Clients First: The Two Word Miracle

Chapter 5

The Morning After

JoAnn was so eager to tell our two assistants, she hardly slept. She was up and down several times, while I barely moved a muscle. I’ve always been like that, getting by fine on six or seven hours. JoAnn likes naps.

Marta arrived promptly at 8:30 AM and Susan about 10 minutes later. We felt so fortunate to have found these two women. Or maybe they found us. Marta was one of our earliest clients, and while her house was in escrow she showed JoAnn some flyers she had designed. The ideas were sweet, but what really captured JoAnn’s interest was how precise Marta had been when committing everything to paper. Her attention to detail was remarkable.

Marta completed real estate school in less than a month, and we immediately tried to give her the role of transaction coordinator, because we now had several people whose homes were in escrow, and those tasks were time consuming. We needed to be showing and listing homes, not sitting through home inspections and meeting with appraisers. If we didn’t like the escrow process, that went double for Marta. She hated it. That’s when Susan found us.

Susan, newly licensed, bravely introduced herself one morning at our broker’s office. We were dropping off paperwork and picking up mail when she stuck out her hand and told us how much she had heard about us. We were so flattered. She was from Wisconsin, and she was struggling. Susan had just had her first listing appointment the night before, and when the people wouldn’t ...