With NAR just around the corner, you may be planning on visiting the vendor Expo.  Whether you're exploring options to replace an existing vendor, or you just like to keep abreast of current trends, there are several things you should keep in mind.  In no particular order...

1. Length of Time in Business:  Approximately 20% of small businesses fail in their first year.  It usually takes another couple of years to become profitable, or at least breaking even.  Even so, 45% of business fail within the first 5 years.  Those aren't great odds.  In real estate especially, those percentages feel even higher.  It's no wonder that hardly anyone would talk to us when we first started marketing our product.  Why risk choosing a new vendor who might be gone in a few years?  There are lots of reasons for that level of churn.  Some vendors aren't prepared for the extremely long sales cycle; some vendors have a good idea but fail to execute; in either case, they run out of money.  Other vendors are quickly acquired by larger companies, leaving their clients in a contract with a company they didn't anticipate doing business with.  Whatever the case, decision makers need to balance the risks of engaging with a new business against the potential benefit of having the "newest" or "prettiest" technology.
   
2. Financial Ownership & Stability:  Who owns the company with whom you're speaking, and how is it funded?  Is it privately-owned?  Is it corporate owned?  It may even be "owned" by a conglomerate of MLSs these days.  Is it self-funded, debt-financed or backed by venture capital?  It's important to know where the money came from, because that drives the business goals.  If it's debt-financed, the company is on a payback schedule to meet those liabilities, although the debtor has no inherent control over the company.  A self-funded company (e.g. selling stock rather than taking on loans to fund operation) may or may not have a certain runway to turn a profit, but has no outsiders controlling the direction of the company.   A company funded by capital investment has a certain length of time to meet the financial goals of the investors.  For those companies, making the sale and closing the deal is the primary goal.  And in today's environment where capital is drying up, there is no more money to go around if those goals aren't met.  Companies more likely to be around for the long haul are the ones that are already successful, with their operations paid for with existing revenue, and not reliant on future growth targets to remain in business.
3. Quality & Maturity of the Product:  If you've never heard Jerry Orbach sing Razzle Dazzle, take a listen before you walk the Expo floor.  Then ask yourself if you're being shown a flashy, curated demo, or actual product deployments for real customers?  One of those is a more reliable way to evaluate technology.  Ask to see several customer deployments, too.  Many a pretty demo results in a signature on the dotted line, but it's what comes afterwards that matters.  Is the product actually built and running in production, or are there a lot of features still in development?  It's a concept known as "hyper growth" in Silicon Valley, where the proof of concept is built quickly, but the  engineering resources to build what was promised in the sales cycle aren't allocated until the deal is closed.  As a side note, growing too fast like this is widely cited as another reason why businesses fail (lookin' at you, Webvan).  The moral of the story is don't get distracted by "bling".  If you're reviewing actual customer deployments, you'll get a much better idea of what's in store for you.
   
4. Recommendations:  While we're talking about actual deployments, let's talk about recommendations from actual customers.  Get lots of them!  You wouldn't dare hire an employee without lots of positive recommendations, so why would you choose a vendor without the same level of due diligence?  I'm not talking about marketing materials with quotes on them.  With AI taking over the world, I wouldn't rely on video testimonials, either.  Just pick up the phone and call your colleagues at other MLSs or Associations.  Ask about their experience with various vendors.  Ask why they were chosen.  Ask about the ongoing relationship and service delivery.  Ask all the questions.
5. Price:  You're probably rolling your eyes right now, but keep reading.  Of course you're going to consider the price!  But price is important not just because you don't want to pay too much, but paying too little can also be a problem.  Remember the saying "if you aren't the customer, you're the product"?  If you're getting something for free, you aren't the customer.  Ask yourself what that company is getting that makes it worth it for them to give you the product for free.  Maybe it's your data, maybe it the ability to use your name in their marketing.  Whatever it is, they're getting something.  Yes, this includes all the cheap or "freemium" models out there that upsell to your users.  In that case, your users are the customers - you (the MLS or Association), are just a pass-through at best.  So think of price not only in terms of raw numbers, but in the value you're getting for that price.  A cheap product with zero support and no ongoing development is far more expensive in the long run than a more expensive product with excellent service and a reputation for quality delivery. 

Five weeks ago, I had a major surgery.  I was physically down for the count for about a week, and mentally fuzzy for at least a week after that.  Honestly, I wasn't mentally focused or engaged for several weeks before the surgery either.  This is blog-worthy because we run a small business!  While Ed and I both "know" everything needed to run the business, we still have a general division of who does what.  But after the recent "This is not a Test" of our emergency business operations, Ed knows a little more than he used to. A little more, but not much, and that's a good thing!

Let me back up.  As a small business, a common concern among prospective clients is how can a small number of people do all of the work?  Said in other ways: who runs the business when we go on vacation or someone gets sick, how can you manage the ongoing workload, how well will the product/service scale, will there be continuous technology updates; you get the picture.  There are a lot answers to this, including the fact that we have a large number of consultants with whom we've worked in the past, and can hire at will as needed.  But more important than that is the effort we've put into automation, documentation, and disaster planning.

So what is Disaster Planning?  Well, when Ed started this as a side business, disaster planning meant grabbing the desktop computer when we evacuated our home for a forest fire.  Literally, that happened.  And now you know how we became a cloud-based company!  So when our house does burn down, we'll have to order more corporate swag, but the business itself all lives online.  That was especially convenient when I may or may not have spilled a bottle of water on my work laptop.  This also allows us to connect and work from anywhere.  Conferences, airplanes, vacations, all those places we don't actually go to right now.  But we can, and that's the important part.  We also have recovery plans for all of our online services, like what happens if our AWS server crashes?  It won't, but we're prepared to restore or rebuild quickly if it ever did.

Automation is something I've talked about before, but it's a great thing to review frequently.  Automation saves time in the long term and allows scalability.  In the "side business" days, it took Ed 2 days every month to build stats for one client. At that rate, he could only manage 2.5 clients a week, and that would be the only thing he could do.  Certainly not a sustainable business model.  When we decided to do this full time, the ability to automate was a huge part of that decision, and figuring out to what automate was the real key.  We started, not surprisingly, by reviewing what consumed the most amount of time.  After that came the "what do I really hate doing" discussion.  The final piece of our automation puzzle is one that doesn't get a lot of attention but really does have an impact - finding the tasks where you don't add additional value.  One example for me was manually sending invoices each month.  Not hard, not time consuming, but easily automated.  We'd much rather spend our time building new product features.

Documentation is the last (or first) step of the work we do.  When Ed works, he opens a blank document and takes notes on everything he's doing. Those notes eventually become the documentation of what he did, how he did it, how to replicate it, and any issues he solved along the way.  When I work, I like to figure things out first and then write up what I did afterwards.  We'll often give our documents to each other and say "go do this thing using my document as your instructions". 

So how does all this relate to me having surgery?  First, all of the automating of our business processes meant there were only a handful of things that Ed even needed to think about or manage.  He didn't need to frantically learn a whole bunch of stuff for which I was generally responsible. He had access to all of the documentation I had written explaining those things on our online server. He had access to all the technical systems, project tasks and statuses, and more. He could even monitor my corporate email for issues that couldn't wait for my return.  Yes, it helped that this all happened over the holidays when work slows down anyway, but there was still work that had to be done.  Like monitoring the data loads, cause data is kind of important to our business.  And he did it.  Not a single client or prospective client was even aware that there was a problem because, from a business standpoint, there wasn't.  And that was a big success.

This concludes our test of the emergency business operations system. 

"Necessity is the mother of invention" is something we're all used to hearing. But there's some argument to be made that laziness is the mother of invention.  Think about the kitchen for a minute.  Dish washers.  Do you really need one?  No, not really. My mother has one and uses it for storage because she prefers to wash everything by hand.  I, on the other hand, wash some things by hand (the good knives, or things that specifically say hand wash), but otherwise I use the dishwasher all the time.  And I am perfectly willing to own that laziness.  Now think about the refrigerator.  That's a lot more of a necessity.  Without refrigeration, food spoils.  There aren't a lot of options around this, unless you live in Alaska and bury your food in the snow to keep it cold.  The moose thank you ahead of time for doing this.

We've been working a little bit on both of these around the office lately.  For my part, I'm firmly planted in the laziness pot right now.  For the purpose of sounding more professional, I'm going to refer to this as "increasing output through efficiency optimization".  Now the next time you see a phrase like that on a resume, you'll know what it really means - you're welcome.  So what have I been doing?  Well, last fall we converted our entire accounting system to an online platform, and it's been AMAZE-BALLS!  It's not that our old system was bad, or even necessarily time consuming since I only spent about an hour a month working on it.  But the accounting was one of those tasks that I had to take a deep breath and psych myself up for because it was just annoying to deal with and had a ton of little steps to complete it.  So we switched platforms, I automated several of the tasks, and my life got easier.  Even now, 6 months later, I'm still finding new features and things I can automate, and each one removes a few minutes of work from my monthly responsibilities.  It's glorious.  There are lots of other projects I've been doing in this same "automating annoying work" category.  The goal is that I'll have more time to spend on new features and innovation, and catching up on Netflix.

Meanwhile, my partner in crime has been spending his time on the "necessity" projects, like converting to API.  That's a lot more technical and a lot more boring to write and read, so I'll leave it at that.  Suffice it to say that this is really less a post about whether necessity or laziness is the mother of invention and more like a proclamation that together they are the mother and father, in a collaborative partnership.

So where am I going with this?  I've been thinking a lot lately about how the pandemic will impact businesses in the long term.  We're already seeing things like Twitter announcing that all employees can work from home forever.  But what else is to come, and which category will it fall into?  My initial reaction is that necessity is driving everything right now.  For example, the conference industry across all types of businesses needs to figure out how to successfully hold virtual Vendor Expos.  Not only is this close to my heart because it's a great sales channels for us, but the host industries makes of lot of money in sponsorship and over-charging on booth fees and such. So I have a feeling effort is being spent in this space already.  I foresee that after a lot of these types of problems are solved, the efficiency inventors will jump in for the ride.  I'm not at all sure what those efficiencies look like yet either.  But after all, if you can't get the mundane work out of the way quickly, there won't be any time left to go outside and enjoy the abundance of fresh air due to reduced traffic.

Stay safe.