Cookies and Candy

As I was clearing out some shelves in the office closet today, I ran across a stash of candy jars. Most of them had one or more of  Mark's business cards taped to them. We haven't used them in several years so I decided to pull the business cards off them, clean them up and see what their highest and best use might be.

They are left over from the days of taking candy around to a dozen or so real estate offices. Usually I'd make the rounds once every two weeks if not every week. I didn't take the usual cheap mints. I took chocolate! One office actually asked if I could come by more often because the candy was typically gone in a day. (Unfortunately this wasn't an office that we got much business out of so "request denied". And even if they were responsible for generating the bulk of our business, I didn't really feel obliged to keep them in candy.) In the end, I stopped doing it because in Texas in July, you can't transport chocolate. It will be goo by the time you get to the third office. It turned out to be easier (and cheaper) to take a box of cookies. And eventually, we just got too busy to take anything.

I'm not sure it made a big difference in our business. But I suspect it was more productive than all of those "front page of Google" schemes. But it had some drawbacks. There were any number of agents who had their hand in the cookie jar, but who never once called us to do an inspection. We had two offices where the candy jar "disappeared". (Really? You can buy one at Hobby Lobby for $2.99.) One office told me to take my candy jar and my candy because they weren't going to recommend us unless we paid them $500 per year. (And we weren't.) And of course, sometimes when I took the candy in I found that my candy jar and/or my brochure stand had been commandeered by a competitor. (How observant are some of these guys when they can't look at the bottom of the brochure stand to see that it belongs to someone else? Not much of an inspector, if you ask me.)

The other problem with showing up every week was that I was rewarded with all kinds of sponsorship "opportunities". I could buy the office breakfast, or lunch, or pay for them to have a happy hour, or a round of bowling. The possibilities were endless. When we were first starting out, we didn't know any better and fell into the trap. But eventually, the demands for money from a couple of offices exceeded the amount of money being generated by those offices. It's just not sustainable. These days we sponsor nothing and no one. I've had a couple of agents and offices inform me that they'd remove me from their list if I refused to sponsor. And I guess they did because we no longer get calls from their clients.

But we're very grateful for the agents who refer us because they believe that we do a fantastic job, not because we sponsored their happy hour.