On a personal level, I enjoy helping people. I always have. The harder the case the better. I seek out broken things to fix – makes me feel good. Professionally, I own a full service marketing company. I get to help people succeed in business, whatever business they are in. As such, we find our days spent in building custom self-managed websites for our clients, so that they can be in control of their destiny in the ever changing world of the Internet; we design brands; we build integrated systems that business owners or their staff can maintain long into the future. Knowing that we can do that successfully is pretty gratifying. There is probably not a problem out there, technical or otherwise, that we couldn't come up with a nifty solution to right now, but it has been a long way in getting there.
We’ve acquired the knowledge and abilities that we have over almost two decades of coding and recoding, designing and redesigning, perpetually tweaking and re-tweaking, downloading every bit of software we could get our hands on, always beta testing, always learning. We still do all of those things, full time, 24/7. We shut down our offices for the night and go to bed thinking about our clients’ various projects. In a nutshell – we do what we do for a living and we take it very, very seriously.
So when I was invited to join a tech support for real estate group on FaceBook, I thought, in earnest, that it would be a great outlet for me. A place where I could maybe accidentally help a few folks out with their various tech issues and make some new friends. Beyond that – there were no expectations of business, credibility building or anything remotely resembling a shark tank. And so I jumped in and advised, and shared, and we have even fixed a few things for a few folks in there, free of charge, over the course of the last few months. I didn’t point to our work. I didn’t recommend that anyone ought to hire us to do anything for them – it wouldn’t occur to me...
But today, a tone of one particular conversation led me to believe that no matter how freely some of us share, we will always be looked at as sharks out to get to your wallet. That my opinion on anything that I do for a living, day in and day out, is somehow worth less to you because you think I always have an ulterior motive. You, the DIY real estate agent, feel justified in looking down on what I say, and on what I do because in your mind - I am a lowly vendor. Whatever contributions I’ve made to the group, such as they were, I made because I wanted to help. But I don’t owe you that. None of us, vendors, whose brain you feel you have a right to, owe you that. It was a gift, and not us coming after your wallet. So by all means. Design, tinker, invent and do whatever it is you believe us people charge too much for daily, but don’t ask to pick my brain. This shark is going to the beach and will remain there until such time as real estate professionals deign to not be so disparaging to people who do something other than sell real estate for a living.
I don’t ask you to justify your commissions to me or to stage my house for sale and put it on the market without a listing agreement. Don’t ask me to hand over what I worked my ass off for the better part of my adult life to acquire as if it’s owed to you. Last I checked, there is always Google. So Google it.
This post orginally appeared on my blog @hamediablog
Comments(10)