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Jughead and the Secret Sauce

By David Noonan posted 03-25-2015 08:23

  

Jughead and the secret sauce

 

One of the least understood professions – maybe a better way to express it is, least understood skill sets – is that of the commercial real estate broker.

 

Part of the difficulty lies in the breadth of the profession; unlike residential real estate, where almost 100% of agents make their living by selling homes, the commercial sector is a far broader tent. Not only does “commercial” include many distinct business segments – manufacturing, warehousing, office buildings, retail (which itself seems to have infinite subsets), medical – but leasing, buying, and selling as leased investments all are specialties of their own. Even investment sales of multi-family complexes – and for that matter, small portfolios of leased single-family homes – are commercial real estate endeavors. When you add those who specialize in land sales, with each commercial use requiring different knowledge bases, the profession seems almost impossible to distill into common categories. 

 

Enter the skilled personality tester. Over the last 50 years, human resource specialists, aided by the advances in behavioral science, have come up with clever predictors of future behavior that have served most industries well in improving their placement of employees. This would be even more dramatically effective if industry itself hadn’t changed so much, but the testing and profile analysis of new employees has given employers some reasonably effective tools in hiring appropriate people for definable functions.

 

It doesn’t work very well for commercial realtors.

 

What happens more often than not, unfortunately, is the old trial-and-error approach. Sure, all the tests are administered to a new, most often young, hired “apprentice”. Resumes are checked, references are polled, but in the end, the rookie gets put into the fray. Unfortunately, and sadly for our industry, if he isn’t a young, white, non-handicapped male, his chances aren’t as good. The rookie gets all the nasty assignments, makes the endless cold calls, lives on little or nothing for a couple of years, and in the end.... is either a rising star, a struggling and confused second-guesser of his own choice, or a dropout.

 

....and the rising stars, by now, have followed a compass of their own to specialties and areas, and practices, and often new companies that fit their unique, particular new practice. And – like snowflakes, no two are alike.

 

So what does all this mean? Looking at the commercial brokers in Cincinnati, at least, there seems to be little correlation between inherent intelligence, work ethic, propensity to team, history of “connected-ness” – and success. There are those who make one wonder how they ever survive – who excel year after year, and an equal number who are students of the market, who work tirelessly, who are well-liked and respected – and who make a decent living, but no more.

Why is this?

 

Enter the Jughead factor. Dennis was one of 32 Bausch and Lomb scholars in the ‘60’s who was the classic “book smart, but no common sense” characters back then who had an uncanny resemblance to the Archie Andrews character Jughead, and was saddled for a lifetime with the nickname. Jughead, Rusty and I drove a VW beetle from school in NY for a summer student engineering job at Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, arriving there with no money but the promise of the job.

 

Unfortunately, our Stanford Research contact over the previous months had been terminated –and there was no job.

 

The 3 of us wasted no time in getting the first job we could find – that of selling encyclopedias door to door. Only we were trained quickly to convey the message, in those simpler times, that “we’re doing market research”. For those surprisingly compliant homeowners who would let us in, we’d go on and on about why our company wasn’t having success with its advertising, and was trying a new technique – that of “placing” new sets of encyclopedias in “qualified” homes, for no charge – for good word-of-mouth advertising. Once we’d get them interested in the “free” set of books, we’d go through a qualification test – which, ultimately was best met by a family who would promise to keep the set “up-to-date” by buying the annual yearbook. It was a compelling sales pitch – but the families were paying in advance for the yearbooks – and in the end, paying a pretty hefty price to have the encyclopedias.

 

We went from town to town in Northern California, getting there in the trusty VW and fanning out individually. Rusty and I worked hard, with reasonable success – maybe 2 or 3 sets sold a week – but Jughead was setting the world on fire. He would sell one set every day before noon and keep on going. He was setting records – he hadn’t even thought of the money he was making - and we couldn’t figure out why he was doing so well.

 

One night we asked him how he did it – to which he replied, “it’s easy – we’re giving them away!” Rusty smirked, and said. “No, we’re not! That’s just the sales pitch. Are you kidding?”

 

Jughead got quiet. He was embarrassed. The best engineering student in our class really thought he was giving them away. It never occurred to him that he wouldn’t succeed in such a simple effort.

 

But after that night, he was never the same. He hardly sold any. He had lost the belief that made him the best.

 

...and so, the Jughead factor, that intrinsic, unshakeable belief that you’ll succeed because you’re doing your customer a favor. He/she needs what you have. That’s the magic ingredient. Those in the complex world of commercial real estate who succeed are those who drift towards the areas where they feel the comfort that what they’re doing is truly needed, that their customers will be better by dealing with them.

 

....and those who struggle and who fall by the wayside are those who have a voice like Rusty’s in their head saying that they’re selling something to a customer who doesn’t have a need and has to be sold.....

 

I ran into Jughead years later, now successful, married, politically engaged, and in a big hurry to make me forget the old nickname. I guarantee you his success in life was in something he believed in - totally. That's the secret sauce.

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