Do You Really Want To Work With An Agent Who Is Available With No Notice?

Sitting at the Updesk, taking calls from people who have seen a yard sign, it is common for people to say "Can you show me the house right now?"  For me, the answer is that as much as I would like to be accommodating, the answer is almost always "no".  Part of being self employed is that I plan out my business day the night before.  My day is booked up.  I live a calendar-driven life.  That is what it takes to be self-employed. My children, when they were small, would slip around and sneak a peak at my calendar to find out what we were going to be doing in the days or weeks to come.  If it is in my calendar, it happens.  Period.

When I get those calls, I can almost always get that buyer into the house in the next 24 to 48 hours, but instantly just isn't going to happen.  Most of the time, people will work with me.  Some people aren't willing to wait.  What I want to ask  them but don't because my good manners won't let me do it.....what I want to ask is "WHY would you want to work with someone who has so little business that they can drop everything and care of what you want done THIS INSTANT????"

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this situation.  When I was younger, I had a way of falling into the hands of Bossy Beauticians.  At some point a decision was made that I needed to begin coloring my hair to cover the gray.  My thinking was that if I was going to pay to have a color, it should be a color I actually liked.  Blonde for example.  Or even better.....RED!!!!!  I wanted RED hair.  I was raised in a family of red-headed people.  I have had a secret case of red-hair envy for most of my life.

So I had a conversation about hair color with the person I paid to be in charge of my hair.  She told me "no", that I needed to have Warm Brown hair.  We did Warm Brown for a period of several years.  Let me tell you how much I hated that hair color.  I am not a Warm Brown kindda girl.

Fast forward a bit.  I was at a seminar in San Antonio, a 4-day seminar.  About Day 3, I began to get the conference equivalent of Cabin Fever.  I was back in my room in the hotel when a wave of Cabin Fever over came me.  I opened up the Yellow Pages and began looking for a Beauty Shop with a street address that I could find.  In case the Yellow Pages reference weren't enough to date this event, hair colors were done in places called Beauty Shops.  Not a Salon.  A Shop.  I phoned and asked if there was anyone available who could put a color on my hair.  The person who answered the phone put me on hold for a while.  When she came back, she said that they have found someone and how fast could I get there. 

I was there in 10 minutes.  When they handed me the color card I pointed at the reddest-red I could find, a red that rolled off the spectrum into magenta (we were all a whole lot younger then).  THAT is the one, sez I.  And that is what happened.  That little girl put that color on my hair.  She did such a bad job, they had to have a multi-operator conference behind the chair after the first go-round with the color.  A committee put a color on my hair the 2nd time.  After a 2nd pass, the color was pretty close to what was on the card, but by that point, the damage had been done to my hair.  It was f-r-i-e-d.

The take-away concept here?  People who are instantly available are not alway the most experienced people at that business.  There is a reason that the people with the experience and know-how are booked up.