Maintain Control
Control what?
Your reaction(s).
Learning to control our reactions (emotions) is vital to progressing in any field, and in life in general. No matter our age, we generally need continuous work in this ‘control’ area as we too often expend energy and lost years trying to control external things… which is a fools errand.
The first version of this post was written in 2014, and it was the first time I pitched the concept of the big three;
- Be Kind
- Work Hard
- Maintain Control.
Back then, and since, I’ve often said work on #3 continues to be my greatest challenge. Perhaps it is yours as well.
The first breakthrough toward better maintaining my emotional control was learning to listen. I know I still need to work on active listening. Again, many of us do.
The better job we do with actually pausing, and truly listening, the more we tune into clients tone, inflection, pitch, pace, and word selection. And then the better we can, in turn, adjust our own tone, inflection, pitch, pace, and vocabulary to match and thus calm our clients. We can defuse stress rather than inflame it.
A mastering of their emotions can easily become a master of communications.
Listen.
Consider.
Breathe.
Communicate.
Never lose sight of the fact—and it is a fact—that clients involved in any aspect of a real estate transaction tend to be under immense pressure, aka stress!
They may be young, nervous first-time buyers who are also planning a wedding and finding themselves pregnant with their first child. They may be move-up buyers with young children or teens, and perhaps another (surprise) child due any day. They may have a mortgage renewal due while rushing to leave town for their annual three-week vacation… with people they really don’t want to vacation with at all. Or they may be in a financial bind, trying to leverage money from their home to keep a struggling business afloat, recover from a bad investment, or are deal with a deeply personal family challenge.
Many clients are stressed to their own emotional breaking point(s) during the financing process and often feel as if everyone around them is pressuring, pushy, picky, and overly demanding in general. Topping it off, as with most things financial, clients also rightly feel that everyone involved in the process is speaking a needlessly complex foreign language. This is a recipe for disaster.
And yes, in that miasma of stress there is you, with your own life and all it’s challenges that nobody seems to care about. But in this equation you are the professional. You are the one being paid for your expert care, attention, and opinions.
When clients are on the ragged edge of self-control, your poise, your confidence, and your aura of calm is paramount.
You must be that port of calm in the storming sea of confusion that is all things real estate.
Offer your clients safe harbour; alleviate their concerns.
Stay calm.
Calm is contagious.
Purchase control over any and all parts of the process that you can—not illicitly, but by taking control of the related relationships involved in the transaction. Here is how…
Financial Control
Too many people in a commission-sales environment think of the gross commission as their ‘paycheque’.
You’re now running a business, you don’t get a paycheque. You have gross business income, and dividend income, that’s it. And your business is a corporation, essentially a third party. And your business has expenses, mine never had an advertising expense because that budget was taken up in different ways, ways that made the transaction smooth for the clients, and smooth for myself.
However too many Brokers view any expense related to completing a transaction as an attack on their personal paycheque, or personal bank account. This is short-sighted.
Here’s another way to view things. Imagine, if you will, that you’re running a business.
Guess what?
You actually are!
And as long as the business survives, so do you.
Now stop imagining— because this’s reality!
Commission cheques are your company’s gross revenue. Each cheque represents a sale for the business, not for you personally. Can you think of any company out there that has;
Zero operating expenses
Zero marketing budget
Zero R&D allowance
Zero breakage
Zero shrinkage
Zero write-downs & write-offs
Of course not. Every business has expenses. Every business allocates or invests a percentage of its revenues in each of these areas and more. There is no such thing as a 100% profit margin; that is an employee mindset, and you are not an employee—you are an entrepreneur.
Every business “buys” business. Be it through marketing campaigns, referral fee programs, discounting the final product, we all buy business somehow, some way. Often we think that our way is “superior,” when, in fact, it is simply different.
How will your business buy business?
Through control.
Control over staff , production, delivery, marketing?
Perhaps, but ideally through control over the process.
Where are the weak spots in your process?
Where’s the opportunity to invest a portion of your revenues into the process to better control the outcome?
Often, a weak spot is the clients’ final signing of legal documents, done with a lawyer of the client’s choosing. And what sort of detailed, comprehensive selection matrix did the clients use in order to select said lawyer?
Price.
Price, as always, is the default all too many of us tend to utilize. What do you get when you shop on price? You get what you pay for. Except in this case you get what the client paid for, and many times it’s a bad deal.
What sort of madness has somebody simultaneously spending and borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a complex transaction and then basing their selection of professional representation on a savings equal to or less than 0.0001% of the purchase price of the actual product in question?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the client’s final choice often results in a less-than-optimal experience for them, and often for the Broker as well, with the clients chosen legal representative making disparaging remarks about the lender, the term, the rate, the product, and often the Broker themselves, with absolutely no perspective or any understanding of the complete file in question.
Lawyers know next to nothing about the underwriting process. They think they know, but they do not have a clue.
Strictly speaking, a lawyer’s role is not to advise the client on the mortgage itself, but simply to confirm the client’s identity, witness signatures, and confirm that the client understands the nature of the documents being signed and then to register the mortgage and title accordingly. And that is all done for the benefit of the lender, the lawyer is in fact acting for the lenders best interests… even though the client is paying the bill. Few clients understand this at all.
And the uninformed opinions of an outsider (the lawyer) not privy to the entire client profile are less than helpful, in particular when they come from an individual perceived by the client to have more authority than the Broker themselves. #irony
All too often these frustrating interactions sour the client’s experience, tarnishing the transaction and devaluing the Broker’s expert advice at the very end of what was a wonderful 4-6 week experience.
Always control who’s having the last word with your clients.
Take control of your clients’ experience from start to finish. Identify a law firm with satellite offices all over town, or that will sign by zoom, ensuring convenience for all of your clients. Consider offering a subsidy, no matter the file size, by an amount that not only bridges the price gap between the cheapest and best firms in town, but actually goes $100.00 further. This provides clients with the best advice, and a great deal. And it results in far fewer fires for you to put out.
This specific control play was critical to my own growth and greatly reduced headaches for all involved. Was this a $250.00 attack on my paycheque?
No.
This was a $60,000-per-year line item on a corporate income statement. I’m running a business; so are you. Act accordingly.
Time Invested
Sometimes increasing control takes time, not money. I’ve known more than a few car salesmen over the years, but there are only a handful I can still name 25 years later. One is Wayne Marks. What did Wayne do that implanted his name so deeply in my brain? Was it billboard advertising? The Yellow Pages? Bus benches? Newspaper ads? An amazing social media presence? Door-to-door mailers? It was none of these expensive and ineffective things.
Wayne simply made a point of calling both my wife (at the time) and I— calling, not texting—and wishing us a happy birthday. Cheesy? Maybe, but most years he was kind enough to call me a few days ahead of my wife’s birthday just to remind me it was approaching. This was classy, clever, and obviously endearing.
Wayne had been in business for decades, and was no doubt spending an hour or more every single morning making his birthday calls. He could’ve easily spent that hour the way the other salesmen did: standing out front smoking, sleeping off a late night, complaining about a sports team, the market, interest rates, whatever. But that wasn’t Wayne’s style, and it shouldn’t be yours either.
Going the extra mile is Wayne’s style.
However you want to look at it, all top producers purchase control over their clients’ experience. They either take over the cost of part of the process just to control who’s handling it, or they invest more time than their competitors ever will in making personal connections. This lowers their dollar-per hour income, but this isn’t the perennial top producers’ key metric. Being nice is their key metric.
Look long and hard at your client process: where can you invest time and money of your own to enhance and better control the outcome?
Now open a Word document and type these words in as big a font as fits on a single page:
1. Be kind
2. Work hard
3. Maintain control
Then hit print and put them up on your office wall.
Go forth; be nice, work hard, and maintain control!
DW