Flashback Friday: Marketshare

Today I”m thinking about Marketshare and found this post from Spring of 2010 that addresses it from a Help-U-Sell perspective.  This metric was so important to us 10 years ago.  We doggedly pursued it, pushing and pushing to increase it.  We watched it like no other metric in the book because it was the most meaningful measure of success.  

I’m afraid, in the downturn, all that flew out the window.  We took our transactions where we could and the idea of dominating a defined geography went away.  I strongly believe we have to get back to a geographically focused marketing program and, therefore, an obsession with marketshare as a measure of success.

Now, if you are roaming all over God’s earth taking listings wherever you can within a 100 mile radius of your office, I wish you luck with that.  It was a good strategy five years ago, but today, it’s a recipe for both burnout . . .  and lousy customer service.  However, if you want to get serious about establishing Help-U-Sell as the dominant force in your TARGET market, you must get back to the basics of:

  • defining your target market
  • collecting data about your target market
  • tracking your share of the target market

One last thought:  Help-U-Sell is a company built on a superior offer to home sellers.  In the post that follows we talk about tracking your marketshare based on closed sides. This method (which is best) takes buyer sides into consideration as well as seller sides.  But since our marketing is oriented to the seller’s side, here’s a quick and easy alternative.  Count the number of active listings in your target market and compare that with the number you have (in the same target market, of course – those outside don’t count).  Your listing marketshare ought to be very similar to your closed sides share.

I’m working through the old Operations Manual and just read through the section on marketshare.  We used to tell everyone they should get 25% marketshare.  That was the goal.  For everyone.  Did we have members who did that?  Yes, quite a few, actually.

We calculated marketshare by taking a carefully defined geography — the area(s) in which the member intended to do business, into which he or she directed marketing — and discovering what portion of the total number of closed sides done in that area were the member’s.  Further dissection of the marketplace into smaller units, like carrier routes or individual neighborhoods, might reveal that the member had 24% marketshare in this neighborhood and 14% marketshare in that neighborhood and so  on, each adding up to a total share of the target market.  We wanted to see target markets in the 10,000 – 15,000 household range with overall turnover rates in the 4% – 5% range.

The problem with this prescriptive approach is that it does not take in to consideration the vast differences that exist between markets.  Factors like:  the sheer number of competitors working the same area, the density of households, the impact of REOs on one market versus another, urban vs. suburban vs small town vs. rural areas . . . these were not considered.

Suppose your target market is a densely populated urban neighborhood.  You have 15,000 households and could probably walk your entire area in a few hours. Mostly it’s condos in the $200,000 range.  You set your fee at $3,950 and you figure with a 50/50 mix of buyer sides and seller sides, your average fee per closed side will be about $4,500.  You build a first year budget with expenses at about $12,000 a month.  Non-REO Turnover is at 4.2% — that’s 630 sales a year or 1,260 available closed sides.  Break even would be at about 32 closed sides:  a 2.5% marketshare.  This becomes our first milestone:  the point at which you start to look for ways to expand the number of transactions you can do by adding staff or improving systems.  You’d expect to hit that milestone within the first year and to be at 3% -5% marketshare  (36 – 63 closed sides), in your second year — and making a good profit.  Getting into your third year,  you’d want to be hitting  5% – 10% (63 – 126) closed sides.  This is usually where the ‘snowball’ effect takes over and as long as you’re willing to invest in more staff and better systems, an increase in marketshare and profit becomes very attainable, even up to say, 20% or 25%.

Now think about a smaller town, say 13,000 households.  Turnover is much lower:  3% in town and 2.8% in the surrounding county.  Although expenses might be lower and competition less fierce, average sale price and average fee are lower, too:  $3,200 per closed side.  A 10% share here (that’s 42 closed sides) — which was the tipping point in the above example — is just getting by.  It’s a nice job, but to be making money and building a business (not just a nice job), you’d need to be at 20% or more, and your snowball might not start until you were at 30%.

The first office needed 5% – 10% marketshare to be ‘thriving.’  The second needed more than 20%.

You have to think about more than just numbers of closings, too.  You have to consider the cost of doing business in each marketplace, the number of closed sides required to break even and how many it will take to get to a reasonable profit.

To further muddy the waters, you have to consider how you’re calculating marketshare.  We use closed sides.  Period.  That’s our yardstick and it makes sense from a dollars and cents perspective.  However, I met a Re/Max consultant once who told me they calculated marketshare on numbers of agents.  Production didn’t matter at all.  Just bodies.  When you think about it, it makes sense for their model. Re/Max operators make money by renting space and services to agents, so numbers of agents is a good measure for them (I’m not sure it’s the best measure for the consumer).

But even beyond that, marketshare is both static and dynamic.  Your static marketshare is a shapshot of a period of time.  It’s what we used in the examples here:  a one year shapshot  —  of all the closed sides done in your marketplace in the past year, how many did you have?  But your marketshare this month or this quarter is probably very different from your market share 8 months ago or two quarters ago.

Use the static, annual marketshare as your report card, the measure of the success of your business, the metric you use to set your goals.  But continually monitor the dynamic marketshare to make sure you are always progressing toward the next milestone and as an early diagnostic tool for problems in your operation or your marketplace.

Testimonials: How to Get Them and Why They Work

There are four key components of Help-U-Sell Marketing.  The four components work together to deliver our consumer message, which is:

We’re Here, People Use Us, It Works, and They Save

Ha!  I bet you thought our consumer message was ‘Sell Fast, Save Thousands,’ but it’s not!  That’s a slogan, and a darn good one too.

The message is the association we want consumers to make subconsciously whenever they see our logo. Our marketing should teach them who we are (a real estate company), how we are different (we save them money), and that other people in the local market have successfully used our service.

The four components of the consumer message are:

  • Pictures and descriptions of homes For Sale – our listings
  • Sold and Saved’s
  • An Easy Way or Smarter Way bulleted list of how we work
  • And Testimonials

These components work together to make the point . . . powerfully.  Really:  if any one of these items is missing, the marketing is weakened . . . and we start looking like every other generic real estate company!

Testimonials are key.  They give the reassurance a potential customer needs that this somewhat strange real estate company that promises savings actually works.  They calm skepticism to the point that most consumers will pick up the phone and ask that magic question:  ‘What do you do?’

30 years ago we asked for pen and paper testimonials.  It was a cumbersome process but yielded a concrete item that could be fanned out on a desk during a listing consultation or proudly displayed in the reception area of the office.  A little later came email.  Both of these methods required the client to sit down and compose a note from scratch.  Today there are much easier ways to get a testimonial.

Both Trulia and Zillow have an online review area where a consumer can rate their agent and comment on their experience.  It’s very easy to orchestrate:  you simply log on to your agent account and send a link to the survey site to your customer.  And you absolutely SHOULD do this with every satisfied seller or buyer because visitors to those large property portals rely on these reviews when deciding which agent to call.

Increasingly consumers are turning to Yelp to make local buying decisions, and your reviews there can also be helpful.

You want good reviews on all of these sites, but you don’t want to make the process difficult for your clients by having them go to three of four different places to give you a testimonial.  I mean:  some will happily do it, but it is asking a lot.  Instead, spread your testimonials around.  Once you have five or six in one place, ask your next five or six customers to go to another place.  I don’t know that having more than half a dozen really good reviews on Zillow or Trulia makes a huge difference:  six should be sufficient.  Once you have decent coverage on the third party sites, you can start to collect testimonials yourself.

Survey Monkey (surveymonkey.com) offers a free platform for building a survey form for collecting testimonials and reviews.  You make up your own questions and the Monkey can accommodate multiple-choice, ratings, text and other forms of input.  I’d suggest keeping your survey simple.  In fact, mimicking the review form that is on Zillow is probably fine.  Once you’ve setup your survey, you can send a link to it to all of your customers and start collecting their testimonials.

And then what do you do with them?  Put them in every piece of marketing you do.  Rotate them through your website, your blog and your Facebook page.  Read through them when you are having a rough week.  Call the testimonial source and thank them for their kind words and for the privilege of working with them.

If you’d like to see excellent use of Testimonials, check this out. 

Remember what Don Taylor taught us:  the most powerful form of advertising is word-of-mouth.  You want your business to be so refreshingly different and so consumer friendly that everyone you work with goes on to spread good rumors about you.  The testimonial is a powerful twist on word-of-mouth advertising.  Get them.  Use them.

PS:  Robbie is building a testimonial gathering mechanism in OMS that should be functioning in the next several months.

 

Flashback: What Consumers Wanted and What They Want Now

I got licensed back in the Pleistocene Era, when dinosaurs roamed the earth:  1976.

Consumers had very little information about real estate, and it wasn’t just MLS-type property information they were lacking.  We had five or six television stations (channels in the UHF range – above channel 12 – were just starting to appear) and so what became a major source of information for many was just getting cranked up.  FM radio was mostly college stations and public broadcasting — AM was king — but there was no news or talk radio.  Not only was there no Internet, there were no PCs.  Information traveled at the speed of sludge and John Q Public had a very limited understanding about real estate and about many other things.

REALTORS held the keys to the kingdom:  the MLS.  The only way consumers got to information about property for sale was through us.  And though there were a few FSBOs, most were willing to pay traditional percentage commissions to gain access to the information.   Funny, though:  with an average sale price of $65,000, a commission of $3,600 — though relatively big — didn’t irritate as much as today, when selling the same house for 2013 dollars would probably cost in the neighborhood of $15,000.

Sellers expected us to do everything.  They wanted to sign the listing agreement and disappear back into their lives, letting their agents take over the process and magically produce a ready willing and able buyer.  I spent much of my agent-time keeping my sellers (buyers too) informed about the process:  what’s coming next, what to expect, what problems might come up and how we’d deal with them, etc.  They were so grateful to have my understanding of how real estate worked at their disposal.

You spent a lot of time with buyers just narrowing the field of their wants and needs.  They needed to see lots of houses to get down to the style, size and location of the perfect house for them and so showing 15, 20, 30 houses over the course of several weekends was not unusual.  They had no way of ‘seeing’ property unless you put them in the car, drove them over and escorted them through.  The best buyer was always the transferee, who often came with home buying assistance from their employer and usually had a very limited time to find the perfect home.  With the transferee you had the chance of meeting a buyer on Friday and writing an offer for them on Sunday — and that was reason to celebrate!

Today, consumers have ALL the information at their fingertips.  The listing information they can view online is almost identical to what we can see, and tools like Listingbook, Zillow and Trulia make it possible for them to easily manage their own home search process . . . until they need a door opened.  More than that, consumers today can get information about every step of the home buying and selling process by typing a search string in Google.  The air waves — radio, television and Internet — are loaded with information about property transactions and there are whole television channels devoted to real estate.

Sellers look to us to plug them into the marketing resources that exist:  MLS, our website, syndication to as many other aggregators as possible.  They also look to us to spread the word about their property locally and to promote it to our Sphere of Influence.  The goal is the same as it’s always been:  exposure.  Today, because the paths to exposure are so well developed, the task is more management of marketing than creation of marketing.

More than exposure, Sellers today look to us to solve their property problem.  Whether they’re upside down, facing foreclosure or just trying to hang on to as much of their equity as possible, our role is to help them map a course that gets them as close to their goals as possible.  Today that often means minimizing the pain.  Really:  150 years ago, when I was selling real estate, simply dropping the new listing in MLS and letting the industry find a buyer in a reasonable period of time was fine.  Everybody moved and everybody was happy.  Today it’s much more about using your knowledge to accomplish the best possible outcome for your clients, and your knowledge has to always be growing.  That’s why, as James Brown said, it’s important that we all stay in school!

Buyers want to do much of their searching on their own.  They want to spend hours on the Internet looking at listings, saving and eliminating them.  They want to drive by before deciding whether they want to see the inside.  They don’t want to be held captive in the back seat of your car while you show them house after inappropriate house.  The value we can bring to them is in giving them the best tools to help them do that self-directed searching, making it easy for them to get quick answers when they need them, and in anticipating problems before they occur.  I keep saying this:  Listingbook is your best friend when it comes to doing all of these things.

The job of REALTOR today is very different than it used to be.  It’s not that we DO LESS than we used to do, it’s that our clients DO MORE.  It’s also that the job has become more specialized and focused.  The one thing that hasn’t changed is the way ordinary real estate brokers charge for their services.    That’s still stuck in the Pleistocene Era.  The tough market of the last few years is like an Ice Age and as with all Ice Ages, the end result will be extinction for certain species.  Not to worry.  As the ice recedes, newer, better, stronger, more adaptable species emerge and dominate.  That’s us.

The Ineffective Realtor (or what to do when your agent sucks)

You are a home seller and you’ve become entangled with an ineffective real estate agent or broker.  The relationship started out well enough and you had high hopes that it would result in a successful transaction but now things are . . . off track.  What should you do?  Without giving legal advice  (I’m not an attorney, and truth is:  what you legally can do varies from State to State) I’d like to explore this for a few paragraphs.

First, let’s get clear on what constitutes poor performance on the part of a listing agent and office.  The logical answer would be:  no activity, no offers.  It would be logical, but it wouldn’t necessarily be correct.  You have to dig a little deeper.  Why is there no activity?  Why are there no offers?  Here’s a great truth:  agents and brokers don’t just pull showings and offers out of their hats.  They have to have a marketable product and the product attracts potential buyers.  Agents and brokers orchestrate exposure for their listings and those that are marketable are shown and eventually sell.  So, the real question is:  did your agent advise you about the marketability of your home?

What does that mean?  Marketability?  Here’s a short list:

  • Is it located in an area into which people are interested in  buying?
  • Does it look inviting from the street?
  • Does it show well on the inside?
  • Is it properly priced?
  • Is it fully and easily available to be shown on a continuous basis?

I can see you nodding ‘yes’ as you read each of those bullets, but stop for a moment.  Think back to the Listing Consultation.  Do you remember the price range your agent/broker recommended?  Did you price within that range?  Or did you insist on a few thousand more?  If so, that’s probably the problem:  price.  If you overpriced against the recommendations of your agent, don’t blame the agent when the house isn’t shown.  If you want to blame your agent for something, blame them for taking an overpriced listing!

And what about that availability thing?  Do you have a lockbox on your property? And is the house available to be shown with or without an appointment?  Those are the homes that are shown the most (assuming they are priced properly) because they are easy to show.  I realize there are often very good reasons why some homes may not have a lockbox, may require an appointment 24 hours in advance, but those good reasons don’t negate the fact that each time you add a showing restriction . . . you restrict the number of showings you will get.

Usually, when listed sellers complain about their agents/brokers, a little digging reveals that the seller didn’t take the agent’s advice about pricing, marketing, staging or showing availability, and that’s why activity is slow.  If there is an agent problem here, it is that the agent didn’t go back again and again to make the point that the price needed adjusting or the house needed to be staged or the showing restriction lifted.

But if you did follow the recommendations of your agent at time of listing and you are still not being shown, before you blow a gasket, find out how long it takes to sell a home like yours in your general vicinity today.  Is it 60 days?  or 160?  Do listed homes in your area have anniversaries before they sell?  Really:  if your market is sloooowww and you need to sell fast, don’t blame your agent; reduce your price.

I know:  I’m putting a lot of this back on the sellers’ shoulders.  I’m making it sound as if the only problem with any listing is the seller, not the agent.  And that’s not really true.  Agents screw up too.  How?

Not exposing the property.  This is rare today.  Any listing put into the MLS is almost always automatically syndicated out to dozens of Internet real estate portals and that’s the best possible exposure.  But, in addition, is your agent making it easy to get information on the property?  Is s/he keeping the flyer box filled?  Is there a QR code on or near the sign?  Is there a recorded information number?  How about a virtual tour? Does somebody answer the phone when the number on the sign is called?

Not following up with regular market updates.  Real estate markets shift.  Sometimes rapidly.  Two months ago, here in my San Diego market, homes were selling in days with multiple offers.  Buyers were paying more than asking prices and waiving appraisal contingencies.  Since then, two things have happened:  interest rates have risen a full percent and potential sellers, intrigued by the feverish activity, have jumped to put their homes on the market.  End result?  Today things are a lot slower.  Your agent should be talking to you once a month or so about changes in your marketplace and how they affect your listing.

Not communicating.  As an agent (a long time ago), I hated to call my listed sellers when there was really nothing to report.  If I’d done everything I could, If the property was properly priced and the marketing was working but we still had no activity – that’s when it was so hard to pick up the phone and make the call.  But that’s the most important time for an agent to call.  You, the seller, have to know that your agent is on the job and concerned about your home selling project.  If you’re not being talked to at least once a week . . . well, that’s a problem.

Not knowing their business.  There’s no substitute for experience and in real estate it is measured in numbers of closed transactions.  Each one adds to an agent’s knowledge of how to make transactions work.  If your agent does not have that depth of experience s/he may not be equipped to handle the inevitable problems that arise during a transaction.  Interestingly, it’s not the new agent you need to be cautious about:  they are usually closely supervised by a savvy broker.  It’s the average agent who’s been in the business for several years and bumps along at 6 – 10 deals a year.  That’s enough production that their brokers assume they know what they’re doing, but their knowledge base can’t compare with agents doing, say, 20 transactions a year.

Charging a stupid percentage based commission.  And that’s exactly what they are:  stupid. They make no sense at all.  A broker charging 5% or 6% or 10% is operating in the real estate dark ages and charging you way more than you need to spend to sell your house.  Find a broker who charges a reasonable flat fee and who allows for the possibility that you may find the buyer yourself (and charges less in that event).  How do you find that modern broker?  Go HERE.

That’s an incomplete list.  I am sure there are other ways in which agents let sellers down.  But what do you do if you are on the receiving end of this kind of poor service?

First:  when you list, get an agreement in writing that enables you to cancel your listing if you are unhappy.  Be fair.  Allow your broker a reasonable time after notification of your dissatisfaction to remedy the situation:  a few days.  And don’t think this kind of agreement enables you to ax your broker and negotiate directly with a buyer or to whimsically flip to a different broker with a shinier business card.

Second:  call your agent and set up a meeting to talk about the problem.  Give them a reasonable time – again, a few days – to fix it.

Third: call your BROKER (the person for whom the agent works) and set up a meeting to discuss the problem.  Your agent is representing the broker and if s/he is not performing in a way that will have you crowing about the great service you received, the broker is going to want to know about it.

Finally:  seek legal advice. That means an attorney who specializes in real estate.  When you list your home for sale with a real estate broker, you sign a listing agreement – which is a legally binding contract. Often they cannot be unilaterally cancelled.  If you were to ‘fire’ your broker and then sell your house through another broker, you might be liable for two commissions!  A good local real estate attorney can advise you and may be able to get you out of a bad situation.

But make that attorney option the last resort.  Talk, talk, talk to your agent and broker first.  The real estate business is built on the referrals of happy clients and an unhappy client can do big damage to a company’s reputation.  Most brokers would rather do whatever it takes to make you happy than have you become a fountain of negative talk in the neighborhood.

Flashback Friday: Flea Circus

‘How do you train them not to jump?’

‘For two months I keep them in a low jar.’ He reached behind him and retrieved a little screw-top container, about an inch and a half tall. ‘At first they jump and jump in there. I can hear them bang their little heads on the lid, bing, bing, bing. But after awhile they adjust. They still hop, a little; they just don’t leap. That’s when I take the lid off and they are ready to train for the circus . . . they’re not going to leap away.’

This is one of my favorite posts.  It originally appeared in early 2010.  I have more to say about it, but don’t want to spoil it for you , so I’ll save it ’til the end . . . 

I live 22 miles from the Mexican border and, like many Southern Californians, spend a lot of time in Baja.  One of my favorite drives is the Routa Del Vina — the wine route — that runs from Tecate in the North to Ensenada in the South.  This sixty mile stretch of highway winds first through mountains and then through dozens of Mexican wineries.  Yes, Mexico makes wine.  It’s generally not very good, but they’re working on it.

In the heart of the region, a dirt road takes off to the west from the highway and leads to a dusty little town called Ejido El Porvenir — Town of the Future.   It may have been the Town of the Future in about 1924, but nothing much has changed since then.  It’s mostly just dust and mud, dogs and farmers and tumble down houses, a small, humble church . . . and Beto’s Circo de las Pulgas — Beto’s Flea Circus.

Beto is a weathered old dude who, like everything in Ejido El Porvenir, is dusty.  He’s missing a few teeth but still manages a nice smile when guests stop by. For $4 US, he will lead you through the little house he shares with his granddaughter and her children to the workshop in back where he keeps his Circus.

The show is presented on the bottom of  a 2′ x 3′ corrugated cardboard box with the sides cut down to about an inch that he pulls from a shelf and sets on a rickety table in the middle of the dirt floor room.  He’s painted the box white — well, it was white, once —  and it functions as the stage for his little flea actors.  He’s got one that walks the tight rope, a few that will kick a tiny ball around, one that rides on the back of a green beetle, and three he harnesses to little carts and then implores to race from one side of the box to the other.  It’s both as silly and fascinating as you might imagine.

After the show, I sat a while, chatting with Beto, he using very bad English, me struggling through equally bad Spanish.  I learned he’s 73, been working with fleas for about 10 years, and took it up to pass the time after he became too old to be useful in the grape arbors.  He gets three or four paying visitors a week but also does free shows for the neighborhood kids who regard him as a funny kook.

‘So, how do you train fleas?’ I asked.

‘Es Facil,’ he replied; it’s easy.  ‘The hardest part is teaching them not to jump.  A flea can jump two, three feet normally.’

I pictured the house I listed 30 years ago in Atlanta.  It had just been vacated by tenants who had dogs and when I walked into the living room, I was bombarded by a hail of hungry fleas flinging themselves at me from the floor. Yes, fleas have very strong legs and they certainly can leap.  Why didn’t these fleas just leap away?

‘How do you do it?’ I asked, ‘How do you train them not to jump?’

‘For two months I keep them in a low jar.’  He reached behind him and retrieved a little screw-top container, about an inch and a half tall.  ‘At first they jump and jump in there.  I can hear them bang their little heads on the lid, bing, bing, bing.  But after awhile they adjust.  They still hop, a little;  they just don’t leap.  That’s when I take the lid off and they are ready to train for the circus . . . they’re not going to leap away.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I asked, skeptically, ‘You train their natural tendency to leap out of them?’

‘Sure,’ he said through that almost toothless smile.  ‘After a few weeks of hitting their heads on the lid, they learn to stop jumping, and they’ll never do it again.’

How  sad, I thought.  These creatures were born to leap and they’d allowed him to take that away from them.  I gave him a puzzled look.

‘It’s just like people,’ he continued.  ‘You can train the dreams right out of the people.  If you place enough barriers, enough restrictions, they come to believe their dreams are impossible.  They give up, and then they live quietly in the world you’ve defined for them.  Every dictator knows that . . . I’m just a flea dictator.’

It started to rain as I left Beto’s house.  The  dusty road turned into a mud bog and soon the Jeep was covered in the stuff.  I’d be bringing a little bit of Mexico back across the border with me this night.  As I drove through the gloom, I thought about what Beto said, and about our current reality:  Help-U-Sell, Realtors in general, and the very tough real estate market of the last few years.  We all made adjustments to make it through. We cut expenses, moved to smaller space, consolidated.  They were necessary cuts.  But, like the fleas, we also cut expectations.  Where we once shot for 10% market share and considered 10 deals a month to be ‘just getting by,’  we came to believe that 2 or 3 or 4 a month was ok.  We could get by with 3 or 4 and not bang our heads on the lid of the market.

Look around.  Yes, things are better today.  The real estate business comes with a new set of challenges – low inventory, rising interest rates – but it’s not as constricted as it was a couple of years ago.

But what about that patch of real estate between your ears?  Did you get so used to the redecorating you did in there during the downturn that you hardly notice the change anymore?   Have you let last season’s reality put a permanent damper on your dreams?  Or can you still see yourself doing 100, 150, 500 deals a year?  You can, you know.  Step by step, stage by stage, phase by phase, you can.  And, truth is, until you believe it, until you expect it, it’s not going to happen.  You’ll just be hopping along, stopping a millimeter or two shy of the lid someone else put over you a long time ago.

Look up.  There is no lid.  There’s nothing but blue skies overhead.  Stretch out your legs and get into your leaping crouch.  It’s time to liberate the fleas!

. . . . . .

So many people have read this post and assumed it was a true story . . . and it IS, up to the point where Beto is introduced.  From that point forward it is fiction; or rather, legend.  

The flea story has been around for some time (Google it) and I remember hearing it told with great flair by the former President of Help-U-Sell, Rick O’Neil.  In his version, he was a boy in New York City and the flea circus was in a basement on 42nd Street.  

I’ve been asked more than a few times how to find Beto, once by a resident of Ejidio el Porvenier!  

It doesn’t matter that Beto doesn’t exist and that the circus may never have existed anywhere.  The image of self-limitation is powerful.  

When I feel myself covered up with can’ts and yeah-buts, flinging themselves at me like fleas from the floor, I pause, look up, notice that there is no lid, and go back to doing the impossible. 

 

 

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