262 - Coaching Culture: How Leadership Shapes the Estate Sale Experience with Aaron's Estate Sales' Aaron Siepierski

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Aaron Sabersky, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of several companies in the Detroit area. Aaron, estate sale and block auction house. And you've also got some staging companies and you, and a new real estate company, but you can be found basically at aaronsestatesales.com. Welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

So you've been, your auction house, I think has been around for about 13 years. Give us a little bit of your backstory. How'd you get into this business?

Yeah. So as a kid, I was always, I grew up with in trailer park with lower level income. And as a kid, we were always dumpster diving, jumping, trying to find something worth something, some sort of treasure. And throughout my teenage years, I traveled a lot. I volunteered a lot for a lot of different volunteer organizations. But when I came back, a neighbor of mine had did estate sales for 30 years and he would go into houses and, and find the treasure inside someone's home and then sell all of those items for that person. So the first day he asked me to, to help him with a clean out. Basically, I was just a kid, 18, 19 years old, and I was just shoveling stuff into a dumpster all day, just doing this clean out for him. And at the end, he found this jacket in the basement and they were all excited about this jacket. It looked like a piece of trash. He would've thrown it away. And they ended up selling that jacket for about $8,000 that very night. And you wouldn't have even touched it, it was so gross. But it was an early railroad jacket from the early 1900s and it was denim. And at the time, people in Japan were paying a lot of money for vintage denim. And it just blew my mind wide open to the fact that I was working hard all day for $100, like killing myself, filling up this dumpster. And he had just found this jacket and made $8,000. In a matter of a few minutes. So it shifted my viewpoint 100%, and I knew that I needed to know more. And so I dove into estate sales.

And is this something that you can get educated in?

You can do— it's mostly self-education. At the time, being younger, it was good. It was a good time to be able to learn because I was able to spend a lot of time. Every time I would come across something that I didn't know, I would buy another book on it. So if I didn't know about antique purses and I got an antique purse, I'd buy a book on it. If I didn't know about pottery, a certain type of pottery, pottery or glass. And so I was able to educate myself. And nowadays with the internet you can, but it's not the same as you can get the data, but unless you have the mass of the item there, you don't really grasp the whole information, all the information that you need.

So I can imagine that over the years you have probably found a lot of hidden treasures in people's homes.

We've found the most, some of the most unbelievable things in people's homes. From Picasso etchings in a basement that no one knew were there to— we've sold at an estate sale, which is just an enormous garage sale. We've sold $60,000 paintings off the wall and amazing book collections, amazing glass and art collections and historic pieces of pottery. Right now we have in our possession an ancient Egyptian tablet that we're going to be selling pretty soon here. You just never know what's behind the next door until you walk into that house and see what they have.

You obviously get really excited about this. Yeah. Tell me about the excitement.

I mean, you just don't know when you have an item and it could be worth absolutely nothing, or it could be worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in this business, I get to experience that every day. I get to experience going into a home and finding that value. That's what I'm really good at now is walking into a home and being able to identify what has value and what doesn't, to be able to maximize it for our clients. And since we're helping our clients through this process, it's a whole different level of excitement and just a great feeling to be able to help others. So that's what gets me excited.

And that's probably what gets you up in the morning too, thinking that every day is a new adventure.

Yeah, exactly. You just don't know what's at stake for the day. So you have to get out there, you have to get into that next home. And what kind of—

tell us a little bit about your typical client.

So our typical client is— there's two main clients that we have. The first one is someone who's downsizing, who has their own things, and they're moving to Florida from Michigan. They're retiring and they have a home somewhere else, so they don't need any of those items anymore. In their current home. They're empty nesters and we go in and we help them liquidate everything so that they could sell their property so that they can move. A lot of people don't know what to do. They're overwhelmed. They don't want to deal with all the stuff. And then our second client is someone that has someone pass away, unfortunately, and now they're liquidating assets for the beneficiaries of the estate or because they also need to sell the property. So that's our second client that we usually handle. To help them empty out the contents of a home. And now we also help them sell the home and stage it and go through the whole process.

So basically you're becoming a one-stop shop for people who are either downsizing or retiring and moving out of the area, or maybe moving into a smaller place, or maybe attorneys or beneficiaries will contact you and say, we've got a probate open and we need you to liquidate all this property.

Exactly. And so what we can do is we can take the entire estate, we can do the estate sale with the household goods and the things of not much consequence. We can take to Worldwide Auction the higher-end items, the valuable jewelry, the art, things of that nature. And then once we clear out, we can clean out the property. So we do a whole house clean out after the estate sale is done. We take those items to auction. Then we can bring in furniture and staging, stage the home, And then sell the real estate as well.

Wow. And you charge all the way along, all along the way. Some of it's commission, some of it's actually just a fixed cost.

Exactly. Exactly. Everything has a different cost and we're going— it's the estate sales breed everything else. And we're going into a few new markets in the next couple of years. Our next market is Dallas, Texas.

Wow.

We've worked in Florida. We've done— we've taken collections from around the country. So we've taken collections from Beverly Hills, California and Miami, Florida and brought them back to our warehouse and sold them worldwide. But yeah, we're looking forward to expanding as well.

How do you build a reputation that where people are contacting you from outside of Michigan to have you handle what are probably very valuable, valuable pieces of property?

Absolutely. Mostly YouTube, actually. We get a surprising number of people finding us on YouTube. The one of the clients that we did in California who was a billionaire client, and we did this, we worked inside of his home with him and he was on TikTok the entire time. He's 78 years old and he was on TikTok. The entire time. So you just don't know where people are going to find you. So it's important to have all communication channels open to the public.

What is it, do you think, that has made you successful over the years?

I think it's this unwavering, like, I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to work until I figure it out and not giving up. There's so many times in business where people want to give up. It's so hard sometimes, of all people, because you deal with emotional and upset and things like that with the the clients that you have. And it gets so hard when you're dealing with people, but every day, every challenge I've looked at as a learning opportunity. And I think that's important, but also knowing that I can make it go right. And just having that datum is solid in my mind that I can make this go right too. That just keeps me going.

Do things go sideways on you every now and then?

Every day things go sideways. What are you talking about? Every day things, a new challenge, a new— I've never been in any other business. I've been doing this basically my entire adult life. So I don't know if all other businesses just run smoothly and they just are— I, if that's happening, then I'm definitely doing this wrong. But in my reality, every single day, if you're pushing into the marketplace as hard as we are, you're dealing with challenge after challenge. So that's what I do every day.

How many, I mean, how many people do you have in your company?

Right now we have about 45 staff.

Okay. And so you've got, obviously you have maybe a layer or two below you. How, how much of your time is spent doing CEO stuff, basically running a company, looking ahead, thinking about future markets, and actually getting into the house and getting your hands dirty, which is what you did in the beginning.

Yeah, I'm still like, if I'm, I'm traveling a lot. So if I'm in Michigan, I'm definitely getting my hands dirty. I'm definitely working in the business. I'm definitely helping wherever I can because I know that's what's needed. So I would say about 15 to 20% of my time is spent on actual CEO things. And right now I'm still training and adding and coaching my upper management so that they can really take over. But it's not a simple 3-month process or 6-month process. Some of these people I've had for 2 years and they're still learning and they're still— I'm still coaching them every single day. They're still calling me for advice. And I think that's the better flow. I'd rather them call me for advice. Hey Aaron, I have this situation. This is what I'm thinking about doing with it. What do you think? Rather than, hey, Aaron, I have this situation, handle it for me. Which was how it was in the past and how a lot of, I think, executives, they get problems put on their lines when I would rather have solutions and be able to give my advice. And that's how we operate now.

How are you able to cultivate that? I take it part of it. I'm going to say first part of it is, of course, who you hire.

Right. But then that— yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I think it's who you hire and setting the expectation as well of that. I think that clear-cut expectations with your staff really helps in that, hey, this is what I want from you. I want to be your coach. I do not want to be your problem solver, and I want to help you until we can get to that point. But eventually, most the time now, they ask me, hey, I have— if somebody says, hey, I have this problem, what should I do? My immediate answer is, what do you think we should do? Because I want to always— I'm not going to end the conversation or stop it and say, hey, figure it out. I'm going to ask them, hey, what do you think we should do? Oh, blah, blah, blah. Okay, great. Do that. Do that. Even if it's wrong, I agree with you. Why don't you do that? Unless it's super wrong. But I want them to bump their heads and see how it is and be able to learn themselves and have their own ideas and thoughts. And if I'm always solving every problem for them, we'll never, I'll never be able to scale.

So part of your thinking is how do I develop my people so they can make their own decisions? I, and I'm comfortable with whatever decision they make. I know that most of the time they're gonna make the right decision and every now and then they're gonna blow it, but that's okay. That's the learning process. And then you can, and if you, I think you're really talking about the people that are your direct reports. So eventually they can have more people under them. Exactly. And I guess at some point in time, you're going to have to teach them how to coach the people to report to them.

And that's super important, the coaching aspect. I think that we take that approach versus, obviously I have to give orders sometimes. I'm saying, I have to say, hey, I need this done, this done. But at this point, they, I've gotten them up to the responsibility where right now the business is pretty much handling itself and they're calling me when they need advice as a coach. And that's where I want to be as we scale. I want to be the coach to upper management. But yeah, they don't all have— they have to hone their skills too. So every single one of my staff has a development plan because it's taken me 12 years to develop any skills that I have. And in business, I think what happens as an entrepreneur is you have a certain skill set, like you can clean houses really good, right? But you don't know how to hire people, you don't know how to train people, you don't know how to maintain people, you don't know about payrolls, you don't know about benefits, how that works, or anything about managing a staff. So those are all skills over time that I've failed at so much that I've had to figure out. And so now they— my staff also need that same development. Like, they're not just going to know how to handle all the employees or how to coach someone or how to do one-on-ones. So it's super important that there's a structure for that in place as well.

I would imagine that you're a pretty good listener. Tell me how you learned how to listen.

I think that I do two things when listening to a situation, or I first, I listen, I gather information, I ask good questions to gather more, because usually people will ask an executive for a decision on something without enough data. And so I think that it's important to say, what is all the information that I need to be able to fully understand this? And then the second part I feel about that is having to look. I feel like it's, it's not only listening, but it's also looking, because oftentimes we'll get a report on how something is or how something can't be or how something's a problem, and I really need to go see it for myself and look and see what the situation is. To be able to come up with all the information to be able to help that person. So I think it's like more definitely stepping back and instead of being like, just do this or just do this, it's okay, what other information am I missing here? What were the numbers? What were this? What was that? What was the employee doing? When were they supposed to be doing that? Did you tell them that? Did all of that gathering of information I think is really important.

So there's another kind of listening that I call listening other people into existence where we're actually listening to validate. Another person's, in particular, emotional experience. Have you ever had that opportunity where somebody's really upset or they're angry or they're emotional and you just listen to them to validate their feelings?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it's, yeah, it's really important. I think it's really important to acknowledge that person when you're listening to them and to be able to say, hey, I understand, and really show them that you got it versus cutting them off versus not really listening and going in a different direction. But it puts them right at ease when you can be like, "Hey, I get what you're going through. I understand. I can completely empathize with that." So that's my experience in listening to my staff. And—

What about with clients?

With clients, 100%. Like, clients, I think that— I guess for the longest time, for about 8 years, I was on the selling side of the business. So I was selling to clients and I was sitting down with them at their kitchen tables going over our services. Going over what situations they were dealing with, which were amazingly emotional when you're dealing with loved ones passing, all the emotion, emotions surrounding someone's personal belongings. And so being able to shut up and listen and be there with that person in the same space as them, literally, I think is what helped me build my business the most versus I've had salespeople where they just want to be interesting and they just want to talk about what they know. And they completely blow it because it's not about you. It's not about me. It's not about whatever. It's about what does that client actually need to have success in their situation?

Exactly. And when I teach sales, I, that's what I tell people. I say, you should never use I statements in a sales call. Always use statements. And 90%. Of the time you are listening, not talking. Right.

100%.

And that's really hard for people to get.

I know, trust me. I know, I have to shake someone and say, hey, just if you would have shut up, they were about to tell you exactly what they needed. Or I've had people, I've listened to sales calls because I've had people record these sales meetings, and the client asked 3 times about a specific thing in our service and the person doesn't even catch it. And if they would have just answered, listened and then answered, they would have closed the deal for sure.

I know, it's crazy.

I think it's a, yeah, I think it's a point of being interested versus being interesting because if people want to be interesting about themselves, like there is a point in sales or like gaining attention where you have to be interesting when you look at the commercials and stuff like that, like they're interesting to grab attention, but then when you're actually selling, you have to be interested in that person.

Not only interested, you have to learn what to pay attention to. And what I teach people to do is pay attention to the emotions. The words don't mean anything, right? Especially if you're dealing with people who are— have a decedent, somebody who's just passed. To your point, homes and property are some of the most emotional things in the world. And listen to those emotions. Listen to what people are feeling. Validate their feelings. When people feel heard, they will follow you anywhere. They'll do whatever you want. So good that finally somebody understands me. And you don't have to say, hey, I get it, I understand. All you have to say is you're really sad and you're really worried and you're really nervous and upset and a little distressed. And you say that, approach it that way, and then all of a sudden, yeah, exactly. And then they're thinking in their mind, wow, this person really gets me. Because they were able to reflect emotions.

That's the power. I totally can see that.

That's the power of this stuff. Yeah, it's really crazy. It's crazy how it works. And I fell into it as a way of calming angry people in my peacemaking practice. And then some neuroscience came out to show why it works, which was even more powerful because it's the only skill I know of that has brain scanning studies that show this is what's going on in the brain when you're listening to people's emotions. Pretty crazy.

Do you ever find that in that process that you mistakenly invalidate their emotions by calling a different emotion or say, hey, listen, I understand you're sad. I'm not sad, I'm just blah, blah, blah.

Exactly. And so what happens is, I'm not sad. Or, hey man, you're really angry. I'm not angry. Oh, you're really frustrated. And you feel completely disrespected and you feel unappreciated, unsupported. And you're really worried. Yeah. And you're really pissed off. Yeah, I'm really pissed off. There's this— very briefly, what's going on is that when a part of the brain called the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed by emotions, it shuts down. People are not able to process their emotions, so they're simply reactive. When you label somebody and they deny the emotion and it's obvious that they're feeling that emotion, it's because They're not able to process that emotion. So you help them process some other emotions, and then once they start to calm down and the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex comes online, you come back and affect label again, and boom, there it is. You got it. And they completely de-escalate. That's the secret.

Gotcha. Okay.

The only other situation, it's not when you're wrong, it's when you get pushback. Don't— who do you think you are, my psychotherapist? You'll get that sometimes. Not very often. Just that just means that you were too, a little too strong because you were a superhero.

That makes sense.

The walls, the emotional walls they have up, their defenses, and now you see them up close and personal and it scares them. And so they push back and that's not a bad thing. All you gotta do is just back off. Um, but yeah, fair, fair enough. It's pretty cool how it works. So you're moving into new markets. So you're looking at Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth area, I presume.

Absolutely, absolutely. Our market is seasonal in Michigan, so in the wintertime it gets a little rough. So we're looking to stabilize it. We think that it's going to be the opposite, where in the wintertime it's going to pick up in Dallas and then the summertime it's going to slow down there because it's so hot, right? Versus in Michigan, it's going to pick up. So we're interested to see how that goes. We've done work in Chicago and Illinois, which has gone quite successful as well, but we want to fully duplicate we want to create a model. We've been working on creating a model that's duplicatable, and then that'll be the first opportunity to test that. And then from there, we'll move into a bunch more markets and expand the business.

And so this is, it's going to be the same kind of model where you're providing clean out, estate sale, auctions, and then staging and sell the house. The whole pack.

Exactly. Exactly. So it'll start with estate sales and clean outs. And from there, uh, things will get sent to our auction house from those homes. And then we'll also do the real estate first while we partner with a staging company. But yeah, those 3 things, the real estate sales, the auctions, and then the real estate sales go together hand in hand. And then over time, the— yeah, the challenge with the staging business is that you have to have a warehouse with a ton of furniture. So it's quite an investment in the beginning where the other ones are pretty low risk to start.

So not a lot of cost involved.

Yeah, exactly.

So what you'll do is you'll hire a real estate staging company, say in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, you'll partner with them. They'll come and do the staging, they get paid, and then you'll sell the house and get the commission on the sale of the house.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Pretty cool. That sounds pretty exciting. And you're flipping seasons to make sure to keep a balanced flow going. That's pretty interesting too.

Yeah, it's one of the things that we've been trying to figure it out in Michigan for 12 years and it always dips. It's been less of a dip and less of a dip and less of a dip every year that we work on it and we work on the market and the advertising and all those ends. But we're like, how much effort are we putting into this versus just going to get a new market and get that rolling where there's a different climate?

Exactly. Wow, really cool. So one more, one more question, Aaron, and then I'll let you go. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

What's one thing about myself that you would never know about unless I revealed it to you. I was— I volunteered for my church from age 15 to 18, and I was one of the first people, one of the first volunteer teams down in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. And we were stationed. We had this— we were with the, with the Seabees. I managed 250 volunteers out of an airplane hangar. At a CB base, which is the military base down in Mississippi.

Wow. Good for you. That was a huge management learning experience, wasn't it?

Yeah, and I was only 17 at the time and I was basically running everything. So it was huge.

You got a brilliant future ahead of you. Thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Yeah, thank you so much. I look forward to connecting in the future.

You bet. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.