Michael Clarke: You Need to Be a Farmer | ACME Article 04.11.23
Based just off of the pristine beaches of Manly, New South Wales, Clarke & Humel are a boutique agency that have consistently gone from strength to strength since they first opened. Acme got the chance to sit down and chat with Principal Michael Clarke about both his and his Co-Principal (and wife) Cherie Humel’s journey from working in different industries, to running their own agency.
Acme: Both yourself and Cherie have really interesting backgrounds prior to getting into the
industry. How’d you make the move from advertising to real estate?
Michael: Effectively because my then girlfriend - now wife, Cherie - said it would be a good idea to get out of advertising and get into real estate. I did what I was told! Jokes aside though, before Cherie had suggested it, I'd never considered it in my life.I loved the advertising course at Charles Sturt University. I was fortunate enough to win an advertising association scholarship and go over to a company called BBDO in New York, then I came back and won an AFA graduate trainee scholarship, so on paper, the advertising CV was looking tickety-boo, but I wasn't enjoying it. I decided I wanted to take up a hobby so went to a Kung Fu class around from where I worked in Pyrmont, but I had got the times wrong and ended up in a dance lesson! That’s where I met Cherie. They paired us together and we went on to become salsa teachers. Going through that process of meeting and getting to know Cherie, she could see I wasn't enjoying advertising as much as I hoped. And she said, “look, you love sales. You're always reading about communication and things like that. You should go into real estate.” So I did.
Acme: So were there certain things that you learnt in advertising that crossed over to real estate?
Michael: It massively helped with getting the marketing right for the brand and conveying what we stood for, obviously to effectively market the properties we sell and importantly getting the right people onboard for the business to grow too.
Ideas like target market, personal branding, understanding the importance of a key message all play a huge role in real estate. The industry is essentially advertising in broad scale sales. It's just what I really love. Combine that with Cherie, who is an architect - good gracious - what a match made it heaven!
Acme: Tell us a bit more about that. How did Cherie go about making the transition from
architecture to real estate?
Michael: Well, I used a very “high-level negotiation tactic” to get her to leave architecture and join me in real estate. It’s called begging [laughs]. Cherie had convinced me to leave advertising, and then two years later I convinced her to leave Architecture and join me. One day my client services manager was sick and Cherie came to an open home to give me a hand. I remember, she leaned over and whispered in my ear towards the middle of the open home, “this could be done so much better.” I said, “okay, great! Join me.” I remember her saying early on, “it's always been my dream to open a business with my partner.” Back then I had never had any ambition to open a business whatsoever. And in actual fact, initially, I was intimidated by it. But things had recently changed in the agency I was with, so I thought, “oh shit, right. Well, if that's what you want, let’s do it.”
I think Cherie found the transition from architecture into real estate, in some ways, more confronting than my transition was. People revere architects generally (and rightly so) and most people have an interest in it. In architecture Cherie was constantly dealing with incredibly sharp minds, and people must be at the top of their game. People’s perception of the advice from an architect is quite different from a typical real estate agent and usually it is requested at a different stage of someone’s property journey, so that transition was more jarring at first, but ultimately what’s led to so much of our success.
Acme: I imagine a lot of her knowledge and skills were still transferable though?
Michael: Absolutely. Because Cherie is able to have a conversation with somebody about a home that is completely different from other people in the industry. She can articulate with educated precision the strengths of a property and what makes it unique or how it relates to other aspects of the process. Also, any unrealised potential of a property or site is an area of her speciality.
Cherie always comes from a perspective of, “this is what I feel that we should be
doing in order to be able to maximise the value of your asset”. And I think people
really resonate with that because it's raw, it's real, it's considered, and it works.
Acme: So with her wealth of experience, is it fair to say Cherie was more involved in the building of the systems at Clarke & Humel?
Michael: The systems? Cherie was more involved in the building the business full stop! Though Cherie has always been listing and selling homes like I have, she evolved the business into something that filled the gaps in the industry that she started identifying at that first open home with me.
Acme: So how did Cherie (and you, of course) go about starting the business? What does that
journey look like after she said “I’ve always wanted to start a business with my partner”?
Michael: Cherie’s father was an architect and builder and did his own developments. When she was sitting around the dinner table as a kid, it was all business and all property. We both list and sell but she saw the bigger picture and realised what was needed for us to grow.
She said to me, “we can build a business that can grow around us - then we can help change other people's lives, not just our own.” That's an insight I didn't have as an agent. She came from the perspective right from the outset that building a business is actually not about your own lives; It’s about helping the people who work in the business, our local community and of course everyone who chooses us to help them with their home, in whatever capacity we might be able to do that. When we started, we wanted to take the best of what we learnt and just do that. Based on what we were passionate about and what we loved about real estate - it's grown from there.
Acme: What would you say to someone who wants to go out on their own and do something new and different in the real estate space, the same way that you and Cherie did?
Michael: First and foremost, just because you're a good salesperson doesn't mean that you'll be a good business owner. If I didn't have Cherie, I would never have gone out on my own. Full stop. But I’ve learnt so much from her and, clearly, couldn’t have done it without her. We’ve been in business for 12 years and I’m still learning lessons that come naturally to her.
Listing and selling is the sexy, fun bit of real estate that everyone loves to do. So, if that's what you love to do, do that until the cows come home. But running a business is quite different. I think oftentimes salespeople are very good at being hunters, but they're not very good at being farmers. And when you’re running the show, you really need to be a farmer.
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