120: The Business of Luxury Estate Sales – Michael Fry of Brown Button

Background on Michael Fry of Brown Button:

Michael H. Fry is the Co-Founder and CEO at Brown Button Estate Sales. He describes himself as a builder of new things and he cares about people in the process. Michael’s specialties include Estate Sales, Online Sales, Online Auctions, Residential Property Management, Real Estate Investing & Rehabbing, Business Start Ups, and Franchising.

Brown Button is a member of the Leawood Chamber of Commerce and is accredited with the Certified Appraisers Guild of America (CAGA). Brown Button founders were presenters at the 2014 & 2015 National Estate Sales Conference and a 2016 Kansas Bar Association educational presenter. Brown Button is also a 2017 winner of the Kansas City’s 25 Under 25 Awards, ranked number nine on Ingram Magazine’s 2017 Corporate Report 100, and listed as number 1,254 on the 2017 Inc. 500|5000 list of fastest growing private companies in the United States.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[2:05] Michael Fry is the co-founder and CEO of Brown Button and Circle Auctions. Their clients are mostly high net worth individuals who plan to move or downsize and want to sell all their personal properties.
[4:16] Michael’s company is included in the Inc 5,000 List and their revenue for 2018 was short of $3 million.
[6:55] Michael talks a little bit about his family and how he got that entrepreneurial spirit at an early age.
[11:28] Michael had a business mentor who was into the real estate business.
[12:45] Even though he was not able to get a degree at school, Michael succeeded because he was a voracious reader and a lifelong learner.
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[17:20] He learned so many things during his first property management company. He sold the company a week before the market crashed in 2008.
[20:54] Michael explains why he and his wife decided to sell the property management company.
[24:32] Michael talks about the process of selling his property management company. He did not go through the book valuation during the selling process.
[28:35] After selling the company, he worked for the new owner for a couple of months during the transition period. He also traveled with his wife and focused more on their personal lives.
[31:26] Michael gave an important advice on how to become an effective leader of a company.
[33:01] Michael started a new company called Flexi Dent, which involves hale damage repair. It was a good business but he picked the wrong business partner.
[42:07] Michael gave some important tips when dealing with business partners. He advises against having a 50-50 partnership.
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[50:12] After visiting an estate sale, Michael got the idea for his third business venture.
[54:28] Michael shares some interesting insights about starting a business. He makes a comparison between starting a business and farming.
[57:55] In the first three years of Brown Button Estate Sale, Michael almost closed the business twice. It was a struggle for them during the first few years of this business.
[1:07:24] For his last advise, Michael emphasizes on the importance of caring for your people.

Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖 📚 Favorite Book(s)? Traction by Gino Wickham, Small Giants by Bo Burlingham, The 80/20 Manager by Richard Koch, EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey, Purple Cow by Seth Godin
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? AirPods – I use them all the time-I was able to read/listen to 62 books last year, many of them on Audible.
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Google Drive & Basecamp -we have checklists for all of our projects. Any team member can jump into any project anytime and know where we are and what they should do.
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? (1) Money -we had a VC offer this last year but they wanted too much control. (2) Getting a LMS set up (Learning Management Software)- we are about to go multi-market and we need to get all of our manuals and videos on a training platform so that we can on-board new team members quickly and efficiently.

Key Point from the Interview:

“The more resourceful you are, and the more initiative you take, the more money you get paid.”

Resources Mentioned:

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