Keep Moving Forward
[AUDIO] Why the way is always forward.
We’ve all been through rough patches. Health challenges. Career setbacks. Rocky relationships. Recessions. Pandemics.
Ups and downs are part of the natural rhythm of things. Even when competitors pose a challenge, we can choose how to react: Will we focus on trying to stop them, or —
Move forward ourselves?
Let me tell you a story.
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Note to Self: The Way Out is Forward
This week, I’m recalling a time when things seemed to be “stuck.”
It seems like we’re there again in my home-industry of real estate. Markets are a little slower, and revenue, a little lower. Internally, the industry’s dialogue is spinning out of control, a contest of “who can poke the other guy in the eye harder.” We’re arguing about how companies do things differently, rather than celebrating our entrepreneurial diversity. We’re threatening each other with lawsuits and establishing walled-gardens where others “cannot” participate. It’s scarcity and limitations, and defensiveness.
It’s not the best of us.
Meanwhile, the next generation is building collaborative things to bring people together. As I write this, a press-release announced that Zenlist, an app that allows consumers and brokers to search homes together was acquired by REALTOR.COM. If they scale it, millions of consumers, agents and industry partners will have a new space to work together. I thought, How cool! and then, How ironic that a bunch of Millennials (from the looks of their About page) are trying to connect people and data together, while others are working as hard as possible to disconnect everything from each other.
Gotta love the pet profiles, too; an interesting comparison to the power-poses of scarcity mindsets.
Make Your Choice: Stop or Go
It feels like an inflection point in our business.
While one group is busy trying to tear the industry apart, another sees the future of unlimited mutual opportunity. The question remains:
Which will you choose?
As for customers, the internal arguments are irrelevant to the majority of customers. Let’s not pretend there’s more than a handful of buyers and sellers who care about how REALTORS handle their listing data. Remember, it’s a home to them, not listing data. They only care about one home: the one they’re trying to buy or sell with your help.
They don’t want anyone to stop them from helping them do that.
Maybe it’s a sign of the times. People are frustrated about lots of things. They’re on edge, ready to pounce on anybody with a differing opinion. Our way, or the highway, say too many leaders. It’s exhausting. Because I’m old enough to remember….
… how every year, these things become afterthoughts.
Remember “banks in real estate” and “portals” and “iBuyers” and “100% models” and “disruptors” and “the internet” and “interest rates” and “murder hornets” and every other boogey-man-of-the-day?
All that worry and anxiety and attempts to block others from doing their thing, when hardly any of it mattered, and the fundamental fact remained the same: Most listings — most homes — are sold by someone from another company — by a competitor. That person you hope will create the listings for your buyers, or show a buyer your listing, especially when the market slows down.
The same person everyone’s been trying to “stop.”
The Way Forward is Unlimited
Which is perhaps why this story came to mind today.
During a previous market downturn, I met with a client. We discussed her efforts to prepare her people. “I’m starting early,” she explained. “We’re cutting costs and scaling back spending.”
“What else?”
“We’re becoming more efficient with technology,” she continued. “We’re redesigning workflows and making sure budgets work for 10- or 20% drop in revenue.”
She sounded confident.
“Did you hear the story about the big European airport that kept cancelling flights?” I asked. “They had serious internal problems, and they kept blaming the airlines for booking so many flights. The airport proposed that the airlines stop selling tickets for the rest of the summer. Their idea of the solution was to come to a stop.”
“What did the airlines say?” she asked.
“The airline that customers consistently love most said ‘not a chance’,” I replied. “They have solved problems before and know the only way out is to keep flying, keep trying and keep moving -
Forward.”
How do You See the Horizon?
We all experience fight or flight or freeze moments. Our instinctual reaction to clouds on the horizon is to stop, gather our resources and defend our turf. To protect against outsiders.
Except that eventually we run out of our internal supplies. By then, customers, partners, and colleagues may have moved on. You might find yourself alone in the desert.
Even the buffalo know that the way out of a snowstorm is to stick together and turn into the wind. Not stand still. You cannot “cut” your way to growth, or balance budgets without igniting activity and engaging partners. Not shut them out. Nobody has ever done more, sold more, achieved more by reducing investments, stalling actions or focusing on making their competitor go away.
“I need more to my plan,” my client realized. “A balanced budget AND a strategy to grow. I need to lean on my partners through the downturn and support each other. Together, we can turn headwinds into tailwinds. If we stop trying to do it alone.”
Sounds like a good idea to me.
Emirates Air knew you can’t balance budgets if you don’t sell tickets. That effort and innovation and collaboration, between employees and colleagues and partners, is the only way to solve the problem. Zenlist is reminding us it’s not a zero-sum game.
That a cornered market is a stalled one. And stalled markets eventually stop.
Any traveller will tell you: They won’t ask for your help if your plane plans to sit in the hangar, safe from competitors.
The way forward is always up, up and away!
—M