The Reputation Snowball

“Big things have small beginnings.”

– T. E. Lawrence

Our son, Gus, recently joined my wife, Wendy, and me at Brandon Turner’s BetterLife REI Summit in Hawaii. He was shadowing us to complete a high school apprenticeship. And we brought him as an early celebration of his upcoming high school graduation.

Driving to the Haleakalā Crater afterward, we asked him to share his ahas from the event. Gus said that he liked the advice from a panel of multifamily investors on the importance of building your reputation and how to get started. Feras Moussa of Disrupt Capital had bottom-lined the conversation: “If all you can do is a duplex, do it well. Document the returns you deliver. And that deal becomes your resume for a bigger deal. And that next deal becomes your resume for your next….”

“It’s like a ‘reputation snowball,’” Gus shared. “Start where you are. Do well. And build on that success.”

I can’t think of a better aha for a young person. And it’s a good reminder to us all.

In survey after survey, sellers are most likely to cite reputation (or honesty) as the most important factor in choosing an agent. Reputation matters when assets are at stake. When you’re building a business, you’re always starting something new. And that new service or product always benefits from everything you’ve done before. Start where you are, do a good job, and document the value you create.

Sociologists Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman coined the “Matthew Effect” to describe the tendency for people to accumulate success in proportion to past success. Merton and Zuckerman were studying credit in scientific papers. “Eminent scientists get disproportionately great credit for their contributions to science while relatively unknown ones tend to get disproportionately little for their occasionally comparable contributions.” The name refers to “The Parable of the Talents” (Matthew 25:14–30). In the parable, servants who had been good stewards of the talents they had been given, were given more.

This is how the “rich get richer” financially, socially, and reputationally. With gravity, objects with greater mass exert more attraction. Likewise, present success attracts future success.

It follows that the more visible your success, the greater its snowball effect. So get over your humble self and request a review. Get the testimonial. Don’t count on word-of-mouth. Frame these accolades on your office wall, plaster them on billboards, and slather them on social! It’s not bragging. It’s business building.

One question to ponder in your thinking time: Where have I failed to trumpet my success?

Co-author of The One Thing & The Millionaire Real Estate Agent ​