How do you create customers for life? Diligence and craft

“Losing sucks, but if you can have some caring and respect for the person you’ve lost to, it’s a little inspirational — it makes you want to get back up again.” That’s the lesson Placester’s vice president of marketing, Seth Price, learned at an early age while going toe-to-toe (playfully!) with his uncle. On stage at Inman Connect San Francisco, he discussed how the skills he learned cooking and practicing martial arts apply to real estate — watch the video now:

• “If you practice a little bit every day, day in and day out, you actually get really good at it. You get better than most people in the world — if you don’t stop.”
• “We’re warriors. This is not for the faint of heart. When you look at your bank balance or your P&L and you are responsible for making sure that the lights stay on, this is not a small task.”
• “What’s the line that you won’t cross in your business? What’s the line that you will cross, that you will hang the banner high, and that’s who you are?”
• “Everyone around you, whether they’re as good as you or better than you or just a beginner, there’s an opportunity to learn something from each one of those people, and that learning will have you rocketship.”
• “We have this tendency to not want to share our best stuff. We have this tendency to look at others and have real envy … but if you look at them as an opportunity to learn, you can actually go faster.”
• “When you train in any discipline, it’s all about following through, never giving up on the dream to build your business.”
• (On cooking): “I was hooked on the discovery that I could create anything that I wanted, that I could experiment and I could watch the face of someone joyfully experiencing the thing that I created. That’s what we do in business.”
• “Once you figure out your recipe, then you can scale it, you can codify it, you can write it down and train someone and you can go to the next level.”
• “If we’ve got to be digital — we also have to be human, because that’s the thing that connects us to other people.”