Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here in our Second Tech Timber episode this season, chief Operating Officer, Camilla Rivera and operations manager Julia o' Buckley, share the evolution of their tech stacks that don't just add efficiency to the business. They also drive Agent Success, CRM, transitions and Open APIs, enhanced visibility and efficiency gains, specific tools, powering their agents and teams. It's all here in just under 20 minutes with Camilla. Then just under 20 minutes with Julia, enjoy the Second Tech tamber episode on Real Estate Team os no

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team Os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Camilla, I've intended to have you on the show since I learned about you and your team with Lori Finkelstein Reader way back on episode two of the show. This conversation is overdue, but good news for viewers and listeners. It's not the only one. We'll actually have a full and proper conversation with you about operations leadership, finding your ops person releasing very soon. But for right now, thank you for joining us for Eptember and welcome to Real Estate Team os.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Thank you for having me, Ethan. I'm excited to have some fun with you today.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, me too. I love your duration in the role and we're going to talk a little bit about your growth and the growth of the tech stack in particular over the past decade with the same team, a very successful team. But I'm going to start with three quick lighter questions and the first one is on a scale of one to 10, how excited or passionate or interested are you in New Tech in general?

Speaker 3 (01:37):
A 10, a strong 10.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Has it always been that way or has that emerged for you over time?

Speaker 3 (01:43):
It's always been that way just because I'm extremely passionate about working efficiently and I think that's what technology allows us to do so that we can spend more time working on the things that technology cannot do for us. So I'm really passionate about how can we work smarter and really making sure that we're leveraging the technology that we have available.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Love it. Okay. We're going to dive into something you just said after we get into the proper conversation, which is kind of this divide between what should people be doing and what should machines be doing, what can machines do well and what can't they, especially in the age of AI and where we are in it, the dawn of it essentially. I personally feel like there's a lot of good debate to be had or what it actually does well, but the second question I'd love to ask you is what's something you've implemented that you've received the best feedback on from agents?

Speaker 3 (02:34):
So definitely when we transitioned CRMs, that was back in 2021 and we transitioned to follow up boss, not just because we're speaking but because I really do believe that it has the best user experience for agents and really has allowed them to understand how to use the system when they open it up, where they should be focused, where to go, and it definitely has to be our agent's favorite tech product.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Awesome. I love ease of use. I love what you said about as soon as I get in, I kind of know where I belong and I know what I should be doing. That's exactly what it should be doing from the agent facing perspective and then from your level, obviously plug anything you want into it and get the information and visibility you need and these kinds of things. Last one is what is one app that you open every single day that has nothing to do or very little to do with real estate?

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Sleep cycle. It's my alarm clock. It tells me how well I slept and it's the best alarm clock ever. It wakes you up when you're already starting to get out of that run sleep. So I use it every single day.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Is that hooked up to a device or is that hooked up to a mattress cover? How is it reading your sleep?

Speaker 3 (03:52):
So no, it's not hooked up to device just because I can't wear anything while I'm sleeping. Unfortunately, it bothers me too much, but it really is just by how much you're moving snoring if you sleep talk. So it works great for me.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Sleep talking. Okay.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, I guess now I'm curious, do I do that? I don't know. That's awesome. I love that. And sleep is, we get so focused especially, I mean this is partly a tech conversation too. We get so focused on health and fitness and wellness and we track all kinds of stuff and the basic X's and O's getting the basic things right, kind of like you mentioned CRM getting great sleep is foundational to everything else goes better when you're getting good high quality sleep. So I love that you went there. Okay. What I would love for you to do is kick us off. You've been with the team for a decade, you're COO, you've probably guided a lot of this, whether or not you did all of it by hand, I would love for you to walk through over whatever in whatever detail you'd like and over whatever time it takes, where did tech start back in mid 20 teens and walk us up to today, what is the evolution of the tech stack? And particularly what I'm thinking about is for an early stage team leader that aspires to maybe grow the way that your organization has grown over the years, what order did these things come in? What were a couple of big pivot points? You already mentioned one in 2021, but walk us through what stands out to you when you think about the past decade of building the tech stack with the team.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
Yeah, absolutely. So I don't even know if the listeners are going to be familiar with this product, but when I first started on the team, we were using Top Producer,

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Totally

Speaker 3 (05:33):
And Top producer. And what's funny is that we were simply using top producer for our past client database, nothing else, even though it had the availability to do task list, so many other things. But our operations team was using paper checklist for listings and transaction coordination and we were paying quite a bit of money for Top Producer and had all these users, but we weren't leveraging fully what the product had to offer. So first what I started, I said, okay, well we're already paying for this, why don't we leverage the task list? So should someone be out of office, there's someone that could just open up Top producer and know where to pick up. So it seems simple, but that was a big evolution to move our operations team from pen to paper to managing their files and listings through Top Producer. And it's funny because some of our ops teams still uses pen to paper and I'm not against pen to paper.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
It helps me simply just because I'm able to memorize it when I write it out. I usually never go back to it, but it just helps me memorize it. But you can't only rely on that. So I tell people, that's okay, if you need to create your daily checklist, that's fine, whatever works for you, but you need to make sure that you're building a system just to protect the business, right? Because God forbid you're not able to show up tomorrow, something happens, how can the next person be able to pick up where you left off? So transitioning to managing task list and files was a big deal for us. And at that time we were also using BoomTown, but we were only using BoomTown once. We would only add a client when they were under contract. So we weren't using BoomTown to manage our future pipeline.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
And so it was simply when it got under contract, agents would add it. And so they as well had their list written down of all their contacts and I started to really understand how BoomTown would help agents with follow-up, right? Because we all know that's the biggest area of opportunity for all of us is in that nurturing and pipeline. And so we started to have our agents add their past client database, but also people that they knew that they would like to either get referrals from or eventually do business with in the future. And even getting agents to start to think about A CRM in that way was a big step. The next big one that I remember was Loop prior. We used to use Form Simplicity, but it was limited in what it had to offer at that time for a team. I think it works very well for single agents, but when you have an operations team on the back end trying to support you and pick up on your missing pieces, we knew that it was time to move to something a little bit more robust.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
And so we transitioned to Dot Loop and one of our agents had such a hard time, he called it dot Poop for so long, just he is just like, there's too many options here, but now it's everyone's favorite product. I know I cannot move our agents from that. It really does make the process a lot easier, especially when the agent on the other side is using Dotloop. It makes it for a very smooth back and forth counter offers and all that. So Dotloop was a big one and I would say the biggest one yet has been the CRM transition. Like I mentioned, transitioning to follow up Boss just because we were at a time in our business where we wanted to integrate so many different systems and leverage different products to help us be more efficient, but the prior CRM had to close API and so we are very limited in what we could do and sometimes that works, but as your organization grows and you want to be able to do more things and leverage more parts of the process, you need to have more flexibility. And that's where we said, okay, it's time to make a change. We had about a hundred thousand people. I don't think I slept for a month because I was like, this could be really bad, but it was the best decision yet. I'm glad we did it when we did it because of course now our CRM is three x that and so I couldn't even imagine going through a process like that. Again,

Speaker 1 (09:59):
I want to spend another minute on the transition in part because of the size of your database and I'm sure someone listening, even if they're half or a quarter of that, it still makes them anxious. To your point earlier, that is the foundation of your future business. This is your future pipeline, so you don't want to lose anything in that transition. I also want to acknowledge that 2021 was one of the best years in real estate from just a sheer volume activity standpoint. So a efficiency is super important at that point, but at the same time everyone's probably super, super busy too. So spend a minute on that transition. I mean one of the ways I think about it is acute pain versus chronic pain. The chronic pain of, well, we don't have the open API, we can't plug in some of these other tools, I can't get us where we need to go. I maybe don't have visibility into all the metrics and things that I need in my role as I'm speaking as you as COO, at the same time, the acute pain of how am I going to get all of these agents' attention, make this transition myself, et cetera, at a time when we're doing more transactions than we've done in a while. I assume, I mean 2021 was I think everyone would say no matter what market there, it is a pretty great year. So how did that go at such a busy time?

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Ethan? I just have to add, we had also just launched Zillow offers. So not only to the market being super hot, we had just launched Zillow offers where we were buying and selling homes for Zillow. So it was a chaotic time to say the least, but we knew that that was going to continue, so we said, okay, we might as well rip off the bandaid. We had been frustrated for some time being very limited to what we wanted to integrate into our organization. And so I reached out to people that had done something similar in the past and I said, tell me what went really well. What did you fail at? What do you wish you would've done differently? And that is something that I do all the time. People's experience, you cannot buy, people learn so much and you could save yourself so much time just from asking others about what their experience was like, and that's with anything in life.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
But I said, okay, let me reach out to people that have gone through this. And I got great feedback and I also set up an army team for myself. I said, I'm not going to go through this alone. This is a really big move. And so I had about three people inside of my organization. I said, all right, we're all going to work together and we're going to build out a map plan of what this is going to look like. We're going to go step by step and we're also not going to tell agents before we have to that let's not create this anxiety or until we absolutely have to, until we feel really confident and until we've mastered the product ourselves. Because if we want other people to buy in and see why it's better for them and how it's going to help them be more efficient, we need to make sure that we can teach that.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
So I got extremely educated on the project. I made sure that there was a few people inside of our organization that were just as educated on the project so that they could help integrate this. And I also hired someone who built out Smartlist just because I knew that I didn't have that type of experience. And so I said, okay, what's the best type of smartlist for agents? You have a ton of experience. You've done this for a lot of teams. And so I hired them to help us with that process. And then I also had our follow-up boss account manager riding alongside with me. We had a meeting almost every other day because I said, you're going to need to hold my hand through this and we're going to need to work very closely together to make this transition. And so I just made sure I had the right team around me to help support this big move both externally and internally.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
And I have to say it went pretty smoothly, but there was a lot of preparation in that I did lose a lot of sleep just because I was super concerned about us missing information data. The biggest pain point was setting up new save searches for our pipeline, but that was also an opportunity for our agents to go back and revisit, were you sending relevant information? Is this even someone that you should be sending something to at the moment? Is it an opportunity for you to check in with this person and see where they are in their life? So you kind of just have to find the opportunities during those times.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
I love your planning and prep approach, and I love that it started with conversations with other people who had been through something similar just to make sure that you were thinking about it the right way and that there's no reason to suffer. That's one of the reasons we host this show is there's no reason to suffer through something that someone else has gone through the hard way learned and everyone is so willing to participate and support each other, plan, prepare, talk to people along the way, find your right partners. Any other key pieces? You mentioned the open API, anything that you have plugged in over the past three, four years via the open API that's been really helpful to you in particular as the operations leader?

Speaker 3 (15:33):
Yes. The ability for our support staff to integrate into Follow-Up Boss so that agents can see all of the communication in a centralized location once it's an active listing or it goes under contract

Speaker 2 (15:47):
Because

Speaker 3 (15:47):
That was a really big piece of frustration for agents, especially for top performers when they have anywhere from five to seven, eight properties under contract or on the market at any given time, you don't want to go through your inbox in your email and try to figure out where everything is right. That takes way too much time trying to find the latest is you're wasting time. And so really plugging our support staff into follow-up boss so that there's visibility for everyone, including leadership. If something happens with a client, I can jump in at any given moment and I know what's the last piece of communication that they've had with our organization from either the agent inside sales or the operations team. So that has been a really big game changer and really provide a lot of visibility inside of our organization.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
I hear efficiency right on the face of that, which is don't go searching for the details, don't let details go missing because that just creates more pain in the future of not only do you have to go dig out the detail, you have to do it under a stressful circumstance. And that brings me back to what you opened on, which is efficiency, whether it's from your perspective, from your operations or staff perspective or whether it's from an agent perspective, give us a high level on how you think about efficiency. What should people still be doing because they do it better or it makes sense to have a hand on it like that human touch and what really does belong to the machine?

Speaker 3 (17:18):
Yeah, this is a great question, Ethan, and it's a hot topic and

Speaker 1 (17:23):
It moves and it changes,

Speaker 3 (17:24):
It does change, but it also stays the same from my perspective. Okay, good. If there's one thing we all need more of is human connection, right? And buying and selling real estate is such an emotional transaction in all of our reviews. No one ever says, thank you for how much money you saved me. Thank you for keeping me informed along the way. Thank you for talking me off the ledge when I had a moment. Thank you for being there for me. Thank you for holding my hand. And while technology AI can help you be more efficient and fill in the gap in those touch points, nothing beats the conversation between you and the consumer. It's just not possible. And that's what people are valued the most throughout a transaction when they're buying and selling. And so for us, of course, email, text messaging, drip campaigns and automations is key so that it can give us more time and agents more time and our operations staff more time so they can spend more time on the phone.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
And it's interesting because people say all the time, no one wants to talk on the phone when they're buying and selling and they have a three to $500,000 asset on the line they want to get on the phone. Of course, they don't want to get on the phone when they're calling Comcast. Of course they don't want to get on the phone when they're calling customer service at Macy's, but they want to get on the phone and talk to a person when they are buying and selling the largest asset that they most likely ever will in their entire lifetime. So for us, it's nothing can really fill in the gap for that conversation between you and that consumer in the moment that they need it the most. And that is different for every client and for every agent.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
I appreciate that perspective so much and that's a great spot to wrap this tech temper conversation. So Camilla, let people know if they want to learn more about you, if they have questions for you, if they want to learn about the way that you're coaching of their operations leaders, if they want to learn about your team, anything at all, where would you send anyone that wants to follow up on this conversation?

Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yes. Well, they could definitely email me camilla@lauriereader.com or also follow me on Instagram. It's Camilla Rivera. I'm happy to connect with other people inside of the industry. Like you mentioned Ethan, it's so important that we all collaborate and help one another. There's enough business out there for all of us to win together and thank you so much for having me today, Ethan.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, all that stuff is linked up right down below. She did not share her email address because she doesn't want to hear from you. I typed it up down below so you don't have to write it down if you're running or walking the dog or mowing the lawn or whatever you're doing while you watch or listen. Camilla, I look forward to our next conversation too where we dive into something you get asked all the time, which is how do I find my future COO? But until then, have a great day and thank you so much for joining us for Eptember.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
Thank you, you too.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
To learn more about Camilla Rivera and the specific tools that she mentioned, check out the description down below and while you're there, be sure to click through to sign up for email exclusive insights and subscriber only episodes@realestateteamos.com slash subscribe. When you do that, you'll be notified as soon as Camilla's full episode she takes on the most common question she gets as an operations leader, how do I as a team leader find my first operations person and how do I invest in them so that they can become the kind of operations leader that Camilla has? Next up is Julia O. Buckley on the four primary tools that the Lawton team provides their agents, how an AI assistant ties all those tools together and how Julia plans to relaunch those tools to the team in order to drive agent adoption and agent success. Julia, great to see you. Welcome back to Real Estate Team os.

Speaker 4 (21:25):
Yeah, thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here and do this again.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Yeah, I loved our conversation almost a year and a half ago or about a year and a half ago and you were one of the first to mind when I thought about past guests that I wanted to bring back for Eptember and to kick it off, we're just going to rip through a couple quick questions before we dive into a good conversation about what's going on with you and the Lawton team. On a scale of one to 10, how interested or excited or passionate would you say you are about New Tech in general?

Speaker 4 (21:51):
I think right now I have full fledged 10. It's literally my life. I don't think I've always been that way, but we're such an exciting time with tech right now, so I'm devouring it 24 7 as much as possible.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Okay. What would you say your number was six years ago when you were just getting into the Lawton team?

Speaker 4 (22:10):
Billy and I have a funny joke because when he gave me the job description for my role, it was like, what's your experience with API can you work with APIs? I'm like, what is this? I don't even understand the concept of it. And so he's like, I think you could figure it out. So he blindly trusted my ability with it, but able to pick up. I think I've always, texts always come easy to me. I've always just been able to understand it and see how it works. I also came from the MySpace and Live journal eras where we actually had to go and code in our backend backgrounds and music, and so I've always been a little bit probably more advanced than elsewhere, but I think the last six years it has just become my full fledged passion.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
I find that encouraging for folks too. I mean what I hear in the way that you structure that is like, well, it wasn't necessarily, I didn't live and breathe New Tech all the time, but I was confident enough that when I was given Blind trust and faith that I was able to live up to it. What is something that you've implemented over the past six and a half years at the Lawton team from a tech perspective that you've gotten the best feedback on from agents?

Speaker 4 (23:19):
I think it's hard to recognize and hear what those themes and not like that they're huge wins, but the biggest ones, and I think we're going to talk about this, is truly I think follow up boss, that implementation because CRM is the lifeline for our agents and so to make a change, and we had been in BoomTown since 2007, you know what I mean? So that was a huge change and the agents who were resistance, they are the ones that are full fledged in Follow boss, love it, eat it, breathe it, everything. So I'm super proud of that. We have an AI assistant house whisperer. I think that's our sexiest tech that we have that agents just naturally love because she's so easy and so I think that's the easiest adoption for agents to kind of come. It's flashy and some of that. So those are probably the two.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
Awesome. If anyone wants a much deeper dive on that F transition, that transition on to follow-up Boss, that's in my first conversation with Julia as part of the inside the Lawton team series, again about a year and a half ago, but I'll drop a link to the whole series right down below on YouTube. It's in the description Apple Podcast, Spotify. It's down below in the description. If you're watching or listening on the website, realestate team os.com that's linked up down below in the description. We will maybe hit that a little bit, but my third quick question off the top is what's one app that you open up every single day that has little or nothing to do with real estate?

Speaker 4 (24:49):
Obviously social media, but I think the funnest one is the New York Times game app. I love Wordle Connections and then we do a word cross, but me and my husband do 'em together, so before we get out of bed we'd drink coffee and do those in the morning. So that's probably the funnest one I open.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
That is fun. What a fun habit. Okay, so when you were on the show initially, your transition on to follow-up Boss, and I think you were implementing SISU at the time as well, both of those were pretty new. Give us 18 months later, what's going well? How has that changed things in particular laying the sisu insights on the F data? Just talk about that a little bit. How has that gone and what's it done for you and the team?

Speaker 4 (25:34):
Our follow-up boss is our most successful, easiest tech transition that we've ever done I think. But it is like the backbone of our whole infrastructure. So agents are completely bought in. I feel like our team leads are bought in. We're using it at a very high level, the CCO implementation we've been in for just over a year. TCS have been in, we actually went all in on CSU and we have recruiting and training all in CSU that's attached to a separate FUB account. So that was a very fun thing to kind of build out and launch. I think it's so such a clean process for the agents to be able to see a full fledged checklist, all of that. So I think that's been super successful on our agent, true real estate side with csu. It has been great. I think we're getting adoption. I think the hardest part on that side has been we are so embedded into Follow-Up Boss and checking our numbers in Follow-Up Boss that CSU thinks a little bit differently of how they display numbers and what their are.

Speaker 4 (26:44):
The trickiest thing has been like, Hey, because the data doesn't exactly match, doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just this one is driving you to work on your business. You're actually outwardly prospecting. Follow Boss is a more holistic inbound sphere, all of that. So I think that has been our hardest hurdle to kind get across and get the agent's mindsets. Also our team leads. It's a bigger coaching mindset than I think we really realize going into it. The next half of the year I kind of want to do a full fledge relaunch of our tech stack and we have four main ones that we're going to try to just really do a relaunch and show agents how they really work together and the ease of them. I think it's kind of important at this point. They're kind of in and understand it, but now it's like, okay, let's get nitty gritty and really dive in.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
Okay. I'm going to ask you to give me, and I know you're working on it in the months ahead, but name the four things and give me a soft, even if it's just a rough pitch of speak to me as if I'm an agent. What is the Main tech? How does it work together? What should I be excited about?

Speaker 4 (28:05):
Yeah, so Follow-Up Boss is our base. It is our CRM. It's where everything lives, it's all of our relationships. Obviously within Follow-Up Boss, we have some plugins in there that kind of just are in that will house of Y Lobo texting Betty. That is going to be all client relationships. We have CSU that interacts with Follow-Up Boss, but that is going to help you keep on track and make sure that you are actually working towards your goals and you don't just get lost in the relationships of the CRM. And then we have fellow and fellow is A to Z, like nurturing relationships. They have so many great features that really touch from when the lead comes in all the way through nurturing them. So I think that's just a holistic one. And then we have Nora, our AI house whisper assistant, and she kind of holds you guys everything all together really. If talking to her it updates the CRM, it updates csu. So really if you can buy into House, whisper, everything else works for you and tells you what you need to do. But yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Okay, well done. I want to peel into that a little bit. So your follow boss is like where I do everything, it's who I should be talking to. It gives me access to all the different channels. This is where I'm doing all of my outreach, contact, communication, et cetera, and I can see some stats in there so that I can see a higher level view of, so when I want to step out of the weeds of doing all this stuff, I maybe get into Sisu and I see how I'm pacing against what my own goals are that I maybe worked with my team leader on and that keeps me track. So I've stepped up I guess to say it's not the 30,000 foot view, but it's also not on the ground. It's like somewhere mid-layer. Describe for me again as an agent what fellow is doing for me unique from say follow-up Boss smart lists and some of these other things that help us talk to the right people at the right time.

Speaker 4 (30:14):
There are certain things that there, they have data enrichment, so it double checks. Make sure that your clients still own the home, that their emails are right, their phone numbers are right. It also sends the monthly equity reports, but what's really cool there is we can customize them. So we have our own cash offer solution in there. We have George's video in there. We can really customize those to either get people who haven't responded to us and nurture. So it just is a very holistic nurturing, I feel like it wraps its hands and arms around the leads in a very unique way. It also gives a way for the homeowners to raise their hand in A CMA or Cash offer. You can see their insights. So it's like home bought on steroids. That is just a little bit, it's like hugging the clients through other journey. I feel

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Really good and that data enrichment layer is pretty interesting too. Okay. House Whisper. This I feel like helps solve pretty significantly a lot of the most common challenges of a team that has grown and scaled over several years. And now has, let's just say dozens of agents who are, in your case, a couple of hundred agents. Yes, some people have solved this before with ISA or VA type roles where basically what I'm speaking about, I guess I'll go straight at it is agents aren't great historically. I think most people would agree, including most of the agents themselves at keeping the CRM updated and we know just the way you talked about just those three tools alone, if we don't trust the quality and quantity of information that's in there, what are we doing that needs to be solid? We need to trust it. It needs to be filled out in a pretty complete manner. We need to be, especially to the degree that we're triggering automation or intelligent automation on some of that data, it has to be there and it has to be accurate. So House Whisper I think closes that loop for you all in a pretty unique way. Give us a quick rundown on that. How long have you all been using it? How has Agent Adoption been? And just maybe start with for folks who aren't familiar, just the basics of how it works.

Speaker 4 (32:35):
We've been working with House Whisperer for probably about a year and a, but we were doing a lot of the beta stuff. So we just had an inside group that was testing a lot of things with them, kind of just vetting it out, making sure it was something we wanted to aligned with us. I got involved I think about a year ago with them and I was rolling out and we were planning on that launch. They helped us launch sisu because I couldn't figure out in my head how to pitch Sisu to 200 agents where they're excited for it or understand it without being like, oh, we're going to hold you guys accountable for everything you do, and really we want to help them get to their goals. So we launched House Whisperer with Sisu and House Whisperer is an AI assistant. She texts them.

Speaker 4 (33:22):
She truly works as a real life human assistant. I got into real estate as an assistant and she's probably 20 times better than I was at 18. So hats off to her. So anything that agent could do for us, we loved it because we don't introduce deal cards or how deal cards work to our agents. It's too complicated to try to figure out all the mapping. So for us, what we did was, okay, use House Whisper, use your Nora assistant. She goes in and she updates everything for us. That pushes everything into sisu. And so that was kind of how we got attachment with it and it was the fun thing that was shiny object that agents got attached to in that, but it gives us really, really clean data with our database and I think that's where it started was database health and keeping the agents, they should not be spending hours and hours in their database, make your calls, go out on appointments.

Speaker 4 (34:21):
That's our whole what we want to do. So she helps in that and initially that's where we started, but we've just really grown with them and some of their features. She can help us pick out pop buys for next month. She can hone in on who's important to call or she will give you a brief update of like, Hey, FYI, you're going to show this property. Don't forget that their kid's name is Joanne. They're 12 years old and their motivation is that they have to be in the school district because she plays soccer. And so she kind of updates them to keep 'em agile and where they're not having to do all this prep work for each appointment. Like I said, she sets all of our appointments, not all of them, but about 70% of our appointments in follow-up boss and then we could have never ever been able to get met. Data agents actually dispositioning after an appointment to find out what those are. But it's so important for CSU to work and know your actual numbers. And so she messages them after their appointments to ask what they're doing and if they met and then kind of next steps, she creates tasks for 'em. But agents have kind of gone,

Speaker 1 (35:38):
You can just call in and talk at it and it'll take everything and organize everything it learns

Speaker 4 (35:45):
And I think the best thing about her is she will shift to what you want. So if I'm like, Hey, I'm a morning person, make sure that you send me my reminders at 6:00 AM and then my goal this month is I need to set 15 appointments, so can you make sure that I'm on track? And so she is like your biggest hype girl. She will send you a emoji. It's like the best. I think the coolest thing too is she fills like a real person within our T. We talk to her. We try to humanize her as much as possible, but you can see through our chats they'll be like, oh, I was late night with Nora working on my database. She is a partner with our agents and it is just been so valuable.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
That's awesome. Well, I'm excited for your relaunch and I'll be curious to know how that goes. I don't know if we'll record it, maybe we will, but we'll do a follow up on that. Okay, cool. But I really like the way that you're positioning all four of those tools from an agent perspective. One of the things I really love about the way your role has evolved in the time that you've been with the team is that you've really emerged as someone who has earned a rev ops or revenue operations or maybe a strategic operations role. I think a lot of ops roles start out as, and perhaps yours did too, although you were alongside A COO rather than a lot of directors of ops or ops managers wind up as the hands-on like, okay, I'll organize everything you just said to me. Wild visionary sales leader person.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
So you've emerged really strategically. You mentioned before that you had a bit of an agent background or had been an assistant as well, so you obviously understand the sales side of it. Talk a little bit about maybe in the form of a tip, how operations can and should just strategically partner with sales to make sure that we're not just doing things exclusively for efficiency, but also to really help drive top line. I mean both are super important. Growing top line with no mind to efficiency is a hamster wheel that's going to be really exhausting and expensive. Going exclusively for efficiency is going to probably limit top line growth. How do you find the balance in that? And I think it's in your partnership with Justin McClellan and maybe even the culture that George and Billy have set, but give us a few words of encouragement on partnering with sales.

Speaker 4 (38:09):
Yeah, I think for me operations, it's always comes down to the people in actually using it. And so Justin and I, well first I think shout out to George and Billy because I think their relationship of visionary operations and how they work together as a team and the respect that they have and how they just move fast. They gave us a really good model on that. But Justin and I pretty much started at the same time and kind of have risen up and we have just been our supports in trying to figure out what works. We test every single thing together, all of the pilots we work on together. And so we've gotten into this relationship where we can almost, I lock step. I can see before I even go to adjusted, we need to do this, this, and this, and then he's going to make sure we want to see this here.

Speaker 4 (39:09):
That takes a lot of time to develop. But my job is I could build the coolest things and things that I think are really passionate, I'm really passionate about, but if they're not going to move the needle and Justin doesn't believe in them as our sales leader, they're not going to move. I think it's as much sales we're also selling to him and making him see the value, but then solving the issue. So 90% of my meetings with Justin, I'm just listening to him. He's talking about his meetings, his coachings, every single thing that he's had, every comment an agent has told him, and then I go and make solutions for those and prioritize based off what I think is going to unlock him on the sales side the fastest.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
It's just an open relationship. It's working together. It's listening a lot and it's prioritizing others' needs as much as your own.

Speaker 4 (40:05):
And it's truly just no ego, I think because we're just building and so I think, but us kind of being as good friends first really helped with that.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
Yeah, I appreciate this. Welcome back to the show. It was a pleasure to have you. I love what you're up to. I want to know how it goes as you kind of repackage and reposition this essence of agent productivity for them. Before I let you go, if someone has enjoyed this and they want to learn more about you or connect with you or the Lawton team, where would be the best or easiest place to do that?

Speaker 4 (40:40):
Instagram probably because it's only handles I can remember, but obviously team is the handle on that one. And Julia, luckily you can find me there is probably the best spot.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
Cool. That stuff's linked down below. And if you are a follow-up boss customer or you're in a trial of follow-up boss, we have a Facebook success community with, I don't know, 25 or 30,000 people in it, and Julia and I are both among them. That's another good place to get your tech questions answered. Julia, thank you so much.

Speaker 4 (41:07):
Yeah, thank you so much. I'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. Get quick insights all the time by checking out real estate team Os on Instagram and on TikTok.