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From Printing to Proptech: 22 Years of Entrepreneurial Grit with Mark Weithorn
Introduction
Today, I’ve got a gentleman who has a 21 year run of owning his own business. It’s a it’s a founder creation story. And he’s actually now helping others learn how to properly start their businesses. His name is Mark Weithorn. Mark, welcome to the show.
Great. Thank you for having me.
Yeah. Give us a quick summary of what your company is about and what what you. Well, we’ll get in there. What you did to set it up. Let’s talk about what it’s about.
Meet Mark Weithorn and DPI Showcase Websites
Sure. Thank you. So I’m the founder and CEO of DPI showcase websites. We’re now it’s 22 years. April was 22 years. It’s man and man. Time flies. But we create websites for realtors and brokers across the United States and Canada. And these websites are linked to the various sources so people can search for properties. And it has a built in CRM client management system and a whole bunch of other features.
Very nice. You know, I just thinking about the 22 year track record and the notion that you are a, a kind of a technology company. You’ve seen some big changes in technology and the whole idea of of web hosting and web development over that 22 year period.
Navigating Technology Change: Web3, AI, and Strategic Decisions
Yeah. My my favorite saying is the only constant is change. And, you know, you got to keep up with technology. And then sometimes you have these like little distractions, diversions. And you go, wait a minute, is that real? Like the whole blockchain Web3. That was like three years ago. We analyzed that and we said, all right, we’re going to sidestep that. But now we’re getting into AI because that’s that’s real and that’s relevant. And that has a lot of useful purposes for people. So the whole trick is to to constantly update what you do.
Right? Right. And that’s no small task because, you know, getting the information you need, the knowledge you need to evaluate. And in my mind you set a critical thing there on the on the Web3.
You reviewed it, you analyzed it and you sidestepped it. That’s a strategic decision. And I’m guessing there’s not a lot of anxiety about having done that. You’re maybe happy you did.
Yeah. You know, some larger corporations than myself. They spent millions of dollars investigating it and researching it. And then they they came up with the solution or the realization that, yeah, this wasn’t for them. Web two, which is, you know, basically you have your website on a server, it’s secured and and it was working fine for them. They have no problem. They didn’t need to be on some some blockchain all over the world. It just didn’t make sense.
Right. Well, there is such a vast majority of owner operators that are essentially local to their market, and their footprint is only so big. And I would imagine in the real estate brokerage and realtor world, that’s very true. I mean, you might have if you’re a broker, you might have branch offices in some major cities, but still on a relative basis globally, your footprints kind of small.
The Real Estate Industry Landscape
So, you know, being a broker is is similar to other corporations in this country. You know, the vast majority of companies in this country are small businesses and it’s the same thing in real estate. There’s been some consolidation compass. They were on a 5 or 8 year journey to purchase a lot of independent brokerages, and they did. And then they just purchased a company called anywhere, which had a whole bunch of other brand names, and they ended up with about a quarter of the real estate agents across the country. So they’re they’re now the big behemoth. Yeah. But then you still have people who who don’t want to be part of that big segment of my my clients are broker owners that have no agents under them, and they do their own thing and they’re as happy as can be. And then I have some companies, the brokerages I work with that have 100 agents, 200 agents, and it’s manageable for them. And that’s okay. And then of course, we work with regular realtors.
The the industry used to be controlled by the brokers. That was about 15, 20 years ago. And then it went topsy turvy. There were too many brokers. It got diluted. It became very easy to become a broker. You take a course, you take a test. Shazam! You’re a broker. So now they’re all fighting for agents, and now the agents are really controlling the industry. They’re not beholden to a broker. They can, you know, switch brokers at any given moment. And so I have a lot of realtors who are smart. They know how to run their own business. And, you know, they know how to bring in business and do real estate.
Well, and I’m certainly aware of some folks, both in my own kind of personal circle here locally, realtors that I’ve worked with personally and that I’ve known through other four other reasons. And you know, they are. They’re part of a brokerage agency. But the brokerage was in kind of intentionally setting them up to succeed independently.
You know, they’re I think of the name Keller Williams as an example. You know, their training is is huge and very effective. And for people who decide to go that direction, they find it invaluable. And pretty soon they’re pretty strong independence on on the knowledge base they’re able to develop. And my understanding, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but Keller is kind of happy to let them go, you know, and then keep running.
And it’s it’s a numbers game for a lot of these large brokers. Yeah. 85% of all realtors sell one or less house a year. They’re part timers. For example, I got off the phone today with a gentleman from Gainesville, Florida, home of the the Gators, University of Florida, and he’s semi-retired. And he just wants to do like, you know, four deals a year and it just supplements his life. And he’s as happy as can be. Yeah. So it’s a numbers game for the brokers. They know. They know how many agents will produce how many won’t produce.
And you know they’re okay with that. They have their formulas and it works. I spoke to one woman who’s took over for her dad, who started the brokerage about 20 years ago, and they have 1800 agents, and they have a formula and it works for them. Yeah, yeah.
I’m glad you mentioned that number. I was going to ask you about that. I’ve again, with my familiarity in the industry, I’ve always heard that number ranging anywhere from 85 to even 90% Of realtors or low volume producers, if at all they get the license and then they. Maybe spend six months to nine months slogging through the effort and realize, nah, I don’t want to do this or. Or they they do hit a stride and they say, I can live with four deals a year. You know, that’s that’s okay for me. So let’s let’s shift focus a little bit. Mark. Let’s, let’s talk about your own journey. You bootstrapped your company. So what were you doing before you decided to create DPI?
Mark’s Entrepreneurial Journey: From Ad Agency to Tech Founder
Sure.
So I’m a marketing person. That’s my background. You asked me to write a line of code. If my life depended on it, forget it. I couldn’t do it. I was I was on with my programmers this morning and I, they they popped up a screen of code and I was like, oh my God, don’t show me that. so I’m a marketing person, and I owned an ad agency, and we were doing collateral Materials, you know, brochures and things like that, helping product development. You know, if you were manufacturer, you came to us, you needed a niche or you needed packaging or things like that. We did that. And then we opened a digital printing company, DPI Digital Printers International, because the technology changed in printing and we thought that was the way to go, and we ended up doing a lot of printing for realtors. It was a nice niche because they were sending out postcards. And then one day at a trade show in Atlanta, I ran into this young guy.
He walks up to my booth and he says, I’ve got this program for realtors, your website program, you want to help me market it? And I left my salesman in the booth, and the two of us sat down at a table and we struck up a deal. And then we spent six months tearing it apart because he was a programmer and I was marketing. And that was the the start of it. He ended up like most programs do. He ended up going in a different direction. They always have new things they’re working on. And I have been, you know, creating and pushing this and succeeding for over 20 years.
So from a headcount standpoint, how big is your company now?
So we have thousands of clients all across the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. And we’re doing all right. You know, it’s I have a team in Miami, web designers and customer support. I I’m on retainer with a large programming firm in Kolkata, India, where I have a team there of full time programmers just working on my account.
Building AI Products and Embracing Innovation
And we we come up with some amazing things, like, right now we’re working on AI products and we’re starting to create all these, they call them agents, you know, agents, tools to automate things. And it’s fun. I’m like, really having a blast. You know, just being creative. I get on the phone or I get on on teams, Microsoft Teams with my programmers, and I say, I have an idea. Can we do this? And they’re like, yeah, sure, no problem. For example, we’re in the middle of creating our own chatbot. The problem with chatbots is they can turn people off. You know you want to go and you got a problem with your cable company. You know you want to eventually talk to a person, but they’ll have a chatbot that’ll keep you on there for 15 minutes. And you just want to like reach out and strangle them. So you have to be careful how you using it. And what we’re doing is we’re doing this in a, in a constructive way that limits the exposure to the chatbot but collects the data.
Collects the lead. Sends them over to a calendar. And it’s palatable for the consumer knowing that they only spend two minutes doing this. And I got my information across, and. And I expect this realtor to get back to me and call me. So it’s a lot of fun creating these products.
Avoiding Bright Shiny Object Syndrome
Yeah. Well, it is a brave new world, and I do for my own clients. In my leader coaching business, there’s AI is always in the discussion. I probably spent half of my sessions yesterday talking about AI strategies. And as a leader, how should I be thinking about AI? And and you’re absolutely right. There’s so many opportunities out there. In my mind, the biggest challenge is most entrepreneurs, independent business people suffer the bright shiny object syndrome. They, you know, they they see a thing and they go chase it and run after it. And it may work or it may not, but even if it is working, they may jump on the next shiny thing that shows up.
And from an entrepreneurial standpoint, there’s a real argument to be made for being careful and strategic about those initiatives that you jump into, and you don’t want to be pinging from one thing to the next and burning the clutch on your team. If you have a team because they’re constantly being asked to shift and pivot. That gets very frustrating for teams that might be working for people. So I think AI is is a prime example of the opportunity to be overwhelmed by the bright shiny object syndrome. And to me, the best recommendation is explore it, learn about it, and get curious. Talk to people, but then decide on a specific initiative that can help your business and hang with it, get it done, and then you can move on to the next one if if there is one to be found.
Sure. You know, I go to these tech conferences and they have these tech throw downs where they put, you know, like 3 or 4 judges on a stage, and then they have ten different startups come up there and present their products.
And usually about 80% of these, I just scratch my head and I said, where do they come up with these ideas? I mean, did they do any market research to see if this is like really viable and somehow they get, you know, funding for it too, which is really scratching my head there because the people giving out the money didn’t they do their research?
Yeah.
So I, I’m a firm believer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And, you know, the bottom rung when it comes to people, you know, it’s like, you know, food. You know, shelter. Things like that. And when it comes to business, the bottom rung, there are some basic needs. You need a cell phone. You need business cards. You need a website. So basic things like that. The the further higher up you go on the on the chart, the less dollars are available. Disposable dollars. So for example a realtor, they’ll have the $69 a month to pay me for the website because, you know, that’s a necessity.
But if there’s some add on or something like that, then that’s becomes, you know, discretionary as to whether or not they’re willing to spend the money on that. So you really need to do your research. You need to make sure that you have a need and then you need to pursue it.
The Power of Communication and Human Connection in Sales
You know, I don’t want to digress, but as you were describing, you know, the startup of a realtor operation. I’m reminded the very first jury trial that I was asked to do my jury duty was a civil suit between a realtor and his phone company, the the phone company. This was back in the day, really, to be honest. Pre-sell prevalence. So if you were a business owner, you contracted with a telecom provider to give you the the phone instruments, the desk, phones, maybe a switchboard, kind of and maybe that was more technology based. But you had that whole package being by some independent provider. Well, in this case, the provider was suing the realtor for non-payment on the contract.
The realtor turned around and countersued because they said your phone system didn’t work, and it drove me out of business. As a realtor, I have to have my phones, and the phones never worked. And they and customers just blew me off. And it was a it was a really painful argument that went on and on for a couple of days. And then it finally got to the jury, and the judge made a real clear point. His instruction to us was a point of law called unconscionable contract. And he said, your challenge is to determine whether this particular contract was unconscionable. Well, we got in the jury room and the jury had no idea what that meant and what that was about. And half the guys on the jury were going a contract, a contract, you know, if you if you sign it and you violate it, you, you pay the penalty, blah, blah, blah. Well, anyway, long story short, we split the baby. And because it was a suit countersuit, we awarded one side something like 250,000 and we awarded the other side $250,001.
Ha, ha.
we brought that out to the judge, and he looked at it. He looked at us, and he looked at it again, and he said, he goes, okay, I’m going to read this. And he put it out there. And the attorneys just erupted. Their brains just fried it. And and, you know, the the jury has ruled and and, you know, this is over. And, you know, I forget which way it went. I think the I think the phone company had to pay the realtor a dollar is what it amounted to. And of course, the attorneys I don’t know what their deals were, but they weren’t going to get paid near the money they were hoping for. So, anyway, I digress. That was. But I think in the in the realty world, you know, having the right communication, having the right connection and being customer friendly, I think is huge. Anybody I talk to in my own circle when they start thinking about buying or selling a home, you know, they’ll.
They’ll always have a favorite realtor and they’ll tell you why. And it’s not always about the property you find. It’s it’s about their service and their connection and their support.
So, you know, I teach marketing classes at the Miami Association of Realtors. I’ve been doing this for about 30 years, and one of my favorite classes, I wrote it, I turned it into a book, too. It’s called surviving the first six months as a real estate agent. And I get all these newbies who come in there who, you know, they’re all excited. You know, they took the course, they passed and they’re like, wow, I’m a realtor. I’m going to go like bake brownies or bake, make cookies and popcorn and sell homes. And, you know, I teach them about how to set up their business because this is now a business. And then I also talk to them about communication skills. I say. Yeah. Technology has changed and it’s always going to change. But sales are two people talking to one another.
That doesn’t change. Like I asked the question. All right. It’s someone’s birthday. What do you do? And invariably I’ll get someone will go, well, you send him a text message and I go wrong. I said, you pick up the phone and you call them. You should have their information in your CRM, your client management system. Then you have the name and the spouse and the kids and the pets and all the other stuff. And you talk to them. You reconnect. You know, text messaging is, you know, hey, confirming our appointment, things like that. But sales are still people communicating with people.
You know, I talk about that from a leadership standpoint as well. It’s one thing. And often in our discussions, People will come to me and say, well, you know, I’m feeling the pinch. I don’t communicate well as a leader, and I challenge them with the idea of it’s not just communication as in content and structure, but it’s about the ability to connect with that person.
And, you know, is your communication making a connection or are you just trying to share information? And that’s a significant difference that needs to be thought about. And to your point, sometimes the ability to connect has nothing to do with the transaction that’s going on or the property that’s in scope for consideration. It’s making those real connections. Was it I think it was Zig Ziglar that said, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
I’m one of my favorite books is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Yeah, yeah. Written in the 1930s. And it’s still relevant today.
Right?
I tell realtors, I say the first 5 or 10 minutes of talking to a new client, you’re not talking business. You’re making a connection.
Now. Where are you from? That’s amazing. I always wanted to go visit that place, you know. Tell me about your kids. What are you. Well, my kids, you know, talk to people, make a friend.
Then you talk business.
Well, and I think particularly in the in the residential real estate realm, getting to know that you start to get you quickly, start to get a picture of what kind of property, if they’re in the buying market, what kind of property may suit their need better. And you you can connect the dots between learning something about the family, their heritage, their status and and by status I don’t mean wealth, but I mean, what situation are they in? Are the kids preschool or are they high school, you know, and what kind of things are you going to be dealing with? And a lot of that information does help inform your ability to provide a better service.
And there’s a lot of complexities to in the real estate arena, you have to go through inspections and then there’s financing and there’s always some little, you know, dip in the road or pothole that you have to overcome. And if your client trusts you to negotiate all that for them, you’ll do fine.
And then two thirds of the business is through referrals. So if you do well with one person, just think of how many friends and family they’re going to send you.
A Story About Staying Connected: The Referral Machine
Yeah, definitely a referral base. We have a lady in our area here and about 25 years ago, maybe a little longer, she lost her husband, sudden death.
Health related, and she was just kind of on her own. She had. I mean, no disrespect, but to be specific about it, she was kind of the Suzy Homemaker focused on, you know, raising the kids and not really thinking about work. And there she was all on her own, and she chose to go the real estate route and got her training and turned out to be a a force. I mean, she she quickly climbed the ladder and dominated the the local area here and was probably one of the top in the top three for sure year over year. I mean, just regionally among all realtors that had signs out, her sign was everywhere all the time.
And and it’s because, number one, she already knew a lot of the community and she leveraged that and was a great connector and it was not uncommon to get invited to a Christmas party. And there she was. You know, she was she was on the invite list of everybody’s Christmas cards and Christmas party and and she showed up because that’s how she perpetuated her business. She invested the time and effort to reconnect with people that she had, maybe once, you know, worked with. So she didn’t let him go cold on the vine. She kept him warm and kept connected.
Well, she had a deed she had to provide for her family, and that’s important. You know, you have to you know, you have to eat. That gives you incentive to go out there and hustle. And if you’re good, if you’re good at it, you know, you the sky’s the limit in the real estate industry. you have to be willing to put yourself out there. You have to be willing to talk to people you don’t know, which is hard for some people.
You have to be willing to answer your phones and, you know, just and be responsible and be there when someone needs you. And if you do all that, people will flock around you. It’s as simple as that.
Mindset Shifts: The Pivots That Keep a Business Alive
Well, Mark, I want to go back to your entrepreneurial journey a little bit. I would imagine over a 22 year period. You’ve had probably several opportunities to hear and see things going on around you, and you wake up one morning and look in the mirror and ask yourself the question, what do I need to be doing differently to keep this thing going and help it continue and and thrive? Can you share with us some of those moments? What were the pivots? And in the sort of the mindset shifts you had to make along the way?
It’s a continual thing. You know, I wake up every day and I say to myself, okay, what do I need to do today? And I’m constantly making those changes in order to stay relevant. One lesson I had, go away.
The Wayback machine. Okay. I had an ad agency. We were doing retail advertising. I was doing fine. And then we went into a recession. And at that point, you know, my first son was born. I have two boys. My first son was born. He was about a year and a half. And I said, all right, I need to fold up my tent and go work at another ad agency. And I got a job at an ad agency, and this guy was was a dinosaur. he just refused to modernize, and he just kept making bad decisions after bad decisions. for example, desktop publishing was coming out, and I was already doing it when I had my own ad agency. And he he had a typesetting machine that he was paying off and he refused. I said to him, I just need $500 to upgrade one of our computers and get us into desktop publishing so we can start tooling around with it. And he refused to do it. And his product suffer.
And your product in in advertising is your creative. If your creative is good, you get the rewards of having to place all the media and stuff like that. And so his product suffered and 1st October he lost two clients which represented over 50% of his business. The next thing you know, I was on the street. So the lesson learned there was that I couldn’t rely on someone else for my livelihood. I needed to to stand up and do it on my own. And this way, if I made a decision that was bad, I could live with that. And I’ll just, you know, move on and just, you know, say, okay, that didn’t work and just move on. that’s that’s how you survive in business is you sit down, you come up with a plan, and then you just motivate yourself to succeed.
The Founder Trap: Delegation, Systems, and Letting Go
I love it. And I frequently talk about the challenge for many entrepreneurs that I’ve come to know over the years. And I saw this first in my banking days, that owner founders might have had a great idea, and it got legs and got traction and started getting market share.
And then there was a need to expand the business with people and sometimes systems and facilities and equipment. But the owners still had that founder mindset of needed to touch everything, control everything, and not willing to delegate or relinquish authority for certain things, and you run out of time in the day if the if the business grows enough. And I called it the paradox of success, if you’re if you’re generating good, healthy revenue, if the business is going to outgrow your capacity to touch everything and it if you insist on being the one, it becomes sort of that pinch in the hourglass, all the sand has to flow through you and across your desk. It’s going to back up and it’s going to slow down, and it’s going to hinder the the overall long term growth of the business. So that’s inevitably one of the first major mindset shifts people need to make is to say, wait a minute. This thing is doing what I always wanted it to do and do. I have people I can trust that I can share Either knowledge or control with, so that we keep growing and keep building and keep expanding.
One book I read, which is really good. It was called Built to Last and it was talking about, you know, how to take your small company and make it larger. And the next thing you know, they’re talking about McDonald’s. And I’m going, wait a minute. I’m a small company. What do I have to do with McDonald’s? Well, the way they grew is they had systems and procedures in place. So when they handed it off to someone to do a task, they knew exactly what to do. And you’re able to replicate and keep quality and consistency and things like that. Me, I, I’m an amazing delegator. I have a great team behind me. And they all know their tests and they all know, you know, our quality and our values and how you treat clients. I get, you know, a lot of realtors who come to me from some of my competitors. And one of the biggest complaints is there’s no one to talk to. you know, if you need some something, there’s no one, you know, to pick up the phone and talk to him.
big companies like Facebook. And now I understand they’re not charging for their product, but they have no customer service. So if you have a problem and and then people have become to rely on Facebook for business because social media is extremely important. But now you have no customer support. so you need to you need to have procedures in place. You need to trust the people around you. And that’s going to allow you to grow. We started as a regional company. We were just in Florida and Georgia, and now we have clients all over the United States and Canada and Puerto Rico. And it’s because we have procedures in place of how to create the websites. How to service the clients. The clients know how to communicate with the web, designers and customer support and things like that. And you know it. I go some weekends and no one’s contacting me over the weekends with problems. You know, like I had a problem last weekend. One realtor forgot to renew her domain name with GoDaddy. You know, that was it.
If if you’re organized and you trust your people, you can grow.
Always Keep an Eye on the Exit
Then there’s the exit strategy. You always have to keep your eye on the exit strategy, because one day time will catch up with you and you’ll say, you know what? I’ve had enough. And you have to be able to have something that’s sellable.
When I talk to people about is yes, I number one, I agree totally with you. There needs to be an exit strategy. So the question is what do you believe you want to accomplish in that exit? Do you truly want to have a saleable asset that can sustain without you being there? That’s the first huge question. And if you haven’t built it to do that, you don’t have a saleable asset and it doesn’t matter who might buy it. They can’t immediately duplicate or replicate your capacity. So the business is going to suffer. And when I’m working with clients on the buy side, doing due diligence on companies, they might want to think about buying.
That’s the first big question. How big a hand does the owner founder have in the day to day operation? And if it’s truthfully in my mind and this is a hard goal to meet. If it if it’s more than about 10% of physical operation, you. You got a question mark there?
And if the owner founder hasn’t positioned themselves to maintain sort of that visionary role of looking at big picture strategies and opportunities, if they’re instead focused on day to day execution and delivery, it’s it’s going to be a hard one to sell and exit. And therefore, as the owner of founder who might want to exit, you might have to just do all your work proactively along the way, saving money and investing and building your own personal wealth. Because the day you want to exit, you’re just going to have to shut the door and you can’t do much else.
The question becomes, you know, like is, is this Mark’s company or is this DP you know, I am constantly.
I keep that in mind because one day someone may say to me, hey, Mark, you know, we like your technology. we need to integrate it into what we’re doing. do you want to sell? And I want to be able to have a clean, a clean sale so they don’t have to worry that they’re going to have to, like, you know, keep me on for five years.
Closing Thoughts
Good. Very wise advice. Well, Mark, we’re about up on time for today. And I really appreciate you sitting in and sharing. Tell people the best way to get in touch with you.
Sure. You can just go to my website d I showcase com dp showcase com. My contact information is there. And basically you know you can see what we do and you can you can contact me or call me. I always answer my phone. Except if I’m on a podcast with you, then yeah, that’s where I’m at.
Well, as always, folks, we’re going to have Mark’s information in our show notes.
And so feel free to hop down there and smash any of his buttons to get in touch. I do like to remind you, we have a video version of this show on YouTube channel by the same name, Leadership Powered by Common Sense. Please check out our archives and drop us a note and let us know if you’ve got an idea or a comment about anything that’s been said. We’d love to hear from you. I think that’s it for today. I’m going to wrap up. Say goodbye. Go out there. Make it a great day.
Meet Our Guest
Mark Weithorn is the owner of DPI Showcase, a company that creates IDX based web sites for Realtors in the South Florida area. In addition Mark has been teaching marketing classes for Realtors for the past 12 years at the Miami Association of Realtors.
Topics for these classes include Finding Buyers On The Internet, Farming For Listings, Niche Marketing, and Building and Expanding Your Business.
Email markw@dpi-miami.com
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