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Tom Postilio & Mickey Conlon Real Estate Background:
– Stars of Selling New York, HGTV’s smash-hit reality series broadcast to 99-million American homes in 65 countries
– Both are Brokers at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, the largest brokerage in the New York Metropolitan area
– Named among the Top 1,000 Real Estate Professionals in the United States by The Wall Street Journal
– Responsible for nearly $2 billion in residential sales
– Internationally renowned for their command of New York City’s luxury real estate market
– Based in New York City, New York
– Say hi to them at http://www.tomandmickey.com
– Best Ever Book: The Great Gatsby
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Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff. We’ve spoken to Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank, Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and a whole bunch of others.
With us today, Tom Postilio and Mickey Conlon. How are you two doing?
Mickey Conlon: Doing great, thanks so much!
Tom Postilio: Doing great!
Joe Fairless: Yeah, nice to have you on the show, and looking forward to diving in. A little bit about Tom and Mickey. Of course you know them, they’re the stars of Selling New York, which is on HGTV, the reality series broadcast to millions and millions of people. They are brokers in New York City, at the largest brokerage in New York, and they’ve been named the top 1,000 real estate professionals in the U.S. by the Wall-Street Journal. They’re responsible for nearly two billion – not million, billion – in residential sales, and they’re based, of course, in New York City, New York.
With that being said, Tom and Mickey, before we dive into it, do you want to give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about you background and your current focus.
Mickey Conlon: Absolutely. We sell luxury real estate here in the great metropolis of Manhattan, and we thank you for that wonderful bio you’ve just read. It’s kind of a very exciting job, it’s a very competitive world that we live in, but it’s also gratifying, and we love what we do. Two billion dollars is a lot of transactions over a collective, cumulative 25 years in the business between the two of us.
Tom Postilio: But it adds up quickly! [laughter]
Joe Fairless: That is quite an impressive number. I lived in New York City for ten years. I moved three years ago from the City; I lived in East Village. So I know a bit about your market, clearly not as much as you two. As you said, it is a very competitive market.
Regardless of what industry you’re in, how have you two been able to stand out and be as effective as you have been?
Mickey Conlon: First off, not everybody in the real estate industry starts there. That’s historically been the case. Many people transition from other careers, because they’re looking for something with certain amounts of autonomy, making their own rules, because by nature we’re all entrepreneurs. We decide how our businesses run, what our business model is, and while we exist under the magnificent umbrella that is Douglas Elliman, we’re still responsible for creating our own business.
So we are both creatures of show business. Tom was a singer for many years, I produced theater, and we bring that skill set to everything we do. We often joke that it’s all show business, and some people have derided that, as if we’re minimizing the importance of a transaction… But there are two words in there: there’s “show”, and there’s “business”.
New York is a city that’s all about lifestyle, it’s all about the sexiness and exclusivity and sometimes even the snobbery of it. So if we’re just selling bricks and mortar, we’re not going to achieve those record prices that the city is so well known for. So we add a little bit of sparkle, razzle-dazzle and we help people to imagine their New York fantasy.
Joe Fairless: The question that comes to mind is, as you just said, you’re selling the sexiness and the exclusivity, you’re not selling the brick and mortar. How do you first identify what you need to sell, what angle you need to take with a property, and then how to actually tactically bring that to life?
Mickey Conlon: Great question. We look at each property differently. Whether it’s a studio apartment or an entire building, that requires us to create an identity. Sometimes it’s an entire neighborhood that requires an identity, because markets don’t grow out of the mist, they are created. We look at ourselves as the people charged with creating those markets.
When we look at something, we look at it the way a director might a script. What is the story here, what is it telling us? What makes it stand out from the other apartments in that line, or the other townhouses on that block, or even the other sales? If we’re going by the numbers, why are we going to be able to get more for this than anybody else has been able to achieve? And we create that story, and that story comes through our property descriptions, it comes through our marketing materials, and it comes right down to the very way we present a property. It really does matter, in the end.
We find that the people who are least successful in this business are the ones who are trying to do it by rote; they’re doing something somebody else was doing. They walk through the kitchen and they say “And this is the kitchen, which is nice…”, and it’s like “Thank you very much… Why are we paying you all of this money to tell us where the kitchen is?”
A better question is to say to somebody, “Do you cook? You do cook, great! Let me tell you a little bit about the kitchen… I’m sure I don’t need to because you’re an expert at this.” But it’s appealing to people’s needs, overcoming their objections and obstacles, and to justify the pricing, because as much as there’s show in our business, the business is a very important component. And nobody wants to overpay for anything, but if we can demonstrate why this opportunity is so special and what it will be worth in the future, then we’ve done our job successfully.
Joe Fairless: If you’re presented with an opportunity for a new listing in an area of New York City that you’re not as familiar with as others, when you go to that area what are you looking for in order to identify the way that area or property stands out among the competition?
Tom Postilio: I have a thought… Sometimes we’re on the same wave length… [laughter]
Joe Fairless: [unintelligible [00:07:46].13]
Tom Postilio: It’s about feeling the neighborhood, it’s about walking the streets, getting the vibe and the feel of the neighborhood first of all.
Mickey Conlon: When somebody wants to explore a neighborhood that they’re not used to, it doesn’t start with us, it starts with them. Go walk around, have lunch some place, spend an evening there. How do the streets feel at night?
One of the other common questions that we get is “What’s the next hot neighborhood?” and in New York it’s like the wheel of fortune – just spin it, and any place you land is almost going to be the next hot neighborhood. And there are some key markers we look for.
Sometimes people are just grasping at straws because developers are building in an area, but that may be because the land was cheap, not because it’s the best opportunity. Sometimes the best opportunities are kind of a confluence of many different factors. When you can look at transportation, or expanding transportation, and see a neighborhood that wasn’t easily accessible before – that’s something to look for. Look for retail – which major retailers are moving into the neighborhood? Which hot new restaurants are in the neighborhood?
Then suddenly we build that infrastructure – that your value, and you just try to get in there before the prices skyrocket out of control.
Tom Postilio: We have been fortunate to sell in just about every neighborhood in Manhattan, but it’s interesting, on the flipside of that, we’re working with a buyer right now – VIP clients, and we’ve helped them, their family, their siblings; we’ve known them since the beginning of our real estate careers… They’re looking now to sell an apartment downtown and move their family out to either several neighborhoods in Brooklyn, they’re exploring the Riverdale sections of Bronx, they’re exploring parts of Madison County, and we’re following and helping with these conversations to really learn those different areas that we obviously don’t do business in every day… Although in Brooklyn we’re more active than [unintelligible [00:09:32].08]
Joe Fairless: When you are identifying the unique selling points of a particular property, how do you approach that?
Mickey Conlon: It starts with pros and cons, and we tell this to every client we work with. Whether you’re looking for a one-million-dollar property or a twenty-million-dollar property, there’s always something that you kind of have to give up on; you’re not gonna get everything on your list. But I think it’s putting the pros and cons… We’ll make a list together and accentuate the positives, that’s the song.
Tom Postilio: We try to break real estate up into its components, and these are ingredients in a recipe that carries us through hot markets and slower markets. So we have the real estate of necessity, and that’s when somebody is just busting out of their studio, their one-bedroom or two-bedroom and they need more space. They can’t wait to see what interest rates are going to do, they can’t wait to see where the market is going next year; they need to fulfill that need now, and that is an ever-present need in New York and in any market.
The other is the real estate of desire. It’s that penthouse, the fifty-million, the hundred-million-dollar… It’s a pied-à-terre, it’s more of a [unintelligible [00:10:40].12] than anything else, and that market tends to be more volatile. But in the everyday market where you combine those two things, and when you can marry necessity with desire, you find a way to reach your target buyer, because even if you just need that extra bedroom, you also have a fantasy of what that bedroom is going to do for your life. You’re going to have more storage, your kids are going to be more comfortable where they’re sleeping, you have ideas about how you use this neighborhood… Is it near the park, is it near shopping?
When we can touch on all of those things and listen more than we talk to our clients, that’s when we can achieve a successful sale, and hopefully a record-breaking sale.
Joe Fairless: And the last thing you just said – listen more than you talk… Earlier there was a comment about the kitchen, where instead of saying “Here’s the kitchen”, asking them the question “Do you cook?” What are some tactical things – if you have any you can think of, and if not, that’s fine – that you always do when you’re either with a client or presenting to a client, that have helped you from a business standpoint.
Tom Postilio: Complete honesty. One of the most powerful things that we can do is if we’re working with a buyer, for instance [unintelligible [00:11:58].06] experience, you’re walking through a place and you know what their criteria is, and of course at the end of the day every real estate broker wants to do a deal… But the most important thing is to be completely honest to the client, because it’s all about referrals, it’s about repeat business, it’s about doing the right thing. So walking through a property, I’ll be the first to kind of whisper to them and say, “This is not for you, let’s go.” That kind of honesty is absolutely important.
Joe Fairless: Was that hypothetical or was that a real scenario where that happened, where you arrived, and you said “This isn’t for you, let’s go”?
Tom Postilio: No, it has happened. It happens often. Obviously, we’re working with buyers and sellers, but when we’re working with a buyer, we can look at a property on paper – you look at the floor planning, the photos and the description… That’s all well and good, those are the ingredients that get you to be interested and walk up to the door, but once you’re there you can immediately ascertain that this is not the right property for your client.
Joe Fairless: Okay. I think you just answered it, but I was going to ask – if you took them there and then you said immediately “This isn’t for you”, I was going to ask, if they get annoyed by that because you took them somewhere and it wasn’t a good use of their time, but that explanation you just said makes a lot of sense.
Tom Postilio: Typically we’ll have multiple showings scheduled in a period of two to three hours, so if you’re seeing six or eight properties, there might be a couple that that’s just our “immediately out.” It’s all part of the exploration of the market and what’s out there for any particular buyer.
Mickey Conlon: And for any buyer trying to educate themselves, it’s important that they see the properties in the same price point that don’t necessarily appeal to them, because it gives them a more comprehensive sense of value, so when they do finally find the right one, they’ve learned, they’ve seen enough that they can feel confident in their purchase.
Joe Fairless: Thinking back, you two have 20+ years of experience doing…?
Tom Postilio: It’s just a little over 25…
Joe Fairless: 25+ years… How have you evolved from when you first got started to now in the business?
Mickey Conlon: My goodness… I mean, on day one – and we tell this to every new broker; we often meet with young agents who just got their license… It takes a good year to really learn the language, to be able to speak this language, and we’ve seen things in our collective experience, just real head-scratcher situations, but you deal with it in real time and you approach it on a day-to-day basis. There’s still things that come up that we go “Okay, wait a minute, how are we gonna solve this one now?”
Joe Fairless: Can you give an example?
Mickey Conlon: One of our favorite deals in recent memory – it was epic. We started with a bidding war, that fell apart. We had an accepted offer above the asking price, buyers fell off left and right, multiple inspections, different inspectors found different problems that uncovered decades of open permits and violations which held up the sale. The seller had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into fixing a roof problem, the buyer had to invest a certain amount… Very long story short – we encountered things that even our attorneys were scratching their heads over.
At the end of the day, we were most proud of the fact that we were representing both the buyer and the seller in this particular transaction, and we were really proud that at the end of this nobody came out unscathed, but we remained friends with both of these parties, and at the end both were grateful.
So it’s not always pretty down there in the trenches, but we try to use our expertise and our past knowledge and our contacts to solve complicated problems without creating a fire drill unnecessarily. We do try to buffer our clients from some of the madness.
Tom Postilio: One of our primary rules of our business is that there’s so much drama on a day-to-day basis… Don’t put it in the face of the client. We are the sponge for that drama, we do this all day. We understand the potholes and the pitfalls and the workarounds, but do not put that on the client, and we’ve witnessed it where some brokers love to get hysterical and create crazy scenarios…
Joe Fairless: That would make for better TV…
Tom Postilio: It makes it look like they’re earning their commission. They’ve waving their hands and squealing a lot, like “You couldn’t do this without me.”
Joe Fairless: What are some other primary rules that you have that you always adhere to or it’s always top of mind?
Mickey Conlon: Absorb the drama, total honesty… It’s all about servicing the customer, not making a deal. Do the right thing by the customer. From a personal business standpoint, constantly evolve. The business evolves, as much as people would like to keep it rooted in the past, and in New York, in many ways, it is. It’s a paper-heavy market, we do a lot of paper, co-op board packages and financial reviews that aren’t common to other markets, but it’s something we have to deal with.
On the flipside of that, we have to deal with emerging technology – how is the industry changing, how are consumers getting their information, how are they processing that information?
We sometimes laugh that all of these aggregator sites like Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy – they’re in a sense like WebMD. People have a certain amount of knowledge, and they process it the best they can, and they make determinations based on that. It’s like going to WebMD sweaty, feverish – you’re always dying within weeks; you’re always diagnosed the worst possible thing. They do that with real estate data – they look at the number, they say “Oh, I know what that’s sold for”, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
So we’re constantly redeveloping our business, staying in touch with our consumers to partner with them, with that technology, to show them how to use it better. Because very often we’ll say “At the end of the day, we may not be the people who find your perfect home. You’ve tuned it, you may send it to us, but we’re going to show you how to get it, and we’ll get it for the best possible price and we’ll guide you through this process to make sure you don’t endure any additional stress.”
Joe Fairless: When you’re talking to a client… Maybe that last property example where there were bidding wars, multiple inspections, permits, violations etc. and something comes up and you have to communicate it back to the seller – say it’s a violation or an inspection issue, how do you communicate that? If you can, will you almost pretend that I’m the seller and there’s a violation and it’s going to tank the purchase price? How do you talk to me?
Mickey Conlon: At any time we have to share a news of that kind, we just take a deep break and we go ahead and tell the truth. Sometimes there’s just no sugar-coating it. You just have to rip off the BandAid and get deep down into the issue. We try to look at the issue from the buyer’s perspective – “This is what they’ve discovered. It has a dollar value. How are we going to do this? Are you, Mr. Seller, going to resolve this? Or are you going to give them cash incentive to overlook this?” Sometimes that’s a complicated road to navigate because we’re not exactly sure; it could open somebody up to liability down the road, even if they simply give a discount on the price to make it go away.
So again, that’s some place where we like to counsel buyers and sellers in those situations to figure out, if this issue goes away, what does that look like in six months or six years when you’re going to sell it.
Tom Postilio: While it’s a case-by-case approach, most of the time we will sit down and put that in writing, because it’s the kind of thing that you wanna give them the time to absorb… “These are the facts of the matter, this is what’s been found, this is how we would suggest approaching it. Please review all of this, review the attached documents, the supporting collateral, and then let’s set up a time for a call.” So they’re not just hit with it blindsided. It’s “Here’s all the information we’ve gathered. Digest it and then we’ll talk.”
Joe Fairless: Yeah, I love that. That makes a lot of sense. I want to briefly go back to what you mentioned earlier, the showbiz part. You said there’s the show, and then there’s the biz. Can you tell us a story of how you’ve approached maybe a particular deal or a showing or something, where you brought the showbiz aspect to life?
Mickey Conlon: Oh boy, I’m sure there were few… There was one of our favorite transactions, we were representing Joan Collins in the sale of her apartment, and we were the fourth brokers on that transaction, so by that time media coverage had been completely sacked up. There was really no meat left on that bone. By that time, as a seller, she was becoming frustrated because she was emptying the apartment, she was sending things to her home in L.A., and you could feel it, it was like, “Okay, we need to reinvent this show.” And with zero budget, we enlisted the help of a friend, a designer, and we said “We have zero budget. What can you do to freshen this place up?”
What we wound up doing is creating a one-million-dollar makeover of the apartment, all with donated furniture, rugs, a piano from Steinway, and it gave it new life. It felt great, you could imagine yourself living in it. And all of those years on the market, we had an active bidding war in the last moment, and we thought “That’s really not common.” After you’ve been on the market for years, you would typically say it’s a slippery slope of diminishing returns; you want to make a sale happen as quickly as possible. But we’ve sort of carved a niche out for ourselves as… How do we put it? “People hire us when they wanna make a first impression for the second or third time.” [laughter]
Joe Fairless: You’re the closers!
Mickey Conlon: Yeah, exactly! So we wound up getting a lot of media coverage, and interestingly, that brought in a whole wave of celebrities who were interested in that particular property. We thought, for some of them, “That’s not really quite the right fit for you”, but it was sort of a tacit endorsement of the building and the neighborhood, and quite a success story, I’d say.
So yeah, a little razzle-dazzle can go a long way.
Joe Fairless: The friend that helped you two out – was that friend an expert in staging? Or did they just have some muscles and they moved the donated furniture into the apartment?
Mickey Conlon: His name is John Lyle, he’s a well-noted designer, and it really took a village, between the painters and the multiple vendors who contributed their time and effort to make this happen, it was kind of like something out of an MGM movie – everybody just banding together, we’re getting this done, and everybody there is going to be a part of that success story.
Joe Fairless: I think you mentioned zero budget – is that relatively speaking, or literally zero in all those individuals donated their time and supplies?
Mickey Conlon: It was a zero budget. Everything was donated.
Joe Fairless: Wow… And the painters, they did it just to say they worked on that place?
Mickey Conlon: Yes, because in situations like this we like to thank everybody… Whether we thank the in writing as a contributing participant in this effort, or where we can refer business to them down the road. When somebody needs somebody, if they need a contractor, if they need an attorney, if they need an interior designer, we like to be able to recommend people who are basically an extension of ourselves, knowing that they’re going to get the same level of service. And these people went above and beyond, and that’s something we really value, so we like to pay it forward, in a sense.
Joe Fairless: Makes sense. Based on you two’s experience — I used to say “y’all”, but I moved from Texas, so now I don’t say y’all… I don’t think there’s a perfect word to substitute for y’all, though… Based on y’all’s experience in real estate, what would you say is your best advice ever for real estate professionals?
Mickey Conlon: For people who do what we do?
Joe Fairless: Yeah.
Mickey Conlon: Always be honest. Don’t make things up. If somebody asks you a question and you don’t know the answer to it, do not make up the answer. We have seen people get in so much trouble time and again; you cannot make representations that are not true, and there is nothing wrong with saying “You know what, that’s a great question. Let me look into that and I’ll get right back to you.”
Tom Postilio: I would add to that – going back to show business – know your audience. Let’s say if I’m representing a seller and I have a showing and I open that door, that’s the curtain going up. Who are you dealing with? Are you giving the same performance every night? What kind of audience do you have out there? Are they with you, are they having fun, are they slightly hostile? Are they someplace in their own heads and they’re really not present for this showing? Figure that out and try to figure out how to break through… Because these people are probably seeing five, six or seven properties in a day, and you want the experience and their short time with you to be memorable, to hopefully get them to come back.
Joe Fairless: How do you break through? Let’s say someone is lost in their own head, and you can tell they’re just not being as focused on the property… Maybe they’re checking their phone, or just kind of absent-minded; what do you do in that moment?
Mickey Conlon: To the best of our ability we’ll try to engage them in conversation. I know there are some brokers — if a buyer’s broker brings their buyers in and we’re representing the seller, they try to act as a wall between the client and us, as if they’re pulling the strings and they’re controlling them. But the best brokers are those who realize we need to foster communication. If we can create a comfortable sense of environment in the space, that will lead with them, because if it’s tense or they’re disconnected, not to be too hippy-dippy about it, but it really does affect the energy of the space, and you leave that thinking “That’s not for me”, even though it may have been for them.
So if we can engage them in a conversation and find out, “This is a three-bedroom listing. How many bedrooms do you need?” “Two.” “Okay, great. Well, here’s the great thing about this other bedroom… It could be a fantastic media room, or an office, or what else do you need?” Then we try to help them go through their wishlist and check off as many of the boxes as we can.
Joe Fairless: Are you two ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round? First though, a quick word from our Best Ever partners.
Break: [00:25:55].00] to [00:26:37].01]
Joe Fairless: Okay, what’s the best ever book you’ve read?
Tom Postilio: From literature – not to be trite, but I think I’ve read the Great Gatsby 14 times. [laughter]
Mickey Conlon: Mine’s usually the one that’s currently on the nightstand, which of course, being obsessed with Frank Sinatra, is a Frank Sinatra book, but I’m gonna go back — you mentioned Barbara Corcoran earlier, and she’s kind of a hero to us. She wrote a book several years ago called “If You Don’t Have Large Breasts, Put Ribbons On Your Pigtails”. Hysterically funny read. For anybody who does what we do for a living, they should read this book. It kind of ties into our mantra of “It’s all show business, and you’ve gotta stand out.”
Joe Fairless: What is the best ever transaction that you’ve done?
Mickey Conlon: I think we have to reference back to that building in Harlem we were just talking about, because it’s not always the highest-grossing transactions that are the best ones. It’s the ones where you come out of the trenches, you’ve survived, and everybody is still reasonably happy. [laughs]
Tom Postilio: And there’s another one too, we sold a townhouse on the upper West Side for another celebrity client, and it was a situation where we went in and we were the second broker… They had it priced at eight-and-a-half; they lowered the price, they were finally ready to move on. We went in, we wanted the listing, we raised the price to twelve million, because it’s not often where you go in and you say, “This is underpriced. This is being approached from the wrong angle.” We went in, we raised the price to twelve, and we wound up closing at eleven million dollars, and that was a record-breaking deal at the time on the Upper West Side.
Joe Fairless: What specific aspect or aspects did you identify that it was under market so you raised the price?
Mickey Conlon: One of the cornerstones of our business is comps. People go by numbers, so when you run what sold in the last six months or the last year of comparable properties, people come up with the price – dollar per square foot, based on the quality of the space, the block, the renovation… And at that moment, when we looked at those numbers we realized “There’s a gap here. This house is far better than anything in the eight-and-a-half-million-dollar range, or the nine-million-dollar range.” So we broadened the search, and we saw an opportunity not in that neighborhood, but in other neighborhoods; the lines blur very quickly… And we thought, “We can do this. We can really get away with this”, and we had half the brokers on the Upper West Side calling us, telling us we were insane. But there were a few [unintelligible [00:29:01].26] colleagues who came through that house and they said “You nailed it, you’re exactly right. I’m bringing my people back.” And they did, they brought rounds of buyers back over and over, because they believed in the pricing.
Certainly after that, the closing price was posted… Those same people were calling us, “How did you do that? What did you do? Was there something included with the sale? Was there extra furniture?” No, we saw an opportunity in the market, we believed the market could bear that, and it did. That forever changed the benchmark in that neighborhood for pricing the townhouses.
Joe Fairless: That’s impressive. What is the best ever way you two like to give back?
Tom Postilio: We write checks to a bunch of different charities, but really our preference on this kind of thing is to be very hands-on and create events that we will host ourselves. We’ll bring in VIP clients to have an experience and to raise money for some charities that we support.
Mickey Conlon: New York City real estate in particular is known for these glittering soirées designed to market properties, and what we like to do… Where a seller has an organization that they believe in and they’d like to support, we try to find the tie-in with the property to raise money for that cause. Because people are more inclined to turn out if they feel there’s some good to be done. So it’s great for our marketing efforts, but more importantly than that, it’s great exposure for those organizations.
Joe Fairless: What’s a mistake that you can think of that you’ve made on either a deal, or just while in business?
Mickey Conlon: We don’t make mistakes. [laughter]
Joe Fairless: You’re perfect! Maybe we’ll add that to one of your mistakes…
Mickey Conlon: One of our biggest mistakes is that we spend a lot of time making a lot of money for a lot of people, and we don’t drink our own Kool-Aid. Sometimes a buyer says, “You guys are absolutely right, I’m doing it”, and they make a lot of money, and sometimes they say “I don’t believe you”, and then five years later we say “Remember that place? It tripled in value.” And we’ve stopped recently and said, “Why don’t we grab some of these opportunities ourselves? Why do we keep giving them away to other people” That’s a mistake that happens over and over, but we’ll learn someday…
Joe Fairless: Lastly, where can the Best Ever listeners either reach out to you or your company?
Tom Postilio: TomAndMickey.com.
Joe Fairless: Well, that’s just perfect. That goes along with the theme, that’s for sure… The show business theme where you two stand out. I love the analogy of looking at it the way a director looks at a script when you approach each property differently. I’ve been taking notes throughout our conversation… I wrote five primary rules that you two mentioned that you follow.
One is buffer clients from the madness, so be a sponge for the drama. Two is total honesty and transparency, regardless of what’s going down. Three is servicing the customer first and foremost, and not necessarily being focused on making the deal. Four is to consistently evolve, and then five – I love this one – is to put something in writing first if something bad or unexpected happens, and then call after. It helps 1) the individual digest the information, process it at their own speed, in their own way, and 2) it allows you to formulate it the way it needs to be formulated and communicated so that you can think through it before sending it out.
I really appreciate listening and having a conversation with you two. I have learned a lot, I know the Best Ever listeners have as well. I hope you two have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Mickey Conlon: Thank you so much!
Tom Postilio: It was a pleasure!
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