The Marriage Of Real Estate And Blockchain with Henry Elder
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Episode Summary:
Henry Elder comes from a four generation of Los Angeles real estate professionals, yet he made his own way in the world when he got out of Pepperdine. He was going to go to law school and decided to go work for a hedge fund instead, and then pivoted again and went into the world of blockchain. The lessons he’s learned along the way starting his own company of surrounding yourself with people you trust as well as people who have complementary skill sets, and finally how he found a confidence at a very young age that made it contagious so that people would want to do deals with him is something you won’t want to miss. Henry delves into the blockchain technology and tokenized real estate, and talks about the concept of marriage between real estate and blockchain.
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Listen To The Episode Here
The Marriage Of Real Estate And Blockchain with Henry Elder
Henry Elder is the guest on the podcast. He comes from a four generation of Los Angeles real estate professionals. He made his own way in the world when it got out of Pepperdine. He was going to go to law school and decided to go work for a hedge fund instead and then pivoted again and went into the world of blockchain. The lessons he’s learned along the way, starting his own company of surrounding yourself with people you trust as well as people who have complementary skill sets. Finally, how he found a confidence at a very young age that made it contagious, so the people would want to do deals with him is something you won’t want to miss.
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Our guest is Henry Elder who is also a friend of mine. He’s the Co-Founder of Digital Asset Advisors, which facilitates the tokenization of any asset including equity ownership. Henry and his team lend their deep experience across compliance, finance, tax, blockchain technology and most importantly to me, strategy to the clients around the world with projects that they currently have active on both coasts of the Middle East and Asia. An early client was Slice.Market which you might have heard of, one of the first platforms for tokenizing real estate in the US. Henry serves as Director of Origination and Investment there. Before that, he was involved with over $1 billion of domestic investments while working in real estate private equity and investment banking. He comes from four generations of Los Angeles real estate professionals. It’s rare enough to meet a native let alone someone who’s family’s been in the town that long. Welcome, Henry.
Thank you. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.
I want to ask you to go back to your own story of origin. If you don’t mind, take us back to what was it like with that history growing up in LA. Is it, “We’ve always been in real estate. It’s in your blood. You must go into this. You have no other choices,” or did you start going to open houses or going to commercial construction sites? Tell us a little bit about how that started and what impact that had.
It was very much one of those, “This is in your blood,” type of things. My family has been in this industry for four generations. After four generations you see both the good and the bad. There have been incredible businesses built and fortunes made and poor decisions made that have brought a lot of turmoil back to a renaissance of sorts. You get to see all of these different ways that people can invest in real estate. The right way to do it, the wrong way to do it and how to deal with the interpersonal conflicts and various family members. It’s very applicable today since we’re going out to vote and it gives you a good idea of how politics works. Some of my earliest memories were visiting my father who ran the family company for a while, visiting him in his big office and being absolutely blown away. In my mind, he was a titan in the industry.
He’s well known in the industry, but to the little five-year-old me, he was an absolute god. In my mind, there was nothing more than I would ever want to do than go into real estate and continue that legacy. That followed me all through college. I studied political science with the goal of going in as a real estate lawyer and going from there. What I found quite quickly after I graduated college is that law is an industry that appeals to a certain type of person. It can sometimes be difficult to find those types of people. I went to the law firm and I took a large number of lawyers out to lunch to get their perspective on the field. Whether or not it would be something that I should go into and what specific part of the field I should go into. What I found by and large probably about 95% of lawyers I took out to lunch either said, “Don’t go into this industry. If you are going into this industry, go into it to learn a lot to go do something else.”
I thought to myself I’m not the person who wants to spend five to eight years building a basis in one industry so that I can go into another one. I would rather go do the thing that I want to do. It was Thanksgiving and I was at a family event speaking with a cousin of mine who works in the hedge fund industry. I was telling him how I was struggling with this. I had taken the LSAT. I was applying to law schools. I was on the path towards committing myself to this. He shared with me that he had almost the exact same struggle where he had originally meant to be a lawyer and quickly found out that it was not quite what it was cracked up to be. He decided to explore something else and ended up working in a hedge fund. He recommended to me that I participate in their internship program. I did that and I applied for it. I got in. I moved to San Francisco for a few months. I worked at this hedge fund. It’s called ValueAct Capital.
At the time that I was there, ValueAct was taking on Microsoft to reform the company and push out Steve Ballmer especially. I’m sitting there. I’m 23 years old. I’m fresh out of college. These guys are talking about strategies for bending a multibillion-dollar corporation to their will. I’m blown away. When I was five years old, my father seemed the absolute pinnacle of corporate professional achievement. Then here I am listening to these guys. I’m 23 years old and I’m like, “This is what I want to be.” I end up coming back to Los Angeles afterwards. I started looking for a job in finance. I’m absolutely smitten at this point. I end up working at a company called George Smith Partners which does real estate investment banking in Century City. I truly started my finance career in a professional capacity and I loved it. I was doing all these real estate deals all over the country. $200 million deals here in LA, $50 million deals in Dallas, $100 million deals in New York. From there I move onto a company called Latitude Real Estate Investors.
[bctt tweet=”Confidence is contagious. Surround yourself with people you trust.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s a large amount of money. Our audiences will be fascinated. You’re young and you’re closing deals in the $200 to $250 million range. What was your biggest surprise? Was it how easy it was or how complicated it was? What was your takeaway from doing those deals?
It exposed something to me that I have struggled with my entire career. I walk into this place, green behind the ears, trying to figure out my place here. I’m working for one of the founders of the company, a guy named Gary Tenzer. He brought me on and he was like, “I need you to run deals for me. I need you to call these 50 people to get this deal signed up.” I was thinking to myself. “What value do I have to these people? How do I get my foot in the door? Why will they take up my call?” I was calling people and I was like, “I work on Gary Tenzer’s team. You have worked together before. Please answer my call. I have a deal you may want to look at.” Some people are picking up the line, but they’re treating me exactly the way that I introduced myself. Which is as someone who has no confidence in himself. It wasn’t until maybe four or five months in that I realized that any of these guys will pick up my call if I simply call them and tell them I have a deal. That’s all I need to do.
I don’t need to qualify myself by saying, “I’m associated with this individual,” or “You’ve done business with someone I know.” All we need to do is call them and say, “I have a great deal. You’ll want to hear more about it. Here are some of the terms. Give me a call back when you have a second.” Once I started doing that and I was more confident in myself and the value that I had to offer, everyone treated me differently. My voicemails were returned, my emails were answered. As long as you portray yourself as a lackey, people who were trying to get business done don’t want to take the time to educate you on how business needs to be done. They want to get business done. If you portray yourself as someone who knows how to get business done and knows what their value-add is, people are likely to do business with you.
There’s a great line of insight there that if you’re confident, then people want to do business with people that are confident. It’s that simple. Is there a big difference between closing a deal of $25 million versus $250 million or is it just a zero in your head?
It’s just a zero. You may be calling different people. In terms of what the process, the types of due diligence that you need to do and the things that you need to know, it doesn’t change that much. Particularly in real estate, real estate is almost like professional sports. You can drill down each property into a series of numerical metrics. Those metrics are exactly the same across virtually every property. Every baseball player has a batting average and every basketball player has a field goal percentage. With real estate, it’s what’s the price per square foot? What’s the rent per square foot? What are the rental coms? If it’s a $200 million deal, those metrics are still the same. It’s a larger magnitude. Real estate is like sports and that it can be boiled down to a series of numbers. You have your batting average with baseball players, with basketball players they have their assists. With real estate, you have price per square foot and rental rates. Whether it’s a $200-million property or a $25-million property those numbers are the same because at the end of the day the way that you’re getting to that valuation is based on those same metrics. There might be more square feet right. There might be a higher rent but it’s still the same numbers.
Real Estate And Blockchain: People don’t want to take the time to educate you on how business needs to be done right. They just want to get the business done.
It’s still a mental game. There are some people that get so afraid, whether it’s their salary or a deal that you’ve got to stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone especially when you’re starting out or if you’re asking for investors to invest in your company. The difference between $1 million versus $10 million, if you’re not confident with it and what you’re going to do with the money then neither would the investors be. That’s a great lesson there. From there you moved to Latitude Real Estate Investors who you’re dealing with bridge debt. How different was that?
It wasn’t too different. The biggest difference was that instead of being the party that brought all the other parties to the table, I was controlling one side of the table. We were bringing the actual capital to the deals, which was an interesting position to be in. If I was worried about the value that I was bringing at George Smith Partners, it’s not something you have to worry about when you’re representing a company that’s going to write a $40 million check.
An analogy would be the difference between hosting a dinner party at a restaurant versus owning the restaurant and inviting people. Would that be close?
That’s accurate.
You’re bringing in the cash and the people as opposed to putting people together.
Once we had a deal under contract, if I picked up the phone and I asked for something, that thing would be delivered. If I called someone and I was like, “We have two days to get this done. I need it done within the next 48 hours,” it would get done within 48 hours. When you’re working to bridge debt fund, it’s a fairly commoditized product. When I was going out to brokers and property owners and trying to get them to use my product, I had to figure out how to sell it to them. That’s where the difficulty came from because that was the difference between me and the 50 other bridge debt lenders that we had out there. That was where I learned sales techniques. You figure out how to differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition. I was lucky in that regard for working at Latitude because it was extremely well-known. It had been around for sixteen years and it had been through a couple of cycles at that time. When I was going out and I was pitching to people, that was what I relied on. “We are like a grandfather of this industry. You can go put your faith in one of these new upstarts and then get left at the altar scrambling for a replacement or you can go with us. We’ve been around for this long because people believed in us, people trust us and because we don’t re-trade or drop deals.” We put out an application that is our solemn if not legal promise that we will fund this deal.
[bctt tweet=”Go do the thing that you really want to do.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When you’re selling anything that is somewhat seen as a commodity, it seems to me like what you were doing was painting a picture for people of what life would be like with you and the history that you bring to the table of stability and competence so that they can sleep at night. You’re tapping into the emotions of that to differentiate why us versus why somebody else. Anytime you’re pitching anything always the question comes down to two things. Why are you the right choice? Why is now the right time? That differentiation of the team from a standpoint of our history but saying, “We’ve been around a long time,” is not enough in my humble opinion. You need to connect the dots, which it sounds like you did so that you won’t be left at the altar by somebody who hasn’t been through this before. Our experience gives you peace of mind. All of that is a great way to sell something no matter what your selling that allows you to stand out from other people. Then you had this moment of insights, a-ha moment. Those, “What am I doing with my life? Am I happy?” You’re too young to have a midlife crisis but you did have a moment where you went, “I’m not a lawyer. I love doing this and I’m good at it. There’s something else.”
I thought to myself, “Four generations of real estate. I’m doing well on my own.” I made it a point of mine not to rely on the family connections to build my own real estate career. Here I was at Latitude nothing to do with the family company. Nothing I had done previously had anything to do with family companies. I’m feeling pretty proud of myself. My then girlfriend and now fiancé was working at a company called Gem. Gem is here in Venice and they build enterprise blockchain applications. Through her, I was getting introduced to all of these people in the blockchain space. One of those people was this gentleman by the name was David Bailey. I met David Bailey the owner of Bitcoin Magazine who was dating my fiancé’s roommate at the time. David was the complete opposite of the buttoned-up, very conservative real estate people, who I had been interfacing with to that point. David was all about Bitcoin. He was very much a Bitcoin maximalist. At first, his appearance and demeanor and all of that seemed exactly what I would associate with someone who was interested in Bitcoin. At that time, it was somewhat fringe and I don’t think anybody from real estate thought that it was something to be taken seriously. Over time listening to David talk about Bitcoin and the blockchain industry as a whole, I started to become more and more interested in it.
In December 2016, we spent New Year’s with David and Emily in Nashville. I think of that as my blockchain baptism. It was four days of concentrated look at what exactly was going on behind the scenes in the blockchain world. It gave me a very early look at what was going on in the ICO’s space. When I came back to Los Angeles, I quickly realized that this created a new capital market. That new capital market would provide new sources of funding for any business venture. I also realized quite quickly that this new capital market would need to be regulated. When I came back to Los Angeles, I started exploring how to tap this capital market to raise a real estate fund specifically because that’s what my expertise was. I called two friends of mine, Paul Monsen who I worked with at the investment bank and Mark Rutter who is one of my oldest friends and is a moderating influence.
Real Estate And Blockchain: Real estate is almost like professional sports that you can drill down each property into a series of numerical metrics.
Paul is like an absolute steam engine. If you get him excited about an idea, he will make it a reality. Mark is very cerebral. He’s absolutely brilliant. He’s a lawyer. I knew that if I took an idea to him and if he got excited about it then that was a good indication that that idea had some serious legs. Mark and Paul got excited about it. We started putting together a team to explore how we could compliantly tap this capital market. At the same time, we started hosting Meetups in Los Angeles called The Blockchain Hideout to educate people on this technology. Also, to take the crowd’s temperature on securities and regulation in this market. Blockchain Capital did their raise in March of 2017. That was the first regulated compliance security token.
Nobody seemed to care. ICO mainly started taking off. Everybody was raising $10 million to $100 million in ten minutes. That was all that anybody cared about. We were having these meetups. We were telling people this company did compliantly. This is probably the model going forward for these. A lot of these ICOs are being conducted in a non-compliant manner. People did not like hearing that. We would get shouted down. We would have people stormed out of the meetups in anger. In October and November, Science Blockchain did their raise and fell somewhat short of the dollar amount that they been targeting. That indicated to us that this concept, although we think it’s interesting and it is the future is not quite ready for prime time. Neither the investor demand nor the community acceptance for security tokens exists yet in a mature form. We showed our idea, but at the same time, we were absolutely bitten by the blockchain bug.
Paul and I started Digital Asset Advisors and said, “We love real estate. We’re good at it. There is an entire world of other stuff out there that we can take part in and make a true impact in the formation of an entirely new industry.” With that, we entered the space and our first client was Slice, which was building a platform for tokenizing real estate. Specifically, commercial real estate, specifically for sale to international investors. One of the greatest and original use for the blockchain is the ability to transact large or small value amounts internationally across borders with very little friction. This lends itself incredibly well to commercial real estate because assets here in the United States are very desirable. However, they are not easy for international investors to access. When you have a situation where the majority of wealth sits offshore, but the majority of desirable investable assets sits onshore. If you can create a pipeline to facilitate the frictionless investment of that wealth into those assets, then that’s a winning business case right there.
[bctt tweet=”Figure out how to differentiate yourself from the rest of the competition.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If I’m to sum up the problem you’re solving at Digital Asset Advisors, it is simply that there’s a lot of wealth overseas that wants to invest in commercial real estate in the US. There are regulations preventing them from easily doing it. It also typically requires huge amounts of money. By using blocking technology, you create this almost like an oil pipeline that takes something from one location to the other and allows it to be fractionalized. It allows people to invest in an asset. In this case Slice is offering commercial real estate that’s never been available before and certainly not in small chunks.
That’s what Slice is doing. I should carefully bifurcate Slice and Digital Asset Advisors.
You helped craft this. It’s the problem you saw, but they’re not the only ones with this problem. What you bring to Slice is the understanding of real estate and blockchain combined.
Real Estate And Blockchain: One of the greatest and original use cases for the blockchain is the ability to transact large or small value amounts internationally across borders with very little friction.
For Slice, yes. We started working with Slice when it was just the two co-founders. They brought on a third co-founder long after we were working with Slice. We worked with Slice exclusively for five months, helping them build their platform. We were helping them figure out the thorny issues of allowing access to foreign investors because there’re tax and regulatory burdens that come with bringing in foreign investors. We need to figure out how to solve that. We were helping them find a pipeline of real estate to bring to the platform, creating due diligence processes that institutional investors would appreciate, investment memos and underwriting models. In that case, our real estate experience was immediately applicable. Real estate is not the only industry that will be impacted by blockchain. Our basic knowledge of finance, economics, blockchain technology and the network that we have built out was applicable across multiple industries and clients. We had the benefit of having worked with Slice and created this high profile and survived for long enough because there was a shakeout of service providers in the spring of 2018.
In the summer of 2018 and fall all the sudden all these people who we been in contact with and all these companies that we were talking to at conferences wanted our help as well. In the winter of 2017 and the winter of 2018, we would go to conferences and they would be absolutely full of people. Every other person you met was some sort of a service provider saying that they could do this and they could do that. By the summer of 2018, you’re going to conferences and none of those people were there anymore. All that’s left were the people who are doing things. Us sticking around long enough and working on a high-quality project like Slice gave us the legitimacy. Where when we went to people when we were like, “You have a problem, we can solve it.” They will believe us off the bat. We went around and we signed up three or four additional clients in completely unrelated industries. Each one of those we’ve been able to apply our knowledge and our skill sets to help them effectuate their business plans. Even to help them put together a legitimate business plan. There are so many good ideas out there for uses of blockchain technology, but there are a lot of people who don’t have the experience of running a company.
[bctt tweet=”Surround yourself with people that compliment your skill sets and open up your point of view so that you don’t end up with a tunnel vision.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They don’t understand financials or they don’t understand what a business financial should look like. While they have an idea of how they can apply blockchain technologies, they don’t know who the best partner is to build the technology or which protocol they should be building on that can utilize their idea of the best. Our position in the middle of all of these different service providers because we work with the issuance platform. We work with the security lawyers. We work with the broker-dealers. We work with the protocols. We work with tech firms. The different disparate parts that you either pull together in order to successfully execute an asset tokenization or a security token offering, we know them all. We can shepherd anyone of these clients through that process and introduce them to the different players and the different service providers and say, “For what you’re trying to do this is the best guy, but these guys are also very good. This is the pros and cons of each one. Let’s sit down with each one of them. We’ll walk you through the platforms and then you decide. We’ll run that process for them because we already have a relationship with all these different guys.
That’s like curating three different businesses. The technology, the protocols, the compliance, the tax implications and the business model. If you’re maybe good at two, but not all three of those things where you need somebody else who’s done it before to say, “Use GoChain versus ERC20.” All those in the weeds kinds of questions that you have to decide while managing the compliance issues and all the other things to make an asset-backed token. It can get overwhelming even if someone’s got a lot of business experience to try and figure it out by yourself. To me, the real value you bring is relationship, insights and curation which saves time, which gets you to market faster. That’s how I connect the dots of the real outcome of what working with you looks like.
If you punch in security token issuance platform in Google, you’ll see twenty different platforms. How do you know which ones are legitimate, which ones have done an issuance and which ones can perform what they say they can? We know that. That’s something that we’re facilitating some of the issuances that they’re doing. We know who’s doing what. We consider ourselves like the guide to this world. You want to understand it, you want to be a player, you want to know how to do it, we’ll help you with all of that.
I think of you as a Sherpa helping people climb Mount Everest. What last piece of advice would you have for someone who wants to get involved in the blockchain, make a career change. If they say, “I want to get into asset back tokens and still have people excited about it.” They may not have the volatility of a Bitcoin but there’s still some upside. What insights and advice do you have for the industry in general?
My big takeaway would be twofold. Surround yourself with people that you absolutely innately trust. Make sure that those people compliment your skill sets. Open up your point of view so that you don’t end of the tunnel vision. Also, this industry is so full of data. It’s changing at such a rapid pace that newbies who are coming into it, it’s quite easy to be overwhelmed by it. When you have a good idea and you’re bringing it to the market, there are a lot of people who will tell you that it’s a bad idea. They’ll shoot it down with a bunch of stuff that you may not understand. In an industry as fast moving as this one, it’s like drinking from three fire hoses. It’s quite easy for somebody to shoot down any idea. If you stick to your guns and you find someone who also supports you and believes you that it’s a good idea, don’t be overwhelmed but don’t be intimidated by the naysayers.
You went through that yourself when you and Paul were starting your own little meetup group. People are like, “What compliance? Get out of here. We don’t care about that.” You’ve lived it and you’re walking your talk. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your journey. You are certainly on an exciting trajectory. You have long since proven yourself separate from your family’s business especially by jumping into the blockchain, not just the real estate but in other areas. It’s going to be fun to watch where you go and which companies are fortunate enough to get to work with you.
Thank you, John. It was a pleasure to be on here.
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Happily Ever Always with Michael Rosenblum
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
We often look for happiness in different places and people. But no matter how much we look, we can’t seem to find it. Michael Rosenblum believes we all deserve to live Happily Ever Always and for him, that is about looking within oneself. He is a self-made man and one of America’s most successful real estate brokers—deemed even as the broker’s broker. He talks about how much of his success comes from loving what he does and in serving other people. Shedding some life into real estate, he gives light and comforting advices on going to listings, selling, buying, and marketing. Ultimately, he believes that money can’t buy you happiness but happiness can make you rich.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Happily Ever Always with Michael Rosenblum
Happily Ever Always: A Top-Selling Real Estate Broker’s Secret Guide to Confidence, Contentedness and Security
My guest is Michael Rosenblum, who has written a wonderful book called Happily Ever Always. He reveals the winning philosophy by his amazing route to becoming one of America’s most successful real estate brokers. He has this amazing story where he takes you on a journey where you go through all these exercises to get in touch with what your thoughts are about happiness. He tells us that good business isn’t good enough. As someone who passionately believes his joy is measured in the equal proportion to the happiness of those around him, you could imagine that he makes everybody feel happier. He said, “We’re intentionally seeking this spiritual connection because it triggers greatness and we all want that. When you realize why you always deserve to live happily ever always, you have the secret to not only a happy life but a happy business life.” Michael, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. I’m delighted to be here, certainly humbled, to say the least.
I always like to ask my guest to tell us your story of origin. You can go back as far as you want. You can be a little boy dreaming of being rich. You can be high school, college, wherever you want to start that had, “I want to be happier than the people I see around me.” Whatever you think would be relevant to give us a sense of how you all started on your journey.
I should probably begin by saying I was one of those children who never felt as if he fit in with other kids. I was a little different. In being different as we all maybe have experienced at one time or another in our life, you get bullied when you’re different by people who sometimes are not happy themselves. As I began to grow and learn to like myself, I decided through my trials and tribulations of life that I wanted to find out if there was some formula for being happy. As a young person, I thought happy was being rich, having a lot of money, all material possessions. I came to learn over time of a successful business that I wasn’t happy.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t wish your villains away” username=”John_Livesay”]
I remember having a job one time. I was paid so much money and it was blocks from my home here in Chicago. I would wake up every morning and I would cringe to go to the office because I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was able to go to dinners and buy different things and yet I wasn’t happy. I thought maybe happiness is when you meet the love of your life, when you meet that right person and you have that connection. I was blessed to have that experience and it didn’t work because you fall in and out of relationships.
That’s a lot of pressure to put on one person, “You have to be responsible for my happiness, now go.”
Together, being with someone, I was thinking that was the epitome of happiness and it wasn’t. In short, what I realized was that happiness came from within me. I had to figure out who I was and what was going to make me happy. What I found that was going to make me happy was having a sense of security of my own personal truth. Accepting me for who I am, growing with that and accepting the flaws, the favorable aspects and the gifts that are buried within me.
It’s an interesting way of looking at life because a lot of us, especially in the business world and sales, are looking for people to like us, accept us, typically in the form of hiring us. This whole podcast is about the successful pitch. If you’re constantly pitching to get hired or to sell a product or a service and your big concern is like Sally Field, “Do they like me?” You’re never going to ever feel completely happy because not everyone’s going to like you or what you’re selling.
That is the truth to heart. Furthermore, what’s interesting is that when you find that you like who you are, you have the ability to present yourself in an authentic way. You’re not concerned what other people think and you’re not concerned that the product you might be selling isn’t going to be favorable to somebody else. You can sell yourself best when you like yourself. When you find your own sense of happiness, then you have the world by the tail and you can do everything and anything that you ever wanted to.
You certainly have the world by the tail when it comes to business as one of the most successful brokers in Chicago. You’ve generated sales of over $400 million and then inducted into Berkshire Hathaway’s Hall of Fame. You’re constantly in the top 1% of 46,000 real estate brokers. There must be something to that success that has allowed you to stay consistently at the top. Yet if people think that that’s going to make them happy, they’re still not getting the message.
It falls back on the fact that you have to be happy with yourself. You have to like yourself. You also have to be authentic to who you are. By understanding who you are, then you present yourself in a real way. When you present yourself in that real, authentic way, you will find that people will gravitate towards you and you can do anything. My success in real estate is probably driven by the fact that I just want to do a great job for people because that’s what I would want to be done for me. I often call myself the broker’s broker. The reason why I call myself the broker’s broker is because I treat my clients in the same manner that I would expect my broker to treat me.
[bctt tweet=”Reincarnation: Do you want to come back as you?” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s almost like a doctor saying, “I’m going to treat this patient like it’s a family member and not just another job.” I love this concept of when we are our authentic selves because in the marketing world if you try to be all things to everybody, you’re nothing to everybody. As opposed to picking a lane, picking a niche, who this is for and who this is not for. Therefore, when you go out to pitch to get someone to hire you, to give you a listing, what is it that you do or say that makes people want to work with you versus someone else? Separate from all the bells and whistles of, “This is our marketing strategy.” I want to hear, if I can, what’s the mindset you go in with? What’s the energy? What is it that somebody could say that would cause you to say, “This isn’t a fit?” Anything you can share in that arena?
I believe the driving force when I go into a listing appointment that separates me from other brokers is number one, my enthusiasm for the work that I do. Number two, being able to give a clear, concise presentation and of course not to forget the word compelling. We all suffer a little bit from not having the most robust attention spans because we’re busy. You need to have your presentation done in a succinct way where for me, one of the things that I do is I like to cover four points. I bring a wonderful presentation book of real estate comps and all the marketing we do. It’s a wonderfully thick book that we leave behind with our clients. What I do is number one, talk about who I am and a little bit about my background. Number two, I get into the comps. Number three, I talk about the marketing that we are going to implement in order to drive traffic to a particular property. Number four, we talk about how we’re going to service you, the client, so that we’re answering your questions before you ask them.
I would imagine that other brokers do a similar process in terms of the research and a little bit about their bio. What I’m looking for is your secret sauce. Do you paint a picture of what life is going to be like? Do you paint a picture of the process which can be stressful being less stressful because of your happiness focus?
It’s probably the oodles of enthusiasm that I seem to generate when speaking to somebody. I’m asking them questions about why they’re moving and why they’re contemplating this sale. If I’m working with a buyer, in going through an assessment program with the buyer, it’s trying to find out what’s the motivating force and then talk around that. I think it’s probably coming in and having an enormous amount of enthusiasm for what I’m doing. The other thing is just having the knowledge. You would be surprised at how many people don’t have a lot of knowledge about their industry. Fake it to make it.
What I hear then is if our audience wants to be more successful and happier, bring your enthusiasm, which has to be authentic. Ask questions that are specific to that particular person’s reason for making a change. Most importantly, prepare and don’t underestimate that can separate you from the competition. If someone is also saying, “I’d like to overcome some self-doubt. Maybe I don’t have the years of experience and this amazing track record that you have, Michael.” What would you recommend people do?
[bctt tweet=”When you find your own sense of happiness, then you have the world by the tail.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I believe everyone has certain gifts that are a little different than someone else’s. When you don’t have an experience in selling a lot of real estates, you might have a skill set that you can comport from a prior profession you were involved in. For instance, maybe somebody was in party planning. What they can talk about is the fact that when they get a listing, they build a marketing plan around that particular listing to figure out how to get the optimum amount of traffic. They’re taking their skill set from planning parties, which involves understanding menus and understanding possibly how to get press, depending upon the type of party it is. It’s taking a skillset from a prior profession, going ahead and comporting that to real estate and implementing it. Your enthusiasm can drive a contagious and infectious road path to get people to do exactly what you might like.
One of the things you talk about in the book, Happily Ever Always, is listen to your gut, not your wallet. That goes back to that earlier question I had about when do you say no to a potential client? Your gut’s saying, “I’d love the commission on this listing.” You’re listening to your gut and not your wallet. Do you have a story around that you can share?
First and foremost, you have to trust yourself. You have to believe that others are going to do the same. When you’re genuine, you win. If you have an agenda only for money, you won’t. Sometimes I’ll go into an appointment and I’ll sit down with a potential seller. They’re telling me that this is where their property should be priced and that they know exactly how it should be sold. It begins to make me feel as if, “What am I here for?” I should probably back up and say when I meet somebody who tells me that they’ve sold a lot of properties and this is where it should be priced despite the comps. I’ve cued them on different reasons as to why they believe that and I don’t feel that it is genuine or it makes sense. I step back and I’ll say, “I don’t think I can meet your expectations. I’m not the person for you.”
I realized that if someone’s telling me that they’ve sold six properties and I’ve sold over 1,000 properties, I have a better track record in deciding whether or not something’s going to go. Therefore, if I feel the person’s contentious, I realize it’s only going to be blood money. It’s not going to be harmonious. When you are in business with someone and when you’re selling something for someone, you’re married to them and you want to have that harmonious relationship. If it’s not there, then you’ve got to listen to your gut, not your wallet. You could end up spending a lot more in the long run.
[bctt tweet=”You get bullied when you’re different by people who sometimes are not happy themselves.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You also said you called it blood money, which leads me to my other question. You talk about, “Don’t wish your villains away.” Tell us what that means.
That’s an excerpt from my book and you should never want to wish your villains away. For lack of better word, I’ll use the word dreadful. Sometimes the dreadful people we think that come into our lives we wish weren’t there are the very people that can teach us lessons, not only about our self but also be a springboard to take us to a greater place. You might say, “Michael, why would you make that statement?” John, I would make that statement because sometimes mean people do things to us. It irritates us to the point where we say, “I’m not going to be your doormat. I’m not going to let you walk all over me. I am going to rise to the occasion and I’m going to be better.” That villain motivated you.
Even Cruella de Vil is someone that could motivate us if you look at it the right way is what you’re saying.
Another thing that I’d like to touch on is the point that is there anything bad in life? I guess we could say there are things that are bad in life, but sometimes from the tragedy comes the victory. We don’t see that necessarily when we’re settled in a situation that is terrible and that is painful. Sometimes if we step out of it, which takes a lot of courage and a lot of strength, we end up finding that we are strong and we can endure and we end up winning.
Is there a time in your business life when things fell apart and you still were able to find happiness?
There was a time in my twenties, I remember specifically where I wasn’t getting paid worth my salt. I felt in all the times that I kept asking my boss for a raise, which was over a two-year period that she wasn’t interested in doing that. I had looked for another job but hadn’t found one yet. I believed that until I took a hold of my life, believed in myself, quit my job and didn’t worry about the fact that I didn’t have another job. I knew that I would get a job or I could wait tables or do something rather than work for somebody and not get paid worth my salt, I went ahead and I quit.
Happily Ever Always: When you find that you like who you are, you have the ability to present yourself in an authentic way.
The next day in making phone calls, I had two job opportunities. What was interesting to me here was the fact that I probably needed to do what I did. I wasn’t going to find the security of getting one job and leaving another job. Perhaps I believe what the universe was saying, “Stand up for yourself. Don’t be a doormat. Believe in yourself. Believe you have great talent and things might not work in that alphabetical order that you want, but if you take the risk, you will find the reward.”
Is that what motivated you to want to write Happily Ever Always?
What motivated me to want to write Happily Ever Always was going through life’s trials and tribulations and realizing that we all deserve to be happy. Therefore, I found myself in my 30s and 40s starting to write different things. By the time I got to 52, I figured it’s a do or die situation. It’s time to write and put it together.
A lot of people have a dream of writing a book and they never make it happen. What was it that made you say, “I’m going to do this now,” besides time is running out?
I feel I am a fortunate person. I’m not the smartest person, I’m not the wealthiest person, I’m not the best-looking person, but I love being me. If I was asked to be anybody in this world, who would I want to be? I would want to be me. To be honest with you, it’s because I can say that with great conviction that I would not want to be anybody but me. I hope in my next life, if we believe in past lives, that I can come back as me. I felt that happiness needs to go in a book and needs to be shared with other people so that they can feel the same way. In writing the book, I felt rather than give my philosophies, pontificate and narrate, I needed to invite the reader to answer questions. As I narrate the story of my road to happiness, I prompt the reader to answer specific questions at the end of each chapter. That when they’re done with the 150-page read, they might have found their personal truth, which will always allow them to live happily ever.
[bctt tweet=”You can sell yourself best when you like yourself.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We’re not going to wish our villains away. We’re going to listen to our gut and not our wallet. We are going to keep our commitments no matter what. Those are the real things that you say will help us be happier in our personal and our business life and that they are in fact connected. Can you speak to the connection between personal and business?
The connection to personal and business is believing in yourself. When you believe in yourself, everyone else will too. In the business world, your colleagues will believe in you and they’ll trust you. In your personal, the people who love you and you love and the people who haven’t come into your life will also find that halo of happiness that seems to surround you as a person.
The book is Happily Ever Always. Congratulations on having a mission and a purpose to help other people get happier and want to be happy with whom they are that they wouldn’t want to be anybody else. The outcomes of that are all the trappings of success, but it’s coming from a completely different place from the inside out instead of from the outside in. If people want to follow you or certainly if people want to hire you to find them a place to live in Chicago or hire you to help sell their place in Chicago, how can they reach you?
They can reach me at HappilyEverAlways.com.
Thanks for being a guest on our show, Michael. It’s been a real pleasure and a happy experience for me and I’m sure the audience.
Thank you, John.
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John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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