During his 26 years in real estate, says John McKilligan, with RE/MAX Platinum Realty in Langley, British Columbia, "I never kept a client list. Never mailed a Christmas card. Never sent a birthday card. Never bought a housewarming present. I could always go out and find enough business.

"After doing this for 26 years I was getting a little tired of that way of doing business, so I started looking around for a better way. I found By Referral Only and joined in 2008. The first thing my Coach had me do was dig through all the old boxes in the garage and pull out any names, phone numbers, and addresses I could find and put them in a database. Two weeks later he said, 'How are you doing?' I said, 'I've been too busy to do anything.' So he helped me hire someone to dig through the boxes and piles and papers. In about four weeks we came up with 400 names. But when we checked whether they still owned their properties, we were down to 240.

"That was a wake-up call – those people had sold their properties, but not with me.

"My next step was to put together the Reconnect Letter, and the first thing I did was rewrite it. My Coach said, 'Don't change it, just mail it,' so I did. Of the 240 letters, 24 came back with 'moved, not at this address' across them. But from the balance, my letter brought me six listings, two buyers, and three closed transactions for commissions around $27,000. My cost was less than $200 for the mailing, plus the cost of hiring the person who put my database and mailing together.

"One of the lessons from this is that now I get up in the morning and look forward to talking to people instead of dreading prospecting. Another lesson is, doing the mail merge, and then watching the printer print out everything – it really was less than one minute.

"The By Referral Only systems are so easy!"