Adventures with lyrical - buying a business

Problem with your business model is clear from the point of view of the realty customer.

People want to go to one website and search multiple agencies (aka "Car Insurance Comparison websites"). People do not want to go to multiple websites.

You"re providing a service that people don"t want to use..

Tmac47 said:

7. We do a lot of other clever stuff within the code itself that I"ll go into if you want.

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Go for it. And it seems like a solid idea. I"ve been frustrated with my realtors site a lot, all kinds of retarded frames and unintuitive search options. That said, why are you considering taking on outside capital again? So you can pursue a marketing campaign? It seems like a better way at first would be to contact realtors one on one in your area and build it word of mouth in your state.

You really need a good salesman to sell you services, ideally someone who can speak idiot. I"m not saying real estate agents are idiots, but when it comes to technology and marketing themselves, they really really are. I"m saying that with 2 real estate agents in my family that call me up frequently to tell them how to log into gmail. They spend so much time out of the office, showing houses, talking to clients, networking, etc that a great many have little knowledge on what the web can do to drive their business and make their life easier. Most agents rely on yard signs, yellow pages, and word of mouth for the entirety of their advertising and don"t have time to learn something new.

Simplify your agent interface as much as possible to take as much guesswork and specifics out as you can. You"d be amazed at the lack of motivation to do things such as record the number of bed/baths and upload pictures there is. Anything you can do to your software to minimize the amount of interactivity the agent has to do to the site to keep it consistently current and accurate is a huge selling point. An agent specific mobile app for uploading house info/pictures would be along those lines.

Here"s the problem. Once you own a business you"re hit up at least 3 times a week by some guy who wants just a few minutes of your time. Then they proceed to tell you how you"ll make more money using whatever it is they"re pitching.

It"s not that your idea is bad. It"s that it"ll get lost with the other callers. You need to identify someone who is a leader in the market you want to break in to. Then convince them to let you redo their website for free. Give it a couple of months and you"ll start picking up the guy"s co-workers etc.

Usually the only ones to get anywhere with my business are the ones who will give me a taste for free. If I can"t get a taste for free from you, the 5 guys behind you will give it up for free. If it yields results then obviously I"ll buy in.

One of the inherent problems with your website pitch, is even with a brand new website/better website it might not translate into many more sales. So when the person looks at the numbers and see that this month is +2 sales over last month or -1 sales from last month, that wont exactly scream "the website will make me rich!"

Lyrical said:

I"m thinking I need to have some sort of drug testing policy in place.

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If you do this, make it at random. Companies I worked for had it at random, and when you were selected, you were escorted to a testing facility. What blows my mind is people I know who have had to take UA tests not at random would always beat them by using someone else"s urine. I can"t imagine having the balls to do it, but I"ve seen people I know pass tests 6 or 7 times using this method.

I think pre employment screening is a waste of funds for companies. All too often I hear, I"m not doing any drugs, I"m looking for a job. Once they have the job, they go back to whatever habit they had.

The worst part of it is catching someone on the test is going to cost you a ton of money having to retrain the guy"s replacement.. Really there just needs to be enough motivation to not compromise the job to begin with. You"ve identified the problem of too much expendable income. There"s probably a way to wrap up more of their income for the sake of your business. Offer 401k matching etc. Get them to use up their money before they get to the point where they have cocaine snow down from the ceiling.

What about changing pay grades to include profit sharing. Instead of giving them 4k every month after taxes, give them 2k, and make the % then get equal out to a 24k check you cut to them before Christmas/your slow season. This does a couple things, it would allow you to not write them checks for 40 hour work weeks when things were slow. Also when people receive a large sum of money they tend to buy a car or some other big toy. This would be infinitely better than putting it up their nose.

On top of maybe solving your too much income for your managers problem. It"d offset wages based upon performance. If they make 100k less a year for you, well then they"d get less "profit sharing money". I"ve also seen this in action and most crews self police. If you"ve got a jackass who doesn"t work as hard, the rest of the team makes his life hell until he puts up, or leaves. Because nothing burns people more than sharing the pool of money while one guy eats a sandwich and the other guy busts his ass.

All these structures are based on service to the company. 50% of the actual profit goes back into the businesses account to grow the business/ride out tough times. The other 50% gets split up between everyone. Lets say you claim 50% of the profit sharing going to the crew. That leaves them with 50%.

1 year = 1 share
2 years = 2 shares
5 years = 3 shares
etc.

Even your secretary gets in on this action. Lets say you"d have 15 shares, and the pure profit was 120k last year.

60k goes into the business account
30k goes into your pocket
This leaves 30k, Each share is worth 2k. A guy who has been there a year, gets a 2k bonus at Christmas time, boosts morale. A guy who has been there 5 years gets 6k in cash. Managers usually get more shares etc.

All of this makes it easier on you, as when times are lean, you can justify cutting back hours, or just letting it fall off of their bonuses. Either way makes no difference to you.

In other businesses I see this play out, guys that have been with the company for a long time are getting 8-12k bonuses. They"d give their life for that job before they"d lose it. They also come to rely on that bonus at the end of the year to buy that car, or house down payment etc.