The Masthead

Bring on the magic! Not the smoke and mirrors of illusion, but the real results of proven “outside the box” thinking and innovation – applied to the way you perceive the economy – to opportunities for financing – to technology and online marketing strategies – to Industry-media relationships – to recreating our Industry image – to sales-customer relationships – i.e., to every aspect of the Manufactured Housing Industry.

Our Editor L.A. ‘Tony’ Kovach is presenting at the 19th Annual International Networking Roundtable in Phoenix Sept 15-17! His subject: “How to Get 150 Inbound Sales Calls a Week at your Location!” This is all part of the Manufacturing Magic made possible through eye-opening, mind-expanding insights on how to grow YOUR business, and thereby grow THE INDUSTRY! Check out Tony’s Blogs for more information.

Celebrate our 12th MHMSM.com Issue – one whole year of passionate pro-Industry service designed for win-win outcomes – through Innovation – Information – Inspiration for Industry Professionals like YOU – presented through DAILY news (News at Noon podcasts), WEEKLY (or MULTIPLE TIMES WEEKLY) Blogs and Industry In Focus reports, plus MONTHLY Feature Articles in podcast and written form, and TIME-SENSITIVE Calls to Action to help YOU get the results you want!

NOTE: There is still one Call to Action on the table:

• By September 30: LET’S UTILIZE SOME AVAILABLE MONEY for Retailers! YOUR assistance is needed to contact members of Congress and ask them to support the Dealer Floor Plan Program Extension and Improvement Act of 2010. This can benefit retailers, communities and manufacturing.

As we gear up for our First Birthday with the October Issue (Vol. 2, No 1), we want to hear from YOU:

1. What topics, issues or challenges are important to YOU that you want us to address?
2. What viewpoints or comments do YOU WANT TO MAKE to encourage and contribute to the Manufactured Housing Revolution? Think of writing a Feature Article, an Industry Voices Guest Blog – or easiest of all, join the conversation by posting, tweeting, calling or emailing your responses to what’s posted on the website. Increase your SEO; get compliments and feedback! Be part of the Revolution!

Easy emails to remember: Publisher/Editor L.A. ‘Tony’ Kovach tony@MHMSM.com; IT Manager Bob Stovall bob@MHMSM.com; Industry In Focus Reporter Eric Miller eric@MHMSM.com; Associate Editor Catherine Frenzel catherine@MHMSM.com and News at Noon and Article Podcasts Erin Patla erin@MHMSM.com

Right now, Get More & Better Results! thanks to the galaxy of Feature Article contributors from A-Z – a spectacular selection of Industry Pros sharing vision, “possibility thinking” and answers to help YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS thrive and prosper. Check out the dozens of Feature Articles this month:

Featured Articles
and Reports for Vol. 1 No.12

Let’s shake things up for this 12th Issue and reverse the lineup of “All the Best” Top-Talent professionals from Z for Ziglar to A for Adams! Here’s your big September line up…

Zig Ziglar – Motivation & Inspiration
• Zig On…Staying Up, Up, Up in a Down, Down, Down World – Part 1. You get back what you send out.

Don Westphal – MH Community Planning
• Land/lease Communities – Many Possibilities. Five scenarios for land/lease community layouts with terrain flexibility

Heather Vela – MH Business Practice
• Fostering a Positive Attitude in the MH Workplace. Multiple benefits include increased sales!

Bob Stovall – Online Marketing
• Online Marketing 1-2-3, Part 3 – Social Networking. Getting your company involved in Social Networking provides access to new customers and vital feedback about your products and services.

Dave Shanklin – MH Industry Financing
• Six Major Recent Changes in MH Chattel Finance Guidelines that You Need to Know. Stunning drops, disallowances, requirements and considerations are Good News-Bad News!

Kenneth Rishel – MH Industry Finance Commentary
• Lender’s Guide to Hispanic Marketing. How to tap into the $1 trillion+ purchasing power of this market by 2020 and $2.5-$3.6 trillion by 2050

Dan Rinzema – Online Marketing
• Turn Internet Leads into Sales! What if you used these 5 Tips to improve your closings?

George Porter – MH Evolution and Finance
• Why Do We Need Two Foundations? Lenders are making structural decisions that result in twice the work and many more problems!

Shawn Mullins – Energy-efficient Manufactured Housing
• Flaunt It If You’ve Got It! How might homebuyer’s priorities change if we were able to demonstrate the dollar-by-dollar payback of energy-efficient manufactured homes?

Mike Moore – Sales
• What Are You Waiting For? We have become so distracted by new sales that we forgot the best way to get more sales is to make customers.

Eric Miller – MH Industry Reporting
• A Cup of Coffee with…Joe Kelly. “A good plan (violently executed) today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

Eric Miller – MH Industry Reporting
• A Cup of Coffee with…JD Harper. Financing is the tide that raises all boats in this industry; a unified voice is needed.

Greg McClanahan – Soft Skills and Personal Development
• Stop Selling Houses – Start Helping People. Every genuinely successful professional embodies the point of this story.

L.A. ‘Tony’ Kovach – MH Industry Reporting
• Reality Checks – Inspirational Dissatisfaction. What is the key to change what can be changed?

Susan Knowles – MH Community Case in Point
• Indian Creek-A Case Study of Companies Working Together. Who wins when investment and technology companies work together with community residents?

Chrissy Jackson – Land Lease Community Management
• Upgrading Your Community – Part V. How to keep your residents happy and personally engaged during the disruption caused by your community upgrade program

Mike Hourigan – MH Business Practice
• When you think about it: It Is the Best and Worst of Times. Find how attitude, tenacity and creativity can turn the worst into the best!

Nadeen Green – Legal, Fair Housing
• 10 Tips on Parking as Reasonable Accommodation. What you don’t know can hurt you!

Sue Frost – Green, Energy-efficient Manufactured Homes
• Greenwise legislation ushers in the “Green Revolution”. Why is the manufactured housing industry well-positioned to increase market share?

Suzanne Felber – Trend Tracking
• How Dramatic Are Your Manufactured Model Homes? Three Tips for making your model homes irresistible.

Tim Connor – Sales
• Effective Cold Calling in a Changing World. Do you know the do’s and don’ts of getting hot results from your cold calls?

Tim Connor – Management
• Why Successful Executives in the Manufactured Housing Industry use Personal Coaches to Grow their Business. “You can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it.”

Chad Carr – Management
• E-mail marketing – What You Need to Know. A false start carries serious consequences, so learn from my mistakes.

George F. Allen – MH Industry Commentary
• Best Kept Affordable Housing Secret in the US! Why HUD Code Manufactured Housing & Landlease (nee manufactured home) Communities Continue to be ‘Best Kept Affordable Housing Secret’

Joe Adams – Marketing
• The Greatest Opportunity in Marketing Today! 6 Tips and more to make it your own

Part 1. Technology delivers “Real-Results Testimonials!”

Most of us just love technology. I certainly enjoy its many benefits. One fun little item I am toying with for my INR presentation in Phoenix next week is letting some people speak – via technology – to those attending. These candid “in their own words” statements about our marketing process of generating more traffic than they ever dreamed possible could say more in 3 minutes than most of the rest of the hour! You can hear their surprise, feel and sense their excitement. Pros like you, happy about “Getting Results!”

Still not sure, but might do these techy testimonials as part of my “How to Get 150 Inbound Sales Calls a Week at your Location!” presentation in Phoenix! If you can, please come; there will be some eye-opening, mind-expanding insights on how to grow YOUR business, and thereby grow the Industry!

Plus tons of other super presentations; see my last weekend blog post for more details and also how to book your seat(s).

Part 2. An upcoming treat!

Can’t say more just yet, but thousands have already enjoyed it, and I think many of you will, too. Please stay tuned…

Part 3. Industry News you can use!

In sales, you or your best people already know the power of third party witnesses, especially with a doubting prospect. We pros know the sorts of negative things the media plants.

Well, we are continuing our “Influence the media as media, with the FACTS” campaign! More than a dozen newspapers from coast to coast have picked up on stories our INdustry in Focus Reporter Eric Miller has documented! From the truth about tornadoes, to hurricanes, to calls to action to passing pro-Industry legislation, we are writing and they are picking it up and sharing it with their readers! Dallas Morning News, Chicago SunTimes, Nashville’s The Tennessean and many more, coast to coast!

Yes, manufactured housing is good news! Over time, this could be big for the industry.

That said, a reader wrote in to say we need to deliver a great retail customer experience. I couldn’t agree more! If we again get ahead as an Industry, if we set new records, we must give customers a great experience! Not sometimes, but every time humanly possible. We must work with lenders, and not bleed them with repos and losses. Vendors, factories, customers, communities, retailers – it has to be about mutual victories, about Everyone-Wins scenarios!

If most of us do that, if enough pros use new marketing and image-building systems (that we know works) to attract customers, we will have many key elements to long-term sustained growth and success!

My family and I are excited about traveling west before we go southwest to Phoenix! We are looking forward to seeing friends and new faces alike. To Colorado for a mix of business and fun, then Vegas (nope, no gambling, my better half wants to see the sights). Then on to Phoenix for the International Networking Roundtable! 200 maximum attendance; see why this event is growing strong in 2010 for its 19th time!

Hope to see you there. I enjoy hearing your views of industry in your own words in person, by email or by your posted comments.

Business growth is often very much dependent on government activity. The right, or wrong, actions or inaction on the part of government can help or harm the business environment. We all know that fact. We know, too, that organization and concerted effort can pay off; this is true of the winner of each and every political campaign. The one better organized, the one that creates the most appeal and gets out the most votes, wins.

“What sort of government have you given us?” It is said that this was the question asked by a woman as Ben Franklin and others finished their work on the U.S. Constitution. Ben Franklin replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it!”

When we say the Pledge of Allegiance, we pledge our allegiance to the Republic, not to the democracy. We are a representative republic. On the national level, our laws are passed by representatives of the people. Our representatives in turn need to know what we the people want, in order for them to deliver it to us via the mechanism of law.

I can look you in the proverbial eye, and ask you to contact your U.S. Representative and Senators. I can do so because I’ve done so this past week; I did it, then turned to my colleagues and teammates and asked them to do the same! We can advance the cause of manufactured housing and modular home construction if we each do our part. That part can be done in just minutes.

Those timely contacts of our elected officials can lead you to the business growth you are investing your time, talent and treasure in!

If a dozen or two of us sound off, oh well! But when hundreds or thousands of Industry professionals like you, your associates and ours sound off, then WOW is the impact on Congress! From there, we can foresee how Congress can move to pass legislation or muster its weight to move regulators on issues that need to be addressed.

Manufactured and modular housing builders need to learn from and support each other. I will simply draw your attention to this article, Builders of Mods and HUDs, can they get along?

Then, I will say, we can and should be learning from each other and working together! We are stronger together – politically and economically – than apart.

Modular and prefab builders have an agenda that could be aided by HUD Code manufacturers, and vice versa. “Factory built housing” is a broad umbrella, one well worth each segment mutually supporting the other!

The summer break for Congress is over, and they are going back to work in Washington. 2010 is a key midterm election year and we are going into the final weeks of an election. There is no better time to get rapid results than NOW!

I am asking YOU to write. Please see the list of issues on my previous blog post; add some of your own if you like. Or do a personal intro of yourself and your company, and then attach all or those parts of the message we sent that you like. (The links for contacting your Reps and Senators are given in that previous blog post, too.) But please, I am asking YOU to do it! Because if YOU do it, you can rightly ask others to do it, too!

Then, I hope some of you will have the oomph to inspire others by posting a copy of the letter, fax or email you send to your Congress person and Senators below, or on LinkedIn. Or share the message you send to your Congress person and Senators with others you know in the Industry. This is a great time for concerted action!

You and your company are in business to make money. Congressional action can help that cause. There are far more reasons to act than not to act. Action ALWAYS trumps in-action! Thanks for all that you and others like you, in associations or businesses do to promote and advance the cause of manufactured housing today.

L.A. ‘Tony’ Kovach, MHM – publisher, editor and The Masthead blogger at
Manufactured Home Marketing Sales Management trade journal at
www.MHMarketingSalesManagement.com aka www.MHMSM.com
tony@mhmsm.com
847-730-3692

And remember! Tony also does contract marketing and coaching for industry clients. Marketing that doesn’t ‘cost;’ it pays off on your bottom line. Enough said! # #

History is often seen as a series of ‘great events.’ While great events obviously occur – the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Invasion of Normandy, the attack on the World Trade Center, the sub-prime bubble bursting in 2008 and so on – history is in fact made up of countless deeds that don’t make headlines or history books. In fact, it is numbers of individual actions or inactions that lead up to every ‘great’ historical event that ever was or will ever be.

So what does this observation have to do with manufactured housing?

Everything.

As I write this, we are at the end of July, August is upon us. We have five months left to do the everyday things that will effect the great manufactured housing turn-around of 2010! We as an Industry are up over last year in shipments! We have individually and collectively as companies and associations taken important steps that can move our businesses up, and those steps will move our Industry up!

When I wrote in the blog last Wednesday that ‘thousands’ of you reportedly wrote into FHFA to comment on the financing issue, what does that mean? That means that you, or someone like you, took the time to do an everyday thing.

Thousands – one individual event at a time – emailed or faxed FHFA. Throngs of you wrote or called your Congressman or Senators! Individual, everyday events that collectively can lead to more financing. In time that can lead us to still more sales, and that can yield good things for our customers, our businesses, associations, the Industry and our Nation.

Such seemingly small steps as sending a message into public officials, ‘those individual events,’ collectively can change the course of our Industry’s history!

Great things happen when a number of ‘little things’ happen first.

You and your team’s choices on the use of time and every day actions do matter. They are like drops of water that in time fill the bucket.

We have plenty of issues that our great Industry faces. We have demonstrated to ourselves as manufactured housing industry professionals and to public officials that we can mobilize thousands. Because we did this once in 2010, we can do so again. If we did this well once this year, we could do it even better next time!

We have another comments issue looming in August. We need to respond again. If you responded on the FHFA finance issue, respond to this HUD on-site completion issue. If you didn’t respond to the FHFA comments issue, here is your chance to be heard on what is truly another key topic for our Industry’s future. Please don’t let someone else do it, take the time to do it yourself, and then ask others to do the same. That discipline to act on these issues can lead us to a big benefit for more home sales for our industry.

Because individual actions matter, let’s do it again.

I will invite one or more industry pros to cover the importance of this on-site completion issue. Until then, please look at what MHARR has already provided us as the start of the understanding process.

Now let me shift gears for a few moments to another everyday issue that is a key part of the great Industry turn-around of 2010.

Some months back, our featured writer John Underwood made a statement that I think bears repeating. The turn-around of the Industry begins with the turn around and sales expansion of you and your firm! When your business is growing, so is the Industry! John also said that if we were doing a better job closing sales with the prospects we are already seeing, then we would be growing our businesses in a common sense fashion. John’s message bears re-reading; catch it here.

Our MHMSM.com IT and Production Manger, Bob Stovall, made an important point in his Cutting Edge in Online Marketing Blog recently that is related. Your people are spending time during working hours surfing the web. For most companies, it happens daily. Why not use that fact to your company’s advantage? Why not encourage or reward your team to spend that time getting to know their industry better? Why not encourage people to take advantage of all the free resources here at MHMSM.com?

As I write this, July is winding down. Our statistics tell us that nearly 1000 people a day are logging onto our site, that would be nearly 30,000 logins by professionals like you a month! Why are they – or you – here? Because our readers see value! They see news and views they can use! Leaders are readers. Learners are earners!

Some day, we will look back at 2010, and see how our everyday acts added up. The great turn around of 2010 is a series of modest, everyday events. Revolutions start with a few, and then those numbers grow.

You will look back someday. Will you look back with pride that you and your team did the everyday things that added up to make a difference? Will you do so with the knowledge that common sense daily disciplines resulted over time in a great outcome?

Vince Lombardi, or any great coach or leader, started their success stories with the basic daily drills. They started with the facts and the pep talks that challenged and encouraged their teams to give and be their best!

History is a great teacher. We can learn from our own experiences and from those of others. We read books or articles, or listen to podcasts, precisely to learn from others! To be inspired by another! We don’t want to be all alone. We instinctively know, we need others in order to be a success.

Innovation – Information – Inspiration for Industry Professionals is our tag line. As in our new book, The Manufactured Housing Revolution, over 500 years of experience by Industry pros can only help you and your team! Being involved in associations, but also being involved here daily, that can only help you and your team!

But it can only do so to the extent that you get and stay involved in The Manufactured Housing Revolution! Take the daily steps that make a difference. Read an article, then apply it’s lessons. Listen to or read Factory Built Housing Industry News at Noon and daily Manufactured Housing Market reports, and see what it may mean for you and your business.

Great events start with a series of modest ones. If we want the great event to have a lousy outcome, then we should waste our time on meaningless or less important stuff. But if we want a great outcomes, then we should do those little daily steps and drills that lead us over time to fantastic victories!

Thank you for being here, and for asking your associates and friends to be here too at MHMSM.com. We do it all for the factory built housing industry that we ourselves work in and serve daily. We do it all for…

…you. # #

L. A. ‘Tony’ Kovach
Manufactured Home Marketing Sales Management Industry Trade Journal
www.MHMarketingSalesManagement.com or MHMSM.com
tony@mhmsm.com
847-730-3692

In our Monday morning emailing today, there were two items that need correction:

While we routinely report, share news, interview industry personalities and print articles by various writers, the reporting may or may not represent our personal views or that of our trade journal on a given subject.

By way of explanation of how an error like this occurs, while we have numerous writers, all the editing, outreaches, IT and much more at www.MHMSM.com are done by only a few hands. In doing a lot with a little, it is easy to overlook a word, grab the wrong draft of a message, and so on. The good news is that we continue to grow rapidly. February was another record month as will be documented again soon. We continue to be the largest, fastest growing and #1 source for factory built housing news and views that you can use.

We will use this glitch above to say that our ability to continue to improve and grow can be accelerated with more sponsors and volunteers.

Just as we invite more writers and readers, so too we need to invite more firms and individuals to sponsor/advertise with us!

We get tons of messages, reports and calls that tell us that you like what you see here at www.MHMarketingSalesManagement.com, thank you. If you need to reach thousands of industry professionals every week, please advertise, sponsor and/or volunteer time.

By working together – through the support of advertisers, sponsors and volunteers – we can accomplish great things for this industry not ‘someday’ but this year, in 2010! Thank you and again for your support and time, and my apologies for the errors noted above.

Corrections 3.8.2010, Tony Kovach’s Masthead Blog, MHIdea.org, www.MHMSM.com