When I was a kid, being “friends” with someone meant that you rode your bike over to their house in the summer to spend the day playing baseball. It meant going to Jack In The Box and pulling your friends’ money together for as many tacos as possible, or going to the roller rink for a birthday party.
Being friends meant doing things together—happy things—even if those “things” were of no benefit to the rest of the world.
The idea of being “friends” has changed. Yes, it might still occasionally involve Jack In The Box tacos, but it also encompasses touching the “Like” button for someone you haven’t seen in years, or sometimes don’t even know at all.
It isn’t just friendships and personal relationships that have lost a little bit of their humanity, and, sometimes, a little bit of their happiness. The same thing has happened to our business relationships.
How many times have you chosen to email someone sitting just a few feet away? If you’re like me, the truthful answer is, “More than I would like to admit.”
How often have you tried to resolve an important issue via email, only to find yourself getting increasingly frustrated because of a series of misinterpretations that could have easily been fixed—or completely prevented—had you just sat down and talked with the person?
(It’s kind of like a skit I once saw by a stand-up comedian, who was telling a joke about how frustrating it can be to argue with someone via text. Eventually the comedian says, staring at his phone in rage, “If only there was a way for me to talk to this person!”)
Life and business have become a little less personal—and sometimes, a little less happy.
Before we sound too much like we are writing a manifesto from our cabin in Colorado (I wish I had a cabin in Colorado..), there has been a lot of good that has come from the way the world has changed. At Worth Clark we’ve been able to leverage technology to serve clients in better, more-efficient ways.
Personally, it’s hard to remember a time when you couldn’t start your day by swiping up with your thumb to see an endless stream of photos that included someone’s lunch, someone’s vacation, or someone’s dog (I’m that dog guy).
And we couldn’t go back to a different time, even if we wanted to.
Here at Worth Clark one thing we’ve tried to do is take an important, high-stakes financial transaction—buying or selling a home—and make it a little bit more personal, and a little bit happier.
Contracts are important, and the process of buying or selling a home is always going to involve a lot of paperwork. However, buying or selling a home isn’t just about money and contracts.
It’s about the life you hope to build in your future home. It’s about transitioning to a new chapter in life, and turning the page on an old one.
It’s about making a significant investment, so you and your family can have financial security.
You will sign a lot of papers when you buy or sell a home, but those papers shouldn’t serve as a set of shackles.
That’s why we’ve become one of the first real estate brokerages to offer a happiness guarantee.
If you’re not happy with our service during the selling or buying process, just let us know in writing, and we can cancel our agreement. Sometimes things just aren’t the right fit, and keeping an unhappy client does neither the client nor our brokerage any good.
The world is changing, and one real estate brokerage won’t stop that. But we can make our small piece of the world a little better.
And happier.
