BURN YOUR FEARS TO THE GROUND - QUESTIONS FROM THE MAILBAG

 Friends, here’s a hard truth most appraisers can’t stomach: If you’re drowning in work, stuck on the hamster wheel, or terrified to shift gears, it’s because you built your business to serve your fear, not your future. These aren’t hypothetical problems. These are the real questions appraisers are sending me every day — emails, texts, DMs, and real calls for help.

Today, we burn that fear to the ground and build something real. If you’re tired of playing small, tired of selling your time by the pound, and tired of waiting for permission to level up, let this episode be your blueprint.

In this episode, we’re dipping into the mailbag to answer and solve some of the most common questions I get from you, the listeners of this show. Of course, some of the questions, as well as the answers I’ll give on this episode also come from my own business building experience, as well as teaching and coaching appraisers for the last 20 years out of these very issues.

Let’s jump right into the first question, which is one I get in a variety of forms, but this is one I got recently from an appraiser in Maryland:

“Over the last 10 or so years, I’ve had periods of drowning in lender work, which is a great problem to have, but I know I need to diversify into more specialty and non-lender work. My problem is that I’m scared to let any of it go. How do I start shifting toward private work without losing income?”

Great question Maryland! Here’s what I say to anyone concerned with letting go of something in order to be better down the road: You don’t shift after you’re ready, you make the shift before you’re ready and work into what you believe the potential outcome to be. If you know you need to do something, but you’re waiting for the perfect moment to do, it will never get done because you’ll never be 100% ready.

We’re you 100% ready to start a business? Likely no. Were you 100% ready to be a parent before having your first child? Likely no. You may have thought you were, but nobody can ever predict what you’ll encounter on your journey. We can look to the experiences of those who’ve come before us and done something similar, but you’re not them and they’re not you, so the experiences will inevitably be different.

When it comes to the specific income question that Maryland asked, there is no real comforting answer because the question presupposes that there is a definite way to make any shift in business and have it be guaranteed to not lose income. The reality of anything in business is that there are no guarantees. There are well worn paths that others can point you to, but your experience and results may vary. There simply is no guarantee that you can shift your focus, your marketing, your efforts, and your business model and not lose income in the short term.

What I can tell you from personal experience, however, is that, when it comes to shifting your business from lender and AMC work to more non-lender work, this is probably one of the easiest and least risky transitions in any business when it comes to income transfer. Why? Because, when you shift away from lender work and into non-lender work, you’re simply shifting your marketing focus, you’re not fundamentally shifting what you do. Both require the same steps and processes for completing an appraisal. What takes the most time initially is the shift in thinking that is required to build a busy non-lender appraisal business if all you’ve ever done is lender appraisal work.

Although both of those types of work are similar in how an appraisal is completed, the non-lender appraisal marketing and business model requires slightly different skillsets, which is where many appraisers ultimately fail to make the transition.

If you’ve been raised on lender work only, you think a certain way when it comes to acquiring new clients. There is very little that marketing, branding, networking, or selling that needs to be done to get onto a lender panel. Fill out some paperwork, maybe send in some sample files and your E&O and you’re on a new panel. This ultimately lulls many appraisers into a sense of entitlement and a false sense of what it takes to survive in the non-lender world.

In the non-lender appraisal business world, you have to know a little something about marketing, brand building, networking and trust building. You have to have a basic understanding of how Google search works, how a Google Business Profile works, how to talk to the people that might want to hire you or refer you, and so on. It requires a different skillset in many ways than what is required to survive in the lender world.

With all that said, you can very easily make a slow transition from 100% lender work into some portion of your business being non-lender work without ever having to sacrifice income. You simply have to get very clear on what the strategy might entail for you to start getting more non-lender work and then set about setting up the infrastructure to attract more of that kind of work. The biggest hurdle for most appraisers will be eventually letting go of some of your lender orders as the non-lender work starts to come in.

When you’re addicted to fast and easy (meaning you don’t have to do anything to see an order in your inbox), it can be difficult to turn some of that work down. The great thing about building up the non-lender channel of your appraisal business is that, if you’re building it the right way, it will allow you to start to pick and choose which work, which fees, and which clients you want to continue working with as you build, which means you get to fire the worst of your lender clients.

I’ve said many times and will continue to say this; you don’t have to completely stop doing lender appraisal work if you don’t want to. We service both of those channels, the lender and non-lender side of the business, and both are very busy. However, what has happened for us over the last 5 or 6 years of continuous business building effort on the non-lender side is that it has become far more stable than the lender side of the business.

At first, it’s the other way around. The lender work was the work we could definitely count on while we built our reputation, our brand, our client base, our marketing, and our business model on the non-lender side. Now, as the market waxes and wanes on the lender side of the house, the non-lender side comes in heavily regardless of what the market is doing. It doesn’t matter if the interest rates go up and down. It doesn’t matter if Fannie Mae makes some kind of announcement. It doesn’t matter if a lender or AMC decides to disappear and ghost us because our estate appraisals, divorce appraisals, high-end cash appraisals, probate appraisals, tax appeals, and date of death appraisal orders come in regardless of what is going on in the market.

With any change in what you do or how you do it, there will be some pain and discomfort. My suggestion is to intentionally create the pain by getting started. Start by saying no to low-fee AMC work that pits you against your colleagues for the lowest fee and quickest turn times, which will free up 10–20% of your week immediately.

Use that freed up time for prospecting, branding, networking, and building your private appraisal pipeline. Yes, your income might dip slightly short-term, but if you’re not strong enough or positioned well enough to stomach a small, short-term income hit, you can’t expect long-term freedom.

Friends, this isn’t theory. This is called entrepreneurial triage, which is where you cut off the dead weight in order to allow the healthier parts of you to grow bigger, better, and stronger. If you’re not familiar with the concept of triage, just look it up. In the medical or first responder world, triage is the process of quickly assessing, sorting, and prioritizing which patients need the most urgent care, especially when you have limited resources, in order to maximize the positive outcomes for the greatest number of victims.

When you’re the CEO of a business, which you are, you have to learn how to leverage the limited resource of your time to maximize the greatest possible outcomes for you in the short and long term. If you can’t afford to tell all your crappy clients to pound sand just yet, don’t. Put a yellow triage tag on them and deal with them later. The one’s that should get a red or black tag (critical or deceased) are the clients that are sucking up all of your time for little money, relative to the hassle. They get a red or black triage tag, which means either they get immediate attention in the form of a serious conversation to see if they’re worth saving and can become a better client for you, or that they ain’t gonna make it and aren’t worth your time and resources, let them go.

The biggest challenge from there is simply not using the time wisely to do what is necessary to build up your non-lender business.

Friends, any kind of change usually entails some pain. If the pain for you is the potential loss of income and that is too much pain for you, then you have implicitly agreed to accept the pain and suffering that comes with that agreement. You either have to simply accept that you’re not willing to make any kind of change because you can’t afford to or accept that there might be some short-term pain and then step into the pain.

The next question is from an appraiser in California, and this one comes in a variety of forms, but I want to specifically use the term that this appraiser used, so here it is:

“Is it even possible to scale an appraisal business without becoming a glorified babysitter for trainees and ultimately training my competition?”

The simple answer is, ‘yes, of course!’. I’ve done it, many of you listening have done it. If someone has done anything at least once, then we know it can be done. I think what this question really speaks to is an internal issue rather than an external one. This question is less about what can be done and more about what the person asking the question is built and prepared to do, and also how they see the world.

If, right out of the gate, you believe you will have to be a babysitter for another grown human being, how highly do you think of yourself, and what do you think about the rest of humanity?

What would ever make someone believe they would hire somebody, which presupposes they’re bringing somebody on to help them achieve something greater than they might be able to achieve on their own, only to have to ‘babysit’? My answer to somebody who asks this kind of question is simple: “probably not for you”. If your first thought when it comes to scaling your business and hiring people that may need some guidance, training, and leadership is that you’ll become a babysitter, you are simply not built for a leadership role, nor for scaling an organization.

One of the ways to scale an appraisal business is to train people that you get to choose in the ways that you want them to work. This is true with almost any hire, by the way. As long as you’re very clear about your vision for the company, your mission in your market, and the product you want to put out into the world, you get to decide how the people you have representing your organization behave. If you don’t think they’ll be able to live up to your standards, you don’t hire them. If you do think they can live up to your standards and simply don’t, you fire them quickly and find somebody else who can.

One of the big problems in the appraisal profession is not that trainees eventually leave and become your competition, that is an outcome and a result. One of the big problems in this industry is the lack of self-awareness that so many of you have. You think everything is happening to you instead of because of you. You think the world is out to get you and that’s why your business sucks. You think that every one of your opinions should be accepted as fact by everyone you give it to and, when they don’t accept your opinion, they’re wrong, not you.

The belief that somebody you train could ever become your competition is such a weak belief system and position to take because it says more about you as a weak business owner than it does about the motives of the person you might share your knowledge with.

No, friends, you don’t have to be a babysitter to scale your business. You simply have to have a clear vision, a strong mission to solve a problem in the market; you have to have a good understanding of what it looks like to deliver a good product and great service, and, if you want to attract others around you to help on this mission, you’d better have a future that is bigger for them than their past.

If your fundamental belief is that you’re going to be a babysitter to another grown human being that took the steps to get their initial licensing, found a mentor and likely changed the trajectory of their life for this opportunity, you are not the right person to be chaperoning that individual’s future growth and development. And we see this all the time with trainees who eventually do make it through the process and then leave their mentor. 9 out of 10 of them have only bad things to say either about the training (lack of) or the mentor.

The problem was not that the mentor had to be a babysitter, it was that the mentor saw them only as a means to a greater end for the mentor. Most mentors see themselves as ‘supervisors’ only, which is a term used in the fast-food industry. When you take on an apprentice in anything, you become a mentor, not a supervisor, I don’t care what your state board uses as the technical term for your role. The job of a mentor is multi-faceted, and it includes more than just passing on how you learned to appraise real estate.

If that’s all you ever give to the trainee and you have no real growth plan for them once they reach a certain level, then the inevitable outcome and result is that the oppressed become the enemy of the oppressor. That is a natural end result of somebody who feels like they have no future beyond a certain point; they break free. The vast majority of the industry only sees the result and the outcome instead of what led to the result.

Does it happen that you can do everything seemingly correct and your trainee still leaves you at some point? Of course! Just like in any business. That is simply part of being in business when you want to grow and scale it.

If you don’t want to deal with other human beings helping you in your business, just continue on as a solo business owner and don’t bring more suffering onto yourself and the person unlucky enough to cross paths with you. However, if you understand human nature and the fact that most people want to be led somewhere better than where they are now, and that they will follow someone with a vision that is greater than their own, then that becomes the skillset you need to work on.

If you want to scale a business and not be a babysitter; create the vision, establish the mission, and then find mature adults that will buy in to the vision and the mission. From there, it’s a daily exercise to speak the vision and mission so that everyone is on board, create a culture that people want to be a part of long term, give them more reasons to stay than reasons to leave, and be more of a leader than a technician. If all you ever want to be is a technician, I wouldn’t recommend trying to scale it with other human beings because, as soon as somebody stronger at leadership than you enters the building, they’ll take over and you’ll blame them for the downfall of your business.

Instead of worrying about training your competition, be the competition that anybody you train worries about competing against if they leave.  

This next question comes from an Appraiser in Seattle:

“I want to grow my appraisal business, but I know I’m the bottleneck. How do I stop being the technician that I was trained to be and start being the CEO, as you always suggest?”

The first bit of advice in this regard is to stop lying to yourself that "no one can do it like you." This is one of those pervasive lies that you can find in almost every profession and industry. I saw it in the mechanical contracting business, I experienced it in the martial arts industry, I saw it in IT and software development; it’s everywhere because it’s human nature to want to be important in the world.

If you develop some kind of skill, then that becomes part of your identity and often the thing we attach our self-worth to. When somebody asks you what you do, you likely tell them who you are by saying: “I’m an appraiser”, which is our subconscious way of telling that person that this is not just something I do, but who I am even if we don’t really believe that.

The problem with this way of thinking is that it becomes a prison cell you built by yourself and for yourself. It boxes you in to being that thing all the time and it leaves you with very little freedom to become something else.

One of the first suggestions I have in answer to this question about being the bottleneck is to first begin to change your mindset, not just about what you do, but also about who you are. Changes in thinking about what you do are going to be required, for sure, but the first sale you’ll have to make is to yourself about who you are. What is your true identity? Are you a technician or are you a CEO of a business that does some technical work? The more you can put some daylight between your old identity as a technician, the quicker you can start to become the person you need to be to scale a company that doesn’t rely on you for all of the work.

The biggest issues I see while coaching business owners is this attitude of, ‘nobody can do it like me’. I feel it because I’ve been there myself. In fact, there are times in all of my businesses every day where I have the thought that I would’ve done this thing differently and probably better. But then I quickly remind myself that my job as CEO is not to make sure everything is done my way, but that everything is done based on our vision, our standards, and the expectations of the clients and customers. I am also reminded every time I see something that is done differently than I would do it that there is always an opportunity to coach, advise, level up, and grow. I can’t leave this part of the discussion without also saying that I have been humbled many times in my businesses by people who do some things way better than I ever could.

A good leader and CEO doesn’t ask, "How can I get better at doing the work?" A good leader and CEO asks, "How can I build a machine that does good work without me?" The rest of this formula is simple: after getting super clear about your vision for your life and then your company, start by identifying every task you do that doesn’t directly require your license, your experience, or your level of pay. Then automate it, delegate it, or eliminate 80% of it within the next 90 days.

“But, but, but…” There are no ‘buts’ to this one. Either you adopt the mindset and identity of a good leader and CEO, or you accept that you don’t own a business, you own a job with fancy business cards. Either one of those is fine with me, the more important question will always be: is it fine for you.

This last question isn’t as common as some of the others, which is why I want to include it in this episode. This one came from an appraiser in Arizona:

“I’ve heard you talk about becoming a specialist when it comes to non-lender work, but how do I know what my specialty should be?”

Great question with a fairly simple set of answers. The first answer, of course, has to do with what lights you up a bit more than everything else. If you hate the kind or category of work that you’re working on daily, you’ll inevitably hate your life as well. What good is the income earned if you hate how you earn it? If you love specializing in waterfront properties, for example, go all in. That doesn’t mean you stop doing all the other work that comes your way, it simply means that you go all in on marketing and branding yourself as the go-to resource for all things waterfront. If you’re the agricultural property specialist, build a personal brand around that.

That’s the ‘no shit’ advice that any good therapist will give you. Here’s the follow-up advice that Blaine Feyen, the coach, will give you: after figuring out what you, at the very least, don’t hate doing, a very close second step is to identify the 3 M’s of any market: money, momentum, and misery. The niche you choose in any business needs to have a path to money, some momentum in that there is enough lead flow and potential business to tap into, and enough misery in that niche that you can solve. The misery part is as, if not more, important than the money and momentum part because, if there isn’t sufficient misery that the clients and customers need solve, the other two (money and momentum) likely aren’t there either.

What I mean by misery is that the problem is big enough that people are willing to pay well for it to be solved, and that it isn’t saturated with so many other problem solvers (competitors) that their misery is mitigated by an overly commoditized pool of potential problem solvers. Any of you who work in saturated markets, like Chicago, for example, know exactly what I’m referring to. There are more appraisers per square mile in Chicago than there are Jewel Oscos and it massively affects the fees and turn times in that market.

If the problem that you’re solving and trying to get paid for can be solved by dozens of other providers in your market, look for another niche. Stop following your passion and start following the profit. If the two overlap, well that’s even better! Who is underserved but has money to spend? Where is there consistent demand and pain points? What type of client or problem angers you off enough to fix it better than anyone else? And if you can’t find a niche that energizes you completely, guess what? Pick one anyway! You don’t need a "soulmate" niche, you need a profitable one that allows you the income and freedom to do what you really love to do in life. Passion often follows competence and profit, rarely the other way around, at least when it comes to business.