5 COMMANDMENTS OF BUSINESS BUILDING

Starting a business is not easy, remaining in business is even harder. If you want to have the greatest chance of success at anything in life, it helps to have some standards, some systems, some guardrails, and some commandments, if you will. After all, success leaves clues and many have both succeeded and failed many times before us. Why not take the lessons from those successes and failures and turn them into something useful that can guide us in a direction that leads to something prosperous and successful? Well, somebody has, and it’s been done hundreds of thousands of times in the form of books, courses, college classes, in fact, whole universities are devoted to this idea of learning from the successes and failures so that those coming after might have something of a lantern lighting the path forward. 

In this post, I will be laying out for you the 5 commandments of business that, if followed, all but guarantee some level of success that probably wouldn’t have been attainable if they weren’t followed. Can you build a business without following these 5 commandments? Sure, many do. The problems and struggles you run into when you don’t follow them are probably some of the same problems you’ve run into over the last year, or maybe three years, or maybe ten. The problems appraisers, specifically, tend to run into typically come from not following these 5 commandments, or at least some of them. So, get ready to write these 5 commandments down and start to transform your business.  

I appreciate you being along for this awesome ride and sincerely hope you get some value from this show. For those of you looking to expand your appraisal business away from the lender side of the house and into the private, or non-lender side of the business, I recorded an hour and twenty-minute-long information packed webinar just for you and I want you to have it free to help you and your business make that transition. Just go to www.coachblaine.com/diversify and download it today. Reach out to me if you have questions or need help with anything as you do shore up that segment of your business.

By the way, I’ve been seeing more than a few posts from people on industry forums about the sheer nastiness sometimes experienced in some of those places. Friends, forgive me if this hurts a bit, but a free Facebook forum with thousands of human beings is never going to be a friendly place, especially if it is filled with real estate appraisers. Appraisers get paid to give their opinions and think everyone wants and deserves to hear theirs. Since most appraisers work from home and don’t interact well with other human beings, free Facebook forums are one of the last bastions of abuse left to a bunch of these people. There are no consequences for bad behavior due to the relative anonymity of the internet. I hate to say it that way, but I too learned some years ago that the only place I could get good information and good people was in a paid group.

Consider this a bonus commandment I hadn’t intended for this episode, but this one will be worth six figures if you apply it. When people have to pay for something, they tend to value it more, there are usually rules of decency to follow, they want to get some value for their money, and the people in those groups tend to be more professional. I run several free and paid groups and can attest to the fact that the groups where people have to pay money are far more friendly and have far more valuable information being passed around than the free groups. The free groups are simply public watering holes that allow the jerks to spoil things for everyone else trying to get some value. I’m not saying that there is no value in some of those groups, I’ve learned lots of valuable stuff from some of them, but I’ve also collected a nice fat list of all the people to avoid should I ever run into them in person because they are time and energy vampires. If you want to be part of something of value, you have to be willing to trade something of value, always! 

I used to coach people for free and they wouldn’t do the work. Now we charge people to coach them, and the people grow faster and farther than they ever thought they could. That’s just the way it works friends! I spend thousands of dollars every month to be part of a variety of different business groups and masterminds because the information is simply higher level, the people are higher level, and the network you’re able to build when you have to pay to be part of something is simply higher level. The return I get on those groups is easily 5 to 10 times the investment. I would not be where I am in life and business today if it wasn’t for the investment I’ve made in coaching and mastermind groups. More importantly, I know I will not be able to get where I want to go without making an investment in finding good coaches and people who have done what I want to do. You have to pay to get access to people doing more than you and to get coached by them in some way, it’s that simple. Anyone who tries to tell you differently has not done it so they are not at the level they could be at if they did. Free never has the value that paid does, plain and simple.

In fact, I’ll let you see what I’m talking about. Anyone listening to this show that wants to see the difference between a free industry group and a paid one can try out our Appraiser Increase Academy for free for a month. I’ll create a special offer just for people who want to see what it’s like to be part of a paid coaching and mastermind group, albeit a very low cost one, so that you can see the difference in how people speak to each other, the information they share with each other, and the benefits of paid versus free. I’m not trying to sell you anything, but if you’re truly tired of some of the attitudes of people in some of those free groups, and you truly want to learn and grow, give it a try. www.coachblaine.com/freemonth, I’ll have my team make up the page and offer right now for you.

Normally, that group is less than $1 per day and there is so much great information about building your business, marketing, building your non-lender AND lender business, building your wealth, and a ton more stuff. There’s a live coaching call each month, an awesome group of people who are focused on building their business instead of tearing people down, dozens of hours of past coaching videos, a dozen or so coaching exercises, free coaching with me on Friday mornings, and a bunch of other stuff. Again, not trying to sell you on this, just seeing the complaints from people who seem like they really want to learn and grow reminded me just now that, if you want something you’ve never had, you have to be willing to do something you may have never done before, and this might just be it for you. Coachblaine.com/freemonth, see if it’s for you. If it isn’t, you’ve lost nothing. 

I will caution you, if you want to take me up on my offer, we have a zero-tolerance policy on bad behavior. The first thing I do before anyone is let into the mastermind group is search the social media forums. If your name pops up as one of the jerks to people on the free forums, you just won’t be let in. As I mentioned earlier, I already have a decent list of people who will never get access to any of our groups, so you can be assured you’ll never be treated poorly or spoken to rudely in any of our groups and the first time it happens, those people are removed without warning. We do the same thing in our free groups as well, by the way. We don’t ask questions, we don’t issue warnings, we simply remove you from the group. It’s never happened in one of our paid groups, but if it did, we would remove you, stop your payments, and that would be the end of it. 

Alright, let’s get into the 5 commandments! We’ve talked about every one of these commandments on this show dozens of times, just never in the framework of all of them at once and referred to as commandments. However, I read a book some years ago called the Millionaire Fast Lane, by M.J. Demarco, and I realized that I had been teaching all of the things he talked about, just in a different way. He teaches them more from a general position of, ‘if you want to make a million bucks, you can get there faster by following these things.’ The philosophy and principles are sound, the messaging was so-so, but the information was good enough that I stuck with it to the end. As always, I don’t agree with everything he said, or at least the way he says some things, but I found myself agreeing with his idea that there is a slow lane, a middle lane, and a fast lane in business and life. If you want to skip over some of the people walking in the slow lane, you’ll have to realize there are rules to doing so and the rules for building a real business come down to these commandments. 

The first commandment is the commandment of ‘need’. What we say with regard to this commandment is thou shalt never start a business just to make money. Thou shall only ever start a business to serve a real need that exists in the world and in the market. If you are not yet in business and are gearing up to start a business of some kind, the questions you must ask yourself are, ‘what need am I serving?’, ‘how do I intend to serve that need?’, ‘what are the pain points of the market I intend to serve?’, ‘what are the deficiencies in the market or gaps in service that I can exploit?’, and ‘what will I do differently than everyone already serving that need?’

By the way, this speaks to the oft lauded advice of following one’s passion and having the money follow. While I am somebody who has followed his passion of teaching, coaching, and building businesses and have reaped some rewards from it, the only reason I’ve reaped some financial rewards is because I always sought out a need in the area my passion was focused in. If there is no need for what you really want to do, you could try to create a need, but many a disappointed and bankrupt individual has lamented the path of trying to create a need where one doesn’t exist. If there is no need, keep searching for where one exists. 

The second commandment is the commandment of entry. Thou shall only ever start a business where there is a relatively high barrier to entry. If you want to be in a business where the barrier to entry is low, or at least relatively low, then your business model should create barriers for your competitors to have to scale to reach you. 

The real estate sales business has a very low barrier to entry. Take some classes, pass a test, find a broker who is willing to lose money on you while you do 3 transactions per year and you’re in business. You’re not making any money, but since the barrier to entry is so low, why would you expect to make any money. You simply can’t expect to win at scale when the barrier to keeping slackers out of the game is very low. Are there agents making good money with big businesses? Sure! But they will always have to compete with everyone and anyone who decides to come into their market to serve that need because the barrier for entry is so low. 

The barrier for entry into the appraisal business, on the other hand, has traditionally been relatively high because of the need for mentorship, but the barrier for entry once past that point is extremely low. Once you’ve fulfilled your mentorship requirement, it takes almost nothing to start your own company and step into the flow of business from lenders. A computer, some software, and a tape measure and you’re in business.

On the contrary, if you wanted to start a ChickFilA franchise, the barrier to entry is pretty extreme. It’s been said that it’s easier to get into Harvard than it is to land a ChickFilA franchise. To start, you need a million-dollar net worth, you need about $4 million in working capital, you need to pass a fairly stringent franchisee interview process, you need to beat out all the others who want to do that same thing, and so on. 

If you want to have a good business that makes good money, the second commandment is thou shall only ever start a business that has a relatively high barrier to entry OR I will make the barriers to competing with me so high that most will never even attempt to scale those walls to compete with me. 

The third commandment for building a real business making real money is thou shall always be in control of the inputs. This means that you always want to be in the driver’s seat when you decide to go into business. You want to have as much control as humanly possible over the variables that feed your business. If you have little control over the inputs, you have little control over your income and competition. Let me clarify a bit. In the appraisal business, for example, you have little control over whether or not a lender will send you an order. There is nothing you can do to make an order appear out of thin air. You also don’t have any control over the interest rate environment, the supply and demand curve, the fees to a large degree, or whether or not a client will stay with you long term.

You might say, ‘yeah, but Blaine, lots of businesses don’t have control over some of those things!’, and you’d be correct. However, there are things you can control, and this commandment doesn’t say thou shall be in control of the market, it says thou shall be in control of the inputs. The inputs are the levers within your business that you can control and the pulling of which makes something else happen on the output side. Inputs include all of your resources, your marketing, your database, how often you reach out to your clients, how often you reward your clients, what kinds of clients you even accept, and how you will serve the need in the market you’ve chosen to serve.

A big one for appraisers is their database, which for 99.9% of appraisers does not exist. We’ve been coaching on this point for over a decade and still can’t find even 10 appraisers out of 50,000 +/- that have built a database of email addresses that they speak to and add value to on a regular basis. This one thing alone has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue into our business over the years. If you don’t have control over the inputs, you are said to be living and operating below the API these days, which means somebody else controls your business. In essence, your business is built on rented land and on ground that is shifting beneath your feet. If you can’t control the inputs within your business, you are simply equivalent to an Uber driver who waits to be handed a fare by the app that runs their business. The app, by the way, that can shut them off at any time, thus controlling their business, the fees they’re paid, where they go, and whether or not they even get to stay in business. 

The fourth commandment is the commandment of scale. This commandment says, thou shall never start a business that does not have the ability to scale, both in terms of how big I can grow and how many lives I can impact. In fact, this commandment relates to what I refer to as the Law of Impact, which affectionately states that the amount of people’s whose lives you impact will determine the size of your fortune. Take, for example, a popular athlete. Regardless of whether or not they’re a good person doing good for humanity, they impact tens of thousands to millions of people and, therefore, tend to earn bigger fortunes than somebody who has little impact. 

Don’t get upset at this law, I didn’t make it up, it just is. The same goes for Justin Bieber, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson, Jake Paul, Casey Neistat, Mr. Beast, and PewDiePie. If you don’t recognize some of those names, I don’t blame you. The last four are YouTubers and influencers who impact millions of people and have the net worth to prove it. It doesn’t matter if you and I would judge them as doing good for the world or doing bad, having impact matters. The fourth commandment speaks to this ability to scale and have impact on the most people. If you are in a business that is difficult to scale, that actually could mean there is great opportunity because it means there is likely little competition as you scale beyond your competitors. What this commandment also says is that we will do our best to have the most impact on the greatest number of people as a simple business principle. The more you impact, the bigger your market, the greater your income. 

The fifth commandment is the commandment of time. You’ve heard me expound on this one endlessly for years. I used to end every show with a thank you for investing your most valuable currency with me, which is your time. Time truly is our most valuable asset and resource for two primary reasons: it’s limited, and we never know when the last moment will be. This commandment says, thou shall not start a business that requires all of my time forever for its success. We may have to grind in the beginning as we build the business, but if you want to build a real business that makes real money, it must be largely detached from your time.

What I’ll also say on this commandment is that the best businesses, in my opinion, are the ones that pay you 24/7. If your business stops earning money when you stop working, you essentially have a job, not necessarily a good business. I know that hurts some people’s feelings because they have a business license taped to the wall, which leads them to believe they have a real and a good business. However, for our definition, a good business is something that doesn’t require you to be there stoking the furnace and chopping down the trees to earn your income. 

I’m not saying that businesses who have owners who grind away in them are not real businesses, they are. I’m saying that, if the business requires the owner to be there grinding away to earn the business it’s income, then it's not a good business, it’s a glorified job with an address and a business license. If the owner goes on vacation and the revenue stops, I’m sorry friends, that’s not a good business, you’re simply a solopreneur with a job. There is nothing wrong with that if that’s what you want. The solopreneur phase is simply when you are trading your time to build something. The goal should be for that phase to be over as quickly as possible. Grind if you have to but grind so that you can eventually hire somebody to help you scale and build what we call moats around your business. The moats are the unique things you do in your business that make your competitors work and waste their own resources trying to catch up to you. 

My goal for you would be to get you out of that grind role as soon as humanly possible, and to use your income to pay for others to help you grow and scale while you work on the need part, the barrier to entry part, the scaling part, the marketing part, the database part, and the getting paid 24/7 part. The point of entrepreneurship is not to toil away in your business until you’re too old and broken to enjoy the fruits of your labor. The goal is to earn as much as you can as early as you can so that you can use those resources to build better and better things, impact more and more people, and enjoy more of the limited time you have on this planet. Time must become your asset, not your enemy. If you’re required to be there all the time for money to flow to you, time is your enemy. The way to make time your friend is by being in a business that has the ability to scale, impact lots of people, and pay you 24/7.

Thou shall build a business based on need. Thou shall choose a business with a relatively high barrier to entry OR we will create barriers for our competitors to have to scale to compete with us. Thou shall be in the driver’s seat and control the inputs and variables of my business. Thou shall choose a business that I can scale, and I shall work on scaling the business from day one. And finally, I shall divorce my time from my business as quickly as humanly possible. If your business relies on you to earn its income, it’s not a good business and not one we want to continue doing for very long in that way. We can continue doing that kind of work, but we will work on making our income come from a variety of sources that are almost fully detached from our time.

If you want to learn more about these commandments for building a business, if you want to be around people who think like this and are building good business, if you want to be part of a dynamic money-making mastermind of big thinkers, if you want to learn how to build up your non-lender appraisal business the right way, head over to coachblaine.com/freemonth and see if our Appraiser Increase Academy is what you’ve been looking for.