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The Top 3 Mistakes We've Learned From · The Spiro Podcast: Managing your Real Estate Photography & Videography Business

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Coming up on this episode of The Spiro podcast.
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the best answer is the correct answer.
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The second best answer is the wrong answer.
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The worst answer is no answer or no decision.
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Hi and welcome to the Spiro Podcast, managing your Real estate media business.
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Spiro is a software platform.
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It's designed to help you run your day to day real estate photo and video business,
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ultimately really, to help it scale and grow and manage
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a lot of the tasks that can chew up a lot of your time
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and just make things a lot more efficient for you.
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I'm Craig Magrum, welcome back this week, if you're returning viewer
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or listener and if you're brand new to the podcast,
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just really glad to have you here and we would love to hear from you.
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Just how you found the podcast.
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Tell us a little bit about your business.
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This is a community
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that we're building to help each other grow strong real estate media businesses.
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So you can drop us an email at hello@spiro
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that's S P I R O dot media.
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All right, without further ado, let me introduce co-host and owner
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and founder of Spiro Todd Kivimaki
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Welcome back, Todd. Craig, a fabulous day for us all here today.
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Excited.
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We have well, by the time you're listening to this,
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we have 12 weeks left in the year at the most.
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12 weeks is crazy.
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So I wanted to put some things on your calendar
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because those 12 weeks are going to go fast.
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Remember, you're burning a couple of those weeks for holidays.
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So here's some things to think about.
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One, we just had a huge launch with Spiro,
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and we launched Titus, which is pay at close if you need a reason
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to reach out to your clients, please let them know about Titus.
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It is in beta right now.
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The 20 that have launched in beta are doing fabulous.
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It's a cool program.
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Basically, your clients can defer payment until close.
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You get paid immediately.
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We are the first platform to bring this and fully
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integrate Titus to make it possible in a feature for your business.
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If you want to find out more,
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you can go to spiro.media and find out more information there.
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You can start advertising this to your clients.
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We are looking at a mid October or early October
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launch for everyone, so it is right around the corner.
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And the first pay close came in Craig the other day actually on the 23rd
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when it launched, we got pinged by the Titus team and they said, hey,
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we just got the first pay at close right on opening day,
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On opening day, $1,260.
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Holy moly.
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That's incredible.
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Pretty cool Yeah.
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We we don't know, like, if you're AOV right now is 250.
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I'm not saying you're going to have 1260, but I am confident
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that you're going to see your AOV increase.
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I'd be curious if that
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that one that came through was an increase, in fact, that.
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Yeah.
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Interesting to find out.
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I'll go find that out and let you guys know next week what that is.
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But I'm confident Nick has seen Nick is the co-founder at Titus.
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They have seen a large increase.
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He's like, hey, I think you're going to get 30% when people use this.
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So yeah, so, you know, we've done a podcast on Titus.
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Go back and listen to that, that the end of the day.
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One thing I want to leave you with is when this was brought to my attention.
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Nick contacted me long ago.
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I wrote it off right away.
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I would never use this personally.
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I don't finance anything. Craig.
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Okay. Other than my house, everything else.
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We own the house.
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We have a payment on.
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I have like a 2% interest rate. Okay.
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That's another problem.
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That's a whole nother podcast in itself about the real estate market and people
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that are locked into low interest rates, like I'm,
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you know, anyway, you're sitting on that for a while.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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I'm not leaving.
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Like I'm literally adding on another house on top of my house.
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If we need more room,
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I mean, come on. Yep.
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But but that was my truth.
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And it was not a true thought.
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Meaning that
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just because I thought I would not use financing.
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Oh, I see what you're saying.
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Yeah, I'm wrong.
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You would not believe the response
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we have heard from agents about this feature.
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Be the first in your market.
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Heck, even if you're not the first in your market
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and someone's already launched with it, this is launch day right now.
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Okay, so just start telling your agents about it.
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If they say no, or at least you had a good reason to reach out to them,
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I think you'll be very surprised with the amount of agents
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that use it and say, hey, thank you for giving me this option.
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And by the way, they spent a lot more money with you.
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So that is on that.
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Put that on your calendar to send that out in your newsletter.
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Today we've given you search our our knowledge based guide.
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We've given you marketing materials.
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You've got graphic social media post.
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We've given you fliers.
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We've given you verbiage.
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Just go to our support guide, type in Titus and take it all from there.
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We've done the work for you.
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You know, at this point about,
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about Titus and agents
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possibly spending more, probably spending more,
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with this option to pay it close actually relates
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to a point that I think we're going to talk about in our topic today.
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Just you're just got me thinking.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, it sure is.
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So that so, that is coming in our topic.
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But the other things for your calendar, November is right around the corner.
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You're five weeks away at the most
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to the conference, the REPP conference in Las Vegas.
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So please go to the link below in the description
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and get yourself a ticket.
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I am going to be speaking.
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My team is going to be there.
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There is a fabulous panel speakers and heck, there are allowing me.
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I get the privilege to host the thing.
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I'm the MC for the event.
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So you're going to love this event.
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It's an incredible event and Eli Jones and his team with the repp team
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and those ticket sales are cutting off quick.
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So get a ticket, book a flight if you're going.
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If November doesn't work for you, please
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come and see us at our first in-person event for Spiro the Spiro Sync.
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That is January 22nd and 23rd.
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Ticket sales have not happened yet, but probably will this week or next.
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So keep an eye at Spiro.media for more information.
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We want you to come. It's a two day event.
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You're going to come grow, learn.
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We're looking for a couple more speakers.
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We're going to have some breakout sessions.
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So if you're like, hey, I kind of like to host a session
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and they're not, you know, we're going to have about 125 people at this event.
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We've limited it for this first event.
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So ticket sales are going to be limited.
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You know, if you want to host a group of 10
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or 20 people, we're going to have these fabulous
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breakout sessions where the community can teach the community.
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So that is coming up January 22nd, 23rd.
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So please put that on your calendar.
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We would love to see you in person in Dayton, Ohio.
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It's going to be good.
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Looking forward to it.
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I hope you make it downtown.
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Oh you Craig is going to be there yes I hope well, okay.
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You just said I was going to I was saying I was hoping to be there.
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You just said I was going to be there. So.
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Guys, he's my boss.
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I'm looking forward to meeting you.
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Oh, we got a great idea to.
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Craig sent it to him this morning, and we don't have to go into it,
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but he's like, let's record a podcast from it.
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Well, credit to Jess.
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Our operations director on our real estate media side of the business.
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She had that idea. I'm like, duh.
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Why didn't I think of that?
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Yeah, that's a fantastic idea. So, yeah.
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Hoping to feature some of you that come to the Spiro Sync
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on the Spiro podcast episode.
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Yeah. Get your face on the podcast.
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That'll be fun.
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Kind of be fun.
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All ready? Anything else for us?
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No. Craig, I'm excited about this topic.
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I, this is a painful one because we're talking about mistakes,
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but, there's always light at the end of the tunnel, right?
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Right.
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So, yeah, the topic this week, top three mistakes
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that we have learned from in the real estate media business.
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For your benefit.
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So point, laugh, have a, you know, hearty chuckle,
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but hopefully take something away at our expense as well.
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Yeah.
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I was just thinking through things.
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The best teacher, I think probably is mistakes and failure.
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In fact, I was I was doomscrolling immediately yesterday after after work.
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After work.
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And this Star Wars clip came up with Yoda and
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was it Luke or Anakin?
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I forget what, but anyway, Yoda says to one of the Jedi
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that failure in this might have been fanfiction.
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I don't know if failure is actually the best teacher, so if it comes from a Yoda,
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hey, it's gotta be.
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It's got a nice Jedi wisdom, you know, master Jedi wisdom.
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So would you impart to us
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this week your master Jedi Wisdom?
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Yeah. One mistakes that.
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Yeah. I'll be happy to give you my mistakes.
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If you consider them wisdom, then thank you for for that.
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Because, like I said, up. How do you like that?
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Yeah, that was great.
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I'm flattered by that. Great.
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So as we Craig and I talked about this,
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and as we look back over the years, you know, there was probably a list of
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we narrowed down a list of 375 different mistakes.
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And we we got it to three and we tried to put them in some categories.
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But as I look back, I the
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these really
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when we figured these out allowed us to grow the most.
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So I wanted to give you the most bang for the buck and
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so that you could understand kind of what we went through.
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All right.
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So number one, what was the what.
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This is in no particular order.
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We're not doing a countdown.
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But mistake number one, Todd
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So, number one was our inability
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to evolve more quickly.
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So I so I think, you know, I've mentioned before,
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so I have a computer science degree in background.
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And one thing that they teach in computer science is
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the past is a good prediction of the future.
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And that is true if you have written code well, logic based code.
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We won't get into artificial intelligence right now.
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But if you've written logic based code.
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What happened in the past is going to happen.
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So if you have code and it's buggy, you're not going to wake up three days
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from now.
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Compile it, hit run, and at the end it magically the bug.
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Yeah, the bugs are still going to be. They're not going to be gone.
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So I was taught this idea that the past is a good prediction of the future,
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but that is not correct.
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And growing a business and the cases that I found,
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so as you grow a business, you go through phases and
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they are you know, if when you first start out, it's just you.
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And so one example is everything revolves around you
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and you do things that are extremely high level.
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You take care and doing those things at the high level,
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and then you sell those as features to your clients.
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So Craig, quick example here is I think when anybody starts off,
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they should go to the agents and say, hey, I understand what you need.
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I will take care of you.
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Here is my cell phone number. Here is my email.
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You call me, I'll change this.
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You tell me what you want in the house.
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I'm going to shoot it that way.
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And that's what you have right now.
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Because you got no one else to sell.
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And when you do that, you know there's going to be clients
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that attacks onto that because they want their person.
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You know, I can think back over the years of some very large clients
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that I personally
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got to start using Wow video tours
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because I personally met them.
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I personally called them.
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I personally was there for them.
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I proved to them that they could trust me
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and they saw me as their guy.
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You know, I, I was Todd Wow.
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in their phone and if they needed a schedule, they called Todd Wow.
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If they needed a photo fixed, which no one ever had to fix
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any one of my photos, they were all okay.
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They were good.
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So just for example.
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No, I'm kidding.
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But Craig, you understand what I'm saying?
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Where
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that if I was still in that mindset,
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I would be shooting a thousand tours a year.
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I would be my revenue would be $250,000,
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and I would be making $40,000
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at the end of the day.
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So you have to get out
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of these mindsets of things that are going to hold you back.
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I could not continue that process of selling everybody.
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On why to use Todd
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because what happened was Todd about
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went crazy.
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Craig,
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I somewhat wish, in a weird way, that my wife would have actually,
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like, marked jotted down somewhere in a notebook.
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Like, every time Todd went crazy,
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you know, like this mental breakdown of, like, I don't know what we're going to do
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just because I was probably so stressed out and everything revolved around me,
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and it would have been fun.
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At this point, I don't know if it would have really
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been fun, but it would have been worth doing.
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The activity of seeing
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where that lined up with what was happening in life right then.
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You know, for a business level on a personal level, I would say
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just about all of them were connected to a business level of an event,
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of just being overwhelmed because there was too much to do, working
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too much, not spending time on myself, losing a, you know, a large client,
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things like that.
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But, in those times, I could
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not keep selling this idea of Todd only because I wouldn't have grown anymore.
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So that is a case where the past is not a good prediction of
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the future, because Todd helped get the business from 0 to 250K,
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but Todd couldn't take it from 250K to 4 million
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Yeah,
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you need a support team around you in changing that.
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That mindset
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that can be challenging.
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Yeah, I I'll admit, Todd like that.
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That's been part of my challenge
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or my my issue and why I've kind of stepped back is
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I, I learned about myself that I would rather do the work,
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like the hands on work and work shoulder to shoulder with people than the out
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front leader that lets go of things and delegates things.
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I'm just I'm not I'm not as good at delegating.
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But I've, I've found
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myself now in a role that I love and I'm thriving in,
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and and so you as owners
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that are watching this, you've, you've got to be willing to let go
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and trust other people to help you reach the goals that you've got.
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So, Yeah, that's that's good stuff, Todd.
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Yeah, I've got a couple more examples just to throw out there.
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And if you guys have examples, please post them in the chat below.
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We would love
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to, talk about them and share them as a community.
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So the next thing that I think about, Craig, is
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this has to do with, some processes and products.
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We have historically, we had started by
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only doing video of homes.
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And those videos.
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I feel like over the years we were too slow to evolve them.
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And when we would launch a video because we were,
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you know, we launched video in 2006.
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So naturally you show a video
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to somebody like video doesn't exist on it.
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There's not even there's barely an internet.
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And again, we've talked about how dumb of an idea it was.
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And I was like, let's start
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a streaming video business in 2006 when someone can't even use it.
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But naturally, we are always ahead of the curve
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a little bit, just because we were the first to do it in our areas and
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we would
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take those ideas and those those that great feedback,
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and I think we would just stick with it because we've always done it that way,
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you know. Oh, that's a dangerous phrase.
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Yeah, that's a dangerous phrase.
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Very dangerous phase.
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And some of that was warranted because it was working
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and our business at Wow is
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we want to appeal to the masses.
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So we had to naturally be okay with some of
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our clients going elsewhere to get a niche product
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and get a custom product every time.
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We just can't do that.
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We're honest with our clients.
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If you want custom every single time, we can't do that.
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If you want consistent, know what to count on. Can get in in a couple days.
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Get your media back quickly and know what to expect.
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We can help you with that.
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I will
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say though, and the times where we updated a video.
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Craig, we did this video like we would take a screengrab of Google Maps,
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I remember that, I remember that it was we would zoom into it.
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Y'all would be like this push down to Google Maps
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and now one thing to let y'all know
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is in our areas, in the cornfields,
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the Google Maps were terrible
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because the satellite views weren't really updated.
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So you're zooming in and, crud pixels.
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It is like, what are we even zooming into?
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And then we had the same title that would roll across the screen,
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and we were just too slow to change it.
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I'm not telling you all to go improve your video product.
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Like, that's not your biggest.
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If that's not your biggest gap, then you should do something else.
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Okay. This is like the idea of working on a website.
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These are some key things that we did over the years at milestones.
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And just to keep them fresh, like we were way outdated.
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Like, you know, we were wearing 80s clothes in the 90s, like a decade of time.
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And it was time to update the video after ten years.
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That's the time frame we went, like we had used the gag.
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Everybody knew the gag.
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Everybody knew what videos were.
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Are we just
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kind of played to our advantage because like, oh yeah, I know your stuff.
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But that was one thing that we held on just just too long.
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What what's wrong with the 80s?
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Close though. Come on.
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They're coming back right
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they are. There's nothing wrong with them.
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All right, all right.
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You got your parachute pants?
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Yes, I do.
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Yeah, well, where I'm at, the con or the Spiro Sync, Craig
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You heard it, people.
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He's got Todd in parachute pants and a pink suit, right?
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No, I think suits at REPP.
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That's right.
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I don't know, I can't guarantee any of this.
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No. Okay.
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All right, moving on, moving on, moving on.
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Okay.
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The last one, Craig, about being too slow to evolve was our transition at Wow.
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From manual scheduling to automatic scheduling.
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Now, this is a problem none of you have to worry about
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because it's auto scheduling is in Spiro.
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It's fine tune, and you have lots of great options,
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but we for many years scheduled
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10 to 12,000 jobs a year.
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Or by looking at a map, giving it dates and time,
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send it out to the agents saying, hey, does this work for you?
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It confirming it.
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If it doesn't work, give them a new appointment
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I took forever.
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I was saying we would imagine that amount of time that took oh,
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I mean, there was five employees, Craig that did that.
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That's amazing. And not only the time,
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but think of how inconvenient that is.
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You imagine if you ordered something from Amazon
20:45
and Jeff emailed you and said,
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hey, you know, we really delivery's a little delayed.
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I've got this item in stock.
20:55
Would you rather take this book than that book?
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You're going to be like, Jeff, just send me the book.
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I want it to be here tomorrow.
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That's why everybody uses Amazon.
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So but we just kept doing that
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and we would hit restrictions and we'd add more people.
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And the problem also with that, Craig, is we would blame
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the people for a broken process.
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And that's a whole nother mistake we made.
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But you never blame the people.
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You blame you blame your processes.
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Okay? I learned that the hard way.
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We'll get to that in a minute.
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But the thing was, is we just put our head down,
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and we were so worried or concerned about the amount of work
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it would take to create the automatic scheduling system
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that accounted for everything we need, that we just didn't do the work.
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We just kept doing what we were doing.
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And it's kind of like this analogy.
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There's a book called You Squared, and it starts off with this
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fly hitting a window,
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and it hits the window and it falls down to the window sill.
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It gets up again, it flies even harder and hits
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the window in flight and lands on the window sill.
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And it's continuing to just hit the window harder and harder,
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but the flies never going to break the window.
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All the fly had to do was fly
22:16
two feet to the left to go through the open door.
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That's what we did.
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It took work to go around and find the door, but
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we were so comfortable hitting the window and hoping to break through the thing.
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But it was never going to happen
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and it had an incredible restriction on our business.
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And just because we didn't want to climb the mountain to be,
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you know, to get over this hurdle, we lived in that for a lot of years,
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and we live with some, some myths,
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some miss thoughts or some mistruths in our head as well, thinking
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it couldn't be done, where we just need
22:53
to put the right people in the room to get it done right.
22:56
So, so basically, the efficiency and the benefit
23:00
of making that change was worth the time and the effort.
23:03
Maybe the money that you were initially afraid to
23:06
to invest in addressing that issue.
23:09
Oh, wonderful.
23:10
Because even I didn't know it at the time, but I was
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creating it for all of you as well, or we were creating it for all of you.
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So it's amazing how you get into some things.
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And that's what the author talks about new squared, like those jumps, not just,
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not just singular jumps, but exponential jumps.
23:28
Like we were doing something that was really hard.
23:31
We found out it was a big problem for more people too, and our work was able
23:35
to carry through to help a lot more people.
23:39
Investing resources into overcoming
23:41
challenges is worth the effort.
23:45
100%.
23:46
And one thing about that, Craig, is you have to be okay
23:50
failing sometimes
23:53
and and investing the money.
23:55
But knowing that it's not going to work out
23:59
now, you don't go into a project knowing it's not going to work out,
24:01
but you have to be okay when it doesn't work out.
24:04
So okay, we we tried something. We learned from it.
24:07
I typically tell myself I'm like, it's the price of education.
24:10
Yeah, that's that's a good
24:13
You know, I paid a lot of money for that college degree.
24:16
And, I'm still happy to pay money for education.
24:20
And we do it through these mistakes.
24:22
Don't look at it as paying or paying a bill.
24:25
Look at it as investing.
24:26
And that's a term investing always has.
24:29
Well, not always.
24:32
Most of the time investing
24:34
has a net profit you're going to gain from investing.
24:38
Right. That's why we invest in our retirements.
24:40
We know that it's going to gain interest over time.
24:43
It's going to compound.
24:44
So look at your investments in your business is compound interest
24:49
and benefit for the future.
24:51
Yeah that's a great analogy Craig.
24:55
All right.
24:56
So too slow to evolve.
24:57
Mistake number one.
25:00
Mistake number two.
25:01
Shall we move on.
25:02
Yeah. Let's move on.
25:04
so, Craig, mistake number two
25:06
was not empowering the team around me.
25:12
And this really defeats the reason why you put a team around you.
25:17
So it seems like a really dumb thing that I would make a mistake on it.
25:22
Just fitting that it's like, well, how did you.
25:23
Why did you do that?
25:24
Todd and this goes back into the past is a good prediction of the future,
25:29
because Todd did really good at first.
25:33
And I mean, if you would look at Todd's
25:35
grade cards that Todd gave himself, we did Craig's grade card last week.
25:39
If you look at the grade cards I gave myself,
25:41
like I was getting all A pluses. Okay.
25:45
Yeah.
25:47
Probably I was being
25:48
lenient with some of those grades, but my point is that
25:52
that taught me that everything had to go through me too.
25:58
And you know what?
25:58
I became Craig,
26:01
I'm going to use a word.
26:04
I think you've used it before, a bottleneck.
26:06
Yes, exactly.
26:08
It's exactly the word I was thinking of a bottleneck.
26:11
And you know what the problem is?
26:13
When you
26:15
are the bottleneck of your business.
26:20
No one tells you.
26:25
So nothing gets done.
26:29
And you don't realize it
26:33
because you're so incredibly busy
26:37
spinning plates
26:39
that you think you're doing a ton,
26:43
but you're nowhere near the capacity
26:47
that you could achieve as a business and as a team.
26:51
If you empowered your team and people around you.
26:57
So, what does that look like exactly?
27:00
Say, okay, so you have, let's start with a VA.
27:04
We've talked about VA is being invaluable resources.
27:07
And one of your first hires.
27:10
So you've hired a VA but you have an empowered them.
27:13
What what would it look like to empower a VA to help your business grow?
27:17
Can you kind of flush that out for us?
27:19
Yeah, I'd love to.
27:21
So once and once this VA once a team member once anyone on
27:26
your team is trained and you feel they're proficient at their job.
27:30
Okay.
27:31
So this isn't in the or this is in there.
27:32
This is maybe month three.
27:35
There needs to be some conversations
27:38
with them to see how things are going.
27:42
And then just ask them like, hey,
27:45
do you have any ideas of how
27:48
I could make your job easier?
27:53
Or when a problem occurs or a gap occurs
27:57
and say your VA emails, you, hey Todd, what do you want to do?
28:02
This client called in. This is what happens.
28:04
What do you want to do?
28:06
For the longest time I would say, oh, just go ahead and,
28:10
comp the order or add on drone and,
28:15
make sure that the photographer does X, Y, and Z extra for the client.
28:20
Okay. VA okay. No problem. Yeah.
28:22
Go click the buttons and Spiro zero it out.
28:25
Call the client, email the client.
28:26
Hey, that's what we're doing for you. Done.
28:30
Okay. Next client calls in
28:32
to happens again.
28:34
Well, as you grow to shooting 100 shoots in a day,
28:38
there's numerous clients that call in every day.
28:41
This is natural. It's the law of not.
28:43
It's the law of numbers.
28:44
As they expand, you're going to have a same percentage of problems.
28:51
And if everything runs through you, you're just teaching your team
28:54
that they need to come to you.
28:58
And probably the more dangerous thing that you're doing
29:02
is you're not motivating or empowering them
29:07
to make a better decision, because you're probably slow to respond.
29:12
You probably are overworked and feeling tired, stressed, anxious.
29:18
So you might be a little snippy.
29:20
You might jump to conclusions
29:23
where your teammate
29:26
is incredible at customer service.
29:28
They know how to take care of people.
29:30
They would love it.
29:34
If you gave them the opportunity, but they're not going to ask for it.
29:40
And this is especially
29:41
true for your Vas in the Philippines.
29:45
Okay, so they are never going to ask you for anything
29:48
because the Filipino culture does not want to ask.
29:52
They feel bad about asking really? Okay.
29:55
They probably feel bad asking you if they can use the restroom.
29:59
And I'm not overexaggerating.
30:01
It's a tremendous culture, a very kind, polite and gracious culture.
30:06
They're happy that they have this opportunity to work for you.
30:09
They don't want to let you down, but they are very cognizant
30:13
of speaking their mind.
30:15
I guess I can see that even to a degree in our own culture,
30:19
because, yeah, if if I'm working for,
30:22
you know, the manager, I don't want to assume and step on toes
30:26
because, you know, for example, Todd Wow video tours your baby.
30:30
Right.
30:30
And having started my own business, I understand this.
30:34
You do things a certain way.
30:36
You've built the business a certain way.
30:38
Who am I to tell the owner that they should do?
30:42
They should do things a certain way, or change something or make something better.
30:46
You know, they're the one that built the business.
30:48
So yeah, there's going to be a natural built in.
30:50
I don't want to use the word fear, but, fear
30:55
of taking that kind of initiative.
30:57
Yeah.
30:58
And there's a phrase I use that a coach taught me.
31:01
He said when the Lions out and playful the lion
31:05
can always bite your head off.
31:09
You know it's the idea even though you as the owner,
31:11
you might be in a good mood that day and you might be jovial.
31:16
You can fire them right now
31:19
so that always exist.
31:22
I think when you empower,
31:25
you know, your team, when you tell them I trust you to make the decision,
31:28
that's for the best of the company that will that will improve their morale
31:34
and make them more invested in the company mentally, emotionally,
31:38
you know, work ethic.
31:41
And they're going to want the win for themself.
31:44
But it it has to come from the top that okay.
31:48
My leadership trust me.
31:50
Wow. That I don't get I haven't gotten that at previous jobs.
31:55
So to to feel that trusted I mean that's going to do something
31:58
for their their ego, their their work ethic, their enthusiasm for the work.
32:04
Yeah.
32:05
A challenge for all of you out there is
32:09
how can you empower
32:12
or how can you put confidence into one of your employees with the decision
32:17
so that they go home and at the dinner table, dinner table,
32:21
they say to their spouse, hey, you won't believe
32:24
what Todd asked me for help with today. Hey.
32:29
And that was a misconception I had over a lot of years
32:31
because I thought when Todd asked for help at that, Todd was weak and Todd took
32:36
pride in Todd, got a little bit of an ego or a lot of bit of an ego.
32:40
Ask my wife about knowing the answers.
32:43
But you know what that did
32:46
that just dug me in a really deep,
32:48
dark hole.
32:51
And they're no fun to be in
32:53
because you are in your own hole.
32:56
And I was only in that hole because of me.
32:59
And that was even tougher
33:01
than being in the hole, was realizing that I did it to myself.
33:07
so a very simple thing.
33:11
Every time
33:13
an employee comes to you and ask you a question,
33:18
ask them
33:20
how they think they should handle that situation.
33:24
What do you think you should do?
33:26
What do you think's best to serve the clients?
33:28
What do you think is the best way that we meet our core values?
33:32
However you want to phrase it, tie it back into your company
33:35
and ask your client, and then just zip, zip
33:38
your lips, let them speak.
33:42
Okay.
33:43
Can I play devil's advocate for just a second, please?
33:48
So what if you have an employee
33:51
that you know you need to empower your team around you,
33:54
but you have an employee that you're just you're still not convinced
33:59
that they're going to necessarily make the right decision.
34:02
You don't have full trust in them yet.
34:05
Where do you go with that?
34:06
How do you develop that relationship?
34:08
Should they still be on the team?
34:10
You know, I'm just thinking through all the questions.
34:11
I don't know if I want to.
34:13
I don't know if I want to empower them.
34:15
I don't know that I trust them.
34:18
So some things that
34:19
that I do, Craig, is one is if that employee needs training
34:23
on that decision, like if they're just literally flipping a coin
34:27
and they don't have any work experiences to base it on,
34:31
then you're going to need to guide them through that.
34:34
And you could ask them some questions.
34:36
Well, how do you think the client would feel about that?
34:38
Okay.
34:39
If this happened to the homeowner?
34:42
It's their house.
34:43
What do you think?
34:44
Is that going to look good for the agent?
34:46
We need to make sure that we look good in the agent's eyes.
34:50
So ask them some questions, and sometimes you are
34:52
just going to have to tell them.
34:55
Now, I saw this with my leadership team at Wow,
34:59
and Steve and Jess are incredible and they have so much
35:04
insight and knowledge into the business and how to improve it.
35:07
The problem was, is I made the decisions for so long
35:13
and then empower them that every time Todd was in the room,
35:16
they always kind of went back to what do you think?
35:19
And they or they would use me as a crutch because they were afraid to make
35:23
that decision.
35:25
And this is despite them really knowing the correct decision.
35:28
But it was just like, oh, this is uncomfortable and this is okay.
35:32
This is natural.
35:33
The thing that I assured them, I did a few things and I do them consistently.
35:38
One, I tell them that I trust them like, you guys are incredible.
35:42
I trust you.
35:43
You guys have done a great work.
35:44
Like this last project.
35:47
It went off incredible.
35:48
Like you guys know what to do.
35:53
And then I also tell them that it's
35:56
okay for us to make mistakes.
36:00
Like, I make mistakes every day.
36:02
And I happen to have one big mistake that I made the day that I lost a quarter
36:06
million dollars.
36:07
That works good for me to bring up right now.
36:11
I would suggest if you don't
36:12
have a mistake that bad, don't make a mistake that dumb.
36:16
Just so you have that example to use with your leaders,
36:21
right, guys?
36:22
Just it was a really painful day and it was a painful year.
36:29
So just don't go make the mistakes
36:31
you have, for example, because that was a really bad thing.
36:34
I'm going to talk about it a repp conference here in November
36:36
for those of you listening in,
36:38
not watching, I was taking a drink right as Todd said that again
36:42
almost spewing all over my equipment in front of me here okay.
36:45
Go ahead. Sorry, I'm going to get Craig at one point.
36:48
And I'm gonna have to buy new equipment for him, but it's going to be worth it.
36:55
So I would tell them this and I would sometimes have to elaborate on it.
36:59
Again, these are my words.
37:00
But I would say, hey, you guys know what I what what
37:03
you want to know what I do when you come and ask me something that I don't know,
37:07
like a big, hairy,
37:09
hard question like, what do you do?
37:12
I'm like, I just flip a coin,
37:15
like,
37:17
and I say something funny.
37:18
And this is the way you guys know me by now.
37:20
I have this little sense of humor that I give at times,
37:23
and I can be sarcastic with it, or I try to make a point with it,
37:26
but I try to bring humor to the day. Understand?
37:28
Like, I don't know the answer to this.
37:31
I just guess.
37:34
But the best answer is the correct answer.
37:38
The second best answer is the wrong answer.
37:42
The worst answer is no answer or no decision.
37:46
So those are some verbal things that I've used over the years.
37:49
And I use them again and again and again and again.
37:53
I say it all the time.
37:55
This is becoming your job as the owner of the company,
37:58
that you need to be symbolic in your employee's eyes.
38:02
Everything you do should be symbolic.
38:05
If you tell them this knowledge, give them this thing,
38:09
crack this joke, you hope that they remember it.
38:12
You hope that they use it with other employees.
38:15
You hope they laugh about it or are proud about it at the dinner table
38:19
with their spouse.
38:22
I think that
38:22
kind of approach makes you human as an owner as well,
38:25
and can really build trust in the relationship with your staff.
38:30
Craig, that is so wise.
38:31
Yes, and we connect with other humans.
38:34
We don't connect with people
38:35
that have egos, that sit in offices that are unapproachable.
38:39
Yeah
38:41
Yeah.
38:41
You want a good culture,
38:42
you want a good, good environment in your in your business.
38:46
Be human, be transparent.
38:48
Yeah, yeah.
38:50
Empower your staff and you will not believe how much you can grow.
38:55
It is in our 20.
38:58
Let's see what 2004 is when we start.
39:02
Why don't I know this number 21st year
39:05
and our 21st year,
39:07
we're going to be up about three quarters
39:10
of a million dollar in revenue from 2023, which is our best year ever.
39:17
So just to give you guys
39:18
some perspective, and it's when I stepped away
39:21
and I have no problem saying that I stepped away.
39:24
I empowered the team
39:26
and they grew way faster than I could ever figure out how to grow.
39:30
And I'm so proud of them for that.
39:32
I am more proud of them than Todd's ego needs to know anything
39:36
or be stroked in any way because of what the team
39:39
has done.
39:41
Pretty cool
39:44
All right, so mistake number two,
39:46
not empowering your team quickly enough.
39:51
All right, so that's two,
39:53
Craig I think let me let me intro number three
39:56
because I think we'll go to some wisdom from you.
39:59
Oh boy.
40:00
number three has to do with
40:04
managing money.
40:06
And this idea of
40:09
spending money to make money.
40:13
And I know that's something that you resonated with.
40:17
And we had discussions about this when you first started Cee imaging
40:20
your real estate media business, this idea of like, hey,
40:24
I've got to take this leap of faith, but it cost money.
40:27
Yeah.
40:29
Yeah.
40:30
So should I share the story?
40:32
Yeah, I'd love it.
40:34
So when I first started talking,
40:39
I was the first beta tester
40:40
for Spiro and and,
40:43
there was a cost involved in that.
40:45
And you have to understand my background, my my career background.
40:50
It was pretty much all other than
40:53
if you want to other than 5 or 6 years of my career.
40:56
Up until that point, it was all nonprofit ministry work.
40:59
And you don't go into nonprofit ministry work to make a lot of money.
41:04
That wasn't wasn't my motivation.
41:06
Believe it or not, believe it or not, right?
41:08
Right.
41:09
The stories about these rich nonprofit CEOs
41:12
and execs, they're the exception, not the rule.
41:15
Okay.
41:17
So financially, things have always been
41:20
a little challenging for me just because of limited income, right?
41:24
But I enjoyed the work I did.
41:27
But I was afraid to spend money frivolous frivolously.
41:31
But I was afraid to spend money, period.
41:33
Because things were so tight.
41:35
So my mentality really was kind of a scarcity mentality.
41:40
Todd, we've we've talked about that mentality before where you're
41:44
you're just you're living out of fear, okay.
41:47
And there was there was a fear a financial fear
41:51
of me spending money,
41:53
to get my initial business started.
41:58
So we, we talked some more
42:00
and things worked out where I'm like, okay, yeah, it
42:03
it is worth this because I'm not going to be able
42:05
to scale my business unless I do invest in a system that's going to help me grow.
42:10
But that that was kind of the first light bulb.
42:13
But I think
42:15
I think we're really lit up and in a, it's actually a much smaller item than that
42:19
first item of investing in a system was purchasing my first drone.
42:25
Okay.
42:27
So the investment in the system was a monthly,
42:29
monthly type of investment based on what I had sold that month.
42:33
Right.
42:34
But a drone is an initial upfront cost.
42:36
That was it was quite a bit.
42:39
I if I remember correctly, Todd, it was like 1400 bucks or something.
42:43
Now, to me that that was a ton of money for that drone,
42:45
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,
42:52
but I'm afraid to let go of that money.
42:56
But I know I have to offer
42:57
drone services to realtors if anybody is going to take me seriously.
43:03
So I, I bit the bullet.
43:06
It went against everything I was conditioned and had experienced,
43:10
to to believe up until that point because I thought
43:15
if I invest the money now,
43:17
then I can hopefully I can at least have the chance
43:20
of getting some drone jobs and selling that additional service.
43:23
And I saw that drone had been, you know, getting
43:26
pretty strong and was going to continue to grow.
43:29
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.
43:37
I made all that money back.
43:39
Plus some,
43:41
and then everything after that investment was just profit.
43:45
It was it was growth.
43:46
Drone didn't take me long to shoot.
43:48
Didn't take long.
43:49
It you know, it wasn't a huge investment to edit.
43:52
And so I spent that $1,400
43:54
and all of a sudden my average order value skyrocketed.
43:58
You know, for properties that that needed drone and and agents
44:02
loved that I could do the photo, the video and the drone all in one appointment.
44:05
I didn't have to outsource the drone from another company.
44:08
They could get everything.
44:10
So it just it was getting over that fear, that initial fear of
44:14
laying out that kind of money
44:17
and then
44:17
seeing that growth was possible because of it.
44:21
Yeah, those are great examples.
44:24
I have one, sorry.
44:25
Yeah, yeah, I'm very simple.
44:27
I have one very similar.
44:28
And then I'm going to flip this a little bit for you all.
44:31
Mine came at the time that I needed to hire
44:33
my first higher level admin.
44:37
Like my my number two individual.
44:40
And I was afraid to do that.
44:44
You know, the business was growing, but I was still very careful
44:47
with every penny that we spent.
44:51
And hiring employee is different
44:54
than hiring a photographer because photographers
45:00
are going to do well for us as contractors.
45:04
When they worked, we paid them
45:06
and that brought in.
45:07
When they we were paying them, we were making money.
45:10
VA’s were a little bit different.
45:12
Well, when, when I started, there is no such thing as VA’s.
45:14
Or if people were using them, I didn't know about them.
45:18
But there wasn't this idea of hiring a VA for, you know,
45:22
$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,
45:30
you know, back at that time, 40 or $50,000 a year.
45:35
And it came time for me to need an individual.
45:37
I was six months behind in doing my invoicing.
45:40
This is before Spiro did it for you automatically
45:43
and I was just spending all the wrong time
45:48
on the wrong task, just low level task.
45:52
And I was just convinced that I was saving money.
45:57
And even if you've convinced yourself
46:03
that you're saving money
46:06
because you're doing it in the evening hours, like, oh,
46:10
I actually I'm doing my billing at night after the kids go to bed.
46:14
So and it's time that I'm kind of just on the couch.
46:18
Anyways, I got a laptop of my life and I've got the TV on
46:22
and I'm going to save the money.
46:24
One you're completely fooling yourself
46:27
because what you're doing is you are taking out all of the margin
46:34
in your brain, all of the space that you need.
46:38
You're overworking yourself.
46:39
So you're going to be less efficient.
46:42
You're killing all your time.
46:44
You should be with your family.
46:46
That yes, you know, even if the kids are in bed,
46:50
where are you?
46:50
Are you spending time with your wife?
46:52
What are you working out or whatever it should be?
46:55
You should be putting something back into you and your personal relationships.
47:01
Preach, preach Todd.
47:02
And and it's just like, no, like just working more than 40 hours.
47:08
I had a coach. She says.
47:08
This is working more than 40 hours is just cheating.
47:14
You should be able to find a way to work
47:17
40 hours or less and still grow and have a fantastic business.
47:24
And if you feel like that's countercultural.
47:26
Todd Yeah, I mean, like, I feel like the culture, the
47:30
the hustle culture, especially for for owners and entrepreneurs,
47:34
is minimum 50 hours a week.
47:36
You gotta you gotta grind out.
47:39
So you're saying 40 or less, 40 or less? Yes.
47:42
I, I can't tell you the number of times
47:44
that I was proud that I worked 60 or 70 or the 80 hour weeks,
47:48
like I was proud of it and oh my goodness, I wish I could go back to younger
47:51
Todd when he didn't have the bags under his eyes.
47:55
No gray hair.
47:56
If his jokes were better.
48:00
But I don't want to go back to the 80 hours a week.
48:02
Todd that was that was just silly. Craig.
48:07
Because I
48:08
wasn't smart enough to find a different way.
48:11
I just wasn't good enough.
48:13
I needed training, I needed,
48:17
I needed coach, I needed somebody to help me understand what I wasn't seen.
48:21
I thought, I'm just going to pound through this.
48:23
No, please don't pound through this
48:26
because your your kids depend on it.
48:29
Your wife depends on it.
48:31
Your family, your mom, dad, your
48:34
everything personal depends on it.
48:36
Remember, you started your business
48:40
to help you reach your personal goals.
48:44
And we find that we get this flipped when we get so deep.
48:47
And as they say, if I could only get the business to this level,
48:49
we justified to say this is what it would do for my family.
48:54
And your your wife's going.
48:55
I just want Todd back. Yeah.
48:58
I don't care about the cars.
49:00
I don't care about the house.
49:01
I don't care about the money. I just want you.
49:04
Like I just want some time with you.
49:07
So I let me flip that because I said I would, Craig.
49:09
And then we'll wrap up for a final close.
49:11
But I think it's important to say this flip side of this story, too,
49:14
because that was Todd at year.
49:15
You know, one, two, three, four.
49:17
Let's go to Todd at year 17, 18, 16, 17, 18.
49:21
Okay.
49:21
I, I had learned that as I finally learned okay.
49:26
It took me ten years.
49:28
If I hire people and find the right people and train them
49:32
and empower them, then
49:34
the business is going to grow.
49:37
Hired on Shannon Shannon is now our CRO Spiro.
49:41
She helped grow wow like crazy.
49:44
Did things that I could even have imagined that we would do.
49:48
Like, oh, this is fun, let's hire another person.
49:52
Okay, brought on our number one photographer, close friend of mine.
49:56
Like he should be the head training person.
50:01
Okay, I had
50:02
the I had the first helper person that I hired.
50:05
I was like, hey, he's going to be you in charge of all the money and growth.
50:10
Okay, great. Oh, well, this works.
50:12
Okay.
50:12
Now we need a marketing person because we really should have marketing.
50:16
You know, you start googling online or what is a hierarchy.
50:20
What are org charts of companies of this size.
50:24
They got all these little dots on the map.
50:26
Okay, let's get that person.
50:28
Well now that person needs an assistant
50:31
and we'd like to do this thing.
50:33
We'd like to start hosting these events and webinars.
50:35
Okay.
50:36
Well we probably need the person that's going to do that.
50:40
And we kept adding and adding and adding
50:44
the office was full.
50:45
It was fun.
50:46
I loved it actually.
50:47
Craig, like this office had 15 people in it every day.
50:52
It was bustling.
50:53
It was energetic.
50:55
I mean, we had the massage chair, the coffee machine.
50:58
We didn't have the slide, but I had considered putting in a slide
51:02
and I got so blinded
51:04
I was just I would just search online.
51:08
I'd look at offices and like, oh, Google's doing that.
51:11
Well, I think we should do it too.
51:14
No, Todd, Google is a freaking large business.
51:17
You should do the that.
51:21
So I hit the tipping point
51:24
to where we put too many people into fast, and I didn't really empower
51:30
the tier of managers and didn't set the expectations.
51:34
And don't point the ship straight enough or direct enough to where we wanted to go.
51:39
So everybody started working in these silos, and they did good.
51:45
They did what they thought was best,
51:48
but it was so over the map, Craig, that nothing
51:52
really came together to move the needle that much further.
51:58
So you can kind of break down
52:00
this third point into two sides of the same coin.
52:04
Spent the mistake being not spending enough money quickly enough
52:08
or spending too much too quickly.
52:11
Yeah.
52:11
So finding that that happy medium of what you're investing in your company.
52:17
Yeah. Exactly.
52:18
If, if you, if there's no one else but you to do it
52:23
and this is going to help you grow,
52:25
you need to have help with that.
52:28
But if you don't have a solid system,
52:31
processes, procedures and a very clear goal,
52:35
then just hiring people is going to convoluted everything
52:38
and you'll grow a little bit, but you'll spend a whole lot of money
52:43
and you'll get these subcultures start to develop, at least for us,
52:48
where people try to get people and other on their side because they're
52:52
they think we should go this way, and this other person thinks we should go
52:55
this way.
52:56
So they try to get some other employees on their side,
52:58
and then all this is happening and you're like, we had this really cool culture.
53:02
Like we have a massage chair. Why are you people unhappy?
53:06
It's like, no, Todd,
53:08
the massage chair doesn't make people happy.
53:11
What makes people happy is they know
53:13
what's expected to them when they walk in the door.
53:17
And then when they walk out the door,
53:19
they feel good about crossing
53:21
those items off their list and feeling like they made progress that day,
53:25
and not that they had to play the popular game.
53:29
Try to get people on their side and manage underlying
53:33
conversations and tones throughout the office. Wow.
53:39
All related to money.
53:41
Invest into Wow.
53:43
I never would have thought of it that way.
53:46
And and one thing is Craig.
53:51
You are always the last person to find out,
53:56
right?
53:58
You might think you know everything that's going on.
54:01
And in the past, when you had one or 2 or 5 employees
54:05
and you had that close personal relationship with them,
54:10
they would come to you and you probably knew a lot of what was going on.
54:14
But when you grow 4 or 5, 15, 20 employees,
54:19
you are the last person to know and you know,
54:24
you find out
54:26
when the problem's too big to solve.
54:28
Sometimes, or the way you solve the problem is you
54:34
move on from a massive amount of people, or you change like you have to.
54:39
You have to go really deep at that point because the problem is so embedded
54:45
that you have to cut really deep to fix the problem,
54:48
and then you're right back where you started.
54:50
Yeah. Well.
54:53
All right.
54:55
Good stuff.
54:56
The top three mistakes that we've learned from that.
54:59
Hopefully you can learn from and not make the mistakes that that we have taught.
55:04
Thank you.
55:04
Thank you for the transparency and the vulnerability on sharing that.
55:09
Yeah. My pleasure. I hope it can be helpful.
55:11
And these are all things that,
55:14
we if you want to find out more about them,
55:17
if you want to speak on them, we are I mentioned at the top of the hour,
55:20
but if you want to speak at the Spiro Sync,
55:22
we have those breakout sessions like I mentioned.
55:24
Email us hello@spiro.media.
55:26
If you're like, hey, this resonates with me, I'd love to talk about this.
55:29
Just let me know.
55:30
We'll put you on the list and then we'll see.
55:31
What ideas you have and see if we can't get your schedule.
55:34
Yeah. Awesome.
55:36
If you have mistakes you want
55:37
to share, you know, in the comments on the YouTube channel, feel free.
55:40
We'd love to to learn from you as well.
55:45
And if you're listening, you can email us those things.
55:48
hello@spiro.media we we like to learn just as much as we like to teach.
55:53
So we we still have things to learn ourselves as we continue to grow.
55:57
So Todd, again, thank you.
55:58
Appreciate it.
56:00
All right.
56:01
Well that's going to wrap things up this week.
56:03
Hopefully this was a benefit to you.
56:06
If you found value in this, we'd love a, like, on the YouTube channel.
56:10
Feel free to share it in the, you know, various social media groups for,
56:14
real estate media.
56:15
And if you have a colleague in, in the real estate
56:18
media industry that maybe isn't familiar with the podcast,
56:21
we always appreciate the share just to be able to,
56:25
share this knowledge and community with others that we haven't
56:28
been able to touch base with and hopefully strengthen their business as well.
56:31
So, guys, thank you.
56:32
We, we appreciate you so much.
56:34
The time that you take out of your day to listen, to watch
56:37
and just want to remind you, make sure you take time out of your day to
56:40
just be really thankful for the blessings in your life and be sure to breathe.
56:45
Have a great week!