NON-LENDER MARKET DOMINATION WITH V.A.L.U.E.

You didn’t get into this business to feel invisible, to have your time disrespected, your expertise questioned, or your fees negotiated down like you're selling used furniture on Craigslist. You got into this because you’re good at what you do. You care about accuracy. You care about doing it right. And at some point, you believed that being good would be enough. But it’s not, and deep down, you already know that.

So let me offer you something different today, not just a strategy, but a shift in identity. A path out of the chaos, the burnout, and the slow bleed of a career that used to feel meaningful. It’s called the VALUE Framework, and it’s not just an acronym. It’s a roadmap, a blueprint for finally being seen, respected, and well-paid for what you bring to the table.

This episode is for the ones who are tired of being just “the appraiser.” It’s for those ready to be the go-to expert and authority in a segment of the market that matters and maybe just need a little guidance on how to get there.

So, if you’re tired of being just another name on a lender’s rotation list; If you’re sick of appraisers bickering over $100 adjustments while the world passes them by; and if you’re ready to build a brand that gets noticed, respected, and paid what it’s worth, this episode might be your turning point.

I’m going to share with you a framework I’ve been teaching for a while that has helped lots of people get clarity on the who, what, where, when, and most importantly, the why of building your real estate sales, appraisal, and/or lending business the right way and for the right reasons. Let’s get into it. 

To be clear, there is nothing explosively groundbreaking about this framework. Most frameworks are developed for the purpose of making something easy to teach and easy to remember, and that’s the case with the VALUE framework as well. I've been teaching and coaching appraisers for many years on these principles since these are the ones that worked for us as we built a fairly large non-lender appraisal business segment within our company. I’ve also seen lots of case studies develop over the years as lots of our coaching students have used these principles and practices to build their own successful appraisal business. 

I need to also state very clearly before we get into this framework that everything I and my company have done to build up our non-lender appraisal business has also worked amazingly well for building up the direct lender segment of our business as well. One of the great ironies of all of these principles is that they very unintentionally showed us what works and what doesn't work when trying to build a business that serves our lives and not just our bank accounts. Everything I'm going to talk about in today's episode will work for your lender business as well and will most likely make it even better. At least that’s what it did for our business and what allowed us to fire every AMC many years ago and never have to bid for work again. 

So, the VALUE framework is obviously an acronym, and each letter of the acronym stands for a principle as well as a command. I don't want you to have to try to remember what each of the letters stands for, so I created a cheat sheet for all of you and you can download it at www.CoachBlaine.com/value . There’s no catch, nothing to sell you, just go to www.CoachBlaine.com/value and you can download a 3 page pdf explaining the VALUE framework and what each letter commands you to do to build your business.

The ‘V’ in VALUE stands for ‘Visibility’, as in, if you’re not visible in your market, it will be tough to build a sustainable business. The word ‘sustainable’ is an important one because I am never about ‘one off’ type tactics. There are enough marketers in the world who can teach you all kinds of tactics that will get you one or two orders. What I'm more interested in doing is teaching you how to build a scalable and salable business, even if you never choose to scale it or sell it. 

I’ve said many times on this show that you always build a business to sell…period, full stop! I didn't say you have to sell it, I said you build it to sell, which means that you adopt a mindset and practice of building it with SOPs, step by step instructions, clear guidelines about how things are done, clear rules about how clients and customers are treated, and a very clear vision and mission. The more clearly and organized your business runs, even if it’s just you, the more valuable it becomes, not to mention how much more efficiently and profitably it runs. Your intellectual property, your SOPs, the proverbial 3-ring binder of your operations becomes an asset, and income follows assets. 

What we’re talking about with all of this is how to build something that is sustainable over the long term, not something that works today but breaks the next time Google makes an update in their algorithm. A lot of the things being taught over the years about how to get leads and business may work in the short term, but almost always fail in the long run if they’re not based on timeless principles. 

The ‘V’ in the VALUE framework is about becoming visible in a variety of ways, but it's ultimately about getting seen by the right people. It’s very difficult to build a sustainable and profitable business if you’re hiding in the shadows. 

The very first step in becoming visible to the right people is getting very clear about who those people are. If you don't know who you want to attract as a client, how will you know the best way to become visible to them specifically? You MUST take some time to sit down and write out the kind of person you want to do business with. This may sound way too cheesy to some of you, but I can assure you that, once you get really clear on who you want to do business with and who you don’t, the right kinds of people start showing up. Clarity is not just a mental filtering tool, it's a magnetic market filtering tool as well. 

I see and hear people talking about marketing to attorneys all the time in this discussion over building a non-lender business. Have you ever dealt with attorneys at scale? I’m not talking about the one or two you’ve had good conversations with or gotten an occasional order from, I’m talking about the attorneys as a whole industry and whether or not that is a demographic type of person or profession you want to go after. 

I’m not denigrating the profession, as attorneys are definitely needed and they obviously have the ability to send work your way, but you have to get really clear about:

what kinds of attorneys?
what kind of personality of those attorneys?
what kinds of clients are they dealing with?
are they ordering the appraisal directly from you?
are they paying in advance?
are they referring their clients to you to order and pay themselves?
are they overly litigious and take everything to court?
do you want to deal with going to court? 

Let’s be clear, all appraisers are not the same, nor are all attorneys, so stop asking how to get more work from attorneys. Start getting clear on the ‘avatar’ of the ideal type of attorney, how they do business, what dealing with them will mean for your life and your business, and any other clarifying details you need to get a very clear picture about who you want to become visible to. You don't want to become visible to everyone, you want to become visible to the people who work like you do. 

Moreover, ask yourself why you want more attorney work. Is it because you want the work from the types of issues they deal with like divorce, estates, real estate transactions, and high net worth individuals? If so, how about becoming visible to those people directly instead of trying to go through one of the most gate-kept professions on the planet? 

Get clear on the who, what, where, when, and why and the how will become much clearer as well. You don't want to attract everybody and just saying you want to market to attorneys is like saying that you want to market to everyone who eats soup. No, you don’t, you want a specific type of client, a specific amount of money, a specific type of experience, and a specific long-term outcome. Decide what that looks like first and then you can decide how to become visible to that type of client and experience. 

One of the best things you can do in almost any business building effort is to become a person of influence in your field. When you are recognized, respected, remembered, and revered in a particular field and market, you may never be able to stop marketing for new business, but you will have to do it far less than the person who isn’t visible, isn’t known, and isn’t recognized as a a person of influence. 

When I talk about becoming visible as part of the VALUE framework, I’m talking about doing the things that make you stand out in a market and make you visible to the people that can and will choose you if and when given the opportunity. 

Before we move on the next step in the VALUE framework, to get a better understanding of why the visibility piece is so important we have to understand the psychology of buying and the differences between being problem aware and being solution aware. 

When a person first recognizes they have some kind of issue that needs to solved, but maybe don't yet know the solution, they are said to be problem aware, just not yet solution aware. When a person knows they have some of issue that needs to be solved and they know that there is a solution for that problem, they are said to be solution aware. What’s most important to understand in all of this is that behaviors of problem aware people are different than the behaviors of solution aware people. 

Problem aware people are trying to first understand their problem before they start seeking out solutions. They’re doing some research on the problem, learning the ins and outs of how to solve the problem, and getting educated on the best path to take in solving their problem.  Solution aware people go right to seeking out solutions and providers of those solutions. Their research is not on what their problem is anymore, it’s on getting the problem fixed as painlessly as possible (I didn’t say as cheaply as possible, nor as fast as possible).

The point of all of this is that, to win in business, you have to meet people where they are in the process. You have to have information and content that speaks to them when they are only problem aware but not solution aware, and then content that speaks to them when they are solution aware and looking for someone to solve their problem and take away their pain. So, think of this as meeting somebody at a networking event who has zero need for an appraisal, or no plans to buy a house. However, after learning more about each other, you end up on each other's mailing lists and getting each other's newsletters, videos, and educational content. 

Months pass until one day your new friend calls because he’s getting a divorce. He’s in a phase where he is both problem aware and also solution aware. He knows he needs an appraisal because his attorney told him he did, and he also knows he doesn't need to go to the Internet to do a bunch of research because he has you, his potential solution. 

Our job as business owners is to be as visible as possible in as manys forms and formats as possible for both the problem aware folks and the solution aware folks, keeping in mind that there is always a gap in time between the problem awareness and the solution awareness, and that gap is different in every business. 

In the real estate buying world, the gap between the recognition that you may want to move or buy your first house and actually making that happen could be many months of researching the problem and the potential solutions. When it comes to the appraisal world, the gap between knowing you have a problem and deciding on the solution might be one day or one hour. 

If you want to truly be visible, and you need to be if you want to be successful, you must be visible in all of the places the problem aware people are searching and researching, as well as where the solution aware people are searching. That means having content on the internet, being found in digital search speaking directly to the problem and the solutions, being recognized and referred by the market for having a specific solution to that specific problem, and being so highly respected that, when the conversation about cost comes up, it's never even a question. That’s the power of visibility. 

The next step in the VALUE framework is the ‘A’, which stands for ‘Authority’. This step of the framework is closely tied to the visibility step because, in becoming more visible, we want to become visible as an authority, which is somebody who is recognized as an expert in the eyes of others, but not just somebody with expertise in a particular area, somebody who also has influence. 

What I want to leave you with on the authority part of the framework is that, when you are an expert in a particular area, people may come to you for input and advice, but they may never refer someone to you. When you’re an authority, on the other hand, people will come to you for your input and advice, and they will look for opportunities to refer others to you because of your influence. 

Every time someone is referring one person to another, the referrer is gambling with their own reputation. Your authority and excellence becomes part of the referring party's brand. The referrer is staking their own credibility by referring you and gambling on the outcome being beneficial for them as well. The better you are, the more of an authority you are, the more recognized, remembered, and revered, the more others will want to signal their access to you as a sign of their own high value. At that level, you’re not just a service provider, you're a credibility amplifier. That’s what the ‘A’ in the VALUE framework stands for. 

The next step and letter in the VALUE framework is ‘L’ and it stands for ‘LEADS’. I can’t hammer this one with you all enough, everything is downstream from lead generation. I know it may sound like a weird word to many of you because you live in the world of ‘bids’ and ‘orders’, but in the real world of business there is something called ‘leads’ and the act of ‘lead generation’. A lead is anyone who may need your services now or in the future. 

You might be tempted to say, ‘well, that’s almost everyone, Blaine!’, to which I would say, ‘go back to the ‘V’ in this framework, which stands for visibility, and recall what we discussed about attorneys and getting very clear on who you want to do business with and be visible to. One of the goals of every business is to be so damn clear about who you are and who you serve that you can always confidently say ‘no’ and turn away anyone who simply doesn't fit the profile, regardless of how much money they’re waving in your face.     

When it comes to leads in the appraisal business, since the window of opportunity is fairly narrow (remember the problem aware solution aware explanation), if you want to truly have some control over your future success in business, you absolutely MUST understand how to generate leads into your business. This is not about waiting for the world to knock on your door, this is about going out into the world and hunting for the kinds of clients you want, and the kinds of referrals you want from those clients.

In the world of leads and lead generation, you have to have an offer, a value proposition, a value stack, and an open mind. On one end of the spectrum, you have the one off clients and customers who will reach out to you based off of your content reach, your Google ads, your web strategy, your website, and whatever else you might be doing to attract the typical homeowner in need of an appraisal at some point in the problem aware/solution aware phase. 

On the other end of the spectrum you have what I call the institutional client. These are the industry professionals you have networked with and earned the respect of to such a degree that they are happy to send you referrals. These are your attorney clients, estate and trust attorneys, Realtors, Brokers and agent offices, financial planners, CPAs, money managers, and so on. All of these are considered lead sources and your job as a business owner is to constantly be hunting for new leads and new lead sources, take care of existing referral sources, create content that will help increase your lead flow from all sources, be out in the market giving talks, guesting on podcasts, teaching CE classes, and whatever else you can do to build up your personal and professional brand to such a degree that you become the authority in your market and your field. 

Speaking of giving talks and teaching classes, the next part of the VALUE framework after leads is the ‘U’, which stands for ‘Unique Positioning’. Sometimes I interchange the words ‘uncommon’ and ‘unique’ when I talk about the U in VALUE, as in, Unique Positioning and Uncommon Positioning. Both make the same point because most unique efforts are uncommon, and they’re uncommon because they’re unique. 

What is definitely uncommon and unique in the appraisal world is showing your face to the world as an appraiser. I have no scientific evidence on this point, only anecdotal experiences having been in the real estate related businesses for 30+ years, but in my experience, appraisers tend to be on the introverted side of the personality spectrum and would prefer not to be out in public giving talks and teaching classes. Yes, there are some of us who have based almost our whole business model on our personal brand as educators and speakers, and the only reason you may know us is because we’re out giving talks and teaching classes, but it’s definitely not the norm. 

That very fact, that it’s not the norm, is the very reason to uniquely position yourself as the name, the face, the voice, the brand, the expert, the authority, and the one to choose for ‘X’. In your case, the ‘X’ is appraisal services of some kind. If something is common, it's likely commoditized, which means it's not valued very highly by the market and the primary filter for choosing that thing is price and convenience, or ease and speed of acquisition. 

If you're an appraiser, that means that most people (this obviously includes lenders and AMCs) believe appraisals and appraisers are common and commoditized and, therefore, easily chosen based on the lowest price and whoever is the easiest and fastest to deal with. Why do they believe that? Because most appraisers are invisible and doing what everyone else does: wait by the email machine to hear a ping from an AMC, which is an invite to a reverse auction for the lowest fee and turn time. 

If the common path leads to lower fees, more stringent demands, an overbearing and ridiculous scope of work, and a hamster wheel leading to your demise, why would you participate in that circus? If you know what the steps are to escape that race to the bottom, why would you choose not to walk a different path? I’ll tell you why; because it's scary. Being unique and uncommon is scary. But being unique and uncommon is often the way to gain attention and recognition, which is often the path that leads to more income in the business world. 

Unique Positioning in the VALUE framework simply means to get out in front in your market, in your field, in your profession, and in your industry so that you’re no longer invisible and so that you can set the standard with which everyone else gets judged by. It means giving regular office talks, it means building an audience, it means creating useful and valuable content for your audience, it means holding lunch and learns, it means holding Q&A sessions for law firms, it means holding Realtor and investor meet-ups, it means hosting monthly happy hours for your VIPs, it means hosting your own events, it means creating your own local masterminds, and so on. 

Get creative, develop a laboratory and scientist mindset where you look at everything as an experiment to gather data and test the results. Some things work, some things work better. That’s the attitude. There’s no such thing as something that doesn't work, only things that work better than others for what you’re trying to do. When you find something that works, you tweak the experiment and try it again to make it better until it’s either going gangbusters and printing money, or you abandon it and move on to the next experiment. When you find something that works great, you double down on it.

I’ve been coaching on this concept for over a decade because it works in every single industry and profession I can think of. I’ve used it in the martial arts business, I’ve used it in the mechanical contracting business, I’ve used it in the coaching business, I’ve used it in the appraisal business, I've used it in the investment business. 

Doing things that are unique and uncommon is what gets you noticed. When what you’re doing to get noticed brings value to the people who can send and refer business your way, your network grows exponentially. And that not only expands your business potential, it greatly expands your opportunities in other areas, quite often unforeseen ones. Remember, trust is one of the most crucial factors whenever humans are doing business with other humans and trust is accelerated when you meet face to face with other humans. 

The last step and principle in the VALUE framework is the letter ‘E’, which stands for EXPANSION. Quite simply, systematizing your marketing efforts in some way ensures that your business can slowly move you from trading your time for dollars to you simply leveraging your intellectual property, your name, your ideas, your expertise, and your authority into higher leverage activities and income opportunities. And, if you’re tempted to push back by saying, “it’s not all about money, Blaine!”, I’ll push back on you with one question, “then why are you doing it?”

Don't lie to yourself and the world that it’s not about the money. Everything you do in the business world, at some point, is about the money and we all know it. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with that. The only thing wrong is your attitude about it because your lies about it not being about the money are simply an excuse to not do the things that make you uncomfortable. 

We trade the best parts of ourselves on a daily basis in order to earn money because money buys us freedom and independence. The irony is that most people waste the best portions of their life trying to buy back their freedom in the most asinine and illogical way possible; by doubling down on the time part and working even harder. They do that until something breaks or falls off and they have an existential awakening. The problem is that their existential awakening often leads to turning away from the thing they were seeking all along because they think it was money’s fault they wasted their life. 

It’s not money’s fault you’re not rich yet, money is an inanimate object that we give energy to. The goal should always be to earn as much as possible in the least amount of time as possible with the least amount of hassle as possible and with people you enjoy doing it with. If you were taught something else growing up, congratulations, all of us were. But that doesn't mean you have to keep believing what you were taught from ages 5 to 25. If changing what and how you believe something is supposed to work is the key that unlocks the door for you, it’s time to grab that key. 

Visibility, Authority, Leads and lead generation, Unique and Uncommon positioning, and then Expansion of what’s working and systematizing the process is the VALUE framework. If you don’t want to have to remember these all the time and would like an easy, done for you cheat sheet, just go to www.CoachBlaine.com/value and download your cheatsheet today.