The Slowest Possible Way to Build a Business

If you wanted to design the least efficient way to grow a business, you would land somewhere close to ours: do good work for one household, then wait several years for them to tell someone.

That is the whole engine. It has been the whole engine for thirty-eight years and something over four hundred million dollars in closed sales, which sounds like a large number until you divide it by the number of kitchen tables it took.

A referral is a person putting their own name on the line for you. There is no advertising equivalent. There is no way to buy it and no way to rush it.

Living in a small town made of your past clients

Working the same coastline for decades means the consequences of your behavior do not disperse. If you handle something badly in 2004, you will meet it again in 2019 at a school event. This is, for a certain kind of person, an unbearable way to live. For us it has been clarifying.

It also means the incentives point in a direction most short-horizon businesses never experience. There is no version of this where talking someone into the wrong decision helps us. Not ethically, and not even practically. The math does not work.

The unfashionable part

We are aware that "honest, responsive, hands-on" reads as generic on a page. Everyone says it. The difference is not in the claim, it is in whether the structure of your work makes it costly to break — and repeat business makes it very costly.

That is really all "For the Honest Approach to Real Estate" means. Not a slogan about virtue. A description of a system where the honest move is also the only sustainable one.

What it feels like from inside

Mostly it feels like being known. You are the person who helped someone's parents. You are on a list in somebody's phone from 1998. You get calls that begin with "you probably don't remember me," and about half the time we do.

Slow is not the drawback. Slow is the product.