Video Transcription

Hi, guys!

But today I wanted to talk to you about execution. And before I get into that, though, last Monday I was still out of town and actually went on spring break with the family, with the kids, and we went down to Disney. For those of you that have ever been down there, I have to say, I always come away thinking, "You know what? I never think big enough," and man, they just have so much going on, and they execute so well and they pay attention to so many details, but it's just so massive. And I do have to say, too, I don't remember the name of the ride, but for any of you like that Avatar, if you haven't seen their new ride there, it's pretty crazy. You need to see it, especially if you're into the virtual reality thing.

So anyhow, today I wanna chat, though, about kinda what's goin' on in the market, the economy, the news, but I wanna tie that into your business. Because I don't know if you say the news on Friday; on Friday, the news was, at least on the financial side, that the federal yield rates have inverted. And those of you that follow the financial side, you know when that happens, it's general not a good thing. Yeah, and we'll see what happens, 'cause it's not guaranteed that it means there's a blip or how big the blip is in the economy, but it's something to pay attention to.

And it got me thinking this morning, as I was preparing to do this video, it really got me thinking that, really, what does it matter, at the end of the day? 'Cause I can tell you from a businessperson, and I'm talking to all of you who are business people as well, that at the end of the day, business is business. We only focus on the things that we can control. So what happens in the economy, we can't control that, so why dwell on it? Yes, we have to respond to it, but for us, and my mentality has always been, "Hey, business is business. I'll control what I can control and respond to whatever I need to respond to, but at the end of the daily, my daily activities don't really change that much.

And so with that, I wanna talk about kinda where, with the changes we have going on and where we're heading, some of the things that you really need to take a step back from the news, especially the news here, where, "Hey, are we heading towards another recession?" I can guarantee we are, someday. It will happen. There will be another blip. The economists I pay attention to are saying sometime in 2021 is what they're saying, but it'll be a small one, and we really won't feel it that much.

But regardless, what do we need to be doing on a daily basis in our business? And to me, it's we need to focus and the fundamentals of what makes us successful. And for you in the real estate profession, it's pretty straightforward. You have to focus on your marketing, and you have to focus on your relationship with your clients. And what does that mean? And from a tech perspective, the things we focus on obviously are CRM tools. So focusing on building your CRM, of paying attention to what's going on in your CRM with your clients. Focusing on your website, but not for the website. Here, I'm a web guy, but I'll tell you, your website serves one purpose. And what is that? To be quite frank, it's to generate good leads and to help serve your clients. It's pretty simple. It's to extend what you do already and to automate some of those things and to serve your clients. So paying attention to the behavior of what your customers are doing, and what do they have going on.

But then in addition to the CRM side is your marketing. So what are you doin' for your email marketing? What are you ... I've been talkin' about that quite a bit. The reason why I've been talkin' about it, if you haven't seen some of the videos, is because email marketing flat out works. It's still one of the highest ROI, or return on your investment, that you can do, is email marketing outside of digital advertising in general. It's very effective, especially if done properly.

But as we're talking about focusing on CRM, a lot of the changes that we are doing, the vast majority, especially in 2019, it's focused on making those tools easier for you. It's tweaking these things. And when it comes to your business, sometimes some of the changes you have to do are tweaks; it's not major overhauls, it's just tweaking a little bit of what you're doing so that you're more efficient, so that you can utilize your time more wisely and how to have a higher return on your time.

And just as one example, we have a change going live today with how you quick add a customer in our platform, trying to streamline that, make it easier. We're lookin' at the behavior that all of our users are doing and saying, "Hey, how are they using this? How can we make it easier?" And we're launching that change today. So just those streamlines.

But what I want you to do, though, is you gotta focus on your execution. Yeah, we pay attention to the news and see what's going on. And even this morning, had a conversation with someone, a realtor, and they're talkin' about the market here in Stark County, Ohio. And it's kinda funny, 'cause they were talkin' about how they feel that, "Well, is now the time, really, to buy or not?" But our reality here, compared to some areas of the country, we never have the highs, but we also never have the crazy lows, either. So we have that very slow appreciation in this market. A far cry from something like Seattle or something like Portland, or even San Francisco or LA, where you see the crazy appreciation going on in property values. We don't see that here.

So to me, in that conversation, is, "Hey, it comes back to the fundamentals of everything. Just paying attention to the details and focusing on executing in business," and if you do those things, for me at least, the business is always taking care of itself. So what I want to encourage everybody to do, especially as we're launching all these little changes that we're doing, is to focus on execution. Focus on building your CRM. Focus on your email marketing. Focus on your digital marketing. There's a lot happening in that area, as far as running ads. But focusing on the real return in the engagement that you're having with your clients. So that's the purpose of today's video, and part of why I talked about this is all the CRM changes that we have going on right now, and upcoming, that you'll be hearing about. That's what we're focusing on, is how we help you be more efficient, more profitable in your business? And at the end of the day, enjoy doing business even more.

So that's my video for today. I think tomorrow, Harley, you're goin' through, I think, our image and some of the changes we've done there. Yeah?

That's right, mm-hmm (affirmative).

So we have some updates there that we've launched, based on feedback. And before I close out, one last thing, too, we want your feedback. Because a lot of the changes that we're doing, it's from your feedback, whether it's direct feedback or your behavior that we notice within our platform, so we want your feedback.

But anyhow, have a great April 1st. And if this is your spring break week, enjoy spring break. Mine was last week, so I'm back to work this week. But anyway, have a great week. Thanks.