So, I finally got the Marketing Machine up'n'running. Up until the past few days I have been absolutely SLOGGING through mountains and mountains of data that I got from the friendly, helpful folks at the Torrington, CT city hall tax assessor's office. "Don't worry about filtering it beyond residential addresses. I'll scrub the data on my end" I said, not knowing what I was in for.

At first, I was excited as a kid in a candy store with what I got. "Golly-Gee! 12,000 properties with names and addresses! This is gonna be a cinch!" So I started to put together my yellow letters and mass-mailing post-cards in MS Word, fully expecting to mail-merge everything direct from my handy-dandy Excel sheet. Once I started running a few test samples, just to be sure everything would shake loose, I encountered my first few problems with the data. I used every MS Office trick that I knew (and several that I had to google), and after about a week and a half of moving data around, lining up my cells with the pertinent information where it needed to be, and figuring out all the kinks in the system, I finally had the information I needed, all neatly lined up, with different categories for different mailings on different excel sheets "This page is for out-of-state absentee owners of SFR's... This one is for Estates... this one is corporate-owned properties, these are multi-families..."

Keep in mind I went line-by-line through Twelve Thousand individual records, making sure that all the names lined up so that it would fit my mail merge when it came time to print. A lot of the filtering that I wound up doing had to be done by hand, because there is no excel macro that is as effective as the ol' mark-1 eyeball for spotting irregularities. There were more than a few lines that had data in the wrong place. Now, there are those who would say "You spent a week and a half screwing around with your excel sheets? Dude, just run the merge, and let the chips fall where they may. C'mon... get a move on... we're burnin' daylight here." But I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my automation. It has to be dead-on RIGHT before I let a system run away with itself.

While this whole process is going on, I'm also taking care of my 10-month-old. See, my part-time job is real estate marketing. I'm a full-time stay-at-home DAD. and you know what? I don't think I'm being braggadocious when I say that I'm an awesome dad. So, yeah. Getting my marketing materials put together is "a" priority, but making sure Lily is fed, changed, and safely at play is THE PRIORITY. It's a challenge to be sure, and it gets overwhelmingly frustrating at times, but I've had my eyes on the prize for a good long while now. Go me.

One of the ways I deal with my frustrations is by stopping doing the thing that's frustrating me, and going to do something else for a little while. For the past few weeks, that has meant going to Staples. A Lot. I have a stack of card-stock, yellow printer paper and mailing envelopes, with a square-meter footprint and a half-meter tall. Yeah, I've got my paper.

So, I got my data all set by the beginning of this week, and I've been spending the rest of the week getting my first 80 yellow letters formatted, printed, stuffed, stamped and posted yesterday (those out-of-staters I was talking about) and my first 360 mass-mailed postcards printed and aimed at my first target neighborhood today. And the best part is, from here on out the whole thing can be predictably automated! And as I'm sitting here typing this, it occurs to me that I forgot to plant my bandit signs for the weekend, and I'll be in class all day tomorrow, so this weekend is pretty much shot for signs. But I think I'll survive.

Those yellow letters should have arrived either today or by tomorrow, and my postcards will hit on Monday. If my marketing is marginally successful, and I get a 3% response rate, that's about 12 call-backs, and if 1 out of 10 of those responses is a deal at my minimum profit, then that's a 900 percent return on my investment so far. Pretty good, eh? As long as I'm able to pay for my first full round of marketing within the next 30 days, then I'll have considered the whole enterprise to be a rousing success. If it takes longer than 30 days, then I'll have to be satisfied with it being a successful learning experience.

And if I never make my money back? Well...

At least I'm an awesome dad.