Making Something From Nothing: Mark Walser of Incenter Appraisal Management On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Identify the team members who can make a continued positive impact on your organization. Invest in them, promote them and reward them. At the same time, don’t be too quick to downsize people who seem more difficult, but if the situation continues, then exit them as fast as you can.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Walser.

Mark Walser is President of Incenter Appraisal Management, a national provider of best-in-class valuations, inspections and data products for lenders throughout the country. Since he joined the company in October 2020, he and his team have launched two industry innovations — 24-Hour Fast Pay for appraisers, and RemoteVal™ remote appraisal inspection technology, intended to address the twin challenges of a home appraiser shortage and valuation backlogs. On a daily basis, he is responsible for overseeing and managing all facets of the company and its offerings. He holds a B.S. in Management and Accounting from San Diego State University and California State University.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

My family is from India, and we immigrated to the U.S. when I was five, settling in Southern California.

As the son of immigrants, I grew up with a deep appreciation for the unlimited opportunities America affords us. If you choose to work hard, and take hold of what this country gives you, there is almost nothing you can’t achieve here. That’s rare to non-existent anywhere else in the world and often overlooked in many of today’s conversations.

In California, I was lucky to be surrounded by entrepreneurs who embraced this philosophy and were rocket riding the dot-com boom. Coming out of high school and college, I fell in with a startup that developed the first wireless email and mobile service applications for handheld devices. They taught me about business, technology and how to create an enormous market from the ground up.

From there, I worked at a real estate technology company, which developed the first mobile wireless app to search the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). Moving forward, I pivoted to the mortgage and appraisal management industries, which are known for their resistance to change. I’m excited that we’re making a big impact with appraisals, which have been slow to evolve.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Jim Elliot, a missionary in the early 20th century, said, ”He is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep in order to gain which he cannot lose.”

His words taught me to look to the future and what was practical, and not just possible. In business, you have to know when to cut your losses and attack a problem differently to develop a solution that the market will embrace.

His words also remind me to value the personal experiences that are most important. I may not be able to take my family to Italy every six months, but I can play basketball with my son or a board game with my daughter as often as possible — you can’t get that time back.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I love Raymond Feist’s Riftwar Saga series. It offers multiple worlds, magic, technology, philosophy, parallel universes, and dragons. It’s so well developed and I also like the multi-generational aspect of his timelines and novels. I started reading those in high school and the series continued into my early 30s. I like immersive reading experiences like that.

For movies, The Matrix was a game changer. And…now that Meta is coming into our future, perhaps it’s a foretelling?

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

Going back to Jim Elliot:

It’s important to take both a creative and practical approach. Start by assessing the problem you want to solve.

For example, there is no industry that hasn’t been affected by COVID-19. When the pandemic began, it could have paralyzed the appraisal, mortgage and real estate professions, but solution providers like us overcame that.

At the beginning, home sellers didn’t want to let appraisers in, and appraisers who were in higher risk categories didn’t want to inspect homes until they were safely vaccinated. These problems helped drive our invention of RemoteVal, which enables appraisers to conduct thorough, compliant appraisal inspections for many kinds of home loans without ever leaving their home offices.

They simply take control of a homeowner’s smartphone camera, direct them where to point it, and remotely snap geographically verified time-stamped images and closeups. The solution also has built-in digital measuring capabilities — an industry first — allowing for real-time calculation of square footage/gross living area (GLA).

We did a technical sprint to create a solution that may change our whole industry. It took a team of dedicated people, with a clear plan, dedication to execution and capital.

We also needed the right attitude. We looked at the technologies that were powering up other industries, and thought of ways to incorporate the functionality we liked best. We saw the possibilities and not the obstacles and RemoteVal was the result.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo, there’s a difference between “knowing the path and walking the path.”

I apply that here.

It’s important to check with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to see what’s out there before you start, and protect your own intellectual property.

Remember, too, that just because someone else may have thought of an idea doesn’t mean you can’t create and execute a better version with a unique technology twist.

It took just a few years for Myspace to beat Yahoo as the most visited site in the mid 2000’s after it was founded in 2003, and it was dominant until 2008 when Facebook came along and beat it. Each organization offered something different that resonated with their key audiences and made a better experience. Things move fast and you have to move with them.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

Our process is slightly different because we’re making a B2B technology available to appraisers and inspectors.

First and foremost, find a good attorney to obtain the necessary patents. At Incenter, we have a strong legal team who helped us obtain good outside counsel.

Create relationships with several manufacturers or software partners, and determine which have the most flexibility and bandwidth.

Ensure that these partners will align with your business model. Might they be amenable to a pay-per-use arrangement? If so, that may empower you to avoid a massive engineering investment. I like to do that on transactional models like ours, and build the cost into the consumer pricing.

Know your business and identify the right channels, partners and customers who can help advance it. Our customers are mortgage lenders. When one of their borrowers is buying a new home or refinancing, they contact us for an appraisal. Our appraisers then become our brand ambassadors. We treat them as partners, not vendors, because we want to make the best experience happen for our ultimate customer, the mortgage lender.

Also, consider making your technology or innovation available via licensing to competitors. By doing so, you may be able to penetrate the industry in a much shorter time, and in a more frictionless way.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Your success depends on your organizational dynamics — understand the politics and players, especially in larger companies. Your ability to navigate them in a smart way will have a big impact on your long-term success. Incenter Appraisal Management is part of Incenter LLC, a family of 11 companies whose solutions help mortgage lenders improve performance. Although we work very well together, I’ve needed to be aware of every firm’s capabilities so that we can innovate together, and promote each other’s services.
2. Identify your sponsors and your influencers–the people who will support your initiatives and potentially even fight battles for you. That way you can focus on building your new product or service and not worry about internal issues.
3. Know where all of your costs are. Sometimes it’s not as simple as a P&L, especially if you are part of a larger organization that shares resources. Otherwise, you could be surprised four to five months into a project. I’ve found that you need to ask the right questions from the very beginning to get at those other charges and work them into your plan.
4. Identify more efficient ways of doing things and push to implement those processes. Don’t be afraid to advocate for them with conviction. That doesn’t mean don’t listen to the experiences of others, but make your team question their process and defend it.
5. Identify the team members who can make a continued positive impact on your organization. Invest in them, promote them and reward them. At the same time, don’t be too quick to downsize people who seem more difficult, but if the situation continues, then exit them as fast as you can.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

First: Do your research: Is anything in the market close to your product?

Second: Protect your own intellectual property and start executing.

Third: Be smart about marketing; build on what your stakeholders are telling you. For example, when we piloted RemoteVal, lenders and appraisers kept volunteering that it was a gamechanger. We could see their eyes light up, and that inspired us to press onward.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I haven’t needed to work with these consultants, so I can’t give you a full answer. We began creating RemoteVal as soon as we had a validated market. We identified a gap and then found a way to fill it.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

Bootstrapping is definitely my personal preference. I believe in having a viable business, and then using some proceeds to fund additional growth and taking strategic investments that actually help you achieve your market success.

When I joined Incenter Appraisal Management in 2020, the organization was already successful and had the funding to create RemoteVal. We really just had to focus on the business and delivering it, not raising capital to fund an “idea”.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I define success as having a societal as well as a business impact.

My family and I personally invest in organizations that provide food, education and opportunity to people in developing countries.

At work, I also feel an obligation to help the people who are up and coming become better leaders. I’m proud that in a male dominated industry, the majority of Incenter Appraisal Management’s leadership team are women. Being able to mentor them, learn from them and prepare them to take over the business is part of making the world a better place.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I believe in the quote attributed to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”

Or put another way, as President John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address: “Ask not what America can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

I’ve always felt that despite the hardships that people experience, what they achieve is in their own hands. Learn to feed yourself, and gratefully accept any mentoring, guidance or constructive criticism along the way. Absorb the lessons of failure and try again. You’ll live a much more productive and satisfying life than by coveting unearned privilege. Don’t ever blame your lack of success on the “system”; more often than not, it’s the mirror you have to look into and then learn from.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I would enjoy having lunch with Kevin O’Leary. I like what he posts on LinkedIn, and his ability to balance the cold, hard truth with a level of relatability in the real world.

He and others can contact me at mark.walser@incenterms.com or see incenteram.com.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.