keeps that ship moving and expanding. Now, I know what some of you might be saying, “well yeah Blaine, he makes millions of dollars so of course he has staff and assistants and can work whenever he wants”, to which I’d say, you’ve missed the point superstar. He wouldn’t have been able to get to the levels of production without first recognizing the need to have somebody in that position. He wouldn’t have been able to grow past a certain point without first sacrificing some of his own personal income to hire and train a person that would ultimately help him go to he next level. And he wouldn’t be living the life he lives now without first recognizing the need to have some kind of work life balance which lead to his decision to hire good people that helped grow his business and in a way that allows him time with family, time to fish, time to smoke cigars, time to congregate with friends and family, and time to enjoy life in general.
 
Now, here’s the main point of todays episode and one of the things that my coach confirmed for me in our discussion. I asked him for his thoughts on the future, where his industry is going, appraisal waivers, technology, big data, Fannie, Freddie, Zillow, Redfin, OpenDoor, discount brokerages, online mortgages, and all the things that the appraisal industry deals with too. His answer may sound a bit crass at first but hang in there for the context and full explanation. His answer was, ‘Save yourself Blaine, don’t try to save an industry that cant be saved.’ He wasn’t specifically referring to the appraisal business, he was referring to the direction of the lending, real estate, and appraisal businesses that are all being affected similarly by advancement, growth, technology, and change. He expanded his thoughts to say that ‘you can do whatever you want to try to keep things the way they are or were sometime in the past, but you’d be pushing against a swiftly moving freight train. The changes in the industry are, in a way, directed by the market, the market we so often claim to speak for. Don’t waste your time or energy trying to save something just because that’s the way its always been done.” He followed it up by explaining that, not only were they not going to bow to the trend to discount their services, cut fees, and throw shit against the wall to see what sticks, they are doubling down on what author John Naisbitt called ‘high tech, high touch’ back in the early 80’s and wrote a book about in the late 90’s. My friend said, ‘we’re investing in technology but not just for technologies sake. We’re only investing in technology that helps us touch our clients and potential clients more often and in more meaningful ways than we might be able to do on our own. We want to be belly to belly with our clients and potential clients because there will always be a need for high quality service in a high tech world. Let the discounters discount and let Zillow and Redfin do what they’re going to do because you cant stop it. Nor can you stop the direction of a whole industry by screaming at it and begging for people to respect the process. At the end of the day, people are going to do what they’re going to do and industries follow the money. If you want to be a profitable player in a a changing market you have to decide on which side of the fence you want to play and then how to be as profitable as you can on that side of the fence. Spending any time trying to get a whole industry to stay the same is wasted time and effort. The industry is changing whether we like it or not and the good news is that we get to decide whether we want to, and to what degree, we want to participate. He said, and I wholeheartedly agree with him on this point, that ‘realtors and lenders are in far more danger of extinction, or at least extreme change, than even appraisers are’. ‘It doesn’t phase me in the least!’, he said, ‘we’re going to keep doing what we do best which is give extremely high quality service to the people who want it. The interesting thing is, every year we seem to find more and more people who really want high quality service over low quality, low touch, high tech service’.
 
So what does that mean for us my friends? What does that mean for appraisers? It means exactly what I’ve been saying since we rebooted the podcast last July. High quality service, high tech service, high quality leadership in your market, and becoming the absolute go to authority in your market is the direction that I encourage each and every one of you to go. Your other option is to choose the other side of the fence which is low quality, low touch, high tech, but considerably lower fees. I’m not against this model either, its just not for me and my personality or skill set. I want to work with and interact with human beings that recognize quality and are interested in relationship over technology. Every smart businessperson knows what ROI means, it means return on investment. Very few know what ROR is and it’s the reason so many suffer in our business. ROR stands for return on relationship and is the number that should be focused on, tracked, and calculated on a weekly and monthly basis. I know this has the chance to come across as discouragement, negative, and a bit counterintuitive when I say the same thing as my friend said, which is to save yourself. I’m not telling you not to be involved with an organization, in fact, I encourage that kind of thing. Thanks to Rachel Massey, Rick Morris, Jason Fischman, Charles Baker, and Dan Bittner, I’ll be speaking and teaching at a couple of Appraisal Institute economic summits and symposiums in the fall. I encourage membership in supportive organizations and even individual appraisers to gather together in their town and develop their own masterminds and collectives to help each other grow and be referral sources. So I’m not saying its every man or woman for him or herself. When I say to save yourself, I’m referring to the eliminating the mindset that an industry or way of doing something can be saved. I’m sorry to be the voice of reason, albeit maybe somewhat negative, but you’re simply not going to save the appraisal industry no matter how many letters you write, how many times you call your Congressperson, or how many signatures you get on your campaign to save it. Governments do what governments do and big money does what big money does. And they tend to feed each other based on what is in their own best interest, not necessarily the best interest of the little guy, the consumer, the homeowner, or the independent appraiser. When you add into that the high tech world we live in today and the era of big data and data analysis, you have a sure fire recipe of change and evolution whether you like it or not. Many will be simply washed out of the appraisal, real estate, and mortgage industries, or they’ll quit. However, for the foreseeable future, there will be a need in every market for high tech, high touch real estate appraisers who follow similar prospecting and belly to belly practices of the industries we serve, which is the real estate and mortgage industries, to name just a few. Don’t waste one minute of your time and life energy trying to save something that doesn’t want to be saved and likely cant. Spend all of your time saving educating yourself, your local market, your market of professionals who can refer you, and those who may have a need for your services or your education in the future.
 
I can tell you from being a speaker and educator in our market as part of our business model that talking to realtors and lenders each week and educating them on how to think properly about, say, appraisal waivers, has helped our business tremendously. I could spend hours and time writing to my congressman about the danger of appraisal waivers, or I could do what we’ve done which is to go into our market and talk about the good, the bad, how to think about them, how to put them in their proper perspective, and what might be a situation where you may want to have your clients call me for an appraisal and our phones are ringing off the hook. Many of you don’t know the power you may have built into each and every one of you when it comes to the power of words and communication. Save yourself my friends. Save yourself by teaching your market what it all means and the benefits your product and service have for them. You’re not going to save the whole industry and you’re not going to stop the freight train of change that is occurring in 100 different industries. Complain all you want. Bitch all you want. Stomp your feet all you want. Discourage people from getting into this industry all you want. We’ll be out in our market again next week talking to 100 more agents and lenders about why to use us, how we like to work, how to think about the appraisal and how not to think about the appraisal process, and why it could just be the cheapest investment and protection of your investment.
 
Bamboo is renowned for its ability to bend under the weight of heavy snow and not break. Surf boards and sailboats work because they’re able to float on the top of the water and move with it instead of fighting against it. And hedgehogs are one of the smartest little animals alive because, when attacked by a predator, they simply curl up in a ball, expose their little spiny backs to their predators and let the predator roll them around trying to find the weak spot in their defense. They don’t fight back, they literally roll along with the attack until the predator gets tired and gives it. One of the foundational principles of Aikido is to accept the energy from whatever direction its coming from. When pushed, move with the push and off balance your attacker. When pulled, go along with the pull and off balance your attacker. Self defense is applied by off weighting an unbalancing an attacker not because they’re attacking, but as a result of them putting forth the energy to attack. We use the energy given to us by the attacker to power our own defense against the attack. No fighting needed because all of the energy is given to you by the attack. No energy needed to fight against something that is inevitable my friends. Take the energy given my the change, evolution and disruption in the market and turn it into something useful for your life and business. Save yourselves my friends and rewrite the rules for your business. The industry is going to do what its going to do and the 1%ers, the hedgehogs, the Aikido practitioners, and those who have the will, personalities, attitudes, internal locus of control, and are able to flex and rebound like bamboo will be the ones who come out of the smoke bigger, better, and more profitable than everyone else. Get off the train tracks and become the conductor of your own railroad.
 
I’d like to thank you for hanging out with me again this week my friends and investing your most valuable currency, which is of course, your time! I appreciate your investment of that currency in one of the most important people in your life, and that’s you. Like the airline attendant who says, ‘in the event of a crash, please put on your own oxygen ask first before you try to help anybody else’, you must save yourself and your business first before trying to save anybody else. You cant save an industry nor the ways things are done. What you can do is be flexible, roll with change, focus on return on relationship, and build the most profitable client focused machine you possibly can. Huge opportunities ahead for appraisers, realtors, and lenders with eyes and flexibility to see them. There will be fewer of us, for sure. The ones who survive will either be data analysts sitting behind a computer all day for relatively low pay, or powerhouse relationship experts who dominate their markets and deliver world class client service in such a way that the market will think the cost of your service is cheap at twice the price. Its your job to make that happen and communicate your value to your market. Speaking of powerhouse relationship experts, I want to take this opportunity to give a big fist bump and bro hug to my friend Mark Skapinetz, founder of the 100% real estate appraisers facebook group and possibly our industries David to the Goliath that is the banking and AMC side of things. If you don’t know Mark, you owe it to yourself to google Mark Skapinetz and Brian Coester so that you can read all about how Mark helped take down one of the giants in the AMC world and for very good reason. What started out as Mark doing exactly what we’re talking about here today, defending and saving himself from Brian Coester hacking into Mark’s emails, eventually turned into something of a battle for all of us. I’ll let Mark explain the whole thing when he starts making the rounds and telling the story, but suffice it to say that it was a multi year legal battle that was very expensive and cost Mark a great deal in terms of personal resources, as well as costing him very dearly personally. From all of us here at the Real Value Studios to you my friend, congrats and thanks for sticking it out! I know it wasn’t easy and there were times when you probably wanted to, and I know we’re encouraged to give up and give in, which would’ve been a win for criminal activity and simply bad behavior. And to those of you who encouraged Mark to give up his lawsuit for your own personal and professional motivations, shame on you. And for not having the guts to say a word about it on your nationally syndicated soapbox, shame on you again. Mark doesn’t need me or anybody else to come to his defense as he’s pretty good at that himself, but if you’ve ever been through a divorce, a bad break up, or god forbid, a nasty lawsuit, you know what it feels like to be in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in your life and have people you thought were your friends just disappear, turn their backs, and walk away from you. People you thought you could count on, people you had invested in and had invested in you, people who told you to your face that they got your back, and then… when it doesn’t fit into their own plans and agenda, boom! All you see is their back as they turn, walk away from you, and close the door behind them. Congrats and thank you Mark, not only for scoring a huge win for yourself personally, but taking a big one for the team, and also for also learning an extremely valuable life lesson about friendship in the process. Love you man!
 
Until next week my friends, I’m out.