February 5, 2025 • 49 mins
The title of this episode is pretty self-explanatory. While we always aim to serve others in our businesses with consistency and excellence, mistakes/human errors DO happen. So, when you DO make a mistake with a client, how do you handle it? You can you turn a potentially bad situation, into something redeemable. Craig shares a failure on his part, and he and Todd talk through how it was addressed and maintained the client relationship.
Chapter Timestamps:
0:00 Episode Open
02:40 Spiro Updates
06:31 Business Leadership Book Giveaway
09:40 How to Handle Mistakes with your Clients
48:04 Episode Wrap-up
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Coming up on this episodeof The Spiro podcast.
(00:04):
But sometimes when bad things happen,we just want to crawl into a hole.
That's that's kind ofwhat the first instinct is like, Oh,
something bad happened. I just.
I don't even want to talk to the person.
I just want to besad that something to happen.
Welcome to the Spiro podcast.
Managing your real estate photographyand videography business
(00:29):
with your hosts, Todd Kivimaki
and Craig Magrum.
Hi, and welcome to the Spiro podcast.
Managing your real estate, photographyand videography business.
Spirit is a software platform.
It's designed to help you
manage your day to day businessand really help you scale as well.
Whether you're just starting outin real estate photography
(00:50):
or if you've grown a businessto serving multiple regions,
it can scale with you and help youcontinue to scale your business.
I'm Craig Magrum, host of the podcast.
Welcome to it.
Each and every week,
our founder and owner of Spiro and co-hostof the podcast Todd Kivimaki
Welcome back to another week, Todd.
Craig, it's great to be back.
I have an overabundance of energyfor some reason this morning.
(01:14):
I don't even have
all of my coffee down,so I'm just going to apologize right now.
I'm already running through my head.
Think, you know, talk slow, Todd.
But let's justsee what you get from me.
I'm apologize in advance.
I'm there with you.
I was up at 4:15 this morning.
I hit my jiu jitsu class at 6 a.m..
oh, nice
had my celsius
(01:34):
So, yeah,I'm. I'm here to go, rearin to go.
ready to go
And it's just this overcast,rainy, foggy here today.
But man, and all you, you know,
Seattle people and you UK, you're like,it's like that every day but
Anyways we've got a great topic today, Craig.
Excited about that.
(01:54):
It's a great topic and it's going to bea personally painful topic for me.
We're going to make some admissions,
but we'll talk
about how youcan make the best of those things as well.
I know we're being cryptic.
So before we introduce the topic
and I go into my self-flagellation
and in confessional box,as an ex Catholic here,
(02:19):
I'm going to be confessing things.
Let's let's talk about Spiroand some of the updates
I've been watching on social media, Todd.
On the publication, some of thesethese updates for Spiro and it's exciting.
And we're we're seeingsome great responses.
People excited about what'swhat's happening.
So what's going on this week.
Yeah the quick rundownand I'll make a quick we look like
(02:41):
we look we are looking to an updatefor the beginning of March.
First week of Marchis what we are shooting for right now.
Give us a plus or minus of a week on thatand some fun thing.
So the one of the items is landingpages for your order pages.
So this would be a collectionof order pages
(03:02):
where you can link it to your booknow, button on your website,
and then your clientswill be able to select
from your residential or commercialyour short term rental order pages,
headshots, whatever you do,and it'll be a nice landing page for them
to go from to pickthe most appropriate order page.
(03:23):
We are also looking to refreshsome of the e-commerce aspects.
I'm super excited about that.
If you want to find out more about thatin the Spiro Super User Facebook group,
I give a little more information on that.
Moving into a couple of other updates.
We're working on.
There's always various UI and UX fixes,
(03:44):
But one update I want to
mention is the feedback update.
So it's very important to us allas business owners at our real estate
media company, too.
We want to know howwe're doing at our company.
We just sent a survey to our employees.
We surveyed our photographers,we surveyed our clients.
(04:04):
We want to know how we're doing.
And also one thing that's connected withthat is feedback on platforms.
Google is fabulous for us.
Facebook is fabulous for us.
Heck, I don't even know how muchwe even really need a website anymore
because people just search youand they look at reviews.
So we are going to put in a mechanismwhere you can collect feedback
(04:26):
after the shoot and you can ask them,How are we doing?
You know, one through five stars.
If it's one or two or three stars,say you're not happy with that,
send them to a pagethat says, Hey, let's get in contact.
We want to make this right.
Say it's five stars.
They're happy.
Everything went fabulous. Great.
Let's ask them to leave that review
(04:47):
on Google or Facebook or any platformyou choose.
So excited about this.
We have some other things
queued up as well, but those aresome ones that I'm like, Wow.
Like, I'm excited to use themat our real estate media company.
So I want to let you know about them.
We'll give you a little more insighton future podcasts as to what's coming up.
And like I mentioned,we're looking at the first week of March
(05:08):
- to bring that to you all- fantastic, exciting stuff.
Yeah, and just just a selfless picture.
If you are thinking about switching,
now's reallyprobably the best time of the year.
We have a ton of peopleand this is going to sound conceited.
I'm not trying to boast,but we have a ton of people
switching in right now, spinning upSpiro software systems.
(05:29):
We have a team here to help you.
We have a of a free setup processwith a pre-buy.
We have a team that will do that for you.
So if you're interested,I don't ask you guys this a lot.
I'm just going to ask youif you are thinking about switching.
We would love to be your platform.
We have some incredible thingscoming up in 2025 and we have a team here
(05:51):
for you to make it easyso you can chat in with us.
Ask us about the free setupif you want a demo.
Nick on our teamdoes demos every Wednesday
or he'll do a personal demo with you,so just ask us.
We'll be happy to give you everythingwe can and make the switch easy for you.
Absolutely, Nick is a great guy.
(06:12):
You get a chance to talk.
Yeah,I was. I was down in the office yesterday.
I'm normally not down there because Itake care of one of our northern regions,
but ran into Nick there at the officeand caught up with him.
And he's just a fantastic guy.
You'll enjoyworking with him if you haven't yet, guys.
All right,
before we dive into the topic, I'mjust putting the topic off, Todd, because
(06:36):
it's okay.
I already know what it is
I want to do.
I know.
I just am putting it off.
Anyway, I had an idea.
I ran this by Todd, and Todd said,Yeah, let's, let's do this.
So I've donea lot of reading over my life.
I love to read and I love to be constantlylearning new things.
And over the years I've collected
(06:58):
a book collection, Todd,that has gotten extensive.
I've already purged it once before,but now I'm running out of room
on my shelves once againbecause of the the plethora.
I like the word plethora.
Did you ever seethis is a squirrel moment?
Did you ever see the movieThe Three Amigos with Chevy?
Yeah.
Chevy and and Steve Martin.
(07:19):
And that was the third one.
The Dana martin.
I think you’re right
Yeah.
they use the wordplethora is in a plethora of pinatas.
So anyway, I have a plethora of booksthat I would love to pass on
because I want to see somebody elseget some value out of these.
And it's a lot of books on leadership.
(07:40):
And since we're talking to businessowners, whether again
you're just startingor you've been in it for a little while,
I'd like to give away some of my books
on leadershipthat I've read and learn things from.
There might be somesome notes or highlights
in some of these books of thingsthat jumped out to me.
But I'd like to share the knowledge.
And so I think once a week, forhowever long I have books for,
(08:05):
we'd like to give a book to youfree of charge.
I'll ship it to you.
You don't have to worry about shipping and
yeah, just pass this on.
So, Todd, how would we like to do this?
Yeah. So if you're.
If you're interested in the
plethora of books
from the Craig Magrumbook collection first is holding up.
(08:25):
from the Craig Magrumbook collection first is holding up.
Oh, John C Maxwell.
John Maxwell,The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication.
This will be the first book I give away.
Apply themand make the most of your message.
And messaging is importantas an owner and a communicator.
It is.
And if you want this,you need to message us inside of Spiro.
So log into your Spiroplatform, click the pink chat bubble.
(08:48):
All right.
So log in to Spiro,not the Spiro website, but the platform.
Click to click the pink chat bubble.
And what we're going to do this weekis the first person who message us.
So we'll look at the time stampand tell us you want the book
and then give us a podcast idea
for to discuss here a questionyou might have.
(09:09):
It doesn't have to be outrageous.
Just whatwhat are you working on this year?
What do you want toknow more about? message us
The customer support team will take thatand then we will let you know
if you won and we'll get your addressand we will ship it to you.
Yeah, yeah.
Just want to share the wealthhere. Share. Share the knowledge.
I love that, Craig. Thank you.
Yeah, I've got there's,I've got some really good books back here
(09:33):
that I've just really enjoyed reading, so
I hope you will enjoy them as well.
All right,
- Are we ready?- We're ready.
I don't know if I'm ready.
- All right,- you wan’t me to set this one up, Craig?
Yeah, go ahead.
Let me set this one up,
because this is this isthere's a lot of learning points here.
And I think at the end of the day,a learning point is
(09:55):
when things happen, it'snot the end of the world.
And always when they happen,it feels like that, right?
Because we as business ownerstake that upon ourselves and we feel that
even not as business owners,You know, Craig is an employee of Wow.
And and he's taken it.
What I feel like it's too hard sobut that's okay it's all that's Craig
(10:18):
he takes it very seriouslyand people are important to him. So
what we're going to discuss todayand I'll I'll,
I'll let you tell the story, CraigBut there was a couple of mishaps
that happened in Craig'sweek this week, and
they happened to everyone. They do.
I think I share with you guys the accountthat I lost that losses a quarter
(10:40):
million dollars and that was likea very low moment for me.
It was terrible.
The the great thing was, iswe just it's two years later,
we onboarded her in a call this morningjust before this podcast, I hopped on,
I said hello.
So I said, Hey, I just I haveI have a 9:45.
I just wanted to say hello, introduce youto the team that's going to onboard you.
so good can come from bad. And
(11:05):
that isone of the things to focus on today.
and, and you can really show
your customer service by how you react.
You have a choice.
When something bad happens, you alwayshave a choice of what you're going to do.
And making the right choice can be key
and you actually coming out on topin the end.
(11:26):
Yeah.
So, Craig, you had a busy week.
It was a busy week.
It's been a busy month in the market
that I serveand I'm very grateful for that.
Had a good number of shootsand I take a lot of pride
in providing really good customer serviceto people
going above and beyond because
(11:48):
I want to createraving fans of Wow video tours, right,
and buildthat loyalty and build that relationship.
And so I tried to takevery good care of people,
but I'm a human being and I make mistakes.
And so I had I had two major mistakesthat I made this week that, you know,
like Todd said, I'm being hard on myself,but it's because I don't like to fail.
(12:11):
I mean, nobody likes to fail,but I really, really don't like to fail,
especially when it's somethingas simple as writing
something down on your calendarso you don't miss a meeting.
And that's what happenedthis week in event number one.
Todd So
I'll just lay this out here.
(12:31):
You know, we've talked in the pastabout sponsoring events as you're trying
to build your business, the importanceof sponsoring events, building community,
supporting the real estatecommunity industry.
And we sponsored an event in my market,
one of many sponsors,
you know, paid to be at that event,paid to have,
(12:53):
you know, recognition with logo placementand things like that.
And part of that was also having a boothat this summit event.
It was a realtor summit for a brokerage
where you can set up your booth and engagewith the realtors that are there.
It's a great networking opportunity.We did it last year.
It was a fantastic event.
They really talked us up and we have agreat we have a great relationship with us
(13:17):
as a brokerage and in
particular the lead broker.
Well,
I live and die by my calendarand I've told my wife
this if it's not on the calendar,it does not exist in my mind.
Yeah.
And so I had set up this sponsorship.
I was committed to coming to it, andsomehow I failed to put it on my calendar.
(13:42):
I you know, any number of excuses
of why that's not the important partand that's really not relevant.
The fact is I forgot to write it downand put it on my calendar.
So the day came and went and I hada couple of appointments that I shot.
You know,it wasn't like it was a complete loss.
We only still had appointmentsthat that I shot.
(14:05):
But I got home and I was uploadingmy media to our editing team.
And I was also checking Facebookand saw that one of the realtors
that I have a great relationship withthat is at this brokerage posted about
about the summit, about the eventthat happened that day. And
(14:25):
it was one of those deer in the headlightsmoments, Todd.
Yeah
and my stomach just dropped
and I got sick to my stomachwhen I realized
I wasn't at this sponsored event
that we paid money to be at.
(14:45):
To me, very, very unprofessional.
And I will just say thatI dropped the ball
immediately,called my immediate supervisor
and and said what I did
because I really believein taking responsibility for your action.
Just own the mistake.
Don't don't make excuses.
Don't beat around the bush,just own it, deal with it,
(15:08):
you know, make good on it.
However you can offer what you can,
because integrity is important to me.
And I'm just I'm not going to tryand misrepresent why I missed it.
It was just a complete failure on my part.
So, you know, talk through itwith Chris.
And
he, you know,
(15:29):
suggested some thingsI made a call to the broker that same day,
got his voicemail
and left him a profuse apologyfor my failure
to not bethere as one of the sponsors of the events
and let him know, you know,this wasn't intentional.
It just I failed to put it on my calendar.
And I just made it clear to him
(15:51):
about my failure.
I said, anything we can do to make up,
you know, I want to make sure we continueto take great care of you.
And, you know,
invest in the relationship.
If there's an opportunity to comespeak with your, you know, your team
at a different event or anything I can doto make good on this, I'll do
(16:12):
it. So
I didn't hear from him for a day and
a bitch has been stewing on this. Todd
So this morning
before the podcast, I reached out againbecause I want to talk to him live.
I want to have the actual conversation,man to man,
you know, and again,take responsibility, apologize,
(16:34):
make sure the relationship's good,do what I can to salvage
what I did and
this broker, again, I've got a decent,
decent relationship with himjust because of time
and taking care of him in the pastand doing good work for him.
And he's like, Craig,
(16:55):
things happen,you know, He didn't even skip a beat.
Todd There wasn't an edge to his voice.
It was a soft response.
It was it was a graceful response.
And he's like, things happen,you know, totally understand.
I said, Well, I just I wanted you to knowit wasn't intentional.
I value the relationship.
I want to make sure we're taking goodcare of you, because I know you do, Craig.
(17:17):
There's no doubtor something like that.
That's not an exact quote.
But Todd,you can listen to the call if you want,
but he's like, don't worry about it.
And I mean, it felt good.
I still am really disappointed in myself,but I wanted to make sure
(17:37):
that I took steps to admit the mistake,take full ownership of it.
And if if he was upset,what can we do to make this right?
Because we value working with you.
We don't take that for granted.
We know he's got four other choices
of companies and individualsthat he could work with and promote.
So I want to make sure that I doeverything I can
to provide the best customer serviceI can despite a failure.
(18:02):
So what
what ended up happening was I'm actuallywas going to be shooting a listing
for him today, but pretty, pretty decent,pretty decent listing.
But as we talked about at the beginningof the episode, Todd, it's Gray here.
It was foggy.
It's kind of dreary in this property'son the river, so they weren't great views.
(18:24):
It's an expensive listing.
I said, Ivan, let's rescheduleit just so we can get the best,
you know, the best media that we cannormally.
You know, normally, if it's reschedulingthe same day, there's a rescheduling fee.
Don't even worry about that. I'mtaking care of this.
And I'm also going to make sure that we dosome luxury editing on the windows
so that you have blue skies outthe windows in the photos and not not
(18:47):
plain boring gray skies because we don'tinclude that automatically.
And he's like, Great,thank you. Perfect it.
Just go ahead,
talk to my assistant, get it rescheduledand and we're good to go. So
it could have gone a different way
where he could have been upsetfor a couple of different reasons.
I don'tI don't want to dominate the conversation.
(19:09):
But what what are you thinking right now?
What are questions you might have for meor points that you want to make?
Well, the
the thing thatI want to point out in this,
this isn't so much a learned behaviors,maybe just for me,
maybe for you all it is.
But sometimes when bad things happen,we just want to crawl into a hole.
(19:31):
That's that's kind ofwhat the first instinct is like, Oh,
something bad happened. I just.
I don't even want to talk to the person.
I just want to besad that something to happen.
You know?
There's no time to be sad.
Something happenedwhen you own a business,
when you when you are
even if you don't own a businessjust in life, there's no reason.
(19:52):
There's there is something about
making up for whattook place in your reaction.
And just like Craig said,he first instinct he had was,
I'm going to own up tothis thing called his supervisor.
But my first reaction wasI was sick to my stomach.
Yeah, true. That's true. Yeah.
(20:15):
Yeah.
And I see you guys asked this questiona lot on online, and this appears
in various different formats ofI see one of my clients used a competitor.
I have a client who hasn't paid an invoice
X, Y and Z of those questions,you know, I forgot to go to an event.
(20:37):
What do I do?
Or you just call that person literally.
And I know
I give that answer every single time.
And the older I get,
the more I just try to keep life simple.
If there's something that I've doneand I can't sleep
or I have that sick feeling,I need to go tell that person, you know.
(21:01):
And Craig's case,he had a fabulous relationship.
And this owner
gave him some grace, which is fabulous.
And the caseI mentioned earlier in the podcast,
where my situation was a little different.
That owner was
understanding and was almost like,hey, don't you know?
(21:23):
I know things happen.
She just happenedto make a different decision
because of the mistake that I made.
So and you can't beyou can't be mad at someone.
Then like, I was fully prepared.
Craig was fully
prepared to have this owner say, Hey,we never want to talk to you again,
you know, And what we would have done iswe would have said, okay,
(21:44):
this is unfortunate, bad things happen
and what are we going to doto make up for it?
And as a business,you have to be prepared to walk that path,
take it head on,and then whatever the decision is,
deal with it.
You know, just a quick little storyof where I'm teaching my boys at home.
So I think I've mentioned this before.
(22:04):
I have a 12 year oldand a ten year old boy
and I have a girls while she's younger,but we talk a lot about communication
and how they communicatewith their with each other.
So Boston's 12, Grant’s 10for those of you
that have a siblingthat's a year or two older or younger.
And if you're the same sex,there's there's competition.
(22:27):
Even if you're boy and girl,like there's some competition.
And if you're the oldest, you're alwaysthe first one that gets everything.
And you always get to experienceeverything first.
And you're probably the favorite as seenby the middle or seen by the youngest.
And if you're the youngest,the oldest sees it as you that you have it
so much easier and you get everything.
(22:48):
And I help them managethose thoughts in their head.
And we talk about this a lot of how theyinteract with each other.
And there's there was a situation
about a week ago where they just didn'tcommunicate very well.
And one of them said to the other like,hey, you know, I'm sorry.
And he didn't want to say sorry,but he said it, which was great.
(23:11):
You know, it wasn't like, Oh,I'm so sorry.
I was like, All right, I'm sorry.
And the otherwas not accepting that apology.
And now that's a wholenother conversation.
But if you give an apologyand the other side doesn't accept it,
that's out of your hands, right?
You can't control that.
You can't control it.
And and you shouldn’t focus on that.
(23:31):
You should do everything you can.You should make it right.
But you shouldn'tfocus on what you can't control.
There is so much that we cannot controlin 2025 and in years
beyond that, if we try to start focusingon those things,
you are going to just burn out.
You're going to be out of gas,you're going to burn out,
(23:51):
you're going to hate your business,you're going to hate your job,
you're going to hate your family,you're going to hate whatever it is.
Focus on what you can controland whatever happens
outside of that,you just have to live with it. And
if it was
not the reaction you want as in my case,
you have toI mean, apologize one more time.
(24:13):
That's what I did.
I kept in contact.
I made sure that person knewthat they were important to me and don't
count on anything, because I don't thinkthat's a great way to live life.
I think you do itwithout counting on anything,
and that reduces back Craigand you tell me if you think differently.
But that servant mentalitythat we talk about so much on this podcast
(24:35):
that you serve your clientsand you don't expect anything,
and when you need something,Craig's has served this broker
for a very long timeand he hasn't expected anything.
And you know what?
The broker gave some gracewhen Craig actually really needed it.
(24:56):
so serve without expectations.
It's not easy to do.
It's not somethingthat my brain is programed with.
My brain is typically what can I giveand how can I get more back?
And as I realize it,that's not a great way to live.
Over the years,
you serve people and you're happybecause you get to serve them
(25:17):
and that's your payback.
Yeah, I think for me, Todd to it'syou know, the serving
without expecting backand not taking anything for granted
that that part is easy for me.
I've learned over the yearshow to then also own mistakes
and not that that's ever easy,but it's gotten easier.
(25:39):
That's just part of my core values.
Is is living a life of integrity
to the best of my ability On your mistakeswhere you can.
Or my challenge is, is forgiving myself.
Yeah.
So when you know, when you say do whatyou can, you can't control that person's
response to your apology or your sincereeffort to make things right.
(26:00):
Yeah, you can't control that.
But what you can control andI'm preaching at myself right now, guys.
What I can control is how I treat myself.
I can't controlhow how that client is going to treat me
even after my effort to make things good.
But I can't control how I treat myself.
And it's gotten to bea little bit of a joke here.
You know, on our team with with Steve
(26:21):
and Chris and myselfand Todd about how bad I beat myself up.
But again, I don't like to fail,
but I have to learn to forgive myselfif I never learn how to forgive myself.
I'm just going to continue to beat myselfup and have absolutely no confidence
in myself as a person.
Not that
not that you ever want to be cocky,
(26:44):
but people will sensea lack of confidence.
So if if I'm trying to develop business
here in my market,but I have zero confidence in myself,
people are going to pick up on that
and they're not goingto want to work with me now.
Yeah, it's it's not that you are cocky
when you go into a presentationor when you talk about what you do,
(27:05):
but I can truly say I love what I do,
but if I have zero confidence
that's not going to come across,I don't think you actually can love
what you dounless you do have some confidence.
And thankfully,
you know, I've gotten some good feedbackfrom people that they like working with.
They they like the product and servicethat we provide as a company.
And so it's built over the years.
(27:27):
So I have to learn to continue
to forgive myself and realize, yeah, I'mgoing to screw up from time to time.
It's going to happen.
I just I learn what I canfrom that situation, pick up and and can
continue to move forward and just continueto try and serve people well.
Do my best.
And that's all you can do.
You know, as an owner, as a as anemployee, no matter where you are in life.
(27:49):
Yeah.
Craig, let me let let's take thisfrom a slightly different perspective
and dimension of the conversationbecause and one I truly
appreciate you sharing that I know howwe talked about this off air a little bit.
I can see it in your face.
I can tell in your motion, like,thank you for being open with us.
I, I really appreciate that.
(28:09):
I don't know about you Todd, but sometimes
when I listen to podcastsand, you know, speakers of any sort,
what you see a lot
of times is just a very successful,polished person and you don't always hear
about the struggles that people have.
I just want to be real with people
we know more and more people are listening
(28:32):
and I don't think we can developa really good community and relationships
with thosethat were in the same industry with
unless there's some transparencyin vulnerable vulnerability,
I don't have to share all my dirty,dirty laundry with you guys.
But we make mistakes.
So how can we learn from those mistakes?How can we share that?
What we've learned with others?
Because you're going to make mistakesas well.
(28:53):
I just
I can't with any amount of pride.
I know myself too well. So.
well I do appreciate thatthat that transparency
and sharingfrom from a different perspective here.
Let's look at thisas from an owner to employee, a photographer
or an admin perspective.
So that's, that's our relationship.
(29:15):
CraigAnd I know Craig doesn't report to me.
You know, he's got a great teamwith, with Chris and Steve.
Ultimately I own the companyso I, you know, I am ultimate. And
so let's talk
about from that perspective as to employeeversus employer direct report your way
as you grow your company, your employeesare going to screw things up
(29:39):
and you screwed things up too.
So you got to realize that one.
I think for me, it took me a lot of yearsto get through my thick skull.
I was like, I never screwed anything up.
You people come in here.
Why is everybody screwing everything up.when in return
I was really just the biggest screw up.
But that's a whole nothertherapy session for me and someone else.
(30:01):
So what?
What happens when there is somethingnot favorable
that happensand it's from one of your employees?
Well, one, I think you need to make sure
that that individual understands
that it was a gap.
(30:22):
It was not great.
There's been times I know in the pastthat Wow, where I'm like,
why are they doing that?
Why is an employee doing something?
And they don't know thatthat's wrong to do.
They haven't been taughtthat the training was maybe lacking.
Maybe we used to do it a different way
(30:42):
and they're on the old wayand not the new way.
And maybe this is a slip of mind.
So first off,you need to make sure that you bring this
and you as the owner,need to communicate it to your employees.
When someone's not doing somethingthat you want them to do.
Remember, this is your business.
It's all in your brain.
Just because it's in your braindoesn't mean it's in someone else's brain.
(31:06):
Okay.
You know the example of booking
a sponsorship at an eventand then that person that's supposed to be
there not showing up, don't assumethat they assume they should show up.
Now you're going to be like, wait, yeah,I just.
I saw you. Yeah. You're like, Oh,wait a minute, Todd.
You're really not that intelligent. Like,what do you.
(31:27):
- What do you mean?- No?
That's not what I was saying.
That's not what I was saying.
Oh, okay, I'm not.
I just I think I know a lot.
So you guys hear me out on this one,but I've done it the wrong way.
I'm telling you, I done this in the past.
If you come to them and you're like,Why didn't
you make that eventand you come at them harsh.
(31:49):
If I would have gone to Craig with that,
Craig would be in the dumpsfor the next three months over it.
Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Like if Craig is already hardenough on himself.
So you need to just be like,if you need to clarify something
very easy, don't come at themwith anger in your heart.
(32:11):
You need to
come from a place of loveall the time in your heart.
And that was very hardfor me to understand.
It took me a lot of years to understandthat you don't
ever need to respondwith anger in your heart.
Man. I like I get angry quick.
I got a temper, y'all.
And I always have something to say.
(32:32):
I always have a response.My 12 year old got.
I was talking to my wife about it.
Actually, all the kids got it.
They all got likethey have something to say immediately.
They got it from me. I'm sorry, Jessica.
That's my wife.
I'm sorry.
Even though and this is funny,
last night when she was like,Hey, that's you as in me coming out.
(32:53):
And I'm like, No, it's not.You always have something to say.
So there I'm just admitting it.
I always had something to say about hersaying I had something to say
that doesn't even make sense anymore.
So let me try to bring this back together.
Welcome to Spiro Confessions.
Holy cow. Yeah.
When something bad
happens as the owner,you need to not get angry.
(33:13):
Come from love and take it as a point that
they did it and do it intentionally.
Your first instinct is going to be,Why is Craig trying
to sabotage my company?
No, that's not the case.
Don't ever assume that might happen,y'all.
I like to think people are good in natureand good people.
(33:36):
If you've hired them andthey've been on your team for a long time,
they want to do good for you.
They do.
And you naysayers can call me up,you know,
whatever you want to call me,but I would rather live my life
thinking people are here to do goodthan thinking everybody's out to get me.
I just don't want to live that life.
And I'll I'll, I'll just leave it at that.
(33:57):
That's that's a my choice.
So when that happens, you need to comefrom a place of love in your heart
and just get those feelings out,you know, and ask them.
So what do you think we should do?
What would be thebest way to respond to this?
Craig had the answer.
He knew what to do.
He executed it. He took care of it.
(34:19):
So as an employer, your people are notgoing to do everything you want.
They're going to make some mistakes.
Some are going to be costly, some are not.
You just need to make sure that
you are
capitalizing on those mistakes.
And I'll give a verbal that we use hereand we use
(34:40):
at while we call it wearing a badge, a
and I have a ton of them,but I've learned from them.
We always ask the question, it'sa very cliche question in an interview,
but it's important.
Do you think mistakes are good or bad?
Just to get that mindset,
you know, is a mistake. Good or bad
(35:02):
mistakes will help you understand
how you can come out on top,how you can grow your business.
So make sure you talk to your employeeswhen something happens, bring it to them.
Don't assume that they've donewhat they should do.
You need to talk about it.
You need to document it if it's necessary.
We didn't felt necessary,
(35:24):
and Craig says we had a different casewith an employee here this week
or in the past that we were like, Yeah,we probably need to document this.
What document?
As we just felt we didn't feelit was to the level that we needed
to formally write something out on aon a disciplinary sheet.
We have a formal write upwhere we do that.
(35:44):
We put it on their record.
All we did in this caseis we sent an email, the email was sent,
the managerwas secede and we documented it.
And that's importantbecause people to know your feedback.
One more thing, I'll leave you with Craigand then we can go to the high points of
the second story, because I think there'sa couple of things to learn in there
(36:05):
is that
your employees want you to be happy.
And what I mean by that is
they it's always in the back of their headis what I'm doing
just Todd like that,or is Steve happy with that?
And as a business owner, at least for me,I didn't always understand that
(36:28):
because you're you're all programeda little bit differently.
At least I am.
And if you are heavy
and times of these gaps of a screw uptime,
you are going to handcuff your employeesand they are going to feel like they're
going to be paralyzed by trying to makethe decision that will make you happy
(36:54):
and them
trying to make the decisionthat's going to make you happy versus
making the correct decisionare two different things.
And sometimes one's good and one's bad,and the one of making you happy
isn't always goodbecause they're paralyzed
by the idea of trying to think aboutwhat do you want them to do versus
(37:14):
what should they just dobecause you trust them?
I trust Craig fully.
I trust Craigto always take care of our clients.
I trust him.
Whatever he says.
I'm like,I trust you, Craig. We align with that.
We're good.
I have a full trust in him,
and if you don't have that full trustin your employees,
build those relationships, traina little bit more.
(37:36):
But you have to get it to a pointthat that employee
feels empowered,that they can make their own decisions.
And if you don't, what's going to happen?
Because we felt it at
Wow at our company, you are going to beginto have a pinch point in your growth.
And I saw this a few years ago at Wow
when everybody was trying to makethe decision that Todd would have made.
(37:58):
And Toddtried to pull himself of the business
a little bit and everybody was in gridlock
because they're like,oh, what does Todd want us to do?
It's like, no, wait a minute.
I trust you guys.
You make the decision that's good for you.
And I would rather be on the reactive endthat if that doesn't come out
the way you anticipate,if you want my help
(38:19):
in trying to make up for thatand fill that gap, come and get me.
But I've screwed up a ton here.
I expect thatyou're going to screw up as well.
None of us like mistakes,but when they happen, let's just work
really hard to fix themso it aligns with our core values.
What what I'll say
in response to that, Todd, isI think there's a little nuance to that of
(38:42):
wanting to make your owner or manageror whoever happy
that there's two ways of wantingto make your owner or leader happy.
One isyou want to make them happy out of fear.
One don't.
When you don't have a healthy culturein the organization or in the company
because of that heavy handednessthat that you talked about.
(39:05):
So they're speakinghappy out of fear or paralysis,
or when you make it a safe space to screwup, not on a continual basis.
Obviously,you don't want to get into that pattern,
but if you make it safeand allow for mistakes, people, I,
I think I, I like to thinkthat people are good natured as well.
(39:29):
Overall, they'll
feel a little bit more safein owning up to their mistakes
and thinking throughhow can I not do this again
because they trust you as a leader,
because you made it safefor them to screw up and you gave grace.
Now, again, there'sthere's always accountability, obviously.
And and I've learnedto take accountability for things.
(39:50):
That's how I'm wired.
But when you make it a safe culture
to allow for mistakesand for allowing people
to be human,they're they're going to have bad days.
And in building that relationship,you know, we talked about relationships.
We talk about relationships all the timewith with clients, with employees.
It all hinges on that.
(40:12):
You I think you'll find
that most reasonablepeople will own up to things
easier and want to learn from those thingsand get better.
So I think the motivation is different.
On wanting to make an owner happy.
One out of fear, one out of grace.
Yeah, Yeah.
I think that's an importantaspect to understand
(40:34):
and I think it's it's ait's a tough question to potentially
ask yourself, like, are my employeesdo they fear me or,
you know, do they have respect for meand they feel confident and sharing
with me
All right.
Well, that was fun.
Oh, well, thanks for sharing, Craig.
(40:56):
I did say at the beginning
there was two situationswere kind of getting close on time here.
We don't we don't want to make the episodetoo long, Do we want to dive into it
or it's kind of a similar situation we're
You know, I think I don't thinkwe need to go into the
to pick the particulars.
I can see out whatever that word is.
(41:18):
At the end of the day,I'll just I'll book note it here.
Craig for us. Craig was on a shoot.It was for a buddy of mine.
He doesn't own a real estatemedia company.
He owns a companythat refurbishes very large buildings.
He was asked to do something a little bitdifferent with the drone as to where
he was tryingto take a close up of some brickwork
because they this is the waythey are actually giving out
(41:40):
quotes to their clientsas they use our drone images
to actually seewhat needs refurbished and redone.
And this was a different shoot.
Craig was on site with the project managerand assembled a do
your up in with eaves and and chimneysand things like that.
And you hit a chimney and the drone goesdown.
(42:00):
Yeah. I mean that's such is life
not great.
Nobody loves to lose a drone,but it's just what happens that happens
all the time.
Not all the time. But
no,
not all the time.
Not for you.
But you know, it's
not uncommon that once a quarter like,Oh, that person lost that drone.
Okay, well, what are we going to do?
Yeah, yeah.
And again, the drone was unrecoverableand I had a shoot before
(42:24):
that one that also had drone, soI had no media for my clients yesterday.
So again, take care of things right away.
I called my first client immediatelyand said, Here's what happened.
I don't have your media.
I can't get it until tomorrowat the earliest, but we will be on this.
Is that going to be acceptable to you?
How can we make this up?
(42:44):
He's like, Actually,I don't need it right away.
He didn't even have a signed contractwith his potential seller,
so he was just trying to get another.
That's a wholeanother problem. Right? Right.
He always pays this bill.
So I wasn't worried about that.
But he's he's like,don't don't don't worry about it, Craig.
Just whenever you can get back out there,that's great.
But again, get ahead of things, own thingsimmediately.
(43:07):
And if you've built the relationshipand you've built the trust,
you're going to nine times out of ten,you're going to get the grace.
So all of this to sayown your mistakes.
Don't beat around the bush.
Don't make excuses,
address it immediately.
I'd rather address it immediately
(43:28):
and not stew on itas bad through the night and not sleep.
But next three nights. Yeah.
And to just take care of it right away.
And then
you make it that you make itthat much worse, much worse for yourself
if you do.
Been calling them immediately,
every almost every client'sgoing to respect that.
If you wait a day, two days,not clients like me, where am I?
(43:50):
Drone photos are like,Yeah, oh, by the way, I don't have them.
You are going to just make the situationand far worse.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So. All right,
Hopefully that
I have one more. I'm sorry, Craig.Just one more quick little point here.
And this is just something to think aboutas your company scales.
So, Craig, that you lost a drone,you had what?
(44:12):
You have one drone, right?
What do we do from a company perspective?
What did you do in that case?
- And just from a logistical standpoint,- yeah, so the office has a spare drone
and I believe in each of our markets
we also have a spare, spare dronein case something like this happens.
And our office is about an hourfrom where I live.
So it's not unreasonablefor me to go drive down there.
(44:34):
So I actually drove down there yesterdayafternoon, picked up the spare.
I'm ready to shoot todayif need be, though.
Looking at the weather,
probably not going to happen today,but I'm going to shoot it tomorrow.
The jobs that I need to.
So just being preparedwith backup equipment
to be able to respondto your clients right away
when you do make a mistake, if you know,if you got, maybe you lose a drone.
(44:58):
So yeah,
I was thankful thattheir office had something, you know, gear
wise to back up so that I could take careof our clients right away?
Yeah.
And that that's something that alignswith our core values.
And I keep going back to thesebecause they're so important.
But clients are our number one priorityso much.
The fact that we knowthat it takes a day or two
or three to get equipmentand we want to keep that.
(45:20):
We have we've taken the investmenton to keep that equipment.
In fact, you picked up a dronethat was new in the box.
It wasn't even it was sealed.
He he took the cellophane off of it.
So number three, corevalue is we are family.
We know.
We know. It's not great to lose a drone.
Craig's not happy about losing the drone,so how can we better support him?
But like, hey,we've got something for you right now,
(45:42):
and then we work out, you know,do you get a new one?
Do you not get a new one?Do you replace this one?
But we
figure out what your core
values are aligned with thoseand that will really keep you pointed
and that will keep your whole organizationconnected and aligned and empowered.
And then you will be able to beginto remove yourself as the business owner.
(46:03):
But you have to set all that first.
Well, Craig, thank you for sharing.
I know that was a lot to share. Yeah.
And at the end of the day,Craig told me these two things.
I was like, That's it.
I Okay, that's we're going to be great, Craig.
Like, I know that's it.
Like you your pending how your employedif your employees not hard on themselves
(46:26):
and it's not don't be likeoh that's all you did okay in my case
it was strategic and I don't think it wasthat big of a deal either of those cases.
But I needed to make sure Craig knewit wasn't that big of a deal to me
because he's so hard himself.
So, you know, like at the end of the day,we're great.
It's Friday,
we got a great weekand we had great numbers in January
and we are off to the races.
(46:47):
Yeah, well, thank you for the grace.
I'll publicly say that Thank youto Steve and Chris for their support.
They've gotten to the point they startto tease me and Chris called me back
that same day that I had to confesswhat happened with the sponsorship.
He said, You know, I was going to give yousome crap about when called you back,
but I thought, Now I already knowCraig Craig's beaten himself up.
(47:08):
Now, if I'd been Steve,I would have done it to Steve.
So I appreciate the relationship.
I have with our supervisors and they're
there their grace as well.
And so, yeah,
you can, you can take a lossand turn it into a win,
build the relationship with your clientsand owners.
(47:31):
You know, as Toddsaid, make it make it a safe space
in your your employees will run througha brick wall for you as well.
I would do that forfor Todd, for Steve, for Chris
because they've allowed methe grace to make a mistake here and there
and learn from it and grow and keepmoving forward to do the best that I can.
So cultureis hugely important in your business.
(47:54):
You can make mistakes into wins.
That's
the biggest takeaway we can say for you.
great, great summary, Craig.
I agree 100%.
Alrighty.
Todd, thanks for
discussing this this week and
we'll we'll be back next week.
I think we're
(48:16):
I think we're going to cover some calendartype things and go
We are, we’re gonna
yeah go into some timetracking a little bit deeper. I think
we're going to help youorganize your time.
So that'syou're going to hit your goals in 25.
So that's what I'm excited about.
So that'll be all next.
Awesome. Looking forward to it.
Hopefullyyou guys learn some good things here.
(48:37):
Make sure you take a breath.
I'm going to get off hereand I'm going to take a breath
and move forward in my day.
But make sure you're thankfulfor the blessings in your life.
And thanks for listeningand thanks for watching, guys.
We appreciate you so much.Have a great week.
Thank you for joining usfor the Spiro podcast,
managing your real estate photographyand videography business.
This is a production of Spiroand wow video tours.
(49:01):
You can find out more about Spirois real estate, media, business management
software at our Web site, Spiro Dot Media.
Coming up on this episodeof The Spiro podcast.
(00:04):
But sometimes when bad things happen,we just want to crawl into a hole.
That's that's kind ofwhat the first instinct is like, Oh,
something bad happened. I just.
I don't even want to talk to the person.
I just want to besad that something to happen.
Welcome to the Spiro podcast.
Managing your real estate photographyand videography business
(00:29):
with your hosts, Todd Kivimaki
and Craig Magrum.
Hi, and welcome to the Spiro podcast.
Managing your real estate, photographyand videography business.
Spirit is a software platform.
It's designed to help you
manage your day to day businessand really help you scale as well.
Whether you're just starting outin real estate photography
(00:50):
or if you've grown a businessto serving multiple regions,
it can scale with you and help youcontinue to scale your business.
I'm Craig Magrum, host of the podcast.
Welcome to it.
Each and every week,
our founder and owner of Spiro and co-hostof the podcast Todd Kivimaki
Welcome back to another week, Todd.
Craig, it's great to be back.
I have an overabundance of energyfor some reason this morning.
(01:14):
I don't even have
all of my coffee down,so I'm just going to apologize right now.
I'm already running through my head.
Think, you know, talk slow, Todd.
But let's justsee what you get from me.
I'm apologize in advance.
I'm there with you.
I was up at 4:15 this morning.
I hit my jiu jitsu class at 6 a.m..
oh, nice
had my celsius
(01:34):
So, yeah,I'm. I'm here to go, rearin to go.
ready to go
And it's just this overcast,rainy, foggy here today.
But man, and all you, you know,
Seattle people and you UK, you're like,it's like that every day but
Anyways we've got a great topic today, Craig.
Excited about that.
(01:54):
It's a great topic and it's going to bea personally painful topic for me.
We're going to make some admissions,
but we'll talk
about how youcan make the best of those things as well.
I know we're being cryptic.
So before we introduce the topic
and I go into my self-flagellation
and in confessional box,as an ex Catholic here,
(02:19):
I'm going to be confessing things.
Let's let's talk about Spiroand some of the updates
I've been watching on social media, Todd.
On the publication, some of thesethese updates for Spiro and it's exciting.
And we're we're seeingsome great responses.
People excited about what'swhat's happening.
So what's going on this week.
Yeah the quick rundownand I'll make a quick we look like
(02:41):
we look we are looking to an updatefor the beginning of March.
First week of Marchis what we are shooting for right now.
Give us a plus or minus of a week on thatand some fun thing.
So the one of the items is landingpages for your order pages.
So this would be a collectionof order pages
(03:02):
where you can link it to your booknow, button on your website,
and then your clientswill be able to select
from your residential or commercialyour short term rental order pages,
headshots, whatever you do,and it'll be a nice landing page for them
to go from to pickthe most appropriate order page.
(03:23):
We are also looking to refreshsome of the e-commerce aspects.
I'm super excited about that.
If you want to find out more about thatin the Spiro Super User Facebook group,
I give a little more information on that.
Moving into a couple of other updates.
We're working on.
There's always various UI and UX fixes,
(03:44):
But one update I want to
mention is the feedback update.
So it's very important to us allas business owners at our real estate
media company, too.
We want to know howwe're doing at our company.
We just sent a survey to our employees.
We surveyed our photographers,we surveyed our clients.
(04:04):
We want to know how we're doing.
And also one thing that's connected withthat is feedback on platforms.
Google is fabulous for us.
Facebook is fabulous for us.
Heck, I don't even know how muchwe even really need a website anymore
because people just search youand they look at reviews.
So we are going to put in a mechanismwhere you can collect feedback
(04:26):
after the shoot and you can ask them,How are we doing?
You know, one through five stars.
If it's one or two or three stars,say you're not happy with that,
send them to a pagethat says, Hey, let's get in contact.
We want to make this right.
Say it's five stars.
They're happy.
Everything went fabulous. Great.
Let's ask them to leave that review
(04:47):
on Google or Facebook or any platformyou choose.
So excited about this.
We have some other things
queued up as well, but those aresome ones that I'm like, Wow.
Like, I'm excited to use themat our real estate media company.
So I want to let you know about them.
We'll give you a little more insighton future podcasts as to what's coming up.
And like I mentioned,we're looking at the first week of March
(05:08):
- to bring that to you all- fantastic, exciting stuff.
Yeah, and just just a selfless picture.
If you are thinking about switching,
now's reallyprobably the best time of the year.
We have a ton of peopleand this is going to sound conceited.
I'm not trying to boast,but we have a ton of people
switching in right now, spinning upSpiro software systems.
(05:29):
We have a team here to help you.
We have a of a free setup processwith a pre-buy.
We have a team that will do that for you.
So if you're interested,I don't ask you guys this a lot.
I'm just going to ask youif you are thinking about switching.
We would love to be your platform.
We have some incredible thingscoming up in 2025 and we have a team here
(05:51):
for you to make it easyso you can chat in with us.
Ask us about the free setupif you want a demo.
Nick on our teamdoes demos every Wednesday
or he'll do a personal demo with you,so just ask us.
We'll be happy to give you everythingwe can and make the switch easy for you.
Absolutely, Nick is a great guy.
(06:12):
You get a chance to talk.
Yeah,I was. I was down in the office yesterday.
I'm normally not down there because Itake care of one of our northern regions,
but ran into Nick there at the officeand caught up with him.
And he's just a fantastic guy.
You'll enjoyworking with him if you haven't yet, guys.
All right,
before we dive into the topic, I'mjust putting the topic off, Todd, because
(06:36):
it's okay.
I already know what it is
I want to do.
I know.
I just am putting it off.
Anyway, I had an idea.
I ran this by Todd, and Todd said,Yeah, let's, let's do this.
So I've donea lot of reading over my life.
I love to read and I love to be constantlylearning new things.
And over the years I've collected
(06:58):
a book collection, Todd,that has gotten extensive.
I've already purged it once before,but now I'm running out of room
on my shelves once againbecause of the the plethora.
I like the word plethora.
Did you ever seethis is a squirrel moment?
Did you ever see the movieThe Three Amigos with Chevy?
Yeah.
Chevy and and Steve Martin.
(07:19):
And that was the third one.
The Dana martin.
I think you’re right
Yeah.
they use the wordplethora is in a plethora of pinatas.
So anyway, I have a plethora of booksthat I would love to pass on
because I want to see somebody elseget some value out of these.
And it's a lot of books on leadership.
(07:40):
And since we're talking to businessowners, whether again
you're just startingor you've been in it for a little while,
I'd like to give away some of my books
on leadershipthat I've read and learn things from.
There might be somesome notes or highlights
in some of these books of thingsthat jumped out to me.
But I'd like to share the knowledge.
And so I think once a week, forhowever long I have books for,
(08:05):
we'd like to give a book to youfree of charge.
I'll ship it to you.
You don't have to worry about shipping and
yeah, just pass this on.
So, Todd, how would we like to do this?
Yeah. So if you're.
If you're interested in the
plethora of books
from the Craig Magrumbook collection first is holding up.
(08:25):
from the Craig Magrumbook collection first is holding up.
Oh, John C Maxwell.
John Maxwell,The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication.
This will be the first book I give away.
Apply themand make the most of your message.
And messaging is importantas an owner and a communicator.
It is.
And if you want this,you need to message us inside of Spiro.
So log into your Spiroplatform, click the pink chat bubble.
(08:48):
All right.
So log in to Spiro,not the Spiro website, but the platform.
Click to click the pink chat bubble.
And what we're going to do this weekis the first person who message us.
So we'll look at the time stampand tell us you want the book
and then give us a podcast idea
for to discuss here a questionyou might have.
(09:09):
It doesn't have to be outrageous.
Just whatwhat are you working on this year?
What do you want toknow more about? message us
The customer support team will take thatand then we will let you know
if you won and we'll get your addressand we will ship it to you.
Yeah, yeah.
Just want to share the wealthhere. Share. Share the knowledge.
I love that, Craig. Thank you.
Yeah, I've got there's,I've got some really good books back here
(09:33):
that I've just really enjoyed reading, so
I hope you will enjoy them as well.
All right,
- Are we ready?- We're ready.
I don't know if I'm ready.
- All right,- you wan’t me to set this one up, Craig?
Yeah, go ahead.
Let me set this one up,
because this is this isthere's a lot of learning points here.
And I think at the end of the day,a learning point is
(09:55):
when things happen, it'snot the end of the world.
And always when they happen,it feels like that, right?
Because we as business ownerstake that upon ourselves and we feel that
even not as business owners,You know, Craig is an employee of Wow.
And and he's taken it.
What I feel like it's too hard sobut that's okay it's all that's Craig
(10:18):
he takes it very seriouslyand people are important to him. So
what we're going to discuss todayand I'll I'll,
I'll let you tell the story, CraigBut there was a couple of mishaps
that happened in Craig'sweek this week, and
they happened to everyone. They do.
I think I share with you guys the accountthat I lost that losses a quarter
(10:40):
million dollars and that was likea very low moment for me.
It was terrible.
The the great thing was, iswe just it's two years later,
we onboarded her in a call this morningjust before this podcast, I hopped on,
I said hello.
So I said, Hey, I just I haveI have a 9:45.
I just wanted to say hello, introduce youto the team that's going to onboard you.
so good can come from bad. And
(11:05):
that isone of the things to focus on today.
and, and you can really show
your customer service by how you react.
You have a choice.
When something bad happens, you alwayshave a choice of what you're going to do.
And making the right choice can be key
and you actually coming out on topin the end.
(11:26):
Yeah.
So, Craig, you had a busy week.
It was a busy week.
It's been a busy month in the market
that I serveand I'm very grateful for that.
Had a good number of shootsand I take a lot of pride
in providing really good customer serviceto people
going above and beyond because
(11:48):
I want to createraving fans of Wow video tours, right,
and buildthat loyalty and build that relationship.
And so I tried to takevery good care of people,
but I'm a human being and I make mistakes.
And so I had I had two major mistakesthat I made this week that, you know,
like Todd said, I'm being hard on myself,but it's because I don't like to fail.
(12:11):
I mean, nobody likes to fail,but I really, really don't like to fail,
especially when it's somethingas simple as writing
something down on your calendarso you don't miss a meeting.
And that's what happenedthis week in event number one.
Todd So
I'll just lay this out here.
(12:31):
You know, we've talked in the pastabout sponsoring events as you're trying
to build your business, the importanceof sponsoring events, building community,
supporting the real estatecommunity industry.
And we sponsored an event in my market,
one of many sponsors,
you know, paid to be at that event,paid to have,
(12:53):
you know, recognition with logo placementand things like that.
And part of that was also having a boothat this summit event.
It was a realtor summit for a brokerage
where you can set up your booth and engagewith the realtors that are there.
It's a great networking opportunity.We did it last year.
It was a fantastic event.
They really talked us up and we have agreat we have a great relationship with us
(13:17):
as a brokerage and in
particular the lead broker.
Well,
I live and die by my calendarand I've told my wife
this if it's not on the calendar,it does not exist in my mind.
Yeah.
And so I had set up this sponsorship.
I was committed to coming to it, andsomehow I failed to put it on my calendar.
(13:42):
I you know, any number of excuses
of why that's not the important partand that's really not relevant.
The fact is I forgot to write it downand put it on my calendar.
So the day came and went and I hada couple of appointments that I shot.
You know,it wasn't like it was a complete loss.
We only still had appointmentsthat that I shot.
(14:05):
But I got home and I was uploadingmy media to our editing team.
And I was also checking Facebookand saw that one of the realtors
that I have a great relationship withthat is at this brokerage posted about
about the summit, about the eventthat happened that day. And
(14:25):
it was one of those deer in the headlightsmoments, Todd.
Yeah
and my stomach just dropped
and I got sick to my stomachwhen I realized
I wasn't at this sponsored event
that we paid money to be at.
(14:45):
To me, very, very unprofessional.
And I will just say thatI dropped the ball
immediately,called my immediate supervisor
and and said what I did
because I really believein taking responsibility for your action.
Just own the mistake.
Don't don't make excuses.
Don't beat around the bush,just own it, deal with it,
(15:08):
you know, make good on it.
However you can offer what you can,
because integrity is important to me.
And I'm just I'm not going to tryand misrepresent why I missed it.
It was just a complete failure on my part.
So, you know, talk through itwith Chris.
And
he, you know,
(15:29):
suggested some thingsI made a call to the broker that same day,
got his voicemail
and left him a profuse apologyfor my failure
to not bethere as one of the sponsors of the events
and let him know, you know,this wasn't intentional.
It just I failed to put it on my calendar.
And I just made it clear to him
(15:51):
about my failure.
I said, anything we can do to make up,
you know, I want to make sure we continueto take great care of you.
And, you know,
invest in the relationship.
If there's an opportunity to comespeak with your, you know, your team
at a different event or anything I can doto make good on this, I'll do
(16:12):
it. So
I didn't hear from him for a day and
a bitch has been stewing on this. Todd
So this morning
before the podcast, I reached out againbecause I want to talk to him live.
I want to have the actual conversation,man to man,
you know, and again,take responsibility, apologize,
(16:34):
make sure the relationship's good,do what I can to salvage
what I did and
this broker, again, I've got a decent,
decent relationship with himjust because of time
and taking care of him in the pastand doing good work for him.
And he's like, Craig,
(16:55):
things happen,you know, He didn't even skip a beat.
Todd There wasn't an edge to his voice.
It was a soft response.
It was it was a graceful response.
And he's like, things happen,you know, totally understand.
I said, Well, I just I wanted you to knowit wasn't intentional.
I value the relationship.
I want to make sure we're taking goodcare of you, because I know you do, Craig.
(17:17):
There's no doubtor something like that.
That's not an exact quote.
But Todd,you can listen to the call if you want,
but he's like, don't worry about it.
And I mean, it felt good.
I still am really disappointed in myself,but I wanted to make sure
(17:37):
that I took steps to admit the mistake,take full ownership of it.
And if if he was upset,what can we do to make this right?
Because we value working with you.
We don't take that for granted.
We know he's got four other choices
of companies and individualsthat he could work with and promote.
So I want to make sure that I doeverything I can
to provide the best customer serviceI can despite a failure.
(18:02):
So what
what ended up happening was I'm actuallywas going to be shooting a listing
for him today, but pretty, pretty decent,pretty decent listing.
But as we talked about at the beginningof the episode, Todd, it's Gray here.
It was foggy.
It's kind of dreary in this property'son the river, so they weren't great views.
(18:24):
It's an expensive listing.
I said, Ivan, let's rescheduleit just so we can get the best,
you know, the best media that we cannormally.
You know, normally, if it's reschedulingthe same day, there's a rescheduling fee.
Don't even worry about that. I'mtaking care of this.
And I'm also going to make sure that we dosome luxury editing on the windows
so that you have blue skies outthe windows in the photos and not not
(18:47):
plain boring gray skies because we don'tinclude that automatically.
And he's like, Great,thank you. Perfect it.
Just go ahead,
talk to my assistant, get it rescheduledand and we're good to go. So
it could have gone a different way
where he could have been upsetfor a couple of different reasons.
I don'tI don't want to dominate the conversation.
(19:09):
But what what are you thinking right now?
What are questions you might have for meor points that you want to make?
Well, the
the thing thatI want to point out in this,
this isn't so much a learned behaviors,maybe just for me,
maybe for you all it is.
But sometimes when bad things happen,we just want to crawl into a hole.
(19:31):
That's that's kind ofwhat the first instinct is like, Oh,
something bad happened. I just.
I don't even want to talk to the person.
I just want to besad that something to happen.
You know?
There's no time to be sad.
Something happenedwhen you own a business,
when you when you are
even if you don't own a businessjust in life, there's no reason.
(19:52):
There's there is something about
making up for whattook place in your reaction.
And just like Craig said,he first instinct he had was,
I'm going to own up tothis thing called his supervisor.
But my first reaction wasI was sick to my stomach.
Yeah, true. That's true. Yeah.
(20:15):
Yeah.
And I see you guys asked this questiona lot on online, and this appears
in various different formats ofI see one of my clients used a competitor.
I have a client who hasn't paid an invoice
X, Y and Z of those questions,you know, I forgot to go to an event.
(20:37):
What do I do?
Or you just call that person literally.
And I know
I give that answer every single time.
And the older I get,
the more I just try to keep life simple.
If there's something that I've doneand I can't sleep
or I have that sick feeling,I need to go tell that person, you know.
(21:01):
And Craig's case,he had a fabulous relationship.
And this owner
gave him some grace, which is fabulous.
And the caseI mentioned earlier in the podcast,
where my situation was a little different.
That owner was
understanding and was almost like,hey, don't you know?
(21:23):
I know things happen.
She just happenedto make a different decision
because of the mistake that I made.
So and you can't beyou can't be mad at someone.
Then like, I was fully prepared.
Craig was fully
prepared to have this owner say, Hey,we never want to talk to you again,
you know, And what we would have done iswe would have said, okay,
(21:44):
this is unfortunate, bad things happen
and what are we going to doto make up for it?
And as a business,you have to be prepared to walk that path,
take it head on,and then whatever the decision is,
deal with it.
You know, just a quick little storyof where I'm teaching my boys at home.
So I think I've mentioned this before.
(22:04):
I have a 12 year oldand a ten year old boy
and I have a girls while she's younger,but we talk a lot about communication
and how they communicatewith their with each other.
So Boston's 12, Grant’s 10for those of you
that have a siblingthat's a year or two older or younger.
And if you're the same sex,there's there's competition.
(22:27):
Even if you're boy and girl,like there's some competition.
And if you're the oldest, you're alwaysthe first one that gets everything.
And you always get to experienceeverything first.
And you're probably the favorite as seenby the middle or seen by the youngest.
And if you're the youngest,the oldest sees it as you that you have it
so much easier and you get everything.
(22:48):
And I help them managethose thoughts in their head.
And we talk about this a lot of how theyinteract with each other.
And there's there was a situation
about a week ago where they just didn'tcommunicate very well.
And one of them said to the other like,hey, you know, I'm sorry.
And he didn't want to say sorry,but he said it, which was great.
(23:11):
You know, it wasn't like, Oh,I'm so sorry.
I was like, All right, I'm sorry.
And the otherwas not accepting that apology.
And now that's a wholenother conversation.
But if you give an apologyand the other side doesn't accept it,
that's out of your hands, right?
You can't control that.
You can't control it.
And and you shouldn’t focus on that.
(23:31):
You should do everything you can.You should make it right.
But you shouldn'tfocus on what you can't control.
There is so much that we cannot controlin 2025 and in years
beyond that, if we try to start focusingon those things,
you are going to just burn out.
You're going to be out of gas,you're going to burn out,
(23:51):
you're going to hate your business,you're going to hate your job,
you're going to hate your family,you're going to hate whatever it is.
Focus on what you can controland whatever happens
outside of that,you just have to live with it. And
if it was
not the reaction you want as in my case,
you have toI mean, apologize one more time.
(24:13):
That's what I did.
I kept in contact.
I made sure that person knewthat they were important to me and don't
count on anything, because I don't thinkthat's a great way to live life.
I think you do itwithout counting on anything,
and that reduces back Craigand you tell me if you think differently.
But that servant mentalitythat we talk about so much on this podcast
(24:35):
that you serve your clientsand you don't expect anything,
and when you need something,Craig's has served this broker
for a very long timeand he hasn't expected anything.
And you know what?
The broker gave some gracewhen Craig actually really needed it.
(24:56):
so serve without expectations.
It's not easy to do.
It's not somethingthat my brain is programed with.
My brain is typically what can I giveand how can I get more back?
And as I realize it,that's not a great way to live.
Over the years,
you serve people and you're happybecause you get to serve them
(25:17):
and that's your payback.
Yeah, I think for me, Todd to it'syou know, the serving
without expecting backand not taking anything for granted
that that part is easy for me.
I've learned over the yearshow to then also own mistakes
and not that that's ever easy,but it's gotten easier.
(25:39):
That's just part of my core values.
Is is living a life of integrity
to the best of my ability On your mistakeswhere you can.
Or my challenge is, is forgiving myself.
Yeah.
So when you know, when you say do whatyou can, you can't control that person's
response to your apology or your sincereeffort to make things right.
(26:00):
Yeah, you can't control that.
But what you can control andI'm preaching at myself right now, guys.
What I can control is how I treat myself.
I can't controlhow how that client is going to treat me
even after my effort to make things good.
But I can't control how I treat myself.
And it's gotten to bea little bit of a joke here.
You know, on our team with with Steve
(26:21):
and Chris and myselfand Todd about how bad I beat myself up.
But again, I don't like to fail,
but I have to learn to forgive myselfif I never learn how to forgive myself.
I'm just going to continue to beat myselfup and have absolutely no confidence
in myself as a person.
Not that
not that you ever want to be cocky,
(26:44):
but people will sensea lack of confidence.
So if if I'm trying to develop business
here in my market,but I have zero confidence in myself,
people are going to pick up on that
and they're not goingto want to work with me now.
Yeah, it's it's not that you are cocky
when you go into a presentationor when you talk about what you do,
(27:05):
but I can truly say I love what I do,
but if I have zero confidence
that's not going to come across,I don't think you actually can love
what you dounless you do have some confidence.
And thankfully,
you know, I've gotten some good feedbackfrom people that they like working with.
They they like the product and servicethat we provide as a company.
And so it's built over the years.
(27:27):
So I have to learn to continue
to forgive myself and realize, yeah, I'mgoing to screw up from time to time.
It's going to happen.
I just I learn what I canfrom that situation, pick up and and can
continue to move forward and just continueto try and serve people well.
Do my best.
And that's all you can do.
You know, as an owner, as a as anemployee, no matter where you are in life.
(27:49):
Yeah.
Craig, let me let let's take thisfrom a slightly different perspective
and dimension of the conversationbecause and one I truly
appreciate you sharing that I know howwe talked about this off air a little bit.
I can see it in your face.
I can tell in your motion, like,thank you for being open with us.
I, I really appreciate that.
(28:09):
I don't know about you Todd, but sometimes
when I listen to podcastsand, you know, speakers of any sort,
what you see a lot
of times is just a very successful,polished person and you don't always hear
about the struggles that people have.
I just want to be real with people
we know more and more people are listening
(28:32):
and I don't think we can developa really good community and relationships
with thosethat were in the same industry with
unless there's some transparencyin vulnerable vulnerability,
I don't have to share all my dirty,dirty laundry with you guys.
But we make mistakes.
So how can we learn from those mistakes?How can we share that?
What we've learned with others?
Because you're going to make mistakesas well.
(28:53):
I just
I can't with any amount of pride.
I know myself too well. So.
well I do appreciate thatthat that transparency
and sharingfrom from a different perspective here.
Let's look at thisas from an owner to employee, a photographer
or an admin perspective.
So that's, that's our relationship.
(29:15):
CraigAnd I know Craig doesn't report to me.
You know, he's got a great teamwith, with Chris and Steve.
Ultimately I own the companyso I, you know, I am ultimate. And
so let's talk
about from that perspective as to employeeversus employer direct report your way
as you grow your company, your employeesare going to screw things up
(29:39):
and you screwed things up too.
So you got to realize that one.
I think for me, it took me a lot of yearsto get through my thick skull.
I was like, I never screwed anything up.
You people come in here.
Why is everybody screwing everything up.when in return
I was really just the biggest screw up.
But that's a whole nothertherapy session for me and someone else.
(30:01):
So what?
What happens when there is somethingnot favorable
that happensand it's from one of your employees?
Well, one, I think you need to make sure
that that individual understands
that it was a gap.
(30:22):
It was not great.
There's been times I know in the pastthat Wow, where I'm like,
why are they doing that?
Why is an employee doing something?
And they don't know thatthat's wrong to do.
They haven't been taughtthat the training was maybe lacking.
Maybe we used to do it a different way
(30:42):
and they're on the old wayand not the new way.
And maybe this is a slip of mind.
So first off,you need to make sure that you bring this
and you as the owner,need to communicate it to your employees.
When someone's not doing somethingthat you want them to do.
Remember, this is your business.
It's all in your brain.
Just because it's in your braindoesn't mean it's in someone else's brain.
(31:06):
Okay.
You know the example of booking
a sponsorship at an eventand then that person that's supposed to be
there not showing up, don't assumethat they assume they should show up.
Now you're going to be like, wait, yeah,I just.
I saw you. Yeah. You're like, Oh,wait a minute, Todd.
You're really not that intelligent. Like,what do you.
(31:27):
- What do you mean?- No?
That's not what I was saying.
That's not what I was saying.
Oh, okay, I'm not.
I just I think I know a lot.
So you guys hear me out on this one,but I've done it the wrong way.
I'm telling you, I done this in the past.
If you come to them and you're like,Why didn't
you make that eventand you come at them harsh.
(31:49):
If I would have gone to Craig with that,
Craig would be in the dumpsfor the next three months over it.
Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Like if Craig is already hardenough on himself.
So you need to just be like,if you need to clarify something
very easy, don't come at themwith anger in your heart.
(32:11):
You need to
come from a place of loveall the time in your heart.
And that was very hardfor me to understand.
It took me a lot of years to understandthat you don't
ever need to respondwith anger in your heart.
Man. I like I get angry quick.
I got a temper, y'all.
And I always have something to say.
(32:32):
I always have a response.My 12 year old got.
I was talking to my wife about it.
Actually, all the kids got it.
They all got likethey have something to say immediately.
They got it from me. I'm sorry, Jessica.
That's my wife.
I'm sorry.
Even though and this is funny,
last night when she was like,Hey, that's you as in me coming out.
(32:53):
And I'm like, No, it's not.You always have something to say.
So there I'm just admitting it.
I always had something to say about hersaying I had something to say
that doesn't even make sense anymore.
So let me try to bring this back together.
Welcome to Spiro Confessions.
Holy cow. Yeah.
When something bad
happens as the owner,you need to not get angry.
(33:13):
Come from love and take it as a point that
they did it and do it intentionally.
Your first instinct is going to be,Why is Craig trying
to sabotage my company?
No, that's not the case.
Don't ever assume that might happen,y'all.
I like to think people are good in natureand good people.
(33:36):
If you've hired them andthey've been on your team for a long time,
they want to do good for you.
They do.
And you naysayers can call me up,you know,
whatever you want to call me,but I would rather live my life
thinking people are here to do goodthan thinking everybody's out to get me.
I just don't want to live that life.
And I'll I'll, I'll just leave it at that.
(33:57):
That's that's a my choice.
So when that happens, you need to comefrom a place of love in your heart
and just get those feelings out,you know, and ask them.
So what do you think we should do?
What would be thebest way to respond to this?
Craig had the answer.
He knew what to do.
He executed it. He took care of it.
(34:19):
So as an employer, your people are notgoing to do everything you want.
They're going to make some mistakes.
Some are going to be costly, some are not.
You just need to make sure that
you are
capitalizing on those mistakes.
And I'll give a verbal that we use hereand we use
(34:40):
at while we call it wearing a badge, a
and I have a ton of them,but I've learned from them.
We always ask the question, it'sa very cliche question in an interview,
but it's important.
Do you think mistakes are good or bad?
Just to get that mindset,
you know, is a mistake. Good or bad
(35:02):
mistakes will help you understand
how you can come out on top,how you can grow your business.
So make sure you talk to your employeeswhen something happens, bring it to them.
Don't assume that they've donewhat they should do.
You need to talk about it.
You need to document it if it's necessary.
We didn't felt necessary,
(35:24):
and Craig says we had a different casewith an employee here this week
or in the past that we were like, Yeah,we probably need to document this.
What document?
As we just felt we didn't feelit was to the level that we needed
to formally write something out on aon a disciplinary sheet.
We have a formal write upwhere we do that.
(35:44):
We put it on their record.
All we did in this caseis we sent an email, the email was sent,
the managerwas secede and we documented it.
And that's importantbecause people to know your feedback.
One more thing, I'll leave you with Craigand then we can go to the high points of
the second story, because I think there'sa couple of things to learn in there
(36:05):
is that
your employees want you to be happy.
And what I mean by that is
they it's always in the back of their headis what I'm doing
just Todd like that,or is Steve happy with that?
And as a business owner, at least for me,I didn't always understand that
(36:28):
because you're you're all programeda little bit differently.
At least I am.
And if you are heavy
and times of these gaps of a screw uptime,
you are going to handcuff your employeesand they are going to feel like they're
going to be paralyzed by trying to makethe decision that will make you happy
(36:54):
and them
trying to make the decisionthat's going to make you happy versus
making the correct decisionare two different things.
And sometimes one's good and one's bad,and the one of making you happy
isn't always goodbecause they're paralyzed
by the idea of trying to think aboutwhat do you want them to do versus
(37:14):
what should they just dobecause you trust them?
I trust Craig fully.
I trust Craigto always take care of our clients.
I trust him.
Whatever he says.
I'm like,I trust you, Craig. We align with that.
We're good.
I have a full trust in him,
and if you don't have that full trustin your employees,
build those relationships, traina little bit more.
(37:36):
But you have to get it to a pointthat that employee
feels empowered,that they can make their own decisions.
And if you don't, what's going to happen?
Because we felt it at
Wow at our company, you are going to beginto have a pinch point in your growth.
And I saw this a few years ago at Wow
when everybody was trying to makethe decision that Todd would have made.
(37:58):
And Toddtried to pull himself of the business
a little bit and everybody was in gridlock
because they're like,oh, what does Todd want us to do?
It's like, no, wait a minute.
I trust you guys.
You make the decision that's good for you.
And I would rather be on the reactive endthat if that doesn't come out
the way you anticipate,if you want my help
(38:19):
in trying to make up for thatand fill that gap, come and get me.
But I've screwed up a ton here.
I expect thatyou're going to screw up as well.
None of us like mistakes,but when they happen, let's just work
really hard to fix themso it aligns with our core values.
What what I'll say
in response to that, Todd, isI think there's a little nuance to that of
(38:42):
wanting to make your owner or manageror whoever happy
that there's two ways of wantingto make your owner or leader happy.
One isyou want to make them happy out of fear.
One don't.
When you don't have a healthy culturein the organization or in the company
because of that heavy handednessthat that you talked about.
(39:05):
So they're speakinghappy out of fear or paralysis,
or when you make it a safe space to screwup, not on a continual basis.
Obviously,you don't want to get into that pattern,
but if you make it safeand allow for mistakes, people, I,
I think I, I like to thinkthat people are good natured as well.
(39:29):
Overall, they'll
feel a little bit more safein owning up to their mistakes
and thinking throughhow can I not do this again
because they trust you as a leader,
because you made it safefor them to screw up and you gave grace.
Now, again, there'sthere's always accountability, obviously.
And and I've learnedto take accountability for things.
(39:50):
That's how I'm wired.
But when you make it a safe culture
to allow for mistakesand for allowing people
to be human,they're they're going to have bad days.
And in building that relationship,you know, we talked about relationships.
We talk about relationships all the timewith with clients, with employees.
It all hinges on that.
(40:12):
You I think you'll find
that most reasonablepeople will own up to things
easier and want to learn from those thingsand get better.
So I think the motivation is different.
On wanting to make an owner happy.
One out of fear, one out of grace.
Yeah, Yeah.
I think that's an importantaspect to understand
(40:34):
and I think it's it's ait's a tough question to potentially
ask yourself, like, are my employeesdo they fear me or,
you know, do they have respect for meand they feel confident and sharing
with me
All right.
Well, that was fun.
Oh, well, thanks for sharing, Craig.
(40:56):
I did say at the beginning
there was two situationswere kind of getting close on time here.
We don't we don't want to make the episodetoo long, Do we want to dive into it
or it's kind of a similar situation we're
You know, I think I don't thinkwe need to go into the
to pick the particulars.
I can see out whatever that word is.
(41:18):
At the end of the day,I'll just I'll book note it here.
Craig for us. Craig was on a shoot.It was for a buddy of mine.
He doesn't own a real estatemedia company.
He owns a companythat refurbishes very large buildings.
He was asked to do something a little bitdifferent with the drone as to where
he was tryingto take a close up of some brickwork
because they this is the waythey are actually giving out
(41:40):
quotes to their clientsas they use our drone images
to actually seewhat needs refurbished and redone.
And this was a different shoot.
Craig was on site with the project managerand assembled a do
your up in with eaves and and chimneysand things like that.
And you hit a chimney and the drone goesdown.
(42:00):
Yeah. I mean that's such is life
not great.
Nobody loves to lose a drone,but it's just what happens that happens
all the time.
Not all the time. But
no,
not all the time.
Not for you.
But you know, it's
not uncommon that once a quarter like,Oh, that person lost that drone.
Okay, well, what are we going to do?
Yeah, yeah.
And again, the drone was unrecoverableand I had a shoot before
(42:24):
that one that also had drone, soI had no media for my clients yesterday.
So again, take care of things right away.
I called my first client immediatelyand said, Here's what happened.
I don't have your media.
I can't get it until tomorrowat the earliest, but we will be on this.
Is that going to be acceptable to you?
How can we make this up?
(42:44):
He's like, Actually,I don't need it right away.
He didn't even have a signed contractwith his potential seller,
so he was just trying to get another.
That's a wholeanother problem. Right? Right.
He always pays this bill.
So I wasn't worried about that.
But he's he's like,don't don't don't worry about it, Craig.
Just whenever you can get back out there,that's great.
But again, get ahead of things, own thingsimmediately.
(43:07):
And if you've built the relationshipand you've built the trust,
you're going to nine times out of ten,you're going to get the grace.
So all of this to sayown your mistakes.
Don't beat around the bush.
Don't make excuses,
address it immediately.
I'd rather address it immediately
(43:28):
and not stew on itas bad through the night and not sleep.
But next three nights. Yeah.
And to just take care of it right away.
And then
you make it that you make itthat much worse, much worse for yourself
if you do.
Been calling them immediately,
every almost every client'sgoing to respect that.
If you wait a day, two days,not clients like me, where am I?
(43:50):
Drone photos are like,Yeah, oh, by the way, I don't have them.
You are going to just make the situationand far worse.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So. All right,
Hopefully that
I have one more. I'm sorry, Craig.Just one more quick little point here.
And this is just something to think aboutas your company scales.
So, Craig, that you lost a drone,you had what?
(44:12):
You have one drone, right?
What do we do from a company perspective?
What did you do in that case?
- And just from a logistical standpoint,- yeah, so the office has a spare drone
and I believe in each of our markets
we also have a spare, spare dronein case something like this happens.
And our office is about an hourfrom where I live.
So it's not unreasonablefor me to go drive down there.
(44:34):
So I actually drove down there yesterdayafternoon, picked up the spare.
I'm ready to shoot todayif need be, though.
Looking at the weather,
probably not going to happen today,but I'm going to shoot it tomorrow.
The jobs that I need to.
So just being preparedwith backup equipment
to be able to respondto your clients right away
when you do make a mistake, if you know,if you got, maybe you lose a drone.
(44:58):
So yeah,
I was thankful thattheir office had something, you know, gear
wise to back up so that I could take careof our clients right away?
Yeah.
And that that's something that alignswith our core values.
And I keep going back to thesebecause they're so important.
But clients are our number one priorityso much.
The fact that we knowthat it takes a day or two
or three to get equipmentand we want to keep that.
(45:20):
We have we've taken the investmenton to keep that equipment.
In fact, you picked up a dronethat was new in the box.
It wasn't even it was sealed.
He he took the cellophane off of it.
So number three, corevalue is we are family.
We know.
We know. It's not great to lose a drone.
Craig's not happy about losing the drone,so how can we better support him?
But like, hey,we've got something for you right now,
(45:42):
and then we work out, you know,do you get a new one?
Do you not get a new one?Do you replace this one?
But we
figure out what your core
values are aligned with thoseand that will really keep you pointed
and that will keep your whole organizationconnected and aligned and empowered.
And then you will be able to beginto remove yourself as the business owner.
(46:03):
But you have to set all that first.
Well, Craig, thank you for sharing.
I know that was a lot to share. Yeah.
And at the end of the day,Craig told me these two things.
I was like, That's it.
I Okay, that's we're going to be great, Craig.
Like, I know that's it.
Like you your pending how your employedif your employees not hard on themselves
(46:26):
and it's not don't be likeoh that's all you did okay in my case
it was strategic and I don't think it wasthat big of a deal either of those cases.
But I needed to make sure Craig knewit wasn't that big of a deal to me
because he's so hard himself.
So, you know, like at the end of the day,we're great.
It's Friday,
we got a great weekand we had great numbers in January
and we are off to the races.
(46:47):
Yeah, well, thank you for the grace.
I'll publicly say that Thank youto Steve and Chris for their support.
They've gotten to the point they startto tease me and Chris called me back
that same day that I had to confesswhat happened with the sponsorship.
He said, You know, I was going to give yousome crap about when called you back,
but I thought, Now I already knowCraig Craig's beaten himself up.
(47:08):
Now, if I'd been Steve,I would have done it to Steve.
So I appreciate the relationship.
I have with our supervisors and they're
there their grace as well.
And so, yeah,
you can, you can take a lossand turn it into a win,
build the relationship with your clientsand owners.
(47:31):
You know, as Toddsaid, make it make it a safe space
in your your employees will run througha brick wall for you as well.
I would do that forfor Todd, for Steve, for Chris
because they've allowed methe grace to make a mistake here and there
and learn from it and grow and keepmoving forward to do the best that I can.
So cultureis hugely important in your business.
(47:54):
You can make mistakes into wins.
That's
the biggest takeaway we can say for you.
great, great summary, Craig.
I agree 100%.
Alrighty.
Todd, thanks for
discussing this this week and
we'll we'll be back next week.
I think we're
(48:16):
I think we're going to cover some calendartype things and go
We are, we’re gonna
yeah go into some timetracking a little bit deeper. I think
we're going to help youorganize your time.
So that'syou're going to hit your goals in 25.
So that's what I'm excited about.
So that'll be all next.
Awesome. Looking forward to it.
Hopefullyyou guys learn some good things here.
(48:37):
Make sure you take a breath.
I'm going to get off hereand I'm going to take a breath
and move forward in my day.
But make sure you're thankfulfor the blessings in your life.
And thanks for listeningand thanks for watching, guys.
We appreciate you so much.Have a great week.
Thank you for joining usfor the Spiro podcast,
managing your real estate photographyand videography business.
This is a production of Spiroand wow video tours.
(49:01):
You can find out more about Spirois real estate, media, business management
software at our Web site, Spiro Dot Media.
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