Greg & Paige Mitts

One of my least favorite phrases has always been “It’s not my job.” Having owned my own company prior to entering the corporate world, I never understood how the ultimate success of any organization was not the job of every single employee. Now that I am back to being a small business owner, the question of “Is this my job?”takes on an even greater importance.

I visited the website of another Charleston, SC virtual tour provider to check out our competition. On their website, they have samples of their work and the tour that they chose to showcase their services has a panoramic spin with someone sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor working on the dishwasher. Seriously, of all the tours that you could choose to represent yourself, you couldn’t find one that didn’t have the dishwasher repair man sitting in the middle of the floor?

One of the challenges Realtors face is that their clients often don’t see their own clutter but as an outsider coming into a home for the first time, you’d think one would notice the dishwasher repair man.

At Vision Quest Virtual Tours, we work as a team. With close to 15 years as a professional photographer, Greg stays behind the camera and I go in front of him to prepare each room to showcase the property in the very best light. It is not unusual for him to have to wait on me to finish staging an area because our work represents both us, the Realtor or business owner and the property we are shooting.

Earlier this week, we were photographing a multimillion dollar beach house with panoramic ocean views. The only problem was that the views were completely clouded by dirt and pollen on the huge windows and the sun shining through just accentuated the grime. We were by ourselves at the house and had a few choices at that point. We could leave and tell them they needed to send someone to clean the windows. We could have photographed the living room with the dirty windows and told them, “Tough luck, we only shot what you gave us.” Or we could clean the windows to the best of our abilities and finish the tour.

I can assure you that it was absolutely NOT MY JOB to go out to our car and get newspaper and scrub the windows with Windex but that’s exactly what I did. It was not an easy job because after the first attempt, the windows were streaked and that looked as bad as the grime did. I am absolutely NOT saying that I clean every dirty window we encounter because if we did, we’d never get out of a house. In this case, I only cleaned the windows that affected the view and yes, it was frustrating to have to do it.

One of our marketing tag lines is “The Big Picture Makes a Big Difference” and in the big picture on this house, the best option for us to get the shots we needed was for me to clean the windows and allow Greg to capture the dynamite view. We had to weigh the cost...it was an hour round trip to get to this house and we had shot five other houses on the same island that day. This was one of our better clients who provides us a steady stream of income and is delightful to work with. Had I told them, they would have scheduled their housekeepers to come clean every window but that would have meant we had to reschedule and drive back later.

No, it’s not my job to move children’s toys or the dog bed and bowls or the plunger and toilet brush. I’s not my job to clean counters and declutter the coffee table. It’s not my job to hide the dirty dishes (and let me state emphatically for the record - I will hide the dishes but I am not washing them!!) It is not my job but IT IS OUR BUSINESSand since excellence is our standard sometimes, we suck it up and do these things anyway.

Vision Quest Virtual Tours provides high quality 360º virtual tours in Charleston, SC and the surrounding areas. To learn more about us or to schedule a tour visit us atwww.VisionQuestVirtualTours.com or give us a call at 843-410-4701.

Before we started Vision Quest Virtual Tours, I worked for a therapeutic boarding school that had been embroiled in a multi-million dollar lawsuit. The bulk of the lawsuit was thrown out by the judge and a small portion was settled but the mother who initiated the suit had a vendetta that lasted until the school eventually closed. The school survived the lawsuit but did not survive the onslaught of internet attacks that this mother led. A Google search for the school’s name yielded the school’s website first and second and our virtual tour as the third listing but the fourth through seventh items that are returned were negative attacks.

These vicious and somewhat baseless attacks were led by this woman but appeared to come from several disparate sources. Because they seemed to come from a variety of sources, they appeared to have merit in the eyes of the prospective parents I talked to. Since the third item that came up in the Google search was the virtual tour, I was able to separate the truth about the school from much of misinformation that was out there.

We get about 1,500 hits per month to our website but even more importantly than that, we drive those hits from dozens of different sources. My experience at the school made me realize the importance of variety in Search Engine Optimization. We blog regularly and submit our tours and blogs to over 40 different websites and we get lots of web exposure as a result. If you search “Vision Quest Virtual Tours” on Google, there are two full pages about us before anyone else even shows up. This is a big deal because our name Vision Quest and the term Virtual Tours are pretty generic terms that are used by many other companies.

The Google search for our name returns references from 16 different websites in the first three pages alone! Google juice comes from having lots of different backlinks to your website. The fact that someone searching for our name yields returns from not only our website but from 15 other sources on just the first three pages helps to boost our credibility. Many people who do a search for our company aren’t really looking for more information as much as they are for validation that we are who we say we are.

The very first Google result that refers to anything other than our company is on the third page and is titled “Co-Ed Naked Networking on Vision Quest Retreats”. While our web content is scintillating, I am pretty sure that Co-Ed Naked Networking would catch the eye of anyone who is searching the web in the same way that the negative posts caught the eye of people who searched for the school. When someone searches for our company, I want them to be thinking about virtual tours - not co-ed naked networking!

Vision Quest Virtual Tours photographs high definition 360º panoramic virtual tours all over the country. We specialize in the areas of healthcare, hospitality and education. We have photographed tours in 31 states but when we aren’t on the road, we split our time between Charleston, SC and Quincy, IL. Vision Quest Virtual Tours is owned by husband and wife team Greg and Paige Mitts and the only co-ed naked networking we do is with each other! To learn more or to schedule a tour, visit us online at www.VisionQuestVirtualTours.com or call us at 404-863-9769.

Before we started Vision Quest Virtual Tours, I worked for a therapeutic boarding school that had been embroiled in a multi-million dollar lawsuit. The bulk of the lawsuit was thrown out by the judge and a small portion was settled but the mother who initiated the suit had a vendetta that lasted until the school eventually closed. The school survived the lawsuit but did not survive the onslaught of internet attacks that this mother led. A Google search for the school’s name yielded the school’s website first and second and our virtual tour as the third listing but the fourth through seventh items that are returned were negative attacks.

These vicious and somewhat baseless attacks were led by this woman but appeared to come from several disparate sources. Because they seemed to come from a variety of sources, they appeared to have merit in the eyes of the prospective parents I talked to. Since the third item that came up in the Google search was the virtual tour, I was able to separate the truth about the school from much of misinformation that was out there.

We get about 1,500 hits per month to our website but even more importantly than that, we drive those hits from dozens of different sources. My experience at the school made me realize the importance of variety in Search Engine Optimization. We blog regularly and submit our tours and blogs to over 40 different websites and we get lots of web exposure as a result. If you search “Vision Quest Virtual Tours” on Google, there are two full pages about us before anyone else even shows up. This is a big deal because our name Vision Quest and the term Virtual Tours are pretty generic terms that are used by many other companies.

The Google search for our name returns references from 16 different websites in the first three pages alone! Google juice comes from having lots of different backlinks to your website. The fact that someone searching for our name yields returns from not only our website but from 15 other sources on just the first three pages helps to boost our credibility. Many people who do a search for our company aren’t really looking for more information as much as they are for validation that we are who we say we are.

The very first Google result that refers to anything other than our company is on the third page and is titled “Co-Ed Naked Networking on Vision Quest Retreats”. While our web content is scintillating, I am pretty sure that Co-Ed Naked Networking would catch the eye of anyone who is searching the web in the same way that the negative posts caught the eye of people who searched for the school. When someone searches for our company, I want them to be thinking about virtual tours - not co-ed naked networking!

Vision Quest Virtual Tours photographs high definition 360º panoramic virtual tours all over the country. We specialize in the areas of healthcare, hospitality and education. We have photographed tours in 31 states but when we aren’t on the road, we split our time between Charleston, SC and Quincy, IL. Vision Quest Virtual Tours is owned by husband and wife team Greg and Paige Mitts and the only co-ed naked networking we do is with each other! To learn more or to schedule a tour, visit us online at www.VisionQuestVirtualTours.com or call us at 404-863-9769.

The book The Traveler’s Gift by Andy Andrew is about Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success and I am reflecting on how these decisions apply to our virtual tour business. I wrote earlier about the first Decision - “The buck stops here. I am responsible for my past and my future.” The next three decisions are somewhat interrelated as they are all about our actions.

The second Decision of the book came from King Solomon and was “I will seek wisdom. I will be a servant to others”. It seems strange that the man who is considered the wisest man ever would advise the traveler to seek wisdom. But there is truth in the idea that the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Our virtual tour technology provider, RTV, Inc. has a national conference that we will be attending in May. I will be teaching other virtual tour providers about how to market their virtual tour business but the real reason we are attending is to learn from other virtual tour dealers about their best practices. Even after almost 15 years as a professional photographer, Greg is always open to learn better ways of improving his skills and systems as a photographer.

The third Decision of the book is “I am a person of action. I seize this moment. I choose now.” This decision was shared by a Civil War colonel at a critical time in the war. Given the choice to surrender or charge, the colonel gave the order to charge and in doing so changed the outcome of the war.

Quitting is often a temptation but as the colonel in the book said, “When I am faced with the choice of doing nothing or doing something, I will always choose to act.” Most of us will never face a physical battlefield but we must make this same decision on a daily basis in the battlefields of our minds. Armed with this simple philosophy, we can usually win our battle at least for the day.

I have found a way to work my way through a quagmire is often not to focus on the big picture but instead to break my actions down into manageable pieces. I have a goal of making at least 100 contacts every week and that number can be overwhelming so when faced with the temptation to take a break or quit before the end of the day, I force myself to make 5 more calls. Usually, the 5 turns into 10 and the 10 turns into 20 but by deciding to do SOMETHING, I am often able to get over the hump.

The fourth Decision, “I have a decided heart. My destiny is assured” was shared with the traveler by Christopher Columbus during his journey to find the New World. Armed with little other than a dream, Columbus was passionate about his vision of an undiscovered land. This passion allowed him to push on despite months of travel with no land in sight...and despite the fact that almost everyone thought he was crazy to try.

Having your own business requires just this sort of determination - especially the sales part. Like I said earlier, I know that when I am calling for a new area, I need to make about 100 calls in order to book two or three tours. What that means is that I am going to get no one on the phone or get told NO about 97 times a week. I got an email last week from a business that said they were interested in doing a tour but needed to pass for now. I exclaimed my disappointment and Greg said, “I think sometimes you think everybody that shows any interest is a Yes”.

I realized at that minute that there’s a reason that he’s the photographer and technical guy and I’m the salesman. He’s right...I absolutely believe that everybody that I talk to would benefit from what I am selling because before I call, I have researched their websites to see if a virtual tour would be a good addition to their marketing efforts. I know the value and quality of our tours so I am absolutely flabbergasted every time someone tells me “No”. If I did not think that way, I would become overwhelmed by the 97 No’s I get and I would want to quit making the calls.

But like Columbus, even though I may not see dry land, I have a clear vision of where I am going and I know without a doubt that if I put in the hours on the phones, the results and my destiny are guaranteed. There are many things you can’t control when you own your own business but you ARE in control of your actions and your attitude.

Vision Quest Virtual Tours provides high quality virtual tours to residential real estate, businesses and vacation rentals in Charleston, SC and all over the country. To learn more about us or to schedule a tour, visit www.VisionQuestVirtualTours.com.