Brandon’s house in Nashville, TN
Well, hey! You’re right on time. Here, let me shut the door. It’s pretty hot out there. High eighties last I heard. Would you care for something to drink? I’ve already put down about a quart of apple juice. It was a two-for-one deal at Costco. You sure you don’t want any? It’s actually pretty good.
Well, okay then. Let’s go over here and get comfortable.
Why are you looking at me like that?
Relax. It’s nothing serious. I just thought we should talk. I mean we’ve always made it a point to look out for each other, right? So we should talk. Because I think the greatest opportunity of our lives is staring us in the face – right here, right now – and I’m afraid we’re going to miss the boat if we don’t get serious.
I mean, I’ll be honest with you. The Internet intimidates me. The whole thing is moving too fast. Shoot, the whole world is moving too fast. Why just last month I bought a seminar, booked a flight, arranged a room and rented a car without ever leaving my desk or picking up the phone. And to top it off, I even printed out a map which gave me turn-by-turn details!
Talk about convenient.
It used to be you paid 2 or 3 bucks for a map and then spent the next 10 minutes trying to interpret the thing. It was a complete hassle. Especially if you have a tough time figuring out North like I do. But not any more. Click, click and wow!
And what about Bill Gates? Now that boy is on a mission. Have you ever had the opportunity to hear him speak?
“There are ten fundamental inflection points, ten significant shifts in customer behavior which are destined to alter all industries. I’m going to ask you whether you believe each of them will happen. Never mind for now how quickly, just tell me whether you believe they’re ever going to occur. If you don’t believe they will, then you shouldn’t change what you’re doing with technology. But if you believe they’re going to happen, and it’s only a matter of time, then you should start to prepare for that change today.”
· Do you believe that in the future people at work will use computers every day for most of their jobs? Today a lot of people use computers occasionally and spend the majority of their time still handling paperwork. Do you believe that today’s paperwork will someday be replaced by more efficient digital processes we are now seeing with scanners?
· Do you believe that one day all households will have computers? In the United States today about 85% of the households have PCs.
· Do you believe that one day most businesses and most households will have high-speed connections to the World Wide Web?
· Do you believe e-mail will become as common a method of communication among people in business and homes as the telephone or paper mail is today? Currently not everyone uses email even if they have a computer. In fact, in 2009, 20% of Americans have never emailed! Can you see that situation changing?
· Now, if most people have computers and use them everyday, do you believe that most information will start arriving in digital form? It’s already happening at warp speed!!!
· Do you think digital appliances will become common? Do you believe that new digital devices will proliferate around the home and be connected to the Web? Can you see the entire World Wide Web available via the TV? Look on the back of your most recent TV….more than likely LCD or Plasma…..see the plugs for a computer???
· Do you foresee a time when notebook computers become computer notebooks? Where you can scratch out a digital note and carry all your personal and professional data you need. I already own one!!!
Am I wasting your time? Do you believe these changes are ever going to happen? If you do, then you need to prepare now. If you don’t, don’t be surprised when you find yourself trying to catch up.” – Bill Gates
What’s really uncanny is Bill delivered that speech to a bunch of German bankers. Today, every one of those “inflections” he was talking about, those ten significant shifts in customer behavior, is a current reality.
High speed cable internet access is already available in most major cities and it is only a matter of time before every house and every business in the nation will be able to access the Internet from their TVs – via remote control. Have you noticed the “new” HDTV’s have ports to hook up to a computer??? If you want to buy anything, you just pay with your credit card direct or in the future, put it on your cable bill to reflect the charge. It’s like 900 numbers. Look what happened there. Same thing. Only in that case it was the telephone companies who cashed in.
Mark my words. We’ll see it happen.
All I’m saying is that we really need to take a long, hard, serious look at this thing because it’s here and it’s here to stay. And you know what else I think? I think we are going to have to step it up a notch or two if we are even going to survive.
I’m serious.
The world is changing before our very eyes. I mean, it wasn’t too long ago when I was in college and the old IBM Selectric was the rave. Now look where we are. I don’t even have to touch my keyboard if I don’t want too.
No kidding. It cost me $300 and three hours to train the computer to recognize my voice. Now I just talk and it types. And it’s pretty accurate too. It opens programs, dials the internet, surfs the internet and fills out forms – all voice-activated. You should try it. The program I got is called Dragon Naturally Speaking. Then I added a few custom macros and… voila! Hands free computing. I’m going to load my laptop next so I can take notes as I drive.
Are you sure you don’t want any juice? It was a two-for-one deal at Costco. You know how it is when you have a teenager. Tea, milk? Water?
Did I tell you about a buddy of mine?
Turns out he was forced out of business. 18 years and a multi-million dollar printing company, poof… see ya… just like that. And he said the Internet killed him which really confused me at first because I told him he should just take his business to the Internet and compete heads up with everyone else.
But he said I was missing the point.
He said it wasn’t that he couldn’t compete on the Internet, he couldn’t compete with the Internet. The impact of the Internet killed his business.
The Internet killed his business because the need to package products had been reduced. You see, it turns out the Internet has made it cheaper and easier to deliver digital products than to deliver land-based, off-the-shelf products. And by knocking out the need for a middle man, the store front and all of its expensive displays, you also knock out the need for a printer. After all, if you don’t have to display your product, there is no need to package your product. And if you don’t need fancy four-color packaging, you don’t need a printer.
The impact of the Internet has already cut the demand for printing services in half.
Oh yeah. Sure. He’ll be all right.
He was pretty good about paying himself first. I think he’s actually looking forward to taking it easy for a while. But you can tell he’s in shock. Who would have thought that something called the Internet would come along and change the world?
Pretty sobering, if you ask me.
By the way, how’s your web site going? Didn’t you scramble to build a site?
How’s it doing? Have you worked on promoting it lately?
You see. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We live in a fast food society and we want instant results. If we don’t see instant results, we bail. We tend to skip on over to the next thing and see if that works out any better.
But it’s a losing strategy.
Remember how we mailed that lead generation postcard to the apartments the first time? What did we get? Nothing. A big fat zero. And then we mailed again and again and again and, sure enough, we started to pull a result.
Right. You got it. The rule of seven. Who would have known? And now the campaign is one of our all-time winners! It’s crazy. Do you ever think we’ll figure it out? I think what happens is people tend to overestimate change in the beginning and underestimate change in the later years. By overestimating and not seeing any spectacular, immediate results, most people are then lulled into inaction. And when the action picks up… well, by then it’s too late.
Have your read Harry Dent’s book? It’s called The Great Boom Ahead. Pretty heady stuff. His entire premise is that every product and every business (and every life force for that matter) goes through a Maturity Curve. You know. Some people call it an S curve and it measures the total life cycle of a campaign, product or business.
Take Hoola Hoops, for example. Hoola Hoops had a life cycle.
In the early years, when Hoola Hoops were first introduced to the market, a few people bought them for the kids. Then word started to spread and people bought more. And as the company made money, they increased their marketing efforts and pretty soon Hoola Hoops went mainstream. Every kid had to have a Hoola Hoop and the rest is history.
Today, you can still buy a Hoola Hoop… but you’ll seldom see them advertised anymore. Why? Because the Hoola Hoop, as a product, has completed it’s life cycle. It’s time has come… and gone.
The Internet, on the other hand, just went mainstream years ago and is still going!
The big boys and venture capitalists consider mainstream to be 100 million users. By stepping into the game now, at the growth stage of the maturity curve, our profitability are almost assured.
Do you see where I’m going with this? The time for resting on our laurels is over.
It took radio 30 years to reach an audience of 50 million. TV pulled did the same thing in 13. But the Internet did it in less than 4. Over 1.5 BILLION people actively use the Internet today.
And the big boys are taking notice.
Look at the corporate site of RE/MAX International. They invest millions of dollars each year in new technology. And you know what? Their site pulls hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of new leads each and every month. Their web site alone accounts for billions in volume.
Can you imagine?
So what I’m saying is the time is now to make that happen for both of us.
And here’s another interesting thing. A number of years ago, Harry Dent made a new discovery which added incredible value and new power to his Maturity Curve analysis. He discovered that economic expansions and spending waves are directly related to population growths and the aging of those populations. “Demand,” he says, “is driven by the amount of the population growth in size and their consumption needs during different stages in their lives.”
So how’s this all work out? Well, Mr. Dent discovered that if you took the rate of births in the U.S. and then moved the curve forward to match the average annual family spending by age group, you would have a predictable chart of future spending and economic growth.
So the first thing he did was to measure and chart birth rates. Bottom line? The 1960s produced a HUGE number of new births. And as these new births that occurred thirty years ago matures, they will be spending their money as dictated by the needs they have as they support family and retirement requirements.
Stay with me here..
Based upon this age group spending analysis, Mr. Dent’s model shows that high growth spending will not peak until about the year 2008 or 2009 when the spending pattern of the aging Baby Boomers drops off as they begin to save for retirement. Then, after that, it will be tough times for the next 13 years until the next wave of new births start spending to meet their family requirements.
WHAT IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW IN 2009???
We are in the times he discusses!
The time to act is now.
The time to build our future is now. If Mr. Dent’s analysis hold true, we are in for a rocky ride for a while.
And that’s what I really wanted to talk to you about. Because, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older or something, but I’m starting to get a little bit tired of chasing the carrot. You know what I mean? I love the business, but I’m getting tired all the same.
So whatcha think? Can we pull it off?
The way I see it, we have to get moving now. If we do, we’ll retire in 10 years with more money than we know what to do with. If we don’t, I’m afraid we’ll be apologizing to our families. And I don’t know about you, but I kinda sick of apologizing and making excuses. It’s heel or hero time.
· A recent poll to Internet users asked what kind of information would upset them if it was unsolicited. Real estate service notifications were not even mentioned! Interestingly, while nearly 80% did not want to see anything on automobiles, over 95% of current Internet users wanted to see more information in regards to health. So what’s this mean to me and you? Well, if you know that health is a big draw, what’s to prevent you from adding health issues to your site? Or for that matter, taking the risk of finding all the email addresses of people who live in your local area and letting them know you have real estate information and services available? Will it be considered spam? Maybe. Maybe not. But can we risk not being aggressive?
· Another important breakthrough on the Internet has to do with daily news reporters. Daily news reporters who use the Internet to find stories and resources has increased from 44% to over 95% since 1994. This means that just being on the Internet gives you a greater chance for media exposure. And what’s to prevent you from adjusting your site in order to give them another voice, another audience for what they have to say? See my point? Why chase after publicity for your business when you can simply redesign your site to be the source from which all local reporters get information. Make it easy for them and I guaranteed they will promote you to all ends of your local community.
So that’s it really. That’s all I wanted to talk to you about.
It just seems to me that if we are going to work hard anyway, we may as well take advantage of all the opportunities available to us purposely design our futures. Because you know what will happen if we don’t.
Let’s make a deal. A pact. You hold me account able to provide the information and tools you need to get the job done… and I” hold you accountable for using them. How’s that sound? And together, we should be able to pull this off.
Are you up for the challenge?
Real Estate Marketing Ideas
The small amount of time we spend in the warm up phase of our listing appointment or our buyers appointment is disproportionate to the huge impact it can have on the sale. Remember that folks love to talk to folks who will let them talk about themselves! It is much more than just saying hello. It is the first few minutes you get to create a warm feeling of rapport and listen to them! After a few minutes of talking about their interests or maybe common interests, go into the who, what, when, where and whys of your call. During the opening, you make a lasting impression on whether or not folks will do business with you.
