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Author: Chris Johnson (page 1 of 6)

Instigator, anthill kicker.

June 30, 2011

Talking Dog Syndrome

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

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Robert Worthington’s car story reminds me of this.

In 2003, I had an epic run.  A 6 figure 60 day period.

I was happy as hell.  In 2004, I became…

Arrogant.  Thought this was my new life.  Thought I was now a 7 figure agent. Made a 60 thousand month an 80 thousand month (and forgot the famine that sandwiched the months).

We’ve talked about this before.

Anyway, enter a man, Harry.  Harry was a mid 40’s (I was late 20’s) agent.  Looked like Peter Falk with a crew cut.  Harry was a nice guy, a little slow, and kind of a bumpkin.  Harry’s mom used to be in Real Estate as an old time agent.  Harry’s mom could now move to Florida.

People thought Harry was a moron.

People derided Harry for having his momma’s business.

Harry drove a 1993 Geo Prizm everywhere.  He got to the office around 7am and left around 10am.  He got back to the office around 7pm and stayed for a half hour or so.  We didn’t see much of him.  I was in the office to sober up for an hour after being a little too boozy.  We passed as he was coming back.

I can’t resist the urge to brag, and this time was no different.

“4 closings this week.”  I said, counting my $129,000 4% double ender as 2 closings.

“Great.” he said, “You only get about 2 great runs a year, so work hard.”

Whatever, bumpkin.

Slow talking Harry was always enthusiastic, didn’t miss a meeting, and kept to himself.

Later, he referred a client he didn’t have time for to me.  I didn’t close him.  The client was a jerk.  (Note: I probably could have closed him had I not wanted to be right, but that’s a lesson for another time).   Another client, and nothing.  Harry asked to see me, I was too busy, but would welcome his referrals.

I got one more, another closable person that my arrogance kept away (after all, I was driving an Acura RL, what the hell could Harry know.  He drove a Hundai to get here. I never met with Harry  and didn’t hear much from him.

But after our brokerage Read more

June 16, 2011

Book To Buy: The War of Art

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Today, you will need to buy this book.

Because it has been the one thing that’s been key to the run I’ve been on.  To understanding who I am.

To go pro.

Every idea I’ve implimented has come from this book – or from the Meditations (hays translation).

Anyway, even if you’re broke and mad at the world, go get this book.  I’ve read it 5 times, I think.  I could stand to read it 50 more.

June 14, 2011

What We’ve Been Doing.

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Howdy Bloodhounds. Not a lot to say in the real estate world because I’be been working on the After Effects Demo Shop, Simplifilm.Com.

The Foundation for a Free Society commissioned us to make a video. So, obviously, we did. This one owes an homage to the clear thinking of Greg Swann (along, of course with Bastiat)

We make demo videos and we’re priced in the lower five figures per finished, written, voiced and rendered minute. This piece isn’t really representative of what we’re doing, but it fits the conversations that we’ve had here. It’s probably the last political thing we’ll do for a great long while. We’re immensely proud of it.

I can say for certain if Greg hadn’t provided some of the vocabulary it wouldn’t have been as good as it it is. Help the Foundation for a Free Society and give them some money. They are locked in and loaded, competent and winning. (Disclosure: some of their money might come back to us in the form of a video, but we assure you: we charged them less per minute – by 1/3 -than anyone else will ever pay).

May 22, 2011

Changing Your Life – Behavior Based Changes For More Productivity

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

I’ve had a string of successes lately.  May will mark the end of the 7th month of growing income.  In a row.  For a salesperson that surfs the payables (thanks, Greg for that phrase), it’s a joy to be there.   I’m also cheating: October was the most brutally bad month I’ve had- it might have been $500.00 net, and it took till January or Feb to recover from that.

I’ve hardly “arrived,” during this time I’ve put on about 17 pounds (despite going to the gym pretty regularly – the battle at the dinner table has been met poorly by me, and that changes Wednesday with a physician supervised 90 day commitment with a variant of the Paleo diet.)   I’m on the cusp of paying the monster IRS debt that I acquired in my 20’s.  On the cusp means July to those scoring at home.

My wife has suffered from the madness of depression during this time (something I’ve struggled with, and it’s true madness), and there are the usual excuses and resistances that exist.  But I’ve done stuff to compensate for the Resistance.  And I’m sharing this with you.

I’m also gonna say that I’ve doubled my income and left about 25% of my “hours worked” behind.   I am working harder, when I’m working, and making a deliberate effort to refresh myself at the wellspring (more on that in a bit).

In any case,  let’s talk about the “how” behind this.  A series of simple change that, taken together, have made for profound growth.  This year will have a higher income than last year.    These habits- below- are why.  Each could get a bigger blog post or treatment.

Daily Read: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I read about 3-5 pages from this each day.  I’m a believer in Christ.  Still the way that this is laid out speaks to me, Scriptures for my thinking and has changed my behavior.  To the point: I don’t have prickly little testy spats with people because I leave them to most of their own bullshit.  I can ignore much, easily.  I don’t need to inform the Read more

April 29, 2011

It’s Time To Think About…Money…Brian Brady’s Money

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

We’re going to take a brief break from the political apocalypse that surrounds us and deal with money.

Your Money.

I’m something of a master at listening on Twitter.  When someone says “After effects”  or “motion graphics” I’m there.  There are a dozen or so other ones that work much better, but you get the picture.  I’m unlikely to share them.

It’s what’s building Simplifilm.com (our work is here, I’ll share some good stuff sometime soon).

I have dozens running on my tweetdeck.  I pitch a few times a day.  It works.

Now, I learned something that Brian Brady better use.

The phrase “New Client,” and “New Buyer,” are tweeted a few hundred times a day.

Over hundred times – 1/3 they are Realtors pandering for Approbation.  “Look at me, I have a client.”  Most of the time, it’s a buyer.  A buyer that needs a mother frolicking mortgage loan.

What if a great lender, googled, called, and then offered the Realtor approval?  What if that lender played dumb and pretended they didn’t see things on Twitter, but had a polished, refined pitch?

Fish in a barrel.  Takes seconds to skim, minutes to sort, and needy people are forever most easily persuaded.

Also: if you have clients- shut up about them.  Marketers brag about new, unsigned clients.  I appreciate them identifying who is in the market for me, saves me the research.  (Be silent, or be better than silence).

April 14, 2011

Approbation Junkies

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

I wonder, with regard to an addiction to things, if there isn’t a deeper cause… maybe a hole that needs filling. I ascribe most of our eventual attacks on ego to a lack of continuity we create within ourselves, and our inability to either align our external actions or accept our internal truth.

Sean Purcell commented here, not long ago.  Good stuff.  I wanted to bring it to the forefront.

Here’s the thing: needing approbation from others has made me weaker than anything else.  It’s made me a pawn of a dilettante, a hustler for a buck and it’s made me do all of the smarmy, seedy things I’ve ever done.   The root cause has been making someone like me.

Think of this: when you’ve gone to a store with a big ticket item, and you get an ingratiating, smarmy salesperson there.  His goal in life is to make you like him.  Is there anything more repulsive?   You see a car salesperson that wants you to seem like a friend.  Is anyone fooled by the saccharine compliments?  Anyone?

And if they convince you that you need to approve of them, you leave with a bad taste in your mouth, not unlike bile.  I’ve been that guy, on both sides of the counter.  I know.

It’s like going into a gentleman’s club, as if some dude in his late 40’s is gentrified by ogling daddy issue girls in their early 20’s.

Approbation is carbon monoxide.  Seeking it in lieu of achievement means a death of a million cuts.

The Oatmeal has it right.

Jesus, also, has it right:

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  (Matthew 6:2)

And what a reward.  Seriously.  What a reward to have dirtbags approve of you.

We clamor for it…the approval of strangers….(or in the case of Real Estate conferences, strangers that cheat on their wives.)  A standing ovation devoid of meaning?  We haven’t achieved jack, but we want the adulation anyway.  We do so much pandering.

To Read more

April 11, 2011

How To Be a Coward: Part 10.

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Greg likes Michelle Pfeifer. I can dig it.

This is more my speed. Look, there’s always – always a justification to surrender, give up liberty, give up more. There’s always – always some call to pretend that everything is OK.

And we surrender in our selves first, because we become addicted to things. We become addicted to stuff. That stuff owns us.

Then we become addicted to making nice. Because if we’re not nice, someone might not let us have stuff.

Screw that. Take back your dignity and only tolerate excellence.

Hard to do.

March 10, 2011

Sane People Don’t Comment on Real Estate Blogs, You Don’t Need 1,000 Facebook Friends & Other Valuable Lessons Learned From 3 Years Slinging Stuff Online

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

The real thing that pissed me off about the well intentioned jackals at Agent ReBoot was not what was explicitly taught: it was what was implied.  Somehow you need oodles of traffic to be successful.  Somehow, you need oodles of Facebook Likes.  That somehow all being able to be at the center a tepid and tense noisy murmur was what it takes to be Real Successful in Real Estate.

And I’ve made the mistake too.  For a long time, I thought it was simple math: converting a tiny percentage of mostly indifferent people would scale.  You would LinkIn a bunch of people on MyTwitFace and voila! Winning!

So you take every friend request you can, and you add the pople you connect with, as force of habit.  If someone has 6-7 friends in common, you add them too.  Winning.

You fire up a blogpost or two,pass it along and your new friends and strangers dutifly comment something often indistinguishable from the stuff that winds up on the wrong side of your akismet filter.

“Nice post, you laid it on me.”  they dutifly say. And you in turn go through the WP dashboard to their sites.  “You make nice post to, I love to hear you on this topic! ” It’s all about the dofollow, baby.  Getcher linkbacks here, and on to the next one.

Winning.  You have a metric to measure: friends, contacts, twitbacks, clicks and raw traffic.  Woot.  Winning. You’re winning that game, the war for comments.  You’re marching your army of 12,000 Twitter Bots, 2100 indifferent Facebookers, and another few hundered people that are still shuffling around the empty halls on LinkedSpace.  Duh, winning!

Bad contacts- just  like bad money –drive out good contacts.  You had a Facebook full of300 friends, coworkers and neighbors.  You were connected to these people.  You were warmed when you saw the pictures they posted.  Now?   You have 300 of your friends.  But now your Facebook had been “improved” by the 700 Realtors from across the country, the 200 vendors that follow them, and just recently a herd of zebra showed up.  Now, instead of the people you love and know, Read more

November 21, 2010

Fathertonge instant communication ideas on the web.

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fLQ9ATx7n8

The above is not embeddable, but a demo-y version of this lovely song:

yeah, I been through a lot and you can’t scare me/go on baby, if you just dare me/i’ll break through any wall–just gimme a call/….i’m a prize fighter.

Fathertongue For the Web

I know that this shorthand isn’t totally innate.  Still,we have, for the most part, been on the web regularly for a decade or more, there are some conventions that signal “what happens next” to people.  It’s not true nose-to-anus father-tongue, but it’s not far off.

Anyway, some Fathertongue ideas as I understand them.  Quick, symbolic shorthand ideas to communicate, in broad strokes, what happens next.  After reading Greg’s post last week, I was thinking of the practical: how can I more properly communicate in my own business (and by extension that of my clients) what will happen when working with me.

That post got me thinking about websites, and quick shorthands for approval, welcome and other things.  That post got me to do stuff to my own business (and I’ll report on the results at the bottom of this post).

How can I create a “scent trail” that’s big and loud?

I started with the green checkmarks in various places–to signal approval.

Check-icon.png

success-check.png

These are, of course familiar to all of us that have bought something.  They are there to get us to buy things.

I then took my checkout page and changed the field entry order and put a lock by it “visa number”.  I also threw in a lock in several places:

 

 

 

Screen shot 2010-11-21 at 3.36.27 PM.png

The lock, in both places, was stock images from  somewhere, the lock by the credit card button is said to decrease abandonment.  My cart is a two step cart: I send people to a page where they enter their name and phone number first, and then if they chose not to, I can now call ’em and ask why.

Now, before I did this, and added our ‘fathertongue tail wags”  I had an ugly cart and 1-step checkout process.   “Here’s a big-ass form, go nuts with it.”  My form that sometimes (often) took a long time to load because of some of Read more

November 17, 2010

Greg Swann is Just a Twit-Head and Other Common Knowledge

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Greg Swann is dead wrong:

I say that trying to sell real estate via Twitter/Facebook is a waste of time — and it is anti-marketing even if it seems to produce some results. Why?

I’ve said it, in public.  And I’m only being mildly gratuitous.  Because it’s fun.

It is productive to be on Twitter all day long.

It’s also productive to be on Facebook all day long.

Especially in comparison to the selling behavior of the average Bullpen Agent(tm).  That’s being on facebook and twitter bitching about their lack of business and appraisal issues.

Now, listen also to what I’m not saying: I’m not saying that it’s the most productive possible use of time. I’m not saying that the ambient, distracted entitled connectivity lifestyle is something to be. I’m not saying that the way the practitioners teach it is sensible.  It’s not prudent to crow-plain about every bit of work that they do as if each ordinary real estate transaction is this death struggle that only you can close because you are $(array_honest,kind,connected,smart).

I’m not saying that I’d follow an example of any of the Twit-Lumin-ati.

I’m saying that in damn near any market, a smart agent should be getting 12-14 deals a year via twitter.

They are there, daily.

And you can snatch them out from under the entitled noses of those folks that are “pillars of the twit-munity,” with ease.   With ease.

How?

1.) Search.Twitter.Com:  This is a godsend.  This is amazing.  “House hunting” in your area “realtor” in your area.  Say hi, send ’em to a squeeze page.

2.) MarketMeSuite.Com (disclosure: they are a paying client of ours). Geotarget local people.  Autofollow and autoengage.  Make contacts and add to your sphere.  They have an auto tool that lets you quickly add and kill it.

3.) TwitterFeed.com when I used TweetSpinner to build up my account (and the ratio of bots/humans is about 4:1) I noticed that my bit.ly links got more clicks.  Others had similar results, and if you happen to be blogging and cataloguing your city brute force style, you do it.

4.) DMs.  These are where Twitter rocks.  Build relationships, make sales.  Don’t hesitate, go balls Read more

November 6, 2010

Let’s Be Clear About Social Media

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

I keep thinking I’m going to stop posting here.  I keep thinking that I’m going to get sucked into the vortex of rancor that BHB can be.   And then we get these gems of conversation from Brian, Jeff, Al & Greg.  And I’m drawn right back in.   Nothing’s perfect, everybody’s crazy, right?  Life goes on, and the closest I will get to a rebuttal of Greg’s impractical rancor is that it’s wallet-foolish to criticize someone that competes for some of the same business you do. Saving my rancor for when it matters has doubled my income. Your milage may vary.

I digress. Circling back to my take on Facebook.   I post there often, it’s in my opening tabs as I start my computer.  I look around and peruse.  I make some money from it, mostly in the form of the zombies.

Zombies?  These are the strangers that add me randomly on Facebook.  I consider that an “opt in”, so I add them back and put them on a “social media” list in Heap.

And then I send my new pseudo-friends a torrent of spam and calls.  They cry uncle with an Amex.   They are mostly realtors.

I process my queue about once a month and I wind up with 75-80 “leads”.  This generates about $3500 in new business.  $50 bucks a friend, y’all can add me all day long.

This is what most Realtors that are hustling do on Facebook. At least there’s effort here, which is more than I can say for those that strive to monetize whatever should flit across their subconscious.

 

Anyhow, enjoy.

November 1, 2010

What A Good Year (Still Broke).

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

This year has been a good year.  I’ve come tantalizingly close to a neutral net worth.

I’m not there yet, but the breakdown is something like this:  Payroll & Business Debt: $8,000, Consumer Debt: $0.  Education Debt $24,00 Tax (mostly Ohio) Debt: $30,000.

Based on the rate I’ve been paying debt down, I’ll probably be healthy in April.  Maybe sooner if I catch some of the breaks I expect.

All of these numbers were higher at the beginning of the year.  And, they are listed in the rough order I’ll be paying them off.   When I started writing on BHB, I was more than a quarter million dollars in non-real estate debt. Staggering now that you think about it.  That’s a whole house, nice in most areas and really nice in the Midwest.  We sold our home, walked away from our lease-option (leaving thousands with the owner who was still underwater).   We went into bunker mode, where we lived (all 4 of us) in a two bedroom apartment.

That helped cut expenses which helped create a business–and helped me be able to fail with less risk.  Because getting caught up on basic needs was just a table waiting job away.  Living cheap reduces pressure and increases options.  I recommend it to all parties.  If you have a wife that lets you do that NEVER LEAVE HER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Anyway, it’s time to up the ante, and we’re gonna be “behavior based” in lieu of outcome based.  It’s well and good to have goals with outcomes.  But behaviors lead to outcomes.  And good definitions of “done” is what’s done.

So I’m going to do 5 things each day.  This will make up the majority of my day.  Other things matter, but not as much.  The definition of success matters as well.   This should take about 10 hours out of me.  Do this, and all else works.

Workout: it’s not enough to get to the gym and be listless. Intensity is key. So, the workout needs to be as follows: 90 minutes total cardio (60 minutes intense) & a weights routine as mandated by Joey Read more

October 22, 2010

Talking Dogs and Skinning Cats: An Anti-Sales Message

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Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

So I’m about to reopen my doors.  I’m up and delivering now, but I have some anti marketing to kill, and I’ll get to it over the weekend.  I had to learn a I recently attended a real-estate trade conference in the Pacific Northwest.  I won’t say which one.  I went to blogworld. sat in the back and mingled little.  What follows is overheard snipets from attendees, booth speakers and vendors.

“You,  can–and you should–finally…graduate from selling.  That’s the goal of every agent, right?  You deserve to rise above the crowd and become an online marketer, an avatar…an icon.  Let me help you do that.  Selling?  That’s for the lesser lights amonst us.  Let them handle it.  And, since it’s for lesser lights, then you needn’t learn to do it at a high level. All you need to do is turn some of your worthless GCI into digital credits.  We’ll bring pre-sold, can’t miss buyers to your door.

“And if our widgets fail…at least you  have provided them with their new entitlement: automated regurgitation of data without context.  Because that’s what buyers and sellers want, right?  They want to be in charge of their own experience and decide what’s right for them.

”Well,  sure I respect him.  Why wouldn’t I?  What happens in Vegas is between adults.  Of course he’s honest, sure.  Just because he lies to his wife, betrays his children in plain site doesn’t mean anything bad will happen business wise.  I think he’s as honest as the day is long.  I trust him implicitly. I mean, you gotta do what you feel is right, right?  He’s kept secrets for me, and you know, at the end of the day, marriage is long.

“Look, I want to provide value.  I don’t want just another pitchfest.  But, you know, if it feels a little festive, great.  If there are pitches going on, hey, what can you do?

“ROI?  Why would you ask about that? Puh-leaze. Hello, Old fashioned.  You need to become a personal brand. You need to become a recognized authority amongst all the agents.  Don’t you know?  Nobody’s ever really figured out the ROI Read more

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