October 1, 2025 • 57 mins
Wisdom is the application of knowledge. We hope this episode is an opportunity for you to apply the knowledge of what mistakes NOT to make, that we've already made for you. It's always fun to hear how others screwed up, right? We hope you get some laughs and good information.
Links mentioned in the episode:
REPP Conference: http://repplaunch.com/repp2025
Spiro Sync Event (Tickets not available yet): http://spiro.media Chapter
Timestamps:
00:00 Episode Open
02:00 Spiro Updates
06:12 Industry Conferences
08:35 Top 3 Mistakes We've Learned From
54:54 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):
the best answer is the correct answer.
The second best answeris the wrong answer.
The worst answer is no answeror no decision.
(00:28):
Hi and welcome to the Spiro Podcast,managing your Real estate media business.
Spiro is a software platform.
It's designed to help you run your day today real estate photo and video business,
ultimately really,to help it scale and grow and manage
a lot of the tasksthat can chew up a lot of your time
and just make thingsa lot more efficient for you.
(00:49):
I'm Craig Magrum, welcome backthis week, if you're returning viewer
or listenerand if you're brand new to the podcast,
just really glad to have you hereand we would love to hear from you.
Just how you found the podcast.
Tell us a little bit about your business.
This is a community
that we're building to help each othergrow strong real estate media businesses.
(01:10):
So you can drop us an email at hello@spiro
that's S P I R O dot media.
All right, without further ado,let me introduce co-host and owner
and founder of Spiro Todd Kivimaki
Welcome back, Todd. Craig, a fabulous day for us all here today.
Excited.
We have well,by the time you're listening to this,
(01:32):
we have 12 weeksleft in the year at the most.
12 weeks is crazy.
So I wanted to put some thingson your calendar
because those 12 weeks are going to gofast.
Remember, you're burninga couple of those weeks for holidays.
So here's some things to think about.
(01:54):
One, we just had a huge launch with Spiro,
and we launched Titus,which is pay at close if you need a reason
to reach out to your clients,please let them know about Titus.
It is in beta right now.
The 20 that have launched inbeta are doing fabulous.
(02:14):
It's a cool program.
Basically, your clients can defer paymentuntil close.
You get paid immediately.
We are the first platformto bring this and fully
integrate Titus to make it possiblein a feature for your business.
If you want to find out more,
you can go to spiro.mediaand find out more information there.
(02:37):
You can startadvertising this to your clients.
We are looking at a mid Octoberor early October
launch for everyone,so it is right around the corner.
And the first pay close came in Craigthe other day actually on the 23rd
when it launched, we got pingedby the Titus team and they said, hey,
we just got the first payat close right on opening day,
(03:00):
On opening day, $1,260.
Holy moly.
That's incredible.
Pretty cool Yeah.
We we don't know, like,if you're AOV right now is 250.
I'm not saying you're going to have 1260,but I am confident
that you're goingto see your AOV increase.
(03:21):
I'd be curious if that
that one that came throughwas an increase, in fact, that.
Yeah.
Interesting to find out.
I'll go find that out and let you guysknow next week what that is.
But I'm confident Nick has seenNick is the co-founder at Titus.
They have seen a large increase.
He's like, hey, I think you're goingto get 30% when people use this.
So yeah, so,you know, we've done a podcast on Titus.
(03:45):
Go back and listen to that,that the end of the day.
One thing I want to leave you with iswhen this was brought to my attention.
Nick contacted me long ago.
I wrote it off right away.
I would never use this personally.
I don't finance anything. Craig.
Okay. Other than my house,everything else.
We own the house.
(04:07):
We have a payment on.
I have like a 2% interest rate. Okay.
That's another problem.
That's a whole nother podcast in itselfabout the real estate market and people
that are locked into low interest rates,like I'm,
you know, anyway,you're sitting on that for a while.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm not leaving.
Like I'm literally adding on another houseon top of my house.
(04:27):
If we need more room,
I mean, come on. Yep.
But but that was my truth.
And it was not a true thought.
Meaning that
just because I thoughtI would not use financing.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
(04:48):
Yeah, I'm wrong.
You would not believe the response
we have heard from agents about thisfeature.
Be the first in your market.
Heck, even if you're not the firstin your market
and someone's already launched with it,this is launch day right now.
Okay, sojust start telling your agents about it.
(05:08):
If they say no, or at least you hada good reason to reach out to them,
I think you'll be very surprisedwith the amount of agents
that use it and say, hey,thank you for giving me this option.
And by the way,they spent a lot more money with you.
So that is on that.
Put that on your calendarto send that out in your newsletter.
(05:29):
Today we've given you search ourour knowledge based guide.
We've given you marketing materials.
You've got graphic social media post.
We've given you fliers.
We've given you verbiage.
Just go to our support guide,type in Titus and take it all from there.
We've done the work for you.
You know, at this point about,
about Titus and agents
(05:50):
possibly spending more,probably spending more,
with this option to pay itclose actually relates
to a point that I think we're goingto talk about in our topic today.
Just you're just got me thinking.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sure is.
So that so, that is coming in our topic.
(06:10):
But the other things for your calendar,November is right around the corner.
You're five weeks away at the most
to the conference,the REPP conference in Las Vegas.
So pleasego to the link below in the description
and get yourself a ticket.
I am going to be speaking.
(06:32):
My team is going to be there.
There is a fabulous panelspeakers and heck, there are allowing me.
I get the privilege to host the thing.
I'm the MC for the event.
So you're going to love this event.
It's an incredible event and Eli Jonesand his team with the repp team
and those ticket salesare cutting off quick.
So get a ticket, booka flight if you're going.
(06:53):
If November doesn't work for you, please
come and see us at our first in-personevent for Spiro the Spiro Sync.
That is January 22nd and 23rd.
Ticket sales have not happened yet,but probably will this week or next.
So keep an eye at Spiro.mediafor more information.
(07:13):
We want you to come. It's a two day event.
You're going to come grow, learn.
We're looking for a couple more speakers.
We're going to havesome breakout sessions.
So if you're like, hey,I kind of like to host a session
and they're not, you know, we're goingto have about 125 people at this event.
We've limited it for this first event.
So ticket sales are going to be limited.
You know,if you want to host a group of 10
or 20 people,we're going to have these fabulous
(07:34):
breakout sessions where the communitycan teach the community.
So that is coming up January 22nd, 23rd.
So please put that on your calendar.
We would love to see youin person in Dayton, Ohio.
It's going to be good.
Looking forward to it.
I hope you make it downtown.
Oh you Craig is going to be thereyes I hope well, okay.
(07:55):
You just said I was going toI was saying I was hoping to be there.
You just said I was going to be there. So.
Guys, he's my boss.
I'm looking forward to meeting you.
Oh, we got a great idea to.
Craig sent it to him this morning,and we don't have to go into it,
but he's like,let's record a podcast from it.
Well, credit to Jess.
Our operations director on our real estatemedia side of the business.
(08:15):
She had that idea. I'm like, duh.
Why didn't I think of that?
Yeah, that's a fantastic idea. So, yeah.
Hoping to featuresome of you that come to the Spiro Sync
on the Spiro podcastepisode.
Yeah. Get your face on the podcast.
That'll be fun.
Kind of be fun.
All ready? Anything else for us?
(08:36):
No. Craig, I'm excited about this topic.
I, this is a painful onebecause we're talking about mistakes,
but, there's always lightat the end of the tunnel, right?
Right.
So, yeah,the topic this week, top three mistakes
that we have learned fromin the real estate media business.
For your benefit.
So point, laugh, have a,you know, hearty chuckle,
(08:56):
but hopefully take somethingaway at our expense as well.
Yeah.
I was just thinking through things.
The best teacher,I think probably is mistakes and failure.
In fact, I was I was doomscrollingimmediately yesterday after after work.
After work.
And this Star Warsclip came up with Yoda and
(09:21):
was it Luke or Anakin?
I forget what,but anyway, Yoda says to one of the Jedi
that failure inthis might have been fanfiction.
I don't know if failure is actually thebest teacher, so if it comes from a Yoda,
hey, it's gotta be.
It's got a nice Jedi wisdom,you know, master Jedi wisdom.
So would you impart to us
(09:43):
this week your master Jedi Wisdom?
Yeah. One mistakes that.
Yeah.I'll be happy to give you my mistakes.
If you consider them wisdom,then thank you for for that.
Because, like I said, up.How do you like that?
Yeah, that was great.
I'm flattered by that. Great.
So as we Craig and I talked about this,
(10:04):
and as we look back over the years,you know, there was probably a list of
we narrowed down a list of 375different mistakes.
And we we got it to three andwe tried to put them in some categories.
But as I look back, I the
these really
when we figured these outallowed us to grow the most.
(10:26):
So I wanted to give you the most bangfor the buck and
so that you could understandkind of what we went through.
All right.
So number one, what was the what.
This is in no particular order.
We're not doing a countdown.
But mistake number one, Todd
So, number one was our inability
(10:46):
to evolve more quickly.
So I so I think, you know,I've mentioned before,
so I have a computerscience degree in background.
And one thing that they teach in computerscience is
the pastis a good prediction of the future.
(11:06):
And that is true if you have written codewell, logic based code.
We won't get into artificial intelligenceright now.
But if you've written logic based code.
What happened inthe past is going to happen.
So if you have code and it's buggy,you're not going to wake up three days
from now.
(11:26):
Compile it, hit run,and at the end it magically the bug.
Yeah, the bugs are still going to be.They're not going to be gone.
So I was taught this idea that the pastis a good prediction of the future,
but that is not correct.
And growing a businessand the cases that I found,
so as you grow a business,you go through phases and
(11:52):
they are you know, ifwhen you first start out, it's just you.
And so one exampleis everything revolves around you
and you dothings that are extremely high level.
You take care and doing those thingsat the high level,
and then you sell those as featuresto your clients.
(12:13):
So Craig, quick example here isI think when anybody starts off,
they should go to the agents and say,hey, I understand what you need.
I will take care of you.
Here is my cell phonenumber. Here is my email.
You call me, I'll change this.
You tell me what you want in the house.
I'm going to shoot it that way.
(12:33):
And that's what you have right now.
Because you got no one else to sell.
And when you do that,you know there's going to be clients
that attacks onto thatbecause they want their person.
You know, I can think back over the yearsof some very large clients
that I personally
(12:54):
got to start using Wow video tours
because I personally met them.
I personally called them.
I personally was there for them.
I proved to them that they could trust me
and they saw me as their guy.
You know, I, I was Todd Wow.
in their phone and if they neededa schedule, they called Todd Wow.
(13:20):
If they needed a photo fixed,which no one ever had to fix
any one of my photos, they were all okay.
They were good.
So just for example.
No, I'm kidding.
But Craig, you understand what I'm saying?
Where
that if I was still in that mindset,
(13:40):
I would be shooting a thousand toursa year.
I would be my revenue would be $250,000,
and I would be making $40,000
at the end of the day.
So you have to get out
of these mindsets of thingsthat are going to hold you back.
(14:00):
I could not continue that processof selling everybody.
On why to use Todd
because what happened was Todd about
went crazy.
Craig,
I somewhat wish, in a weird way,that my wife would have actually,
like, markedjotted down somewhere in a notebook.
Like, every time Todd went crazy,
(14:22):
you know, like this mental breakdown of,like, I don't know what we're going to do
just because I was probably so stressedout and everything revolved around me,
and it would have been fun.
At this point,I don't know if it would have really
been fun,but it would have been worth doing.
The activity of seeing
where that lined up withwhat was happening in life right then.
You know, for a business levelon a personal level, I would say
(14:45):
just about all of them were connectedto a business level of an event,
of just being overwhelmedbecause there was too much to do, working
too much, not spending time on myself,losing a, you know, a large client,
things like that.
But, in those times, I could
not keep selling this idea of Todd onlybecause I wouldn't have grown anymore.
(15:06):
So that is a casewhere the past is not a good prediction of
the future, because Todd helpedget the business from 0 to 250K,
but Todd couldn't take it from 250K to 4 million
Yeah,
you need a support team aroundyou in changing that.
That mindset
that can be challenging.
Yeah, I I'll admit, Todd like that.
(15:28):
That's been part of my challenge
or my my issueand why I've kind of stepped back is
I, I learned about myselfthat I would rather do the work,
like the hands on work and work shoulderto shoulder with people than the out
front leader that lets go of thingsand delegates things.
I'm just I'mnot I'm not as good at delegating.
(15:51):
But I've, I've found
myself now in a role that I loveand I'm thriving in,
and and so you as owners
that are watching this, you've,you've got to be willing to let go
and trust other people to helpyou reach the goals that you've got.
So, Yeah, that's that's good stuff, Todd.
Yeah, I've got a couple more examplesjust to throw out there.
(16:12):
And if you guys have examples,please post them in the chat below.
We would love
to, talk about themand share them as a community.
So the next thing that I thinkabout, Craig, is
this has to do with,some processes and products.
We have historically, we had started by
only doing video of homes.
(16:32):
And those videos.
I feel like over the yearswe were too slow to evolve them.
And when we would launch a videobecause we were,
you know, we launched video in 2006.
So naturally you show a video
to somebodylike video doesn't exist on it.
There's not even there's barelyan internet.
And again, we've talked abouthow dumb of an idea it was.
(16:54):
And I was like, let's start
a streaming video business in 2006when someone can't even use it.
But naturally,we are always ahead of the curve
a little bit, just because we werethe first to do it in our areas and
we would
take thoseideas and those those that great feedback,
and I think we would just stick with itbecause we've always done it that way,
(17:15):
you know. Oh, that's a dangerous phrase.
Yeah, that's a dangerous phrase.
Very dangerous phase.
And some of that was warrantedbecause it was working
and our business at Wow is
we want to appeal to the masses.
So we had to naturally be okaywith some of
(17:36):
our clientsgoing elsewhere to get a niche product
and get a custom product every time.
We just can't do that.
We're honest with our clients.
If you want custom every single time,we can't do that.
If you want consistent, know what to counton. Can get in in a couple days.
Get your media back quicklyand know what to expect.
We can help you with that.
I will
say though, and the timeswhere we updated a video.
(17:59):
Craig, we did this video likewe would take a screengrab of Google Maps,
I remember that, I remember that it waswe would zoom into it.
Y'all would be like thispush down to Google Maps
and now one thing to let y'all know
is in our areas, in the cornfields,
(18:19):
the Google Maps were terrible
because the satellite viewsweren't really updated.
So you're zooming in and, crud pixels.
It is like, what are we even zooming into?
And then we had the same titlethat would roll across the screen,
and we were just too slow to change it.
I'm not telling you all to goimprove your video product.
(18:43):
Like, that's not your biggest.
If that's not your biggest gap,then you should do something else.
Okay. This is like the ideaof working on a website.
These are some key things that we didover the years at milestones.
And just to keep themfresh, like we were way outdated.
Like, you know, we were wearing 80sclothes in the 90s, like a decade of time.
(19:04):
And it was time to update the videoafter ten years.
That's the time framewe went, like we had used the gag.
Everybody knew the gag.
Everybody knew what videos were.
Are we just
kind of played to our advantagebecause like, oh yeah, I know your stuff.
But that was one thing that we held onjust just too long.
What what's wrong with the 80s?
Close though. Come on.
They're coming back right
(19:26):
they are. There's nothing wrong with them.
All right, all right.
You got your parachute pants?
Yes, I do.
Yeah, well,where I'm at, the con or the Spiro Sync, Craig
You heard it, people.
He's got Todd in parachute pantsand a pink suit, right?
No, I think suits at REPP.
That's right.
(19:47):
I don't know,I can't guarantee any of this.
No. Okay.
All right, moving on, movingon, moving on.
Okay.
The last one, Craig, about being too slowto evolve was our transition at Wow.
From manualscheduling to automatic scheduling.
Now, this is a problemnone of you have to worry about
because it's auto scheduling is in Spiro.
(20:07):
It's fine tune,and you have lots of great options,
but we for many years scheduled
10 to 12,000 jobs a year.
Or by looking at a map, givingit dates and time,
send it out to the agents saying, hey,does this work for you?
It confirming it.
If it doesn't work,give them a new appointment
(20:29):
I took forever.
I was saying we would imaginethat amount of time that took oh,
I mean, there was five employees, Craigthat did that.
That's amazing. And not only the time,
but think of how inconvenient that is.
You imagineif you ordered something from Amazon
and Jeff emailed you and said,
(20:50):
hey, you know,we really delivery's a little delayed.
I've got this item in stock.
Would you rather take this book than thatbook?
You're going to be like,Jeff, just send me the book.
I want it to be here tomorrow.
That's why everybody uses Amazon.
So but we just kept doing that
and we would hit restrictionsand we'd add more people.
(21:12):
And the problem also with that, Craig, iswe would blame
the people for a broken process.
And that's a whole nother mistake we made.
But you never blame the people.
You blame you blame your processes.
Okay? I learned that the hard way.
We'll get to that in a minute.
But the thing was, iswe just put our head down,
and we were so worriedor concerned about the amount of work
(21:36):
it would take to createthe automatic scheduling system
that accounted for everythingwe need, that we just didn't do the work.
We just kept doing what we were doing.
And it's kind of like this analogy.
There's a book called You Squared,and it starts off with this
fly hitting a window,
and it hits the windowand it falls down to the window sill.
(21:59):
It gets up again,it flies even harder and hits
the window in flightand lands on the window sill.
And it's continuing to just hit the windowharder and harder,
but the fliesnever going to break the window.
All the fly had to do was fly
two feet to the leftto go through the open door.
(22:21):
That's what we did.
It took work to go aroundand find the door, but
we were so comfortable hitting the windowand hoping to break through the thing.
But it was never going to happen
and it had an incredible restrictionon our business.
And just because we didn'twant to climb the mountain to be,
you know, to get over this hurdle,we lived in that for a lot of years,
(22:45):
and we live with some, some myths,
some miss thoughts or some mistruthsin our head as well, thinking
it couldn't be done, where we just need
to put the right people in the roomto get it done right.
So, so basically, the efficiencyand the benefit
of making that change was worththe time and the effort.
Maybe the moneythat you were initially afraid to
(23:06):
to invest in addressing that issue.
Oh, wonderful.
Because even I didn't know it at the time,but I was
creating it for all of you as well,or we were creating it for all of you.
So it's amazinghow you get into some things.
And that's what the author talks aboutnew squared, like those jumps, not just,
not justsingular jumps, but exponential jumps.
(23:28):
Like we were doing somethingthat was really hard.
We found out it was a big problemfor more people too, and our work was able
to carrythrough to help a lot more people.
Investing resources into overcoming
challenges is worth the effort.
100%.
And one thing about that, Craig, isyou have to be okay
(23:50):
failing sometimes
and and investing the money.
But knowingthat it's not going to work out
now, you don't go into a projectknowing it's not going to work out,
but you have to be okaywhen it doesn't work out.
So okay, we we tried something.We learned from it.
I typically tell myself I'm like, it'sthe price of education.
(24:10):
Yeah, that's that's a good
You know, I paid a lot of moneyfor that college degree.
And, I'mstill happy to pay money for education.
And we do it through these mistakes.
Don'tlook at it as paying or paying a bill.
Look at it as investing.
And that's a term investing always has.
Well, not always.
(24:32):
Most of the time investing
has a net profityou're going to gain from investing.
Right.That's why we invest in our retirements.
We know that it's going to gaininterest over time.
It's going to compound.
So look at your investments inyour business is compound interest
and benefit for the future.
Yeah that's a great analogy Craig.
(24:55):
All right.
So too slow to evolve.
Mistake number one.
Mistake number two.
Shall we move on.
Yeah. Let's move on.
so, Craig, mistake number two
was not empowering the team around me.
And this really defeats the reasonwhy you put a team around you.
(25:17):
So it seems like a really dumb thingthat I would make a mistake on it.
Just fitting that it's like, well,how did you.
Why did you do that?
Todd and this goes back into the pastis a good prediction of the future,
because Todd did really good at first.
And I mean, if you would look at Todd's
grade cards that Todd gave himself,we did Craig's grade card last week.
(25:39):
If you look at the grade cardsI gave myself,
like I was getting all A pluses. Okay.
Yeah.
Probably I was being
lenient with some of those grades,but my point is that
that taught methat everything had to go through me too.
And you know what?
I became Craig,
(26:01):
I'm going to use a word.
I think you've used itbefore, a bottleneck.
Yes, exactly.
It's exactly the wordI was thinking of a bottleneck.
And you know what the problem is?
When you
are the bottleneck of your business.
No one tells you.
(26:25):
So nothing gets done.
And you don't realize it
because you're so incredibly busy
spinning plates
that you think you're doing a ton,
but you're nowhere near the capacity
(26:47):
that you could achieve as a businessand as a team.
If you empowered yourteam and people around you.
So, what does that look like exactly?
Say, okay,so you have, let's start with a VA.
We've talked aboutVA is being invaluable resources.
(27:07):
And one of your first hires.
So you've hired a VAbut you have an empowered them.
What what would it look like to empowera VA to help your business grow?
Can you kind of flush that out for us?
Yeah, I'd love to.
So once and oncethis VA once a team member once anyone on
your team is trained and you feelthey're proficient at their job.
(27:30):
Okay.
So this isn't in the or this is in there.
This is maybe month three.
There needs to be some conversations
with them to see how things are going.
And then just ask them like, hey,
do you have any ideas of how
I could make your job easier?
(27:53):
Or when a problem occurs or a gap occurs
and say your VA emails, you, hey Todd,what do you want to do?
This client called in.This is what happens.
What do you want to do?
For the longest timeI would say, oh, just go ahead and,
comp the order or add on drone and,
(28:15):
make sure that the photographer does X,Y, and Z extra for the client.
Okay. VA okay. No problem. Yeah.
Go click the buttons and Spirozero it out.
Call the client, email the client.
Hey, that'swhat we're doing for you. Done.
Okay. Next client calls in
to happens again.
Well, as you growto shooting 100 shoots in a day,
(28:38):
there'snumerous clients that call in every day.
This is natural. It's the law of not.
It's the law of numbers.
As they expand, you're going to havea same percentage of problems.
And if everything runs through you,you're just teaching your team
that they need to come to you.
And probably the more dangerous thingthat you're doing
(29:02):
is you're not motivatingor empowering them
to make a better decision,because you're probably slow to respond.
You probably are overworkedand feeling tired, stressed, anxious.
So you might be a little snippy.
You might jump to conclusions
(29:23):
where your teammate
is incredible at customer service.
They know how to take care of people.
They would love it.
If you gave them the opportunity,but they're not going to ask for it.
And this is especially
true for your Vas in the Philippines.
(29:45):
Okay, so they are never going to ask youfor anything
because the Filipino culturedoes not want to ask.
They feel bad about asking really? Okay.
They probably feel bad asking youif they can use the restroom.
And I'm not overexaggerating.
It's a tremendous culture,a very kind, polite and gracious culture.
(30:06):
They're happy that they havethis opportunity to work for you.
They don't want to let you down,but they are very cognizant
of speaking their mind.
I guess I can see thateven to a degree in our own culture,
because, yeah, if if I'm working for,
you know, the manager,I don't want to assume and step on toes
because, you know, for example, ToddWow video tours your baby.
(30:30):
Right.
And having started my ownbusiness, I understand this.
You do things a certain way.
You've built the business a certain way.
Who am Ito tell the owner that they should do?
They should do things a certain way, orchange something or make something better.
You know,they're the one that built the business.
So yeah,there's going to be a natural built in.
(30:50):
I don't want to use the word fear,but, fear
of taking that kind of initiative.
Yeah.
And there's a phraseI use that a coach taught me.
He said when the Lions out and playfulthe lion
can always bite your head off.
You know it's the ideaeven though you as the owner,
(31:11):
you might be in a good mood that dayand you might be jovial.
You can fire them right now
so that always exist.
I think when you empower,
you know, your team, when you tell themI trust you to make the decision,
that's for the best of the companythat will that will improve their morale
(31:34):
and make them more investedin the company mentally, emotionally,
you know, work ethic.
And they're goingto want the win for themself.
But it it has to come from the topthat okay.
My leadership trust me.
Wow. That I don't getI haven't gotten that at previous jobs.
(31:55):
So to to feel that trustedI mean that's going to do something
for their their ego, their their workethic, their enthusiasm for the work.
Yeah.
A challenge for all of you out there is
how can you empower
or how can you put confidence intoone of your employees with the decision
(32:17):
so that they go homeand at the dinner table, dinner table,
they say to their spouse, hey,you won't believe
what Todd askedme for help with today. Hey.
And that wasa misconception I had over a lot of years
because I thought when Todd asked forhelp at that, Todd was weak and Todd took
pride in Todd, got a little bit of an egoor a lot of bit of an ego.
(32:40):
Ask my wife about knowing the answers.
But you know what that did
that just dug me in a really deep,
dark hole.
And they're no fun to be in
because you are in your own hole.
And I was only in that hole because of me.
And that was even tougher
(33:01):
than being in the hole,was realizing that I did it to myself.
so a very simple thing.
Every time
an employee comes toyou and ask you a question,
ask them
how theythink they should handle that situation.
(33:24):
What do you think you should do?
What do you think's bestto serve the clients?
What do you think is the best waythat we meet our core values?
However you want to phrase it, tieit back into your company
and ask your client,and then just zip, zip
your lips, let them speak.
Okay.
Can I play devil's advocatefor just a second, please?
(33:48):
So what if you have an employee
that you knowyou need to empower your team around you,
but you have an employee that you're justyou're still not convinced
that they're going to necessarilymake the right decision.
You don't have full trust in them yet.
Where do you go with that?
How do you develop that relationship?
(34:08):
Should they still be on the team?
You know, I'mjust thinking through all the questions.
I don't know if I want to.
I don't know if I want to empower them.
I don't know that I trust them.
So some things that
that I do, Craig, is oneis if that employee needs training
on that decision, likeif they're just literally flipping a coin
and they don't have any work experiencesto base it on,
(34:31):
then you're going to needto guide them through that.
And you could ask them some questions.
Well, how do you think the clientwould feel about that?
Okay.
If this happened to the homeowner?
It's their house.
What do you think?
Is that going to look good for the agent?
We need to make surethat we look good in the agent's eyes.
So ask them some questions,and sometimes you are
(34:52):
just going to have to tell them.
Now, I saw this with my leadership teamat Wow,
and Steve and Jess are incredibleand they have so much
insight and knowledge into the businessand how to improve it.
The problem was, isI made the decisions for so long
(35:13):
and then empower themthat every time Todd was in the room,
they always kind of went back towhat do you think?
And they or they would use me as a crutchbecause they were afraid to make
that decision.
And this is despitethem really knowing the correct decision.
But it was just like, oh,this is uncomfortable and this is okay.
This is natural.
(35:33):
The thing that I assured them, I dida few things and I do them consistently.
One, I tell them that I trust them like,you guys are incredible.
I trust you.
You guys have done a great work.
Like this last project.
It went off incredible.
Like you guys know what to do.
(35:53):
And then I also tell them that it's
okay for us to make mistakes.
Like, I make mistakes every day.
And I happen to have one big mistakethat I made the day that I lost a quarter
million dollars.
That worksgood for me to bring up right now.
I would suggest if you don't
have a mistakethat bad, don't make a mistake that dumb.
(36:16):
Just so you havethat example to use with your leaders,
right, guys?
Just it was a really painful dayand it was a painful year.
So just don't go make the mistakes
you have, for example,because that was a really bad thing.
I'm going to talk about ita repp conference here in November
(36:36):
for those of you listening in,
not watching, I was taking a drinkright as Todd said that again
almost spewing all over my equipmentin front of me here okay.
Go ahead. Sorry,I'm going to get Craig at one point.
And I'm gonna have to buy new equipmentfor him, but it's going to be worth it.
So I would tell them this and I wouldsometimes have to elaborate on it.
(36:59):
Again, these are my words.
But I would say, hey,you guys know what I what what
you want to know what I do when you comeand ask me something that I don't know,
like a big, hairy,
hard question like, what do you do?
I'm like, I just flip a coin,
like,
and I say something funny.
And this is the way you guys know meby now.
(37:20):
I have this little sense of humorthat I give at times,
and I can be sarcastic with it,or I try to make a point with it,
but I try to bring humor to the day.Understand?
Like, I don't know the answer to this.
I just guess.
But the best answer is the correct answer.
The second best answeris the wrong answer.
(37:42):
The worst answer is no answeror no decision.
So those are some verbal thingsthat I've used over the years.
And I use them againand again and again and again.
I say it all the time.
This is becoming your jobas the owner of the company,
that you need to be symbolicin your employee's eyes.
(38:02):
Everything you do should be symbolic.
If you tell them this knowledge,give them this thing,
crack this joke,you hope that they remember it.
You hope that they use it with otheremployees.
You hope they laugh about itor are proud about it at the dinner table
with their spouse.
I think that
kind of approach makes you humanas an owner as well,
(38:25):
and can really build trustin the relationship with your staff.
Craig, that is so wise.
Yes, and we connect with other humans.
We don't connect with people
that have egos, that sit in officesthat are unapproachable.
Yeah
Yeah.
You want a good culture,
you want a good, good environment in yourin your business.
(38:46):
Be human, be transparent.
Yeah, yeah.
Empower your staff and you will notbelieve how much you can grow.
It is in our 20.
Let's see what 2004 is when we start.
Why don't I know this number 21st year
and our 21st year,
(39:07):
we're going to be up about three quarters
of a million dollar in revenuefrom 2023, which is our best year ever.
So just to give you guys
some perspective,and it's when I stepped away
and I have no problemsaying that I stepped away.
I empowered the team
and they grew way fasterthan I could ever figure out how to grow.
(39:30):
And I'm so proud of them for that.
I am more proud of them than Todd'sego needs to know anything
or be stroked in any waybecause of what the team
has done.
Pretty cool
All right, so mistake number two,
not empowering your team quickly enough.
(39:51):
All right, so that's two,
CraigI think let me let me intro number three
because I thinkwe'll go to some wisdom from you.
Oh boy.
number three has to do with
managing money.
And this idea of
spending money to make money.
(40:13):
And I knowthat's something that you resonated with.
And we had discussions about thiswhen you first started Cee imaging
your real estate media business,this idea of like, hey,
I've got to take this leap of faith,but it cost money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So should I share the story?
Yeah, I'd love it.
(40:34):
So when I first started talking,
I was the first beta tester
for Spiro and and,
there was a cost involved in that.
And you have to understandmy background, my my career background.
It was pretty much all other than
if you want to otherthan 5 or 6 years of my career.
(40:56):
Up until that point,it was all nonprofit ministry work.
And you don't go into nonprofitministry work to make a lot of money.
That wasn't wasn't my motivation.
Believe it or not,believe it or not, right?
Right.
The storiesabout these rich nonprofit CEOs
and execs,they're the exception, not the rule.
Okay.
(41:17):
So financially, things have always been
a little challenging for mejust because of limited income, right?
But I enjoyed the work I did.
But I was afraid to spend moneyfrivolous frivolously.
But I was afraid to spend money, period.
Because things were so tight.
So my mentality really was kindof a scarcity mentality.
(41:40):
Todd, we've we've talked aboutthat mentality before where you're
you'rejust you're living out of fear, okay.
And there wasthere was a fear a financial fear
of me spending money,
to get my initial business started.
So we, we talked some more
(42:00):
and things worked out where I'm like,okay, yeah, it
it is worth thisbecause I'm not going to be able
to scale my business unless I do investin a system that's going to help me grow.
But that that waskind of the first light bulb.
But I think
I think we're really lit up and in a, it'sactually a much smaller item than that
first item of investing in a systemwas purchasing my first drone.
(42:25):
Okay.
So the investment in the systemwas a monthly,
monthly type of investmentbased on what I had sold that month.
Right.
But a drone is an initial upfront cost.
That was it was quite a bit.
I if I remember correctly, Todd,it was like 1400 bucks or something.
Now, to me that that was a ton of moneyfor that drone,
the extra batteries, the case,you know, the controller, all of that.
(42:49):
And I'm like, man,yeah, I've got the money, I can spend it,
but I'm afraid to let go of that money.
But I know I have to offer
drone services to realtorsif anybody is going to take me seriously.
So I, I bit the bullet.
It went against everythingI was conditioned and had experienced,
(43:10):
to to believe up until that pointbecause I thought
if I invest the money now,
then I canhopefully I can at least have the chance
of getting some drone jobsand selling that additional service.
And I saw that drone had been,you know, getting
pretty strongand was going to continue to grow.
And Todd within,I believe it was ten shoots.
(43:34):
I don't remember the timeframe,but it wasn't that long of a time frame.
I made all that money back.
Plus some,
and then everythingafter that investment was just profit.
It was it was growth.
Drone didn't take me long to shoot.
Didn't take long.
It you know,it wasn't a huge investment to edit.
And so I spent that $1,400
(43:54):
and all of a suddenmy average order value skyrocketed.
You know, for propertiesthat that needed drone and and agents
loved that I could do the photo, the videoand the drone all in one appointment.
I didn't have to outsource the dronefrom another company.
They could get everything.
So it just it was getting overthat fear, that initial fear of
laying out that kind of money
(44:17):
and then
seeing that growth was possiblebecause of it.
Yeah, those are great examples.
I have one, sorry.
Yeah, yeah, I'm very simple.
I have one very similar.
And then I'm going to flip thisa little bit for you all.
Mine came at the timethat I needed to hire
my first higher level admin.
Like my my number two individual.
(44:40):
And I was afraid to do that.
You know, the business was growing,but I was still very careful
with every penny that we spent.
And hiring employee is different
than hiring a photographerbecause photographers
are going to dowell for us as contractors.
(45:04):
When they worked, we paid them
and that brought in.
When they we were paying them,we were making money.
VA’s were a little bit different.
Well, when, when I started,there is no such thing as VA’s.
Or if people were using them,I didn't know about them.
But there wasn't this ideaof hiring a VA for, you know,
$1,500 a month or $1,200 a month.
(45:25):
It was you needed to hire an employee,and this employee was costing you,
you know, back at thattime, 40 or $50,000 a year.
And it came time for meto need an individual.
I was six months behindin doing my invoicing.
This is before Spirodid it for you automatically
and I was just spending all the wrong time
(45:48):
on the wrong task, just low level task.
And I was just convincedthat I was saving money.
And even if you've convinced yourself
that you're saving money
because you're doing it in the eveninghours, like, oh,
(46:10):
I actually I'm doing my billing at nightafter the kids go to bed.
So and it's time that I'm kind ofjust on the couch.
Anyways, I got a laptop of my lifeand I've got the TV on
and I'm going to save the money.
One you're completely fooling yourself
because what you're doing isyou are taking out all of the margin
(46:34):
in your brain, all of the spacethat you need.
You're overworking yourself.
So you're going to be less efficient.
You're killing all your time.
You should be with your family.
That yes, you know,even if the kids are in bed,
where are you?
Are you spending time with your wife?
What are you working out or whateverit should be?
(46:55):
You should be putting something backinto you and your personal relationships.
Preach, preach Todd.
And and it's just like, no,like just working more than 40 hours.
I had a coach. She says.
This is workingmore than 40 hours is just cheating.
You should be able to find a way to work
(47:17):
40 hours or less and still growand have a fantastic business.
And ifyou feel like that's countercultural.
Todd Yeah, I mean, like,I feel like the culture, the
the hustle culture, especially forfor owners and entrepreneurs,
is minimum 50 hours a week.
You gotta you gotta grind out.
(47:39):
So you're saying 40 or less,40 or less? Yes.
I, I can't tell you the number of times
that I was proud that I worked 60 or 70or the 80 hour weeks,
like I was proud of it and oh my goodness,I wish I could go back to younger
Todd when he didn'thave the bags under his eyes.
No gray hair.
If his jokes were better.
(48:00):
But I don't want to go backto the 80 hours a week.
Todd that was that was just silly. Craig.
Because I
wasn'tsmart enough to find a different way.
I just wasn't good enough.
I needed training, I needed,
I needed coach, I needed somebodyto help me understand what I wasn't seen.
(48:21):
I thought,I'm just going to pound through this.
No, please don't pound through this
because your your kids depend on it.
Your wife depends on it.
Your family, your mom, dad, your
everything personal depends on it.
Remember, you started your business
to help you reach your personal goals.
(48:44):
And we find that we get this flippedwhen we get so deep.
And as they say, if I could only getthe business to this level,
we justified to saythis is what it would do for my family.
And your your wife's going.
I just want Todd back. Yeah.
I don't care about the cars.
I don't care about the house.
I don't care about the money.I just want you.
(49:04):
Like I just want some time with you.
So I let meflip that because I said I would, Craig.
And then we'll wrap up for a final close.
But I think it's important to saythis flip side of this story, too,
because that was Todd at year.
You know, one, two, three, four.
Let's go to Todd at year17, 18, 16, 17, 18.
Okay.
I, I had learned that as I finally learnedokay.
(49:26):
It took me ten years.
If I hire people and find the right peopleand train them
and empower them, then
the business is going to grow.
Hired on ShannonShannon is now our CRO Spiro.
She helped grow wow like crazy.
Did things that I could even have imaginedthat we would do.
(49:48):
Like, oh, this is fun, let's hireanother person.
Okay, brought on our number onephotographer, close friend of mine.
Like he shouldbe the head training person.
Okay, I had
the Ihad the first helper person that I hired.
I was like, hey, he's going to beyou in charge of all the money and growth.
(50:10):
Okay, great. Oh, well, this works.
Okay.
Now we need a marketing personbecause we really should have marketing.
You know, you start googling onlineor what is a hierarchy.
What are org charts of companies of thissize.
They got all these little dots on the map.
Okay, let's get that person.
Well now that person needs an assistant
(50:31):
and we'd like to do this thing.
We'd like to start hosting these eventsand webinars.
Okay.
Well we probably need the personthat's going to do that.
And we kept adding and adding and adding
the office was full.
It was fun.
I loved it actually.
Craig, like this officehad 15 people in it every day.
(50:52):
It was bustling.
It was energetic.
I mean, we had the massage chair,the coffee machine.
We didn't have the slide,but I had considered putting in a slide
and I got so blinded
I was just I would just search online.
I'd look at offices and like,oh, Google's doing that.
Well, I think we should do it too.
(51:14):
No, Todd,Google is a freaking large business.
You should do the that.
So I hit the tipping point
to where we put too many people into fast,and I didn't really empower
the tier of managersand didn't set the expectations.
(51:34):
And don't point the ship straight enoughor direct enough to where we wanted to go.
So everybody startedworking in these silos, and they did good.
They did what they thought was best,
but it was so overthe map, Craig, that nothing
really came togetherto move the needle that much further.
(51:58):
So you can kind of break down
this third pointinto two sides of the same coin.
Spent the mistake beingnot spending enough money quickly enough
or spending too much too quickly.
Yeah.
So finding that that happy mediumof what you're investing in your company.
Yeah. Exactly.
(52:18):
If, if you, if there's no one elsebut you to do it
and this is going to help you grow,
you need to have help with that.
But if you don't have a solid system,
processes, proceduresand a very clear goal,
then just hiringpeople is going to convoluted everything
(52:38):
and you'll grow a little bit,but you'll spend a whole lot of money
and you'll get these subculturesstart to develop, at least for us,
where people try to get peopleand other on their side because they're
they think we should go this way,and this other person thinks we should go
this way.
So they try to get some other employeeson their side,
(52:58):
and then all this is happening and you'relike, we had this really cool culture.
Like we have a massage chair.Why are you people unhappy?
It's like, no, Todd,
the massagechair doesn't make people happy.
What makes people happy is they know
what's expected to themwhen they walk in the door.
And then when they walk out the door,
(53:19):
they feel good about crossing
those items off their list and feelinglike they made progress that day,
and not thatthey had to play the popular game.
Try to get people on their side and manageunderlying
conversations and tonesthroughout the office. Wow.
(53:39):
All related to money.
Invest into Wow.
I never would have thought of it that way.
And and one thing is Craig.
You are always the last personto find out,
right?
You might think you know everythingthat's going on.
(54:01):
And in the past,when you had one or 2 or 5 employees
and you had that closepersonal relationship with them,
they would come to you and youprobably knew a lot of what was going on.
But when you grow 4 or 5, 15, 20employees,
you are the last person to knowand you know,
(54:24):
you find out
when the problem's too big to solve.
Sometimes,or the way you solve the problem is you
move on from a massive amount of people,or you change like you have to.
You have to go really deep at that pointbecause the problem is so embedded
(54:45):
that you have to cutreally deep to fix the problem,
and then you're right backwhere you started.
Yeah. Well.
All right.
Good stuff.
The top three mistakesthat we've learned from that.
Hopefully you can learn from and not makethe mistakes that that we have taught.
Thank you.
Thank you for the transparency and thevulnerability on sharing that.
(55:09):
Yeah. My pleasure.I hope it can be helpful.
And these are all things that,
we if you want to find outmore about them,
if you want to speak on them, we areI mentioned at the top of the hour,
but if you want to speak at theSpiro Sync,
we have those breakout sessionslike I mentioned.
Email us hello@spiro.media.
If you're like, hey, this resonateswith me, I'd love to talk about this.
(55:29):
Just let me know.
We'll put you on the listand then we'll see.
What ideas you haveand see if we can't get your schedule.
Yeah. Awesome.
If you have mistakes you want
to share, you know, in the commentson the YouTube channel, feel free.
We'd love to to learn from you as well.
And if you're listening,you can email us those things.
hello@spiro.media we we like to learnjust as much as we like to teach.
(55:53):
So we we still have thingsto learn ourselves as we continue to grow.
So Todd, again, thank you.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Well that's going to wrap thingsup this week.
Hopefully this was a benefit to you.
If you found value in this,we'd love a, like, on the YouTube channel.
Feel free to share it in the,you know, various social media groups for,
(56:14):
real estate media.
And if you have a colleaguein, in the real estate
media industry that maybe isn't familiarwith the podcast,
we always appreciate the sharejust to be able to,
share this knowledge and communitywith others that we haven't
been able to touch base with and hopefullystrengthen their business as well.
So, guys, thank you.
We, we appreciate you so much.
(56:34):
The time that you take out of your dayto listen, to watch
and just want to remind you,make sure you take time out of your day to
just be really thankful for the blessingsin your life and be sure to breathe.
Have a great week!
Coming up on this episodeof The Spiro podcast.
(00:04):
the best answer is the correct answer.
The second best answeris the wrong answer.
The worst answer is no answeror no decision.
(00:28):
Hi and welcome to the Spiro Podcast,managing your Real estate media business.
Spiro is a software platform.
It's designed to help you run your day today real estate photo and video business,
ultimately really,to help it scale and grow and manage
a lot of the tasksthat can chew up a lot of your time
and just make thingsa lot more efficient for you.
(00:49):
I'm Craig Magrum, welcome backthis week, if you're returning viewer
or listenerand if you're brand new to the podcast,
just really glad to have you hereand we would love to hear from you.
Just how you found the podcast.
Tell us a little bit about your business.
This is a community
that we're building to help each othergrow strong real estate media businesses.
(01:10):
So you can drop us an email at hello@spiro
that's S P I R O dot media.
All right, without further ado,let me introduce co-host and owner
and founder of Spiro Todd Kivimaki
Welcome back, Todd. Craig, a fabulous day for us all here today.
Excited.
We have well,by the time you're listening to this,
(01:32):
we have 12 weeksleft in the year at the most.
12 weeks is crazy.
So I wanted to put some thingson your calendar
because those 12 weeks are going to gofast.
Remember, you're burninga couple of those weeks for holidays.
So here's some things to think about.
(01:54):
One, we just had a huge launch with Spiro,
and we launched Titus,which is pay at close if you need a reason
to reach out to your clients,please let them know about Titus.
It is in beta right now.
The 20 that have launched inbeta are doing fabulous.
(02:14):
It's a cool program.
Basically, your clients can defer paymentuntil close.
You get paid immediately.
We are the first platformto bring this and fully
integrate Titus to make it possiblein a feature for your business.
If you want to find out more,
you can go to spiro.mediaand find out more information there.
(02:37):
You can startadvertising this to your clients.
We are looking at a mid Octoberor early October
launch for everyone,so it is right around the corner.
And the first pay close came in Craigthe other day actually on the 23rd
when it launched, we got pingedby the Titus team and they said, hey,
we just got the first payat close right on opening day,
(03:00):
On opening day, $1,260.
Holy moly.
That's incredible.
Pretty cool Yeah.
We we don't know, like,if you're AOV right now is 250.
I'm not saying you're going to have 1260,but I am confident
that you're goingto see your AOV increase.
(03:21):
I'd be curious if that
that one that came throughwas an increase, in fact, that.
Yeah.
Interesting to find out.
I'll go find that out and let you guysknow next week what that is.
But I'm confident Nick has seenNick is the co-founder at Titus.
They have seen a large increase.
He's like, hey, I think you're goingto get 30% when people use this.
So yeah, so,you know, we've done a podcast on Titus.
(03:45):
Go back and listen to that,that the end of the day.
One thing I want to leave you with iswhen this was brought to my attention.
Nick contacted me long ago.
I wrote it off right away.
I would never use this personally.
I don't finance anything. Craig.
Okay. Other than my house,everything else.
We own the house.
(04:07):
We have a payment on.
I have like a 2% interest rate. Okay.
That's another problem.
That's a whole nother podcast in itselfabout the real estate market and people
that are locked into low interest rates,like I'm,
you know, anyway,you're sitting on that for a while.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm not leaving.
Like I'm literally adding on another houseon top of my house.
(04:27):
If we need more room,
I mean, come on. Yep.
But but that was my truth.
And it was not a true thought.
Meaning that
just because I thoughtI would not use financing.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
(04:48):
Yeah, I'm wrong.
You would not believe the response
we have heard from agents about thisfeature.
Be the first in your market.
Heck, even if you're not the firstin your market
and someone's already launched with it,this is launch day right now.
Okay, sojust start telling your agents about it.
(05:08):
If they say no, or at least you hada good reason to reach out to them,
I think you'll be very surprisedwith the amount of agents
that use it and say, hey,thank you for giving me this option.
And by the way,they spent a lot more money with you.
So that is on that.
Put that on your calendarto send that out in your newsletter.
(05:29):
Today we've given you search ourour knowledge based guide.
We've given you marketing materials.
You've got graphic social media post.
We've given you fliers.
We've given you verbiage.
Just go to our support guide,type in Titus and take it all from there.
We've done the work for you.
You know, at this point about,
about Titus and agents
(05:50):
possibly spending more,probably spending more,
with this option to pay itclose actually relates
to a point that I think we're goingto talk about in our topic today.
Just you're just got me thinking.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sure is.
So that so, that is coming in our topic.
(06:10):
But the other things for your calendar,November is right around the corner.
You're five weeks away at the most
to the conference,the REPP conference in Las Vegas.
So pleasego to the link below in the description
and get yourself a ticket.
I am going to be speaking.
(06:32):
My team is going to be there.
There is a fabulous panelspeakers and heck, there are allowing me.
I get the privilege to host the thing.
I'm the MC for the event.
So you're going to love this event.
It's an incredible event and Eli Jonesand his team with the repp team
and those ticket salesare cutting off quick.
So get a ticket, booka flight if you're going.
(06:53):
If November doesn't work for you, please
come and see us at our first in-personevent for Spiro the Spiro Sync.
That is January 22nd and 23rd.
Ticket sales have not happened yet,but probably will this week or next.
So keep an eye at Spiro.mediafor more information.
(07:13):
We want you to come. It's a two day event.
You're going to come grow, learn.
We're looking for a couple more speakers.
We're going to havesome breakout sessions.
So if you're like, hey,I kind of like to host a session
and they're not, you know, we're goingto have about 125 people at this event.
We've limited it for this first event.
So ticket sales are going to be limited.
You know,if you want to host a group of 10
or 20 people,we're going to have these fabulous
(07:34):
breakout sessions where the communitycan teach the community.
So that is coming up January 22nd, 23rd.
So please put that on your calendar.
We would love to see youin person in Dayton, Ohio.
It's going to be good.
Looking forward to it.
I hope you make it downtown.
Oh you Craig is going to be thereyes I hope well, okay.
(07:55):
You just said I was going toI was saying I was hoping to be there.
You just said I was going to be there. So.
Guys, he's my boss.
I'm looking forward to meeting you.
Oh, we got a great idea to.
Craig sent it to him this morning,and we don't have to go into it,
but he's like,let's record a podcast from it.
Well, credit to Jess.
Our operations director on our real estatemedia side of the business.
(08:15):
She had that idea. I'm like, duh.
Why didn't I think of that?
Yeah, that's a fantastic idea. So, yeah.
Hoping to featuresome of you that come to the Spiro Sync
on the Spiro podcastepisode.
Yeah. Get your face on the podcast.
That'll be fun.
Kind of be fun.
All ready? Anything else for us?
(08:36):
No. Craig, I'm excited about this topic.
I, this is a painful onebecause we're talking about mistakes,
but, there's always lightat the end of the tunnel, right?
Right.
So, yeah,the topic this week, top three mistakes
that we have learned fromin the real estate media business.
For your benefit.
So point, laugh, have a,you know, hearty chuckle,
(08:56):
but hopefully take somethingaway at our expense as well.
Yeah.
I was just thinking through things.
The best teacher,I think probably is mistakes and failure.
In fact, I was I was doomscrollingimmediately yesterday after after work.
After work.
And this Star Warsclip came up with Yoda and
(09:21):
was it Luke or Anakin?
I forget what,but anyway, Yoda says to one of the Jedi
that failure inthis might have been fanfiction.
I don't know if failure is actually thebest teacher, so if it comes from a Yoda,
hey, it's gotta be.
It's got a nice Jedi wisdom,you know, master Jedi wisdom.
So would you impart to us
(09:43):
this week your master Jedi Wisdom?
Yeah. One mistakes that.
Yeah.I'll be happy to give you my mistakes.
If you consider them wisdom,then thank you for for that.
Because, like I said, up.How do you like that?
Yeah, that was great.
I'm flattered by that. Great.
So as we Craig and I talked about this,
(10:04):
and as we look back over the years,you know, there was probably a list of
we narrowed down a list of 375different mistakes.
And we we got it to three andwe tried to put them in some categories.
But as I look back, I the
these really
when we figured these outallowed us to grow the most.
(10:26):
So I wanted to give you the most bangfor the buck and
so that you could understandkind of what we went through.
All right.
So number one, what was the what.
This is in no particular order.
We're not doing a countdown.
But mistake number one, Todd
So, number one was our inability
(10:46):
to evolve more quickly.
So I so I think, you know,I've mentioned before,
so I have a computerscience degree in background.
And one thing that they teach in computerscience is
the pastis a good prediction of the future.
(11:06):
And that is true if you have written codewell, logic based code.
We won't get into artificial intelligenceright now.
But if you've written logic based code.
What happened inthe past is going to happen.
So if you have code and it's buggy,you're not going to wake up three days
from now.
(11:26):
Compile it, hit run,and at the end it magically the bug.
Yeah, the bugs are still going to be.They're not going to be gone.
So I was taught this idea that the pastis a good prediction of the future,
but that is not correct.
And growing a businessand the cases that I found,
so as you grow a business,you go through phases and
(11:52):
they are you know, ifwhen you first start out, it's just you.
And so one exampleis everything revolves around you
and you dothings that are extremely high level.
You take care and doing those thingsat the high level,
and then you sell those as featuresto your clients.
(12:13):
So Craig, quick example here isI think when anybody starts off,
they should go to the agents and say,hey, I understand what you need.
I will take care of you.
Here is my cell phonenumber. Here is my email.
You call me, I'll change this.
You tell me what you want in the house.
I'm going to shoot it that way.
(12:33):
And that's what you have right now.
Because you got no one else to sell.
And when you do that,you know there's going to be clients
that attacks onto thatbecause they want their person.
You know, I can think back over the yearsof some very large clients
that I personally
(12:54):
got to start using Wow video tours
because I personally met them.
I personally called them.
I personally was there for them.
I proved to them that they could trust me
and they saw me as their guy.
You know, I, I was Todd Wow.
in their phone and if they neededa schedule, they called Todd Wow.
(13:20):
If they needed a photo fixed,which no one ever had to fix
any one of my photos, they were all okay.
They were good.
So just for example.
No, I'm kidding.
But Craig, you understand what I'm saying?
Where
that if I was still in that mindset,
(13:40):
I would be shooting a thousand toursa year.
I would be my revenue would be $250,000,
and I would be making $40,000
at the end of the day.
So you have to get out
of these mindsets of thingsthat are going to hold you back.
(14:00):
I could not continue that processof selling everybody.
On why to use Todd
because what happened was Todd about
went crazy.
Craig,
I somewhat wish, in a weird way,that my wife would have actually,
like, markedjotted down somewhere in a notebook.
Like, every time Todd went crazy,
(14:22):
you know, like this mental breakdown of,like, I don't know what we're going to do
just because I was probably so stressedout and everything revolved around me,
and it would have been fun.
At this point,I don't know if it would have really
been fun,but it would have been worth doing.
The activity of seeing
where that lined up withwhat was happening in life right then.
You know, for a business levelon a personal level, I would say
(14:45):
just about all of them were connectedto a business level of an event,
of just being overwhelmedbecause there was too much to do, working
too much, not spending time on myself,losing a, you know, a large client,
things like that.
But, in those times, I could
not keep selling this idea of Todd onlybecause I wouldn't have grown anymore.
(15:06):
So that is a casewhere the past is not a good prediction of
the future, because Todd helpedget the business from 0 to 250K,
but Todd couldn't take it from 250K to 4 million
Yeah,
you need a support team aroundyou in changing that.
That mindset
that can be challenging.
Yeah, I I'll admit, Todd like that.
(15:28):
That's been part of my challenge
or my my issueand why I've kind of stepped back is
I, I learned about myselfthat I would rather do the work,
like the hands on work and work shoulderto shoulder with people than the out
front leader that lets go of thingsand delegates things.
I'm just I'mnot I'm not as good at delegating.
(15:51):
But I've, I've found
myself now in a role that I loveand I'm thriving in,
and and so you as owners
that are watching this, you've,you've got to be willing to let go
and trust other people to helpyou reach the goals that you've got.
So, Yeah, that's that's good stuff, Todd.
Yeah, I've got a couple more examplesjust to throw out there.
(16:12):
And if you guys have examples,please post them in the chat below.
We would love
to, talk about themand share them as a community.
So the next thing that I thinkabout, Craig, is
this has to do with,some processes and products.
We have historically, we had started by
only doing video of homes.
(16:32):
And those videos.
I feel like over the yearswe were too slow to evolve them.
And when we would launch a videobecause we were,
you know, we launched video in 2006.
So naturally you show a video
to somebodylike video doesn't exist on it.
There's not even there's barelyan internet.
And again, we've talked abouthow dumb of an idea it was.
(16:54):
And I was like, let's start
a streaming video business in 2006when someone can't even use it.
But naturally,we are always ahead of the curve
a little bit, just because we werethe first to do it in our areas and
we would
take thoseideas and those those that great feedback,
and I think we would just stick with itbecause we've always done it that way,
(17:15):
you know. Oh, that's a dangerous phrase.
Yeah, that's a dangerous phrase.
Very dangerous phase.
And some of that was warrantedbecause it was working
and our business at Wow is
we want to appeal to the masses.
So we had to naturally be okaywith some of
(17:36):
our clientsgoing elsewhere to get a niche product
and get a custom product every time.
We just can't do that.
We're honest with our clients.
If you want custom every single time,we can't do that.
If you want consistent, know what to counton. Can get in in a couple days.
Get your media back quicklyand know what to expect.
We can help you with that.
I will
say though, and the timeswhere we updated a video.
(17:59):
Craig, we did this video likewe would take a screengrab of Google Maps,
I remember that, I remember that it waswe would zoom into it.
Y'all would be like thispush down to Google Maps
and now one thing to let y'all know
is in our areas, in the cornfields,
(18:19):
the Google Maps were terrible
because the satellite viewsweren't really updated.
So you're zooming in and, crud pixels.
It is like, what are we even zooming into?
And then we had the same titlethat would roll across the screen,
and we were just too slow to change it.
I'm not telling you all to goimprove your video product.
(18:43):
Like, that's not your biggest.
If that's not your biggest gap,then you should do something else.
Okay. This is like the ideaof working on a website.
These are some key things that we didover the years at milestones.
And just to keep themfresh, like we were way outdated.
Like, you know, we were wearing 80sclothes in the 90s, like a decade of time.
(19:04):
And it was time to update the videoafter ten years.
That's the time framewe went, like we had used the gag.
Everybody knew the gag.
Everybody knew what videos were.
Are we just
kind of played to our advantagebecause like, oh yeah, I know your stuff.
But that was one thing that we held onjust just too long.
What what's wrong with the 80s?
Close though. Come on.
They're coming back right
(19:26):
they are. There's nothing wrong with them.
All right, all right.
You got your parachute pants?
Yes, I do.
Yeah, well,where I'm at, the con or the Spiro Sync, Craig
You heard it, people.
He's got Todd in parachute pantsand a pink suit, right?
No, I think suits at REPP.
That's right.
(19:47):
I don't know,I can't guarantee any of this.
No. Okay.
All right, moving on, movingon, moving on.
Okay.
The last one, Craig, about being too slowto evolve was our transition at Wow.
From manualscheduling to automatic scheduling.
Now, this is a problemnone of you have to worry about
because it's auto scheduling is in Spiro.
(20:07):
It's fine tune,and you have lots of great options,
but we for many years scheduled
10 to 12,000 jobs a year.
Or by looking at a map, givingit dates and time,
send it out to the agents saying, hey,does this work for you?
It confirming it.
If it doesn't work,give them a new appointment
(20:29):
I took forever.
I was saying we would imaginethat amount of time that took oh,
I mean, there was five employees, Craigthat did that.
That's amazing. And not only the time,
but think of how inconvenient that is.
You imagineif you ordered something from Amazon
and Jeff emailed you and said,
(20:50):
hey, you know,we really delivery's a little delayed.
I've got this item in stock.
Would you rather take this book than thatbook?
You're going to be like,Jeff, just send me the book.
I want it to be here tomorrow.
That's why everybody uses Amazon.
So but we just kept doing that
and we would hit restrictionsand we'd add more people.
(21:12):
And the problem also with that, Craig, iswe would blame
the people for a broken process.
And that's a whole nother mistake we made.
But you never blame the people.
You blame you blame your processes.
Okay? I learned that the hard way.
We'll get to that in a minute.
But the thing was, iswe just put our head down,
and we were so worriedor concerned about the amount of work
(21:36):
it would take to createthe automatic scheduling system
that accounted for everythingwe need, that we just didn't do the work.
We just kept doing what we were doing.
And it's kind of like this analogy.
There's a book called You Squared,and it starts off with this
fly hitting a window,
and it hits the windowand it falls down to the window sill.
(21:59):
It gets up again,it flies even harder and hits
the window in flightand lands on the window sill.
And it's continuing to just hit the windowharder and harder,
but the fliesnever going to break the window.
All the fly had to do was fly
two feet to the leftto go through the open door.
(22:21):
That's what we did.
It took work to go aroundand find the door, but
we were so comfortable hitting the windowand hoping to break through the thing.
But it was never going to happen
and it had an incredible restrictionon our business.
And just because we didn'twant to climb the mountain to be,
you know, to get over this hurdle,we lived in that for a lot of years,
(22:45):
and we live with some, some myths,
some miss thoughts or some mistruthsin our head as well, thinking
it couldn't be done, where we just need
to put the right people in the roomto get it done right.
So, so basically, the efficiencyand the benefit
of making that change was worththe time and the effort.
Maybe the moneythat you were initially afraid to
(23:06):
to invest in addressing that issue.
Oh, wonderful.
Because even I didn't know it at the time,but I was
creating it for all of you as well,or we were creating it for all of you.
So it's amazinghow you get into some things.
And that's what the author talks aboutnew squared, like those jumps, not just,
not justsingular jumps, but exponential jumps.
(23:28):
Like we were doing somethingthat was really hard.
We found out it was a big problemfor more people too, and our work was able
to carrythrough to help a lot more people.
Investing resources into overcoming
challenges is worth the effort.
100%.
And one thing about that, Craig, isyou have to be okay
(23:50):
failing sometimes
and and investing the money.
But knowingthat it's not going to work out
now, you don't go into a projectknowing it's not going to work out,
but you have to be okaywhen it doesn't work out.
So okay, we we tried something.We learned from it.
I typically tell myself I'm like, it'sthe price of education.
(24:10):
Yeah, that's that's a good
You know, I paid a lot of moneyfor that college degree.
And, I'mstill happy to pay money for education.
And we do it through these mistakes.
Don'tlook at it as paying or paying a bill.
Look at it as investing.
And that's a term investing always has.
Well, not always.
(24:32):
Most of the time investing
has a net profityou're going to gain from investing.
Right.That's why we invest in our retirements.
We know that it's going to gaininterest over time.
It's going to compound.
So look at your investments inyour business is compound interest
and benefit for the future.
Yeah that's a great analogy Craig.
(24:55):
All right.
So too slow to evolve.
Mistake number one.
Mistake number two.
Shall we move on.
Yeah. Let's move on.
so, Craig, mistake number two
was not empowering the team around me.
And this really defeats the reasonwhy you put a team around you.
(25:17):
So it seems like a really dumb thingthat I would make a mistake on it.
Just fitting that it's like, well,how did you.
Why did you do that?
Todd and this goes back into the pastis a good prediction of the future,
because Todd did really good at first.
And I mean, if you would look at Todd's
grade cards that Todd gave himself,we did Craig's grade card last week.
(25:39):
If you look at the grade cardsI gave myself,
like I was getting all A pluses. Okay.
Yeah.
Probably I was being
lenient with some of those grades,but my point is that
that taught methat everything had to go through me too.
And you know what?
I became Craig,
(26:01):
I'm going to use a word.
I think you've used itbefore, a bottleneck.
Yes, exactly.
It's exactly the wordI was thinking of a bottleneck.
And you know what the problem is?
When you
are the bottleneck of your business.
No one tells you.
(26:25):
So nothing gets done.
And you don't realize it
because you're so incredibly busy
spinning plates
that you think you're doing a ton,
but you're nowhere near the capacity
(26:47):
that you could achieve as a businessand as a team.
If you empowered yourteam and people around you.
So, what does that look like exactly?
Say, okay,so you have, let's start with a VA.
We've talked aboutVA is being invaluable resources.
(27:07):
And one of your first hires.
So you've hired a VAbut you have an empowered them.
What what would it look like to empowera VA to help your business grow?
Can you kind of flush that out for us?
Yeah, I'd love to.
So once and oncethis VA once a team member once anyone on
your team is trained and you feelthey're proficient at their job.
(27:30):
Okay.
So this isn't in the or this is in there.
This is maybe month three.
There needs to be some conversations
with them to see how things are going.
And then just ask them like, hey,
do you have any ideas of how
I could make your job easier?
(27:53):
Or when a problem occurs or a gap occurs
and say your VA emails, you, hey Todd,what do you want to do?
This client called in.This is what happens.
What do you want to do?
For the longest timeI would say, oh, just go ahead and,
comp the order or add on drone and,
(28:15):
make sure that the photographer does X,Y, and Z extra for the client.
Okay. VA okay. No problem. Yeah.
Go click the buttons and Spirozero it out.
Call the client, email the client.
Hey, that'swhat we're doing for you. Done.
Okay. Next client calls in
to happens again.
Well, as you growto shooting 100 shoots in a day,
(28:38):
there'snumerous clients that call in every day.
This is natural. It's the law of not.
It's the law of numbers.
As they expand, you're going to havea same percentage of problems.
And if everything runs through you,you're just teaching your team
that they need to come to you.
And probably the more dangerous thingthat you're doing
(29:02):
is you're not motivatingor empowering them
to make a better decision,because you're probably slow to respond.
You probably are overworkedand feeling tired, stressed, anxious.
So you might be a little snippy.
You might jump to conclusions
(29:23):
where your teammate
is incredible at customer service.
They know how to take care of people.
They would love it.
If you gave them the opportunity,but they're not going to ask for it.
And this is especially
true for your Vas in the Philippines.
(29:45):
Okay, so they are never going to ask youfor anything
because the Filipino culturedoes not want to ask.
They feel bad about asking really? Okay.
They probably feel bad asking youif they can use the restroom.
And I'm not overexaggerating.
It's a tremendous culture,a very kind, polite and gracious culture.
(30:06):
They're happy that they havethis opportunity to work for you.
They don't want to let you down,but they are very cognizant
of speaking their mind.
I guess I can see thateven to a degree in our own culture,
because, yeah, if if I'm working for,
you know, the manager,I don't want to assume and step on toes
because, you know, for example, ToddWow video tours your baby.
(30:30):
Right.
And having started my ownbusiness, I understand this.
You do things a certain way.
You've built the business a certain way.
Who am Ito tell the owner that they should do?
They should do things a certain way, orchange something or make something better.
You know,they're the one that built the business.
So yeah,there's going to be a natural built in.
(30:50):
I don't want to use the word fear,but, fear
of taking that kind of initiative.
Yeah.
And there's a phraseI use that a coach taught me.
He said when the Lions out and playfulthe lion
can always bite your head off.
You know it's the ideaeven though you as the owner,
(31:11):
you might be in a good mood that dayand you might be jovial.
You can fire them right now
so that always exist.
I think when you empower,
you know, your team, when you tell themI trust you to make the decision,
that's for the best of the companythat will that will improve their morale
(31:34):
and make them more investedin the company mentally, emotionally,
you know, work ethic.
And they're goingto want the win for themself.
But it it has to come from the topthat okay.
My leadership trust me.
Wow. That I don't getI haven't gotten that at previous jobs.
(31:55):
So to to feel that trustedI mean that's going to do something
for their their ego, their their workethic, their enthusiasm for the work.
Yeah.
A challenge for all of you out there is
how can you empower
or how can you put confidence intoone of your employees with the decision
(32:17):
so that they go homeand at the dinner table, dinner table,
they say to their spouse, hey,you won't believe
what Todd askedme for help with today. Hey.
And that wasa misconception I had over a lot of years
because I thought when Todd asked forhelp at that, Todd was weak and Todd took
pride in Todd, got a little bit of an egoor a lot of bit of an ego.
(32:40):
Ask my wife about knowing the answers.
But you know what that did
that just dug me in a really deep,
dark hole.
And they're no fun to be in
because you are in your own hole.
And I was only in that hole because of me.
And that was even tougher
(33:01):
than being in the hole,was realizing that I did it to myself.
so a very simple thing.
Every time
an employee comes toyou and ask you a question,
ask them
how theythink they should handle that situation.
(33:24):
What do you think you should do?
What do you think's bestto serve the clients?
What do you think is the best waythat we meet our core values?
However you want to phrase it, tieit back into your company
and ask your client,and then just zip, zip
your lips, let them speak.
Okay.
Can I play devil's advocatefor just a second, please?
(33:48):
So what if you have an employee
that you knowyou need to empower your team around you,
but you have an employee that you're justyou're still not convinced
that they're going to necessarilymake the right decision.
You don't have full trust in them yet.
Where do you go with that?
How do you develop that relationship?
(34:08):
Should they still be on the team?
You know, I'mjust thinking through all the questions.
I don't know if I want to.
I don't know if I want to empower them.
I don't know that I trust them.
So some things that
that I do, Craig, is oneis if that employee needs training
on that decision, likeif they're just literally flipping a coin
and they don't have any work experiencesto base it on,
(34:31):
then you're going to needto guide them through that.
And you could ask them some questions.
Well, how do you think the clientwould feel about that?
Okay.
If this happened to the homeowner?
It's their house.
What do you think?
Is that going to look good for the agent?
We need to make surethat we look good in the agent's eyes.
So ask them some questions,and sometimes you are
(34:52):
just going to have to tell them.
Now, I saw this with my leadership teamat Wow,
and Steve and Jess are incredibleand they have so much
insight and knowledge into the businessand how to improve it.
The problem was, isI made the decisions for so long
(35:13):
and then empower themthat every time Todd was in the room,
they always kind of went back towhat do you think?
And they or they would use me as a crutchbecause they were afraid to make
that decision.
And this is despitethem really knowing the correct decision.
But it was just like, oh,this is uncomfortable and this is okay.
This is natural.
(35:33):
The thing that I assured them, I dida few things and I do them consistently.
One, I tell them that I trust them like,you guys are incredible.
I trust you.
You guys have done a great work.
Like this last project.
It went off incredible.
Like you guys know what to do.
(35:53):
And then I also tell them that it's
okay for us to make mistakes.
Like, I make mistakes every day.
And I happen to have one big mistakethat I made the day that I lost a quarter
million dollars.
That worksgood for me to bring up right now.
I would suggest if you don't
have a mistakethat bad, don't make a mistake that dumb.
(36:16):
Just so you havethat example to use with your leaders,
right, guys?
Just it was a really painful dayand it was a painful year.
So just don't go make the mistakes
you have, for example,because that was a really bad thing.
I'm going to talk about ita repp conference here in November
(36:36):
for those of you listening in,
not watching, I was taking a drinkright as Todd said that again
almost spewing all over my equipmentin front of me here okay.
Go ahead. Sorry,I'm going to get Craig at one point.
And I'm gonna have to buy new equipmentfor him, but it's going to be worth it.
So I would tell them this and I wouldsometimes have to elaborate on it.
(36:59):
Again, these are my words.
But I would say, hey,you guys know what I what what
you want to know what I do when you comeand ask me something that I don't know,
like a big, hairy,
hard question like, what do you do?
I'm like, I just flip a coin,
like,
and I say something funny.
And this is the way you guys know meby now.
(37:20):
I have this little sense of humorthat I give at times,
and I can be sarcastic with it,or I try to make a point with it,
but I try to bring humor to the day.Understand?
Like, I don't know the answer to this.
I just guess.
But the best answer is the correct answer.
The second best answeris the wrong answer.
(37:42):
The worst answer is no answeror no decision.
So those are some verbal thingsthat I've used over the years.
And I use them againand again and again and again.
I say it all the time.
This is becoming your jobas the owner of the company,
that you need to be symbolicin your employee's eyes.
(38:02):
Everything you do should be symbolic.
If you tell them this knowledge,give them this thing,
crack this joke,you hope that they remember it.
You hope that they use it with otheremployees.
You hope they laugh about itor are proud about it at the dinner table
with their spouse.
I think that
kind of approach makes you humanas an owner as well,
(38:25):
and can really build trustin the relationship with your staff.
Craig, that is so wise.
Yes, and we connect with other humans.
We don't connect with people
that have egos, that sit in officesthat are unapproachable.
Yeah
Yeah.
You want a good culture,
you want a good, good environment in yourin your business.
(38:46):
Be human, be transparent.
Yeah, yeah.
Empower your staff and you will notbelieve how much you can grow.
It is in our 20.
Let's see what 2004 is when we start.
Why don't I know this number 21st year
and our 21st year,
(39:07):
we're going to be up about three quarters
of a million dollar in revenuefrom 2023, which is our best year ever.
So just to give you guys
some perspective,and it's when I stepped away
and I have no problemsaying that I stepped away.
I empowered the team
and they grew way fasterthan I could ever figure out how to grow.
(39:30):
And I'm so proud of them for that.
I am more proud of them than Todd'sego needs to know anything
or be stroked in any waybecause of what the team
has done.
Pretty cool
All right, so mistake number two,
not empowering your team quickly enough.
(39:51):
All right, so that's two,
CraigI think let me let me intro number three
because I thinkwe'll go to some wisdom from you.
Oh boy.
number three has to do with
managing money.
And this idea of
spending money to make money.
(40:13):
And I knowthat's something that you resonated with.
And we had discussions about thiswhen you first started Cee imaging
your real estate media business,this idea of like, hey,
I've got to take this leap of faith,but it cost money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So should I share the story?
Yeah, I'd love it.
(40:34):
So when I first started talking,
I was the first beta tester
for Spiro and and,
there was a cost involved in that.
And you have to understandmy background, my my career background.
It was pretty much all other than
if you want to otherthan 5 or 6 years of my career.
(40:56):
Up until that point,it was all nonprofit ministry work.
And you don't go into nonprofitministry work to make a lot of money.
That wasn't wasn't my motivation.
Believe it or not,believe it or not, right?
Right.
The storiesabout these rich nonprofit CEOs
and execs,they're the exception, not the rule.
Okay.
(41:17):
So financially, things have always been
a little challenging for mejust because of limited income, right?
But I enjoyed the work I did.
But I was afraid to spend moneyfrivolous frivolously.
But I was afraid to spend money, period.
Because things were so tight.
So my mentality really was kindof a scarcity mentality.
(41:40):
Todd, we've we've talked aboutthat mentality before where you're
you'rejust you're living out of fear, okay.
And there wasthere was a fear a financial fear
of me spending money,
to get my initial business started.
So we, we talked some more
(42:00):
and things worked out where I'm like,okay, yeah, it
it is worth thisbecause I'm not going to be able
to scale my business unless I do investin a system that's going to help me grow.
But that that waskind of the first light bulb.
But I think
I think we're really lit up and in a, it'sactually a much smaller item than that
first item of investing in a systemwas purchasing my first drone.
(42:25):
Okay.
So the investment in the systemwas a monthly,
monthly type of investmentbased on what I had sold that month.
Right.
But a drone is an initial upfront cost.
That was it was quite a bit.
I if I remember correctly, Todd,it was like 1400 bucks or something.
Now, to me that that was a ton of moneyfor that drone,
the extra batteries, the case,you know, the controller, all of that.
(42:49):
And I'm like, man,yeah, I've got the money, I can spend it,
but I'm afraid to let go of that money.
But I know I have to offer
drone services to realtorsif anybody is going to take me seriously.
So I, I bit the bullet.
It went against everythingI was conditioned and had experienced,
(43:10):
to to believe up until that pointbecause I thought
if I invest the money now,
then I canhopefully I can at least have the chance
of getting some drone jobsand selling that additional service.
And I saw that drone had been,you know, getting
pretty strongand was going to continue to grow.
And Todd within,I believe it was ten shoots.
(43:34):
I don't remember the timeframe,but it wasn't that long of a time frame.
I made all that money back.
Plus some,
and then everythingafter that investment was just profit.
It was it was growth.
Drone didn't take me long to shoot.
Didn't take long.
It you know,it wasn't a huge investment to edit.
And so I spent that $1,400
(43:54):
and all of a suddenmy average order value skyrocketed.
You know, for propertiesthat that needed drone and and agents
loved that I could do the photo, the videoand the drone all in one appointment.
I didn't have to outsource the dronefrom another company.
They could get everything.
So it just it was getting overthat fear, that initial fear of
laying out that kind of money
(44:17):
and then
seeing that growth was possiblebecause of it.
Yeah, those are great examples.
I have one, sorry.
Yeah, yeah, I'm very simple.
I have one very similar.
And then I'm going to flip thisa little bit for you all.
Mine came at the timethat I needed to hire
my first higher level admin.
Like my my number two individual.
(44:40):
And I was afraid to do that.
You know, the business was growing,but I was still very careful
with every penny that we spent.
And hiring employee is different
than hiring a photographerbecause photographers
are going to dowell for us as contractors.
(45:04):
When they worked, we paid them
and that brought in.
When they we were paying them,we were making money.
VA’s were a little bit different.
Well, when, when I started,there is no such thing as VA’s.
Or if people were using them,I didn't know about them.
But there wasn't this ideaof hiring a VA for, you know,
$1,500 a month or $1,200 a month.
(45:25):
It was you needed to hire an employee,and this employee was costing you,
you know, back at thattime, 40 or $50,000 a year.
And it came time for meto need an individual.
I was six months behindin doing my invoicing.
This is before Spirodid it for you automatically
and I was just spending all the wrong time
(45:48):
on the wrong task, just low level task.
And I was just convincedthat I was saving money.
And even if you've convinced yourself
that you're saving money
because you're doing it in the eveninghours, like, oh,
(46:10):
I actually I'm doing my billing at nightafter the kids go to bed.
So and it's time that I'm kind ofjust on the couch.
Anyways, I got a laptop of my lifeand I've got the TV on
and I'm going to save the money.
One you're completely fooling yourself
because what you're doing isyou are taking out all of the margin
(46:34):
in your brain, all of the spacethat you need.
You're overworking yourself.
So you're going to be less efficient.
You're killing all your time.
You should be with your family.
That yes, you know,even if the kids are in bed,
where are you?
Are you spending time with your wife?
What are you working out or whateverit should be?
(46:55):
You should be putting something backinto you and your personal relationships.
Preach, preach Todd.
And and it's just like, no,like just working more than 40 hours.
I had a coach. She says.
This is workingmore than 40 hours is just cheating.
You should be able to find a way to work
(47:17):
40 hours or less and still growand have a fantastic business.
And ifyou feel like that's countercultural.
Todd Yeah, I mean, like,I feel like the culture, the
the hustle culture, especially forfor owners and entrepreneurs,
is minimum 50 hours a week.
You gotta you gotta grind out.
(47:39):
So you're saying 40 or less,40 or less? Yes.
I, I can't tell you the number of times
that I was proud that I worked 60 or 70or the 80 hour weeks,
like I was proud of it and oh my goodness,I wish I could go back to younger
Todd when he didn'thave the bags under his eyes.
No gray hair.
If his jokes were better.
(48:00):
But I don't want to go backto the 80 hours a week.
Todd that was that was just silly. Craig.
Because I
wasn'tsmart enough to find a different way.
I just wasn't good enough.
I needed training, I needed,
I needed coach, I needed somebodyto help me understand what I wasn't seen.
(48:21):
I thought,I'm just going to pound through this.
No, please don't pound through this
because your your kids depend on it.
Your wife depends on it.
Your family, your mom, dad, your
everything personal depends on it.
Remember, you started your business
to help you reach your personal goals.
(48:44):
And we find that we get this flippedwhen we get so deep.
And as they say, if I could only getthe business to this level,
we justified to saythis is what it would do for my family.
And your your wife's going.
I just want Todd back. Yeah.
I don't care about the cars.
I don't care about the house.
I don't care about the money.I just want you.
(49:04):
Like I just want some time with you.
So I let meflip that because I said I would, Craig.
And then we'll wrap up for a final close.
But I think it's important to saythis flip side of this story, too,
because that was Todd at year.
You know, one, two, three, four.
Let's go to Todd at year17, 18, 16, 17, 18.
Okay.
I, I had learned that as I finally learnedokay.
(49:26):
It took me ten years.
If I hire people and find the right peopleand train them
and empower them, then
the business is going to grow.
Hired on ShannonShannon is now our CRO Spiro.
She helped grow wow like crazy.
Did things that I could even have imaginedthat we would do.
(49:48):
Like, oh, this is fun, let's hireanother person.
Okay, brought on our number onephotographer, close friend of mine.
Like he shouldbe the head training person.
Okay, I had
the Ihad the first helper person that I hired.
I was like, hey, he's going to beyou in charge of all the money and growth.
(50:10):
Okay, great. Oh, well, this works.
Okay.
Now we need a marketing personbecause we really should have marketing.
You know, you start googling onlineor what is a hierarchy.
What are org charts of companies of thissize.
They got all these little dots on the map.
Okay, let's get that person.
Well now that person needs an assistant
(50:31):
and we'd like to do this thing.
We'd like to start hosting these eventsand webinars.
Okay.
Well we probably need the personthat's going to do that.
And we kept adding and adding and adding
the office was full.
It was fun.
I loved it actually.
Craig, like this officehad 15 people in it every day.
(50:52):
It was bustling.
It was energetic.
I mean, we had the massage chair,the coffee machine.
We didn't have the slide,but I had considered putting in a slide
and I got so blinded
I was just I would just search online.
I'd look at offices and like,oh, Google's doing that.
Well, I think we should do it too.
(51:14):
No, Todd,Google is a freaking large business.
You should do the that.
So I hit the tipping point
to where we put too many people into fast,and I didn't really empower
the tier of managersand didn't set the expectations.
(51:34):
And don't point the ship straight enoughor direct enough to where we wanted to go.
So everybody startedworking in these silos, and they did good.
They did what they thought was best,
but it was so overthe map, Craig, that nothing
really came togetherto move the needle that much further.
(51:58):
So you can kind of break down
this third pointinto two sides of the same coin.
Spent the mistake beingnot spending enough money quickly enough
or spending too much too quickly.
Yeah.
So finding that that happy mediumof what you're investing in your company.
Yeah. Exactly.
(52:18):
If, if you, if there's no one elsebut you to do it
and this is going to help you grow,
you need to have help with that.
But if you don't have a solid system,
processes, proceduresand a very clear goal,
then just hiringpeople is going to convoluted everything
(52:38):
and you'll grow a little bit,but you'll spend a whole lot of money
and you'll get these subculturesstart to develop, at least for us,
where people try to get peopleand other on their side because they're
they think we should go this way,and this other person thinks we should go
this way.
So they try to get some other employeeson their side,
(52:58):
and then all this is happening and you'relike, we had this really cool culture.
Like we have a massage chair.Why are you people unhappy?
It's like, no, Todd,
the massagechair doesn't make people happy.
What makes people happy is they know
what's expected to themwhen they walk in the door.
And then when they walk out the door,
(53:19):
they feel good about crossing
those items off their list and feelinglike they made progress that day,
and not thatthey had to play the popular game.
Try to get people on their side and manageunderlying
conversations and tonesthroughout the office. Wow.
(53:39):
All related to money.
Invest into Wow.
I never would have thought of it that way.
And and one thing is Craig.
You are always the last personto find out,
right?
You might think you know everythingthat's going on.
(54:01):
And in the past,when you had one or 2 or 5 employees
and you had that closepersonal relationship with them,
they would come to you and youprobably knew a lot of what was going on.
But when you grow 4 or 5, 15, 20employees,
you are the last person to knowand you know,
(54:24):
you find out
when the problem's too big to solve.
Sometimes,or the way you solve the problem is you
move on from a massive amount of people,or you change like you have to.
You have to go really deep at that pointbecause the problem is so embedded
(54:45):
that you have to cutreally deep to fix the problem,
and then you're right backwhere you started.
Yeah. Well.
All right.
Good stuff.
The top three mistakesthat we've learned from that.
Hopefully you can learn from and not makethe mistakes that that we have taught.
Thank you.
Thank you for the transparency and thevulnerability on sharing that.
(55:09):
Yeah. My pleasure.I hope it can be helpful.
And these are all things that,
we if you want to find outmore about them,
if you want to speak on them, we areI mentioned at the top of the hour,
but if you want to speak at theSpiro Sync,
we have those breakout sessionslike I mentioned.
Email us hello@spiro.media.
If you're like, hey, this resonateswith me, I'd love to talk about this.
(55:29):
Just let me know.
We'll put you on the listand then we'll see.
What ideas you haveand see if we can't get your schedule.
Yeah. Awesome.
If you have mistakes you want
to share, you know, in the commentson the YouTube channel, feel free.
We'd love to to learn from you as well.
And if you're listening,you can email us those things.
hello@spiro.media we we like to learnjust as much as we like to teach.
(55:53):
So we we still have thingsto learn ourselves as we continue to grow.
So Todd, again, thank you.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Well that's going to wrap thingsup this week.
Hopefully this was a benefit to you.
If you found value in this,we'd love a, like, on the YouTube channel.
Feel free to share it in the,you know, various social media groups for,
(56:14):
real estate media.
And if you have a colleaguein, in the real estate
media industry that maybe isn't familiarwith the podcast,
we always appreciate the sharejust to be able to,
share this knowledge and communitywith others that we haven't
been able to touch base with and hopefullystrengthen their business as well.
So, guys, thank you.
We, we appreciate you so much.
(56:34):
The time that you take out of your dayto listen, to watch
and just want to remind you,make sure you take time out of your day to
just be really thankful for the blessingsin your life and be sure to breathe.
Have a great week!
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