In this episode of the Alchemist Nation Real Estate Podcast, I talk to Devon McGuiness, the owner of devonmcguinness.com. I wanted to know what her website is all about. She says that she has been encountering conferences lately where that kind of information is important and it helps to put everybody in awareness. I still wanted to know what kind of conferences has she been going to lately. She says that she supports a lot of small businesses and non-profits where she has been attending and volunteering, giving and being of service to others. Helping where she can and with her skills, help educate and lend a hand.
To listen to Devon McGuinness’ Alchemist Nation Real Estate Podcast on Anchor: #107 Alchemist Nation Real Estate Podcast With Devon McGuinness – The Data Miner and Story Teller.
I ask Devon what made her get involved in real estate. Surprisingly she is not specifically in real estate, it is something that is a fascinating piece of how we accumulate wealth as well as how it drives our society. She is more interested in the data, so she is a storyteller and she got into that business because she made maps for a while and she realized that there is a sense of place that is really important. All the information that goes into understanding where we are whether it’s a map or perhaps it is not a sense of place as in not the physical location but maybe it is our digital sense of place, digital community, and understanding how and where we fit into that. This is what she really enjoys getting into the data, bringing that humanity back.
I further ask Devon what is her biggest strength that she brings to the digital world. She says that her strength is to look at the spreadsheet and start to analyze the narrative behind it. As I told her that I’m always online more than ever, so I leave traces of myself on the web through data by putting a cookie or cache or the websites that you’ve visited and opted into, letting them see your data. Google Analytics is that one free resource you can use and all these analytics pieces are available in the way that they can understand and start to communicate on that level. She finds that to be really powerful on how you can understand your customers. She has always thought of customers as a concept of building the concept of a physical world into your virtual world.
As a real estate investor, I get a lot of my clients from bigger pockets even though most people don’t really pay attention to social media, bigger pockets are followed by Linkedin and Facebook. For Instagram and Snapchat, if I’m to spend money there, it isn’t a good return on investment. I wanted to know how Devon can identify this for non-profits that she is working with. She has a process that she will go through as an iterative phase where they will look at all their baseline data, then start to build on a strategy month over month or whatever cycle they would like to look into. Most organizations looking at it more than once a month is a bit overwhelming and there isn’t enough time to see the impact of that strategy. Sometimes it is for a specific sprint of work but overall for non-profits or a smaller organization, you will want to see how that strategy builds with small adjustments as you go through it. That’s the goal to start with that baseline and move forward with what is really aligning with what you want to be doing but also seeing what should be done.
I also ask Devon where she sees herself in the next 3 -5 years and what is that big project of hers she is working on. Her goal in the next couple of years is really to educate people on the data that they have that they probably think that they don’t have. She looks at it as everybody has data and even if you don’t know it yet it is a great thing for you to have where it can be an extra asset that you don’t have to pay an extra fee for. In a smaller sense, you don’t need big data to make an impact and to really understand what’s going on. Everyone thinks that it has to be a huge spreadsheet yet it has to be just your data, not big data.
Devon talks about the 3 pieces of advice she has ever been given
1) – Read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s book – Be a little deaf. It is not about having the answers but asking the questions.
2) – People sharing their kindness and honesty to her.
3) – Reading science fiction books helped her to be creative in a very well-grounded way.
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