I’m very excited to announce that the Tucson Association of REALTORS® MLS (TAR/MLS), representing approximately 6,000 members in Ariziona, has selected FBS and our flexmls Web System for their next MLS system. The TAR/MLS Committee and Board of Directors engaged in a very thorough review of the major MLS vendors and concluded unanimously earlier this week that FBS and the flexmls Web system was the best company and system for them.
From a company perspective, getting the opportunity to work with the staff and members at TAR/MLS is a huge win for FBS. TAR/MLS will be one of FBS’s largest customers and furthers our goal to provide great service to MLSs of all sizes. From a personal perspective, I’m excited to get to work with such an incredibly well-run organization. Getting to know and work with Wes Wiggins, Brian Case, Scott Weidamoyer, Andy Gordon and others at the MLS has been great and we’re all excited to get to work together on the conversion.
I’m also excited to get to work with the forward-thinking Board at TAR/MLS. I’d like to give a special shout-out to Director John Mijac who, with Wes Wiggins and staff, put in hundreds of hours (or more) leading the group evaluating the various vendors. I’ve gotten to know John pretty well over the last several months and found him to be exacting and exhaustive in his research and presentation skills. John left no stones unturned in his review but, if he had, they would have been uncovered by President Kim Clifton, who conducted one of the most detailed executive interviews I’ve ever been through. I left that meeting incredibly impressed with Kim, and plenty exhausted as well. Jim Adams from Long Realty also dug into our RETS services and related processes to ensure that we had the right tools to feed the back-office and other systems they and other brokers require. Overall, the entire Board was thorough and objective in their review and we learned a lot from their professional review process.
Getting to work with all these great people is what makes this business so rewarding. The months ahead with all the conversion work and introduction of a new system to the members of TAR/MLS undoubtedly will be made much easier because of the great people involved. All the employee-owners of FBS sincerely thank the leadership at TAR/MLS for trusting us with such a great responsibility, and we look forward to living up to your expectations!
The other night I had dinner with Dan Woolley and Greg Robertson, two friends who are serial entrepeneurs now working on building their third business, Dwellicious. During dinner, we had an excellent discussion on the pros and cons of an ESOP and employee ownership. When I got home from dinner, I cruised through my feed reader and came across Glenn Kelman’s post A Free Call on the American Economy, which I think summarizes the issues quite well (in my words): owners are inclined to survive and entrepreneurs need to strive.
Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to step up and out in order to create something new. The emphasis is on something new — they want to create that new business and will do whatever it takes to make it grow. Owners, in contrast, are more conservative. They’re looking long. They already have something they’re looking to grow and build upon, and not lose. These are entirely different perspectives, whether you have your own money on the table or not.
During dinner, Greg asked why I turned FBS into a 100% employee-owned company as opposed to going it on my own. My response was longer than I want to write now, but a decent summary is that I’m an owner and not an entrepreneur. I don’t want to take huge risks but I want to grow FBS with like-minded people. Making employees owners is all about risk distribution, creating accountability, and building a company designed to last.
At the same time, this from Glenn’s post resonates with me: “So while ownership is an important virtue, the willingness to take risks on a big idea is too.” There’s no doubt risk-taking is important to every business, otherwise you stagnate and likely die. This is the challenge we have before us, how to maintain our ownership mentality while taking sufficient risks to grow.
Worldwide economic concerns are not the usual fodder for the FBS Blog, which is focused on the narrow vertical of the MLS industry. However, another topic of interest here is employee ownership, as FBS is a 100% employee-owned company. We’re a small company, with just 40 employees. Fortunately, we’re also a successful company. So it is with detached concern that I, as the CEO of FBS, watch the economic calamities of the world’s gargantuan companies unfold in ever widening waves. I ask myself: Why should stupid decisions of a few executives and bureaucrats impact us, whether it be the result of the failure dragging down the economy as a whole or as a result of “bail outs” requiring more and different taxes from government?
The mantra is that these companies are too big to fail, which, for me (and others), begs the question of whether they are simply too big. Markets are efficient only when there are many buyers and sellers and information about the market transactions is readily available to all. In the case of the current crisis, both of these pillars of efficient markets were missing. The credit risks were continually repackaged until only a few very large institutions were carrying huge amounts of risk and the information about those transactions was anything but transparent.
Now, as the dominoes fall, we’re continually chasing after them trying to prop them up. We’ve gone from insurance, to credit and now onto auto-makers and auto-dealers, local governments, and who knows what else. We seem to have forgotten that failure is critical to efficient markets so that pricing can adjust. Tim Bray, a technologist at Sun Microsystems, writes today about his “severe anger at the financial professionals who paid themselves millions for driving the economy into a brick wall at high speed, then walking away while we pick up the pieces.” I’m not feeling angry but I am concerned.
How is it that we’ve entrusted our money to people who’ve created systems so complex that they allow us to delude ourselves into thinking that only experts on Wall Street can understand them? Nothing should be so complex and if the so-called experts cannot make them transparent, that likely means they are not the experts they claim to be. In his post The Visible Hand on O’Reilly Radar, Dale Dougherty makes a similar point:
Wall Street hired the best and the brightest, paid them handsomely, and gave them unlimited resources and technology. It turns out they were building enormously complicated castles made of sand. A great wave washed them away, astounding all the smart people who devoted their lives to speculation, not production. Their models based on historical data predicted future profits, not collapse.
Dougherty is making another point in the quote above with which I don’t quite agree, but it does lend toward something useful. By differentiating between “speculation” and “production”, Dougherty is suggesting that one has more value than the other. I disagree with that. Speculation or risk diversification, if you will, is as much of a product with value as a building or a car.
On the other hand, the idea that we, as individuals, need to be making more stuff is important. We need to be producers, not just consumers. We need to be capitalists (those who own and create capital). At the core, much of the economic crisis at hand is due to the separation of risk and reward. The folks selling the mortgages to whoever could sign weren’t responsible for the failure in payment, that risk was shifted off to others and ultimately onto the tax payers. When we start considering shifting the risk of the poor decisions over decades from the American auto-makers and their stakeholders onto the American public, we know that this separation of risk and reward is going too far.
The issue here is one of being a country of independent creators, owners and risk takers-absorbers, or infinitely dependent consumers. Over the last many decades, we’ve succumbed to becoming so segregated into areas of expertise that we are forced into more consumption than production. We no longer understand the specialties and expertise of anything but our little niche, and so we’re dependent to an unhealthy degree. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that specialization is a bad thing or should go away, but rather that each of us needs to be more responsible for ourselves. Each of us can insist on understanding enough to make independent and informed decisions.
Tim O’Reilly also wrote recently in A Critical Choice Regarding Innovation that he “believe[s] that the choice is stark: just give people want they want, leading us deeper into a consumer culture whose very financial fabric is wearing thin, or seek out big, hard problems that other people take for granted as unsolvable, and remake the world.” He concludes the post with a call to arms of sorts, for individuals: “[T]he Knights of the Round Table were the archetypal myth of Western civilization, the idea that each of us, alone, must go off into the deepest, darkest part of the forest, populated by monsters, on a quest to make the world a better place.”
Indeed, what is missing from our economy and culture today is individual responsibility and creation and ownership. We need to be owners, each of us. No more bailouts, for anyone. The freedom that Martin Luther King spoke about so eloquently was the freedom to fail as much as to succeed. If someone or some thing is “too big to fail”, then it simply is too big. We need our failures to succeed.
There’s a lot corny about Tom Cruise’s “you complete me” dialog at the end of Jerry Maguire but the part that always sticks with me is where he says something like “we live in a cynical world of tough competitors.” Implicit is that there’s something more to life and I’ve been fortunate to witness that this week.
It’s been a long week around here working on the ARMLS conversion. Not much sleep and lots of work. Fortunately, that hard work is paying off. We certainly have tuning yet to do on the system but we’ve gotten over the core networking issues that were plaguing us early in the week. Jaison Freed and Cal Heldenbrand pulled an amazing all-nighter on Wednesday to re-build our firewall configurations from scratch and split our web farms, which were the key networking issues. Jaison’s effort was especially amazing given that he had pulled an all-nighter Monday night as well. Another stellar performer, working through illness and little sleep, James Ridley, summed up on Twitter how I feel exactly:
A really tough week, but I saw some great reactions to some really adverse situations. It’s awesome to work with people like that.
I’ve named a few co-workers but the reality is that literally everyone in the company has been nose to grindstone, doing great work. What an amazing group of people. Sometimes I found myself wondering if the stress is worth “it” but what I’m realizing is that “it” isn’t a monetary reward or other “win” but the relationships we build through life. So, yes, it’s worth it.
The reactions of our employees have been matched equally by the reaction of our long-time customers. These are people who’ve been there with us through thick and thin, and continued to show their humanity this week. These are people who are watching our company grow and celebrating with us even though that growth has impacted them negatively this week. In our cynical world, there aren’t many people who can reach those heights and so we’re very fortunate to have so many of them as clients. I’ve received many e-mails of support from clients and friends in the industry this week, and to all who’ve written, I want you to know it means so much.
At the same time, the newarmls.com blog is blazing away with rants and insults from a few drowning out meaningful discussion by others. I begrudge no one their anger but find it unproductive as well. Richard Park’s comment (#247) rebuffing the ranters hit home with me: “Do you think that those in charge of the system are sitting in their chairs gloating over your difficulties? Don’t you think they are feeling enough pressure and motivation to get things going without your trying to kick them in the gut while they do it?” No one here at FBS has shrunk from or denied the problems we had this week, but the cynical nature of some people does amaze me.
But what it really does is highlight by contrast how amazing the people are who rise above their frustrations and anger and seek out solutions and dialog. Those are the people I want to do business with. For them, we’ll walk through crushed glass with bare feet (or at least stay up all night) to help them. Why? Because we’re helping another human being. A person. That the “it’ in all of this.
Though all the people I’ve worked with and spoken to this week are the inspiration for this post and my work, the fire that lit my energy again enough to write the post was from an e-mail sent to me by David Newcombe at Russ Lyon | Sotheby’s International Realty. David was caring enough to solicit positive feedback from some of the others in his office and sent it along to me and the great team at ARMLS with the following note (which I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing because I’m not going to e-mail him to ask at this time of the morning):
” So, for anyone feeling down or pissed off – here are the GOOD NEWS emails. Please pass on as you wish to the incredible teams at ARMLS and Flex, with love from Russ Lyon Sotheby’s International Realty……..”
In this cynical world, this kind of support builds relationships that make the effort worth “it”. We move beyond objects to people. Humans. Amazing and beautiful. Now, back to work.
P.S. I’m having to moderate comments because, I believe, some of our firewall changes are preventing Akismet from handling the comment spam.
I was at a birthday party for one of my in-laws over the weekend. During dinner, I sat next to one of my wife’s uncles and we had an interesting conversation. Before I delve into the conversation, though, let me give you just a bit of background. My wife’s mom is one of fourteen siblings and so their extended family is huge. We had over 300 people at our wedding and I think I invited around 30. We’ve been married for a dozen years now and I’ve come to know many of the relatives but there remains a significant group I’ve only met a few times and definitely don’t know well. Part of this group are what are known affectionately as the couch uncles, because they tend to sit together on the couch at family gatherings and fall asleep. The uncle who is the subject of this post, Richie, is one of the couch uncles and someone I really had not gotten to know much about until just the other day. I’m glad I did.
During dinner, my brother-in-law was chatting with Richie and they started talking about a job Richie had at a manufacturing plant several years back. Richie made a comment like, “that was the best job I ever had.” That perked up my ears and I asked him why it was better. At first he sort of looked at me wondering why I cared, but then he must have concluded it was okay and he responded with ease and clarity:
I jotted the above down on my phone as fast as I could as he was talking, because I really wanted to remember it as close to what he said as possible. The insights are central to what makes us human: independence, adding value through competence, and respect/reward for that competence.
I find great motivation in these words and ideas because they go to the core of what I’m aiming for in our employee-owned company. Importantly, however, expressing the ideas of independence and reward for competence is much easier than weaving them into your culture and processes. As our company grows, our teams get bigger and our reliance on others deepens. This is requiring us to evaluate our project management and development processes to try to maximize independence and control for each developer while recognizing the inter-relationships their work has with others. Finding that balance is difficult but critical.
One of the blogs I find most fascinating is Signal vs. Noise from 37signals. These guys seem like a bunch of pretty happy software developers and so their advice is worth considering. From what I can tell and based on my experience as a practicing lawyer, I think these guys operate much in the way a small law firm operates, essentially professional peers working together toward a common goal but on equal footing with each in control of their own projects and careers. Each benefits from the relationships in the firm but each person also remains their own.
A team of our developers is working on revising our development process now and I’m hopeful the result will be a process emphasizing individual control in a peer environment. Perhaps then we’ll be able to define the best job here at FBS, so that at some dinner conversation years from now, we’ll all be able to say to our relatives, “FBS was the best job I ever had.”
I’m pleased to introduce Brandon Medenwald as a new contributor to the FBS Blog. Brandon is one of the lead flexmls Web developers and has been with FBS for about four years. In that time, Brandon has been the driving force behind some of our most popular features, including the photo tour, contact management, mapping, and the CMA in flexmls Web. Brandon has a great sense for excellent design and that shows through in his work. Brandon’s first post will focus on web standards and how Microsoft’s latest proposals for IE8 likely will just make development harder.
We’re just an hour or so away from pushing our latest release live. We have a single code set managing all of our hosted customers, and so we’ll be upgrading over 100 MLSs tonight, one of the beautiful things about web software.
We’ve added a ton of new features but mostly what this release is about is making the interface more elegant. We’ve taken several core applications and harmonized them into a single interface so users can view big beautiful photos, navigate and search by maps, see all the listing details and history, compare listings statistically and graphically, as well as discuss the listings with each other. We had many of these features already but now they are together, and in that togetherness lies power. Lots of power.
There’s an excellent theory of software development that says simpler is best. In many ways, that’s right. Apple raises this to fine art, providing just the features users need when they need them, making their stuff brilliantly easy to use. Probably out of necessity, we’re developing towards a variant on this philosophy. We most definitely want our software to be easy to use but we also want to respond to our customers’ unique needs. This is important in the real estate software business because real estate remains local. Sure, standards are critical, but property in Alaska is different than property in Florida. Our software has to embrace those differences, and yet remain easy to use. That’s an enormous challenge, one I believe we’re meeting. Again, we’re upgrading 100 MLSs tonight, with a single software application that respects the differences of those MLSs and, at the same time, brings them together with data sharing technology and a common mapping platform. This release is looking far to the future.
For our customers who may be reading this, you’re in for some change when you wake up in the morning. Change is hard. It may be frustrating. I encourage you to embrace the change, have fun with these new features. I know you’re trying to sell a house today and that the changes may make that harder on this day. The payoff for that frustration will be in the next hundred or thousand or more days, when the flexmls Web system will do things that amaze and delight you and your customers. That’s our objective. We call it Net Results. It’s a slogan but one we mean.
There are those who believe MLS software vendors are obstacles to progress. All I can say to such naysayers is they should hang around our shop for awhile. Listen in on our conversations with our customers. Come to our annual Summit. Heck, read this blog. We’re partnering with our customers to create something new. Tonight a new MLS interface is being birthed. It’s just a beginning and we have lots of ideas for more and we know you do, too. We’re listening.
We have some big news we’d like to share and as I’m not much for press releases, I’m going to make this an FBS Blog exclusive and see how far and fast the news spreads:
Arizona Regional MLS has entered into a three-year contract with FBS for our flexmls® Web MLS system to replace the current system.
(Let’s pause for a moment here so Greg Swann, Russell Shaw, Jay Thompson, Jonathon Dalton and the many other Phoenix area bloggers who may be reading this can wipe the coffee from their screens.)
Yep, that’s right, come July 1 of next year, ARMLS members will be logging in to a new MLS system. Why not sooner, you might ask? Well, that brings me to some more news I think is exciting. I believe FBS will be breaking new ground here as an MLS vendor, because our intent is to blog about the conversion process step by step, and many steps there are. Here’s a brief outline of just the major milestones for the conversion:
This may seem like a long time in today’s Internet time, but there are a lot of people who depend on the MLS system for their livelihood. This not only includes agents and brokers but many third-party vendors (IDX vendors, Realtor.com, lockbox vendors, etc.) who will have to change their systems (hopefully only slightly) to point at our RETS feed and work through other integration issues. There are many, many people working with ARMLS data and providing them lead time to integrate to our system is critical, which brings me back to why blogging about the conversion is important.
I’m pretty sure this conversion is going to be written about by several prominent bloggers. If they log on to the system after the conversion and hate it, we’re going to hear about it. If they log on and love it, hopefully we’ll hear about that, too. But my main hope is that we can engage many in the process each step of the way, so that we can get feedback throughout and make corrections as we go.
For example, I know Greg’s going to be wondering about Safari support, so here’s the deal: flexmls Web works well with Safari except for our custom report writer. We hope to add Safari support for the custom report writer, too, by changing to a different rich-text editor but, to date, rich-text editing in Safari has been a challenge to support. Of course, Mac users can use Firefox, which we fully support (along with IE, uggh), but we also understand that browser of choice is important. To that end, the major upgrade we’ll be releasing on November 1 will further extend our commitment to cross-browser support (can I again say uggh about IE?) with our new mapping and search interface.
We know there are going to be lots of other questions like this by many throughout the conversion process, and so we want to try to communicate broadly and deeply about our progress and challenges all along the way. We know that we have to get this right, for ARMLS, their members, and ourselves. It’s taken me awhile to get to this point, but this is a HUGE win for FBS! At 39,000 users, ARMLS is one of the top five largest MLSs in the world. We’re humbled by the confidence ARMLS leadership has placed in us and we’re going to work our tails off to earn that confidence and trust.
In addition to working hard, though, we also hope to work smart, and smart for us is the RE.net. We know we can learn better and faster if we engage, so we’re engaging through the FBS Blog. There’s no faceless company doing this conversion. It’s me, Michael Wurzer, along with Greg Kilwein (Chief Software Architect), Kelly Prichard (Support Manager), Colleen Phillips (System Designer), John Jeppson (Conversion Programmer), Sarah Lovaas (Report Designer), Steve Schlangen (Account Executive), Melissa Brown (Lead Trainer), and so many others at FBS with many talents we’ll be bringing to bear on this conversion.
Our team will be working with the committed people on the ARMLS staff, led by their new CEO, Bob Bemis, and many agent and broker volunteers to make this a success for everyone. The current Board President, Abe Schwarz, incoming Board President, Gary Cumiskey, and many other volunteers took time away from their paying work to choose the best solution for ARMLS. The review process was rigorous, including consideration of all the top MLS vendors, through many presentations and review sessions. We visited ARMLS twice (remember this post?); Abe, Gary and Bob Rucker also visited Fargo to meet our staff and see our offices and data centers; and there were many, many hours of review and consideration put in by these and other volunteers in between.
Of course, I believe all the work and review ARMLS committed resulted in an excellent choice in FBS but now it will be our actions that prove them right. So, we’re rolling up our sleeves and getting to work, and we’ll be posting about that work here as we progress — and we welcome those interested to the conversation.
Remarkable service exceeds expectations. More often than not, though, the service provider is in control of your expectations or at least should be. Let me give you an example.
I went to the dentist the other day after an extended absence. I was nervous about the visit but the dental assistant quickly exceeded my expectations by setting them properly. Every time she went to do anything, she succinctly and clearly explained what she was doing and why. Then she told me the result of whatever she just did. As she went on, my comfort and confidence in her and the process grew. At the end, the dentist advised that I needed a root canal. Ugggh. But, I wasn’t surprised by it nor was I upset (except perhaps with myself), because they had been constantly setting my expectations.
In contrast, when I went to get the root canal, the doctor was less forthcoming. I knew I needed a root canal but I really didn’t know exactly what was going to be happening. At each stage, my discomfort increased more and more because I wasn’t sure what was about to happen. Had this doctor just talked out loud, I think it would have been easier and better, as I would know what to expect. Occasionally, he would say something like, this is going to hurt a little, which was great, but I would have loved to know just a tad more about why.
Setting expectations is what remarkable service is all about. In today’s world of hyper-specialization, the service we get is often from professionals who live in a world of complexity about their profession, which is why we’re going to them in the first place. The true professionals, however, are those who can explain the complexity of their service simply, to anyone. If you can’t do this, that means you need to learn more about your profession. When you can communicate what you do and set expectations for your customers continually, accurately, and easily, you will find your customers remarking about how your service exceeds their expectations.
I’m pleased to introduce Greg Kilwein from FBS as a new contributor to the FBS Blog. Greg heads up our development team for flexmls Web and so his posts likely will focus on design of MLS systems and related programming and management issues. Greg got the itch to contribute when I wrote about the emergence of desktop user interface conventions in building web applications. My post was a quick summary of that issue, and Greg goes into a lot more depth. Welcome, Greg!
