Man, that first year was beans-and-rice mode. I don't mean that's all we ate. I mean preservation mode: spending as little as we could, no eating out, a lot of coupon clipping, and even being on food stamps. I didn't love pulling out my Quest card at Walmart. And if anybody's ever gone to the government health care office, it was just, I guess, humbling.
We didn't come from a lot of money. I didn't have a ton saved, because I had a family at the time. I had a wife and three sons, and my wife didn't work. We had to get on government assistance health care, and even food stamps, just to try to buy time.
Leaving the bank
Back in 2013, I was pretty miserable working a banking job, and I needed to do something different. I was a branch manager at a bank. I followed a friend's advice and got my real estate license. Then an opportunity came up for me to leave the bank and work full time purchasing properties for a hedge fund. My friend told me I should make a good living at it, so I decided to leave.
When I left the bank, I didn't make anywhere near what I had hoped. Part of that was a lack of work. Soon after I left the bank, the hedge fund tightened its buy box. The boxes got so small that almost no properties fit, so we couldn't buy at the volume everyone expected, and the company made less money. I was making only a small part of what I'd been promised, which was tough, because I had a wife and three kids at the time, and my wife didn't work. And that opportunity dried up relatively quickly. I'd say within four to six months of leaving. So then I had nothing.
I was kind of fed up with banking, and I was at a fork in the road. Do I go back to banking? Do I become a traditional real estate agent? Do I do property management? Or do I do something else? I decided on something else, and that was real estate photography, the business that became ListerPros. It suited me best, and it was the thing I was most passionate about, even though in the short term it was probably the one that made the least money. That was one of the hardest decisions I had to make, because you get used to that consistent paycheck.
There was a lot on the line. I'm glad I had the support of my wife, otherwise I probably wouldn't have made the decision. My wife probably knew me better than I knew myself. She knew how hard of a worker I was.
The five-year question
I didn't want to go down another path like I had in banking, where it ended up not being as good as I thought it was going to be. I looked myself in the mirror and said, all right, what am I likely going to still enjoy doing in five years? And the answer was real estate photography.
Even at the time, I think the real estate industry was pretty good, and I was a licensed real estate agent. I definitely know I could have made a lot more money short term being a real estate agent, but I enjoyed this aspect of it a lot more. I think you have to sacrifice short-term compensation and money for the longer-term vision. If I would have done the business for money, I don't think I would be in it today. I'd probably be burned out.
I've always been somebody that really loved technology and computers and programming. There was something about real estate photography, when I started doing it, that I really liked, because it's a systematic thing, and I like systems. So it really is something that, even after all these years, I'm still passionate about today.
I don't like to just be on my computer twenty-four hours a day, and I don't like being out in the Arizona heat sweating all the time. I think it's a great balance between doing computer things and systems, and getting out and working with your hands. I like doing both.
Even today, when I'm not shooting a whole lot of houses, I like to maintain our pool, and I like to work on cars. And I do like endurance sports. I've done several Ironman races. For me, it's just a better way of life. I think you've got to go after what you enjoy, even if your short-term financial position is not very great.
A kit-lens disaster
The first listing I ever shot was my own. This was before I was committed to the business, or had even thought about it. We hadn't had a good experience with our existing photographers, so I figured, whatever, I'll just shoot this one myself. I used a regular mirrored camera with a kit lens.
I still have those photos to this day, because I can look up the old listing. I didn't know what I was doing. But it put real estate photography in my head.
I did shoot for my broker, some of his houses. At the time there weren't many resources out there on the topic, so it was pretty challenging. It did take a lot of trial and error, and really a lot of time and effort. After that, I started to practice and research and figure out ways I could improve my picture quality. Once I had a decent amount of shoots under my belt and I felt confident, I started offering my services to other agents.
I started ListerPros in December 2013. A few months after starting, I felt there was a need for us to offer high-end photography to our customers with million-dollar listings. Me being new to real estate photography at the time, I didn't know much about how to shoot and edit high-end homes. So I put out an ad for a luxury real estate photographer.
The guy I ended up hiring was the guy that taught me how to shoot and edit high-end homes. He was also a photography teacher at the time. Essentially, I became his assistant for five or six luxury shoots as I learned the ropes: the equipment, the camera settings, and the process of shooting and editing high-end homes.
I ended up purchasing most of the exact same equipment he was using: floodlights, flashes, speedlights, and a Canon 5D Mark III. Shortly after that he switched to Sony, so I did the same. The one thing that always troubled me when I was shooting was how complex the shooting process was: flashes not working properly, tripping breakers with my floodlights, manually adjusting each flash individually.
I knew a simplified shooting process wouldn't achieve a hundred percent of the quality I could produce with that setup. But as long as I could achieve eighty percent of the quality with a simplified shooting process, I would be happy. It took us several years, through a whole lot of trial and error, to get there.
The first customers
To get ListerPros off its feet, I knew I needed to get out of obscurity. Initially, since I was a real estate agent, I had the people at my brokerage, who I serviced, and then I had to get out there. I come from a big service-first kind of background in the banking industry, and that's probably the biggest thing that made me think we could be successful in this. So I had to figure out a way to come across differently, where people could give us a shot. For the first three or four years, I was pretty active on social media; early on, I was contacting people with a lot of emails and direct messages.
I remember sitting down and talking to an agent who ran a brokerage of ten-plus agents. Their questions were about my capacity: how could one person service all of their listings, and could I handle larger volumes? I had to convince them of my commitment, and that I wouldn't drop the ball. I never did. I was able to service them, and having a whole brokerage use us was a huge revenue generator, though I don't know why I say "us," because at the time it was just me, by myself. In addition to those guys, I got an agent who still uses us today, and those are the two that really stand out to me, that really helped springboard ListerPros into what it is today. Selling yourself is what's important at the beginning of things, and without those producing core customers, it's hard to sustain in this business. You're definitely not going to get a return on your time doing free jobs for an agent who only does one listing a year.
Buying time
I gave myself about six months where I could survive. Go as lean as possible, spend as little money as possible. What you need is time. It does take time to be able to find success in this business.
I was trying to do real estate transactions at the same time as shooting houses, to get the business going. For me, I would even buy and sell cars to make extra money when I wasn't doing real estate. I was even working expired listings, calling homeowners whose listings had lapsed, from the car while I drove from one photography job to the next. I wasn't making much from photography yet, so I used every spare minute to bring in revenue.
When I started ListerPros, I was doing some things on the side for my friend in real estate. I wasn't making a whole lot of money in photography. I was just skating by.
I had some retirement money set aside for an emergency, and I didn't need to use it when I first started. I was willing to work really, really hard to not have to tap into it.
Once you get on government health care and food stamps, it kind of makes you think: okay, at what point do I need to be self-sustaining again? At least for me, it's not enjoyable. But having those things was really helpful, and it definitely bought additional time to be able to figure it out and make it successful.
Obviously, over time I've paid way more into taxes than I ever took from the government. But sometimes you need that kind of help to be able to sustain. I guess, at the end, it's a personal decision. Without that help, you're just drained of what you have, and you're having to go back to corporate America within two months.
I'd given myself a good six months, but luckily, by spring, I started to pick up traction relatively quickly, and it worked out. You've got to be a little bit strategic about how you're going to go about it, what resources you have available to you, and know when to pack it up because it didn't work out, and when to keep going forward.
Posts, paint and lockboxes
At the beginning, we didn't just do photography. We did signs and lockboxes, with an inventory that we'd go out and install. I actually have a video on how to build real estate signposts out of wood, and I built, I think, three hundred to four hundred posts myself.
I liked being in control of the logistics. I could just stop by Home Depot and say I need twenty more for tomorrow, and I would stay up at night painting posts, doing whatever to make that happen.
Some days I was doing a whole lot of shoots while running the sign installation business at the same time. We would take pictures, and then I would install the sign and install the lockbox. It definitely had its challenges, especially when you hit sprinkler lines and it put you behind schedule.
And there are pictures of me editing pictures with my one-year-old on my lap. So you just got to make it work.
At the beginning, I think I valued too much being apples to apples with competitors. I knew I was more passionate about the media, but to get people on board with us, we offered signs, lockboxes and photos.
A few years in—2015 or 2016, I think it was 2016—we stopped offering the signpost and lockbox install and gave up that portion of the business. I thought we would lose a lot of customers, and we lost fewer than I expected. It was kind of a short-term financial sacrifice for our longer-term vision of what we were trying to do.
The signs and lockboxes were causing most of the issues with our business while producing only a small share of our revenue. So it made sense to get rid of it, because then we were dealing with fewer problems, and we could focus on the more profitable side of our business, and be able to scale to other markets easier.
Now, we get asked a lot about signposts and lockboxes, so I know we're leaving some revenue on the table by not offering them. But it's a decision we've made, that we want to focus on media, because that's more what we're passionate about. "How can we make as much money as possible?" That's never been the conversation.
The first employee
I didn't start ListerPros to be a solo photographer my whole life. I started to make money, and what did I first do? I didn't go out and buy something super expensive. I spent the money on an employee, on bringing people on. You make the sacrifices for what you value.
Even while I was installing signs and doing lockboxes, I was thinking, how am I going to train somebody else to do all this? Luckily, I did find a good person who was my first employee, who was a hard worker, who was willing to do everything that I was doing at the time. That first hire has got to be very important, because they've got to maintain your level of service.
This was my first full year. I think it was eight or nine months in, August or something, that I hired my first full-time employee. I paid him a salary, because at that time I didn't know exactly how much business was coming in. I think he may have made more than me in that first year.
Our business has always been bootstrapped. Everything I was making, I put back into the business. When I could afford another employee, I brought him on, and I stayed committed.
Then October, November and December came around, and we experienced a dramatic decrease in business that I wasn't expecting. I was not prepared for the seasonality of this business. I made significantly less than my employee during the month of December.
For me, all I cared about was surviving. As long as I could keep our costs low, provide for my family and make our mortgage payment, I was fine with it. I do remember, at the end of that first year, man, I literally was taking L's.
You've got to stay committed to your word and make sure that you're paying your team members. I always stayed with the commitment that I made to my team members and to my customers, putting them first, versus my needs. When revenue is kind of low and you're just barely getting started, you have to be a hundred percent committed to go a certain way or not.
A few years later we grew into Tucson and then Las Vegas, which I'll come back to.
Not going back
That first year, I could easily have gone back into the banking industry. I wouldn't say those were tough times. It was just decisions that we had to make. We had to go down that path to help buy more time. I was hell-bent about not going back.
Do this next
Take one sheet of paper this week. Write down what you would still enjoy doing in five years, and under it, how many months you could live lean while the business gets going. When both lines are filled in, you have the decision in front of you.