by Chris Johnson

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

by John Rowles

IDX Search Entrepreneur

Author website

From the Daily Beast:

For 10 months, (a real estate agent) drove around with a corpse in her car. She never contacted police or tried to find the dead person’s relatives. Instead, as the body began to decompose, she spread baking soda on the floorboards to mask the smell.

Leaving aside for a second the pain this must be causing the dead woman’s family, as well as the real estate agent’s likely clinical insanity, there is something about this that strikes me as instructive.

It’s the bit about spreading baking soda to mask the smell.

It pains me to admit it, but I can identify with that impulse and recognize it in some of the organizations I’ve worked with: When faced with a big stinky problem, we don’t necessarily ignore it, we just sprinkle baking soda on it, and that allows us to keep going at least for a little while.

So, what have you been sprinkling baking soda on?  Maybe today is a good day to do something about it before the problem gets so bad someone else has to call for backup.

by Chris Johnson

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.

“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

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Dark matter can be a bitch.  And I mean this in the politest of ways; a mere postmodern posing of the generational Petro/Girard  family tenet, ‘in a hundred years it will all be over.’  Anything after that, please, draw your own conclusions.

I’m speaking as a  self-actualized moving part of an economic algorithm (and every time I use this word I must ask, ‘is this particular rithm an Al Gore  invention?’) that I was born into—with about the same amount of choice I had in the decision whether or not to crawl from my mother’s womb (yes, I was a breech birth baby) several decades earlier—the end result of a totally nother flawed rhythm method.  I have become cyber-morphed with the last four digits of my social security number, a randomly assigned superfecta I’ve lately grown to loathe…

“Excuse me. What was your name again?” I ask the voice who finally takes my call.

This was my second twenty-two minutes on HOLD in the Michael Bolton Greatest Hits audio loop queue of the American Express Blue Card Department. By this point I was looking around my office for a blunt object to off myself with. (Excuse the non-participial modifiers and occasional tense shifts as I’m a bit rusty at posting any thought that requires more than 140 characters these days.)

“It is Jess-ie, Mister Petro,”  the voice answers.

I instantly think of my deceased father, a passing memory still fresh in my mind; the other Mister Petro, forever with a faint whiff of expensive cologne and a seemingly wise and vast financial demeanor. (And that Mister Petro survived a real economic Depression.)

“Thanks you very much today,”  the odd voice, not from this hemisphere, adds on cue.  “How  may I assist you?”

“Hmmm. You don’t sound like a Jessie,” I say, looking to cyber-bully an over-matched, out-sourced CSR.

“Thanks you very much, Mister Petro.”

I swim back in space and think of my father and me playing  golf under the lights back in old Charlotte, many years earlier; that little Par 3 course on a swampy lake  just off Independence Boulevard. At once I  smell the honeysuckle fragrance and imagine the chatter of  the late night crickets…I recall the real Mister Petro as a much nobler man than I find myself Read more