Category Archives: Career

Going for it

Career, Life

In business and in life, you sometimes just have to go for it. Not always, but sometimes. For example, if you are driving down the interstate, you shouldn’t go for it and drive as fast as you can. If you do, the po-po will show you your lodging for the night. If your child comes to you for advice, you go for it and give them all you have.

For many years my family would go on this annual camping trip the 4th of July week to Vogel State Park located in the blue ridge mountains. My wife’s family started going when she was just a child and our daughters grew up expecting to camp at Vogel every 4th of July. The last several years we haven’t gone but some of the dearest friends we have ever known, we met them at Vogel.

One thing that was always a constant at Vogel, was nightly softball games. The name of this blog is “going for it” and was named after those softball games. The game always reminded me of life in that there are times to play it safe and then there are times you (metaphorically speaking) just go for it.

We had this friend who would play sometimes named Andy. If you could copy anyone in softball, it would be Andy. He looked like a normal guy who could probably play well and get by, but when it was his turn to bat, he was a whole different person. It was like be became someone else.

The ball field had a creek that ran across the outfield that was about 225 feet from home plate. If the ball made it to the creek in the air, it was a home run whereas if it bounced in, it was a double. The first time I saw Andy bat will be forever in my memory because it was a lesson in life as well as softball. I remember he swung at the ball so hard, his left shoe came off.. I looked up at the ball and it was not only over the creek, but it landed another 150 feet beyond the creek in the camp ground. It was the farthest I had ever seen anyone hit the ball on that field. To top that off, the ball was one we had been using for several games and was already mushy. If it had been a new ball, we probably wouldn’t have been able to find it.

At the time Andy hit that ball, I vividly remember thinking about life and what it means to try as hard as you can to do something. I can name several times in my life where I literally tried as hard as I could to do something. When you do that, those feelings never leave you and become part of who you are and may even play a role in who you become. It is very rare to see people who are good at many things. It is much more common for people to be good at only a few things. It doesn’t matter if you are a full-time mom, dad, business person, speaker, author, sales person, teacher etc. What does matter is that you choose to try as hard as you can at something. It doesn’t have to be a life changing, rather it can be as simple as being a good listener or a friend who can be trusted.

The great thing is it is your choice. Using a golf term to make the point, sometimes you must choose between laying up and playing it safe or going for it. I say, with family, you should go for it and try as hard as you can to be the very best example you can be. Regarding our work life, try as hard as you can to be found faithful, honest, hard-working and trustworthy. I believe the rest will take care of itself. KT

When things aren’t going well

Career, Family, Life

What do you do when things don’t seem to be going well?  There are times and cycles in life where things go well and then there are times when it seems like everything is a struggle. So, the question is what do you do?

The simple answer is to keep going. There are more sports examples than we have pages to write on but most of them have one thing in common. The athlete just keeps going forward and doesn’t quit. Two weeks ago, Tiger Woods won the Masters after 10 years of not winning a major tournament. He just kept doing what he was doing.

Success books will tell you to wash you face, pull up your pants, lace up your boots and keep going forward. They also tell you that many many times you don’t need to make significant changes, rather, just keep doing what you have been doing. I believe that over the course of a career the most significant factor to success is consistency. Simply keep going.

I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in DC and the one thing I can tell you is that along the 26.2-mile course you will experience many moments of strength and many moments of weakness where you fell like quitting. The key is push through the exhausted moments when you feel like quitting and keep going forward till your chest crosses the finish line.

Lastly, one important thing we should all do is to take a moment and look at our life (family, health, friends, God) and take an inventory of the good. My guess is that anyone reading this blog is still alive (ha) and have unfathomable blessings if they will just acknowledge it. KT

Who has been calling lately?

Career

In our line of work and probably also in many sales organizations, business usually goes to the person who is top of mind and doing the best job of staying in touch.

I have a close client (and friend) that recently hired someone else to market his hotels. While I could never get a good answer from him as to why, the impression I got was that he hired the broker because he felt they were more active than we were. I learned a big lesson that day about staying in touch. The client was getting called by this other hotel broker to discuss various deals and while I knew him well, I didn’t call him nearly as often as the other broker.

The lesson is that people like to be communicated with and usually give business to the person they have the most contact with. Not always, but many times that is the case. In this day of technology, is it easy to get lulled into thinking that because you sent an email, it is the same as a phone call. It’s not. I suppose the same would go for an employee/ employer relationship as well. As an employee, it is always good to speak to those in authority on a frequent basis to let them know your thinking about his/her business and trying to be as responsive to the customer as you can.

The lesson learned is, regardless of how well you know a client, it is always good to pick up the phone and check in with them. They appreciate that you were thinking of them and it also keeps you top in their mind when it’s time to hire someone. KT

You don’t always have to be first, to win

Career

With many situations in life you want to be first, but there are also situations when coming in second isn’t so bad. In the sales world, particularly hotel real estate, it sounds almost sacrilegious, but there are times when coming in second place, is better. What do I mean? We have sold more hotels than I can count being the second brokerage firm to bring a property to market. In real estate like many professions, it is the first one in that gets all the seller’s lofty expectations and is on the receiving end of the seller’s frustration because the market is telling him/her their pricing expectations are out of line.

By the time the seller has vented his/her frustration and fired the first broker, it is sometimes (not every time) easier on the second broker to reach the seller’s expectations and many times that broker becomes the one that wins the day.

I have a good friend of mine who is an auctioneer and one of the funniest guys I have ever known. He has this saying that cracks me up every time I hear it. He says, “you want to be your wife’s first love, her second husband and her third real estate agent.” Again, it makes me laugh! What he is saying (in real estate terms) is you don’t have to always be first, and in fact many times being second or third isn’t always bad. KT

Testing the market

Career

In real estate, determining what someone will pay for an asset is the first course of action in the sales process. It all starts with the estimated and projected value of the (in our case, hotel) property. We are asked many times weekly and monthly to provide what we call a BOV. This stands for brokers opinion of value. This is not a sheet of paper with numbers on it, rather it is a 35-page book on the methodology of how we determined the applicable value for a hotel.

There are certain properties and certain times where as a broker, you just scratch your head on value and just put it on the market to see what someone will pay. Case in point was a foreclosed hotel in Vermont that was closed and environmentally contaminated. The property had Legionnaires’ and friable asbestos. Legionnaire is an airborne bacterium caused by standing water, mildew and mold. This was the worst property I had ever worked on. The lender was one of our biggest clients, so I couldn’t just punt the ball to someone else. I had to button my chin strap and get on it. I flew up to see the hotel and the address was so remote, it wouldn’t even show up on GPS. Once I found the place, there was guard outside to help you “suit up, mask up” before going inside. I had just spent 800 dollars getting there but there was no way I was going in that building. My 800 dollars was just so I could say I had been to the hotel. Ha

I remember the guard asking me if I wanted to go inside and I said, no,,,, I think I am good. He looked at me like, “why did you even come up here?’ No kidding, our, BOV value we told the client was, zero. Yes, zero. Nada, goose egg, donut. Zero! Well, if you are a broker, when you sell/ give something for free,,,,,you don’t make any money! Ha. Our strategy was to earn a long-term relationship with the client by getting them out of this deal, so after we gave our zero value, we told the client we were going to get them out of the hotel even if we didn’t earn anything to demonstrate our commitment. The client loved us for this commitment and we started the marketing process with the goal of giving it away if we had to.

Well fast forward to the marketing process. We put a price (not zero) on the hotel for marketing purposes and it wasn’t a week later, we get a call from a buyer living in Florida that had grown up near the hotel and his family had eaten in the hotel every Sunday when he was a boy. He has an emotion attachment to the property. He wanted it because it reminded him of his childhood. He offered to buy the hotel with no contingencies and paid a big number for the hotel and was just as happy as he could possibly be.

We earned that client’s business and favor and have since sold 60+ hotels for them. I guess our strategy worked.

It did teach me a big lesson. The actual value of real estate is in the eyes of the buyer, not us as the broker. This is the point; a buyer never buys anything without some emotional connection or reason. That my friend is why we as brokers do the best we can to estimate a property’s value but always realize the ultimate valuation, is what the market will pay. KT