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Jun
25
Posted by Larry Cragun
Two great Gig Harbor neighborhoods Posted by Matt Thomson
When I first started writing this blog, I was featuring different neighborhoods around Gig Harbor. I’m not really sure why I went away from that. In the past few weeks, I have sold two homes in adjacent neighborhoods to folks who found me via this blog. That’s pretty exciting for me, for the new home owners, and for the sellers of those homes as well. If you own a home in Gig Harbor and are thinking of selling, you may want to keep that in mind…this blog is a powerful marketing tool for Gig Harbor real estate.
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May
07
Posted by Larry Cragun
Sorry, I need to reschedule todays training until Friday at 1PM PDT. I hope that works ok…. Plus for a little fun the race is on. Danita Jolly, Burien Undressed, posted her first article a few days ago and is up to 3 articles posted. If you do a Google search for Burien Real Estate you will find out of 548,000 times Google has indexed (copied) that phrase Danita is in position 52. Looks like a winner to me. It took us over a year to get In the top 10 (Page 1) for “Issaquah real estate”. Go Danita Go, we are betting on you. How about you, what’s your bet today – on you?. Lar PS: Don’t wait for Google, go write an article on a local merchant. Make them your friend in the computer.
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May
07
Posted by Larry Cragun
Hi,
Well I have to say I’m having so much fun with this. Me and my project manager from Startpoint, Susan Moore, just posted an article. And now if you google “burien investments” The Burien blog was on page one. Isn’t that amazing.
Danita Jolly
RE/MAX Team One
636 S.W. 152nd, Suite D
Burien, WA 98166
Cell: 206-412-3699
Fax: 206-244-6023
Office: 206-244-6000
This is an example of:
1- How we give each other ideas and feedback in our undressed network.
2- The Long Tail, what you write about will find traffic, sometimes it isn’t the short tail or most sought after words or phrases.
3- Our technology and network. We are very Google friendly.
4- How fun this can be.
5- The purposes of this blog.
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May
06
Posted by Larry Cragun
All t0o many big and little businesses play the big gamble. I know, it’s the American way. It’s also a way to crash and burn. Zillow is playing it, Redfin is playing it, and some agents are playing it. Even some households do the big gamble.
What is the big gamble? Bet on the future by negative cash flow or raise millions in venture capital. It works sometimes. It crashes and burns more often.
We at CiUn signed on to the bootstrapping option. Keep the other income coming in, go bare bones, prove your idea, then ramp it up. It seems to have worked. Our idea is working for our customers. We are living what we sell and it is working. Our little company is now in positive cash flow.
Watch us grow, help us grow, and best of all be a part of us.
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May
04
Posted by Larry Cragun
It is about time to pack it in for the week and I wanted to share a couple of important things with you. In getting to know each other Jim Warner of the ROCS Alliance suggested I read a couple of books by Jim Collins – Built To Last and Good To Great. This has been a good suggestion, which I pass along to you. BTW this wasn’t the first time someone suggested that to me, but was the time it created the action.
This has been good for Kathleen and me to read together.
From todays reading I felt I inspired to pass this along to you: Jim and I, and even some of you and I have discussed the fall out that is going on in Real Estate – agents being forced to leave the business.
Some will leave our business by necessity and by necessity some need to leave.
From Good To Great I leave you this thought and a strategy:
The Good-To-Great Companies focus on three core concepts: (Picture yourself as a mini company – and at the same time consider what I think we are focused on at CiUn Inc.)
1- What are you deeply passionate about?
2- What can you be the best in the world at?
3- What drives your economic engine?
Jim Collins calls The Three Circles of The Hedgehog Concept.
All three are required for a successful good to great company, or mini company. The economic engine is driving many out of our business, many that have passion and are great technicians in our industry – even love it.
Jim Warner points out that our business at CiUn is a way for agents suffering economically to still stay in the business. I will let him address his vision once you are introduced to ROCS officially.
But for CiUN Inc in the undressed network, how about us? That is what this message is about.
About # 1 Passion: Our kids, at least a few of them, are amazed at our perserverance (passion) – think we are nuts – or are on board with our passion for this network. We have a mortgage company and a real estate practice that are taking second place in our hearts to “blogs???”. I tell the service station attend we work 24/6. We love what we are doing here.
About # 2: Being The Best We are not the best, but we are good. Jim tells me Good is the Enemy of Great. Jim Collins proposes that Great Companies focus on what they can “potentially” do better than anyone else. I believe that is us, and part of that is because of you our network. Going it alone, in my opinion, is silly. Real Estate is made up of loan wolf experts – this network is counter to that. The surveys we are receiving back are going to be a benefit to all of us, with some critical and some positive feedback we need and you can benefit by. We believe the brand, the network, the technology, the support, and the focus we have can make this project great. As fast as we can, we will invest in even more for you and the network.
About # 3: A successful economic engine. We have covered our basic overhead because of our real estate practice and our mortgage business. We committed in the beginning to a term common to the internet – bootstrap. Having witnessed 2 million dollars, to a previous dotcom adventure, and seeing it not be enough and watching several others waste millions and millions more than that – we signed on to the bootstrap concept for CiUn Inc. Some really good companies started this way: Flickr, DIGG, and Google for example: Flickr sold to Yahoo for a few million and the other two eventually took on investors, but they bootstrapped until proven.
We are now positive cash flow only because we don’t take salaries. Our economic engine, to be beyond bootstrap needs us to reach 200 monthly clients. We are gearing up to get that, ROCS is gearing up to help us do that. Many of you are helping us do that. With the great ideas coming in from about 20 of us can you image the power of 200? But financially that puts CiUn in a place it can start adding things more aggressively that benefit us all.
In a nutshell: I believe we can become a great company. We appreciate your pioneering this with us. We will be ever looking to how we can make sure this is a great company and is a great tool for you.
Thanks for participating, for your input, and for all have done and will do to help us grow.
Larry Cragun
