Speaker 1 (00:00):
In a very basic and very real way. Real estate technology comes down to problems and solutions on an iterative journey toward a better result, a better business, and ultimately a better life. Here in our fourth eptember conversation, learn how two leaders clearly identify problems and build their own tech solutions. Then continue iterating on them. Spend about 20 minutes with Ryan Young CEO and team leader of the number one team in Ohio and CEO and co-founder of fellow. Then spend about 24 minutes with Brian Hurley, a Google engineer who also builds marketing and tech solutions for his wife Teresa, who's built her business from real estate agent to team leader to brokerage co-owner, learn from their stories, lessons and experiences to build some of your own solutions. Enjoy this Tech Timber episode on Real Estate Team os no

Speaker 2 (00:51):
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

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Butte. Ryan, in addition to being the CEO of the number one team in Ohio, you're obviously the CEO of a software company that was born a bit out of problems you faced as a team leader and that's now helping tens of thousands of agents and LOS solve similar problems. Welcome to Tech TE on Real Estate Team Os

Speaker 3 (01:21):
I am pumped. This is going to be awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
We're going to start with three quick questions. The first one is on a scale of one to 10, how interested or excited or passionate would you say you are about new tools and new tech in general?

Speaker 3 (01:34):
An 11, I would say I'm obsessed. 10. I'm a 10.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Has it always been that way or did something change or unlock for you that got you really deep into it?

Speaker 3 (01:47):
Two things changed. It didn't use to be that way. One is I started building a product and then really surrounded myself with people way smarter than me. That opened up what you can actually build and what's possible. And then also just in the past six to 12 months, just this AI boom has made me obsessed with Everything Tech.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
What is the most underused tool or piece of tech in most real estate businesses here in 2025?

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Your database, we'll go deeper in it but me, I know how strongly I feel about a database and so we'll talk more about that

Speaker 1 (02:34):
And I love seeing it as a tool in particular. I think a lot of people think of it as a collection of people in contact information with some information appended to it, but it actually is a tool to leverage. So we'll definitely be getting into that. What would your 2015 self say about the tech that you're using today In 2025,

Speaker 3 (02:54):
The 2015 version of myself was literally writing Post-It on a desk of saying reminder to call this person back a listing appointment opportunity. They would've said, you're a former chef turned real estate guy, you will never use technology, you'll never embrace technology. You'll always be the guy that says, I don't need that. If 10 years ago was looking at me now they'd be like, how did this happen?

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah. Cool. Well, so let's jump into it. I would love for you to talk about the way that fellow was developed and not necessarily as a company or a product, but really again through this problem solution lens. I mean what I really want to hear is the story of you as someone trying to get things done as a business leader struggling and deciding to go down the road of your own solution.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
I'm an entrepreneur and I've always been building and been creative in approaches on how I've scaled the young team and one of the things that we always did was the guaranteed cash offer. And what was interesting was we were seeing so much success around the guaranteed offer that I started a second company called Flash House. Flash House's whole entire concept was we will buy your house for cash, we're direct cash home buyer, cash offer solution, and the young team partnered with Flash House. So the young team would go on a listing appointment, they'd say, Hey, we can get you a cash offer from House. Now I own both companies, but it gave Flash House the ability to be very focused on buying homes and it gave the young team a lot of focus on listing, helping people buy and sell and we could work together hand in hand.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
As Flash House got bigger, we started spending a lot more money on marketing and it was growing really quick. And what was so interesting was I started to see a lot of people from the young team's database requesting cash offers from Flash House. I started getting really frustrated that past clients that had no idea that I owned both companies were sneaking around to my competition that I just so happened to own and requesting these cash offers. They didn't reach out to me and they're like, Hey Ryan, I actually requested a cash offer from Flash House. They were going through the entire process getting their offer going through home assessments and stuff like that, and I started realizing that if they're going to my competition that I have visibility into, where else are they going? And so I realized that I needed a solution to build a moat around my database to start getting visibility to what's happening in my database.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
And that was really why we built fellow was because of the paranoia of with IBU and all the things that were happening, tech and all these venture groups spending billions of dollars to ultimately disrupt the real estate industry. I felt like I really needed to protect myself, the young team, which was my largest asset from where we ultimately how we built our business, which was ultimately building this great database and having all these past customers and generating from it. So it all stemmed from a problem that I was having and it's obviously evolved from there, but it was really kind of a way for me to say, how do I protect the young team and ultimately what we build.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Okay, two directions I want to go and you can pick which place we go first. I'm sure you'd be happy to go to either one. One is database as your best asset.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
It's not specifically a tech timber conversation, but I think it's really important. And then the other one is solutions and iterating on that solution either as new problems emerge or as new capabilities emerge, get into that tech side of, because you just alluded to that's kind of where it started. It's obviously become more, I want to talk a little bit about that from the frame of we identify a problem, we find a solution. That solution might be buying a subscription to some service and plugging it in and hooking it up through the API to follow up boss or whatever CRM you're using or whatever it might be, a different type of solution, but that solution doesn't necessarily fit a year from now or two years from now or it used to be 80% effective and now it's 45% effective. So we need to, so I'm going to talk about that. So go either direction you want database is your best asset or what's required to constantly iterate on problem solution.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
So the only thing constant in this world is change and so iteration is everything, but before I talk about iteration, something I feel very passionate about and I get to speak on large stages and I'm always talking about your database as your largest asset and I think some people don't look at their database as an asset, they look at it as kind of a repository. As you mentioned, it's almost a glorified spreadsheet with names and numbers and emails and we just kind of throw stuff in there and it's a holding vessel for contacts, right? It is so much more to your business when you want to create predictability, when you want to create consistency, stability, profitability. And I feel so strongly because I have visibility into all these top companies around the country, we work with over 50% of the real trends, top 1000. And so I get visibility into what they're doing and how they're scaling their business and also with the young team, if you want to build a business that is just a call it a leaky bucket where you just have to keep pouring more on top and it just keeps pouring out depending on how big the holes are, it's like, and then you're constantly just sitting there plugging and then more holes open up and it's like you're on a hamster wheel of a business.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
And if your business is purely hoping for some of these macro factors of waiting for rates to come down or waiting for this person to win the election or seasonality or whatever it is, real estate's not that fun. And what I've found is when you have a very strong database that is properly managed that is kept up to date, this hygiene, this integrity component that Tiffany who I love always talks about database integrity, it all of a sudden completely changes the opportunity within your business. Then all of a sudden your business starts to become a focus of your business is just how do I build my database? How do I keep adding to my database because that database is an asset that provides dividends and the bigger the asset or the more valuable the asset, the more the dividends I get out of it. And so your database should be this asset that starts to create predictable opportunities year over year versus a liability of just like, eh, I just throw stuff in there and then it becomes dated it because it's static and it doesn't constantly update.

Speaker 3 (09:35):
And so now it becomes detrimental to my business and when this concept sticks and you make the investment into your database, it completely changes the trajectory of your business and most importantly the profitability and the margins of your business. So I feel very passionate about that and I could go for hours talking about different ways to do so and why in case studies of what happens when you have a very valuable asset, when you have a valuable database versus when you don't. But you mentioned the iteration component. So we have this concept around we're losing the people in our database, we know they're requesting offers on our competition, so how do we start getting in front of our database and ultimately driving revenue and starting to become more predictable? And so one of the first things that we observed at fellow was that basically 20% of the contacts that were being pushed into our platform had an address attached, 80% didn't.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
Now obviously being on a conversation right now with Zillow and Follow-Up Boss and Zillow's core model was generated originally from essentially buyer lead opportunities for agents, a hundred plus million unique visitors every month searching for homes, ultimately connecting them with the real estate professionals. We over the past decade have built our databases on these buyer leads and how fellow started where there was this concept besides protecting our database was the young team always had a policy when a buyer lead came in that we would go to this safety product that we used to identify if they had any criminal activity and if they did, then we'd immediately push 'em to the side and while we were doing that, it would drive me crazy because we would just go to the platform and we type in their name and we'd find them and we'd be like, okay, they don't have any criminal activity. You're good to go on the appointment. But right above that was their home address,

Speaker 1 (11:37):
Right? It's right

Speaker 3 (11:38):
There and we're sitting there and we're just pushing. We're not thinking about it. We're just moving on to the next buyer lead. And I started saying, guys, put the address in the CRM if we're going to do it, and by the way, if we're going to check, let's just see if they own that property. So when we started seeing syncing their databases, I started to see just the young team. All these databases were essentially 20% sellers or addresses attached, 80% buyer leads. So the first iteration was how do we actually start showing people the value of what they really have in their database? Let's add an enrichment component and let's actually find the addresses for them and let's actually show them if they're a homeowner. So then we started finding the addresses and it completely was this magical moment to our users of I can't believe that all of these homeowners are actually in my database.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
I thought I had a database of buyers and it started to change the way they look at 'em. Then we took it one step further and said, well, we know that you have all these homeowners in your database. What if we could show you by plugging in MLS data, how many of these homeowners are actively on the market or when they last sold and getting you some visibility into who actually these homeowners are so you don't have to go manually one by one. So then all of a sudden we flipped a switch and it was this next magical moment where it's like you have 600 people in your database that not only own homes but that are active on the market with your competition. That was that next kind of iteration. So now our user base was getting obsessed with like, oh my God, I need to start figuring this out.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
I used to look at my database as a liability or I just didn't value it. Now all of a sudden I realize I have all these homeowners in my database. Now I realize that a lot of these homeowners are actually going to market without me, so what do I need to do to start winning more of these opportunities? Well, this is where we continue to iterate where we went really deep in saying what other data points would be really relevant so that we can get very granular messaging and engagement with the homeowners to how long they've owned their home, the equity position they have the appreciation, they've seen all these different data points and now we can get really granular. That gives us such a value add to the way we actually interact with them through automation and through marketing and through ultimately showing you the probabilities that people should be selling because of all these data points.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
And so fellows really went from originally just kind of this very basic platform of trying to protect cash, offers home value in our database from going other places to becoming this really data rich, very granular and segmented and automated product that is really the engine to a lot of people's databases and it's been really cool. And then I'll just take it to one last place. So the next iteration is great. We're creating a significant amount of engagement with the consumers in their database. We're providing them a significant amount of data that shows them what's actually happening and who they have in their database and who's actually transacting. But I'm a team leader and one of my biggest struggles is actually getting my team to do the work, make the phone calls, and I love my team. We sell 500 homes a year, we have 15 agents, very high productive agent type of model, but it's sometimes harder to follow up with all the abundance of opportunities that my database is creating.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
And so this conversational AI piece that we're just about to launch, we'll call the database for you, we'll text the database for you. We have chatbots, we have email, all these different AI driven products that are actually going to take the top of funnel and start to work them further down is that next iteration of saying, we hear our user base, we hear that you love the engagement, but you're struggling to get the agent to actually get on the phone with them. So how can we actually communicate and transfer them live to you this bottom of funnel opportunity? And that's the evolution. That's what the iteration looks like.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yeah. Okay, so pulling all the way back out, all of these opportunities were in the database all along,

Speaker 3 (15:37):
All along,

Speaker 1 (15:38):
But I didn't have tools in tech that would append that data, give me the visibility into it, surface opportunities, give me context and all of these other things. So the tools in tech that we've put around what once was a spreadsheet and then became a repository of contact information, we now have all these tools in tech around us to do that. Then this next layer you added, and we've had this conversation with a number of folks here in the tech timber series around how some of in particular AI calling and texting is, some agents are feeling like, well, this is starting to encroach, but the ones that really see it kind of in a more constructive way see it as an opportunity to really be in their best position more often. If a tool is going to be better at doing that, the tool can do that, and then I'm there to have real conversations with people that have been warmed up qualified.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
So to turn this into a question and to tie it back to something you shared right in the beginning, you mentioned that part of what's got you so lit up over the past year or so is the real emergence of AI in its power. I would love for you to spend a minute on the difference between automation and ai. I think a lot of folks are still selling automation as ai, and I'm not asking for something like definitional, but just from what is this unlocking and go back to that excitement that you shared off the

Speaker 3 (17:02):
Top? Yeah, well, there's two parts to this ultimately you kind of referenced. I just want to touch on the threat of AI

Speaker 3 (17:14):
That you kind of mentioned of some people are in camp ai, some people are a little bit concerned about ai. I feel like AI empowered agents are going to win. I don't feel like AI is here to replace. I feel like you're going to see real estate professionals that leverage AI to remove the day-to-day things that they don't want to do or that they struggle to do or they don't want to make the investment into the skillset or mastering the skillset so that they can do the things that they want. And I really do believe within the young team on the young team, and I'm an agent, I'm a licensed built team for number one team, the state of Ohio. So it's like I'm wearing my young team hat as I'm saying this. There are a lot of things that I'm really excited about for the young team that fellows building that Fub is building fellow and Fub work so beautifully together that are just going to make us so much more efficient and start to eliminate the things that ultimately we don't as agents we don't want to do or we don't love doing.

Speaker 3 (18:11):
We want to be in front of customers, we want be out showing houses, we want to be negotiating deals. We want to be the creative brain behind the listing strategy. And so this is going to ultimately help empower us on the things that we are either weak at or that we don't want to do. To ask your question about the difference between automation and ai, one of the things that's really interesting with us at fellow is we're currently incubating right now marketing to about 50 million contacts. And one of the things that's so interesting is that we're trusted on thousands and thousands of agents and loan officers all over the entire country to get the right message to the right person at the right time. And because we have 50 million contacts and then we enrich 'em with millions of data points, now all of a sudden we have a very unique perspective essentially, which becomes our models and our data set that we're looking at that would identify engagement behaviors, different insights that we're observing macro.

Speaker 3 (19:14):
And so what's so interesting is from an automation perspective, we can make our automation so much stronger and more effective because our models are getting smarter and smarter every day, every month. We know that different cohorts based off of this data and based off of the transactional data and them. So we know that all of a sudden what's happening in a certain price point because we have a unique perspective because we're observing what the 50 million consumers are, essentially, how they're engaging the frequency they're engaging when they're engaging, the messages they're engaging with, and then what is the consistency amongst the data points that ultimately would say, Hey, how do we get really predictive with this? And so it's so much more than us just building workflows. Automations are kind of the workhorse or the machine and it's like, but we're looking at ultimately the output of the machine in a much more macro level and saying, we're looking down and observing and saying, how can we get better results for our customers? How can we create more sticky engagement with the consumer, which ultimately creates better results for our customer? And that's where all the AI and all the magic is happening on the backend, and that's something very different than ultimately building a workflow, building an automation.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, I love that. You just gave me a vision as you were sharing all of that of sometimes solutions beget more opportunities. It wasn't a problem that we identified, but now that we see this in this way, we can go further a

Speaker 3 (20:47):
Hundred percent

Speaker 1 (20:48):
So much good stuff that we could continue covering. Appreciate what you're up to. Thank you for spending this time with us in Eptember. If someone wants to follow up on this conversation, where would you send them?

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Let's send them to sending me an email. I'm going to just throw my email out there, ryan@fellow.ai, it's FE l.ai. I love to geek out over this stuff. Like I said, 10 years ago, Ryan posted notes on millions of dollars of commissions just sitting on post-it notes on my desk, crumpled up, spilled coffee on 'em. Now I'm just so obsessed with process automation and ai, all these things that the future is taking us to, and it's like I just love to geek out on these type of conversations. So love to chat with anyone.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Love it. That's Ryan at fellow with an o no w.ai. I am ethan@followupboss.com. We'd both love to hear from you, anything you've got to share or anything you've got to ask. Appreciate you so much, Ryan. I hope you have a great afternoon.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
Looking forward to the next one.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
Ryan Young didn't share his email address because he doesn't want to hear from you, so be sure to reach outRyan@felo.ai. Next up is Brian Hurley, a Google engineer who's also solved problems and built solutions in support of his wife to race's business as she's grown from real estate agent to team leader to brokerage co-owner, get insights to improve your marketing, your experiments, your client communication, and your hiring process. Brian, you work full-time outside the real estate industry, but you've built a tech stack and marketing stack to support a real estate business that's gone from solo agent to real estate team to brokerage. Welcome to Tech 10 on real estate team os.

Speaker 4 (22:36):
Awesome. Thanks for having me here, Ethan.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, it's really nice to get the other side of this for folks watching and listen, I'm going to link up down below the episode with Theresa Hurley, Brian Hurley's wife and the real estate agent who has built her business that way. And with you, we're going to kind of go behind the scenes a little bit, but before we do, I have three quick questions for you. The first one is on a scale of one to 10, how interested or excited or passionate would you say you are about new tools and new tech in general?

Speaker 4 (23:02):
It's going to be a 10 for me, but that's because of who I am and what I do. But that 10 has changed. So originally if I were to zoom back years ago, I was excited about everything, anything new that came out I wanted to know about. If it was computer hardware, it was software, it was new techniques, whatever I wanted to know about it. And now I'm not like that. I'm much more focused. I care about solutions, how am I going to learn new ways to get things done better, faster? I'm less concerned with the nitty gritty details of a new graphics card or something like that.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
This is really ultimately about solving problems. We actually have not just tech for the sake of tech, it adds cost, it adds complexity, it adds a variety of other challenges when we're not actually implementing to solve specific problems. Brian, can you think of a tech investment that you've made that didn't pan out or didn't pay off?

Speaker 4 (23:56):
There's been a lot of times where I thought something might not pan out or I took an investment not knowing. I think, okay, we're going to do this and see how it goes. If we lose everything, it's fine. We bounded that investment. The biggest one is when we first really started trying to push Theresa, when she started her business and get her advertising, I decided I was going to spend a certain number of thousand of dollars to learn this and be the best at it that could possibly could be, and we expected to lose it all. We did not. It was awesome. In fact, we've done so tremendously well from the investment, but there's other things where I thought something was going to be great and it just didn't turn out as well. Maybe it was just okay. In 2022, I was at Fcon with Teresa.

Speaker 4 (24:38):
I ended up chatting with Jason Pantana who talked ad pubcon that year, and I was talking with him about various things. I said, Hey, I work at Google, really appreciate all the things you do with your podcasts and everything. And he said, Hey, you know what? You have this idea that no one's really been able to make happen. Maybe you can make it happen. So he described the idea and I said, wow, that's really cool. I never thought about that before. And so then I went back home and spent a weekend and built this thing and he had told me, Hey, if you've got it running, give me a call, talk to me, let me know how it went. So I got it running, I tested it for a month and it just wasn't really panning out. It worked okay, but it wasn't like the amazing thing that we both thought it could be. I ran it for months and it just never was quite as good as my current technology stack, my current advertising stack. And so I let it go and I've had a lot of those things where I've had this idea or someone else gave me this idea and I spent all this time thinking it was going to be great and it just was decidedly okay.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Do you set specific timelines or goals when you make some of these measured bets or is it just kind of like a wait and see and look for some signs like you're experimenting and so with a scientific experiment you go in with a theory and you see what the evidence tells you. In this case, are you looking for any particular evidence against a timeline to know whether to double down or pull the plug?

Speaker 4 (26:02):
That's an interesting question and I think it goes to something that I have a theory about personally or opinion about. And that is I think that in the real estate industry, a lot of people give up too soon. When I am trying to do something new where I have an experiment, I have to give it ample time to play out because there's lots of things that could make it not work. And a lot of that is based on time and sometimes it's the wrong time of year, it's the wrong market. Sometimes you have a great idea that doesn't work, but it could work in the future or maybe it would've worked in the past. I don't know. But a lot of things just need some time. So I think that anytime you make an investment in technology or some kind of process that you're going to do for your business, whether it's real estate or something, you need to give it a proper amount of time and a proper amount of time in my opinion is minimum one month.

Speaker 4 (26:49):
However, probably like three months is a more realistic timeframe. I do a lot of AB testing, so I will do some, I'll have an experiment, I'll start that experiment, I'll run it for a while and then I'll make a variation of that experiment and I will AB test it versus the original to see if it's better or not. And then if it's better, I'll take that new one and I'll build upon it. And if I don't do that kind of testing, I can never really prove to myself that something is working or doing well or if it's just in my head.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
What would your 2015 self say about the tech that you're using today in 2025?

Speaker 4 (27:21):
I wouldn't really believe it to be honest. And we zoom back to 2015, I was still working at Google, so I've been here for quite some time. Technology stacks back then the environment back then was very different. No one was thinking about generative ai. Google's working on AI things, but they, no one ever thought it was going to be as big as it is now. No ever thought that your average person would be using it every day. And I didn't think that either because at that time it was not good. It was good for very specific things, but we use it for very general things and I use it every day, honestly. And I don't use it in a way that I think is lazy. I use it in a way I think makes me more empowered. I can do what it does, but I don't want to do it. I don't do all that time. I use deep research all the time. I don't have time to go sift through a hundred websites to gather the information that I need. I have the time to take that result and do something great with it. But all that research time is just a huge time suck and I only have so much time.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
So let's dive into Tech Stack Marketing Stack. When Theresa first started as an agent to where you are today, I don't know how much of your work supports the brokerage that she's a co-owner in at this point, but give us a walkthrough from your perspective of what you started with, how you approached it and where it is today.

Speaker 4 (28:47):
So it started from empathy. So my wife got back in real estate in the late 2020 timeframe, realistically 2021. And she worked exceptionally hard. She called expires, she did everything that people told her to do. She worked her sphere and that was great, but her sphere was very tiny. It was like her mom's group at the time. She stayed at home with our kids for 10 years. She could only work what she had, which was little other than the prospecting she did with circle prospecting and outbound calls for expireds. So my thought is I know in engineering we have business that we get from our existing customers and that's the kind of stuff where you get from nurturing people, but you always need some kind of way to get new business. And outbound calls are one really great way of doing that. But we needed more things that were inbound and needed something that could scale higher.

Speaker 4 (29:42):
So I thought we need to run ads and I don't know how to do this that well. So I said, look, I can spend some time and some money, but I'm going to need the money from your business to do this and it might fail. And she said, that's fine. I'm willing to put the investment in. And so I spent all the time I could researching everything I could. I talked to people inside my company. I talked to experts who were not in real estate. I actually didn't talk to many people in real estate. I didn't know anyone yet, and I learned a lot of things. I learned a lot of things that people don't actually know in real estate, which is interesting. So then I started making ads and they were very successful. We got in a lot of leads. My wife is very, very good at conversion.

Speaker 4 (30:19):
So this boosted her business significantly. So I think that if you look at the first six months of the year, 2021, when she was really starting out her business, she was selling houses, she was doing okay, but she was selling one a month or less than one a month and trying very, very hard. And then the next six months, and actually it was really the last three months of the year, everything just blew up. So that year was her first year. She sold I think 34 or 35 houses, which was a lot for her, pretty much for her first year. But we continued to scale that. So the next year was around 60 ish and I think last year was about 90 and I think we're at about 76 so far this year. So things have continued to scale that way.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
And that's her own production?

Speaker 4 (31:09):
Well, it's her and her team. So it used to be just her.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yeah,

Speaker 4 (31:12):
It was just her and I was building just for her. When you're building for one person, it's very different. We want to have this authentic view, this authentic voice, and that's a very important part of her business and I built that in everything. In fact, one of the things I think was a mistake possibly that I cannot undo is that her website is theresa.com and that's what we built our lead gen off of. So we do not have a generic buy homes in pittsburgh.com or something like that.

Speaker 5 (31:40):
And

Speaker 4 (31:40):
I kind of wish I had that, but now I'm way down this path. So I have her first name.com and that is what it is. But we wanted that authenticity. So that's just what I went with to start. I didn't know better at some point it just got too big. So she built a team. It was honestly mostly her production still for a long time. I think we're in the phase now where it's not like that anymore, but for a while, understanding how to be a team lead and to build a successful team is hard. And you have missteps. We definitely had some missteps and I think Teresa talked about those in her podcast.

Speaker 4 (32:12):
I think we're much past that now. We're not at those missteps. The missteps are much smaller and they're easier to recover from. So when we moved to the team, the messaging was no longer the authenticity of Theresa. It was the authenticity of the team. It was making people trust the team. And that is hard because the team is different. People have varied personalities. We don't talk for everyone. So in a lot of ways we had to back off from the voice. We didn't back off completely, but when we talk to people in follow up boss or action plans, they had to be less tailored than they used to be. They used to send out videos of traces talking about things. We got rid of some of that because it was too much there and not enough team. And as you continue down that path and then you go to the brokerage level, it gets even crazier

Speaker 4 (32:56):
Because we go to the broker's level. Your voice is specifically not you. We're more generic now completely. All our action plans are as generic as they've ever been. That means that you have to pick it up on the human contact aspects. So there is very much, whenever she talks to someone, she's always sending them videos, but they're not like automated videos she made a month ago. They're something she made right now live from the Fall boss app or something like that. And she encourages her agents to do the same thing. So there still is the authenticity, but it's all done by the agents themselves in a manual form and all the automated things are kind of the backup, make sure we're not falling between the cracks, you're still getting things from us, you still know who we are. There is some tailoring that goes there, but it's tailored more for Teresa. So since Therea owns the account, she's the person who created it. It all originated with her. She still gets customer review things sent out and all that. But people who are in the brokerage, unless they specifically ask, and usually they're asking me, they don't get anything custom, they get a very generic thing and it's designed to not look like it's somebody else

Speaker 4 (34:04):
Because the last thing that we want is someone getting a review request for Theresa when it's some other team lead in the brokerage that would look really terrible. And that was very hard to go from a very dialed in with hundreds of action plan system to a system that was still hundreds of action plans that was not tailored to her. I had to go through every single template and make sure it was depersonalized and that was hard, but worth it

Speaker 1 (34:30):
As you got to know the business better and you started maybe expanding ad types or ad sets or maybe even some of the channels that you were investing in, it's follow a Boss, it's Ad Tech or using other people's ad platforms and flowing those into follow-up boss. You already mentioned some of the communication that you set up and had to review as the business got a little bit more complicated. What are the other kind of core pieces of tech around this business today?

Speaker 4 (34:56):
So everything is mostly custom by me, honestly. And

Speaker 4 (34:59):
I'm a weirdo, so I build everything. I don't build things with Zapier or make I actually code everything. It's usually running in Google Cloud. I work for Google, I know all that stuff. I've worked for Google Cloud for years, so I'm very comfortable with it. So I build everything custom. But whenever Theresa has a problem, she often will come to me and say, how do I solve this problem? And I'll come up with a solution. Some of these solutions I've actually kind of gotten rid of over time. A good example would be the transcription thing. We had a really, really awesome transcription system before Fub had it. Fabs is better now because it does a lot of things that I can't do because I'm not in Fub, but had that at least a year before Fub had it. So we had something that we could use because Theresa had this problem. She said, I'm in my car all the time, people call me and I have to stop on the side of the road and take notes

Speaker 4 (35:50):
And people are zooming past me. It's super unsafe and I can't get where I need to go. And so the problem for her was literally just, Hey, I need something to take notes for me so that I'm not doing it and I can continue driving where I need to drive. And that was the solution. And it worked awesome. It was great for the time. We have other ones now. A lot of 'em are lead flow based. So for example, when we get a lead that comes in, people will, it goes to a shark tank kind of pond. And I got this idea from Shay Herron,

Speaker 4 (36:20):
She has a system with her team and I talked to her, I talked to a bunch of teams, how do you guys do what you do? And so what I did is I took her ideas and I coded it into a system that works with follow-up boss and it does things like lead accountability. So if you grab a lead and you don't call them in an hour, it gets taken away from you. It goes back to the pond and a note will pop in saying, Hey, you didn't call them in the hour. This is why it's going back to the pond. It's still nice though because if a lead comes in at 11:00 PM it's not going to take it from you because it knows that there's TCPA rules and it will follow those and say, you know what? You couldn't have called them legally, so we're going to be nice and not take it from you.

Speaker 4 (36:58):
But if it's like 10:00 AM the next morning when they haven't called, it'll say sorry, it's going back. And the same thing happens with follow-up. If they don't email, they don't send texts, they don't do certain actions, they don't get to keep the lead. It used to just be, going back to your original question, we had Teresa getting leads and then we had a small set of people getting leads and they were two exclusive areas that were pretty much to them only. We had some people who shared areas and they got round robin. And now that we have not only her team but also the brokers taking leads, we have to do something that's a little more fair, which is you get any lead, you see you want that you're willing to do the work, you can grab it and take it. If people see the right thing in the right place, they will work hard for it. We had to go to that kind of system. And so her problem was is how do I maintain some degree of accountability? How do I make this fair? And so we built something on top of FI do kind of constantly

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Love it. Herron was our guest last year and last year's tech timber. So that'll be linked up down below. If anyone is watching or listening and doesn't have someone like Brian immediately adjacent to their business, the follow-up boss success community for anyone in a free trial or anyone who's a customer is a great place to drop questions. And Shay and other folks will share how they're solving some of these problems as well. Selfish question just because I want other folks to benefit from this. The same way that you have, I took all the contents of the show, put a little AI layer over it and now you can talk to or type back and forth with the collective wisdom of now you Brian and all the other guests including Theresa of real estate team os that's live@realestateteamos.com slash bot. It's just an AI chat bot trained exclusively on the contents of these conversations. And you recently found that useful.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
Yeah, so this is another one of those things where Theresa had a problem. And so her problem was is that as we're growing, we have this problem that other people don't have. Mostly just because we are in a different phase I guess, of our business. We don't have an operations manager and this is a real problem. We need one desperately. And so we decided we're going to go finally hire an house manager and it's been a very long time. We've wanted one for a while. It will make our lives several percent better if we have one. So she went out and put an ad out to try to hire one and got 150 plus resumes. And she said to me, how in the world am I ever going to get through these even though I'm already super busy and that's why I need a person.

Speaker 4 (39:34):
How do I get through these resumes in some amount of time and pick the right people to go talk to? I don't know what I'm going to do. And she starts going through by hand and she gets through 10 of them and she's like, I don't see this ever actually going anywhere. And I think what she was fishing for is some help and I wanted to help, but I also knew that a lot of those resumes are not going to really fit what she needs. And so there's probably a better way we could at least get through a bunch of them and manually look at the ones that are best. And so my thought was is what are we even hiring for here? And so I went to T os, I'm like, I need to see what other people are talking about when they're hiring this type of role.

Speaker 4 (40:14):
And then I saw your bot and I was like, you know what? Maybe I'll just use the bot. Let's see what the bot has to say. And so I started asking the bot questions and it gave very detailed answers directly from the content of the videos. And so I asked the questions about the ideal candidate for an operations manager, gave it some of our constraints and everything, and it popped out kind of very detailed, almost a job description of what an ops manager should look like based upon the opinions of the people featured on Team OS. I said, that's super interesting actually. Then did it for a bunch of other types of jobs that people have talked about in TOS for real estate specifically, maybe like eight or nine, maybe even 10 types of jobs. Some are just like a new agent, an experienced agent, an ISA, things like that.

Speaker 4 (41:01):
But I thought I can build a tool for this. At first I was going to just use chat GBT or Gemini, and I was going to try to get through these, but I realized that I have to upload 150 resumes and that's going to take a lot of time. I bet I could just make a tool to do this. So then I made a tool. I actually made a tool where you upload as many resumes as you want and then it assesses using AI against that rubric that I basically created with the team osbo for those different categories like director of operations, it pops out a match to the resume based upon it's a percentage based upon how close it thinks. This person is on the resume to the job description. And then it describes why or why not, like a little summary underneath and it puts 'em all down and ranks them in terms of order. And I understand resume is not the best thing. Some people are great, but they have bad resumes.

Speaker 4 (41:53):
Some people are terrible but have awesome resumes. That's not the point. The point was to try to get us down to a manageable level, and it did immediately, it cut out a huge swath. Anyone who was under a 50% score we're like, no, we're not going to even look at, we took 10 of them and looked at the ones that run under 10% and we're like, yeah, these are not what we want. The actual tool did what we wanted it to do. We would never call these people back. They just aren't a good fit for what we want. And then the ones that were really high wasn't like a keyword search you'd see in traditional HR kind of systems.

Speaker 4 (42:28):
It was a much more thoughtful process. So the summary might say, well, this person has never worked in real estate before, but they've worked in a lot of software or CRMs for other industries that are very related and they've done the kind of things that you want from an operations manager. Clearly they've demonstrated that they are able to think on their own, come up with ideas and implement processes without you having to tell 'em to do that. And so those kind of commentary that came from the tool were awesome. And in the end we thought, okay, we got about 20 people who were good candidates. Let's just look at the first 10 to start. So the race started scheduling interviews. She had one was not that great and she was thinking, I hope this is going to work out okay. Her second one was excellent, absolutely amazing.

Speaker 4 (43:17):
Her third one was also amazing. Her fourth one was amazing. And the problem is is that we started having so many amazing people we're thinking, crap, what are we going to do here? So she kind of stopped and then picked two of those and there's one we're going to hire and she's going to be a perfect fit for what we need. But ultimately it came down to having those resources available from the team bot, which I'm glad I used. I don't know why I thought of doing that, but it just was something that came to me. I thought, how am I going to give this information? I don't trust just asking an AI to help give this information. One of the things that's important to me with using generative ai, if you don't give it adequate input, it can go off the rails.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
The theme that I hurt here and there is like human in the loop. So you set this thing up, let's test. Are the bad ones actually bad? Are the good ones actually good? Anyone who's using generative AI in a productive manner, one is very thoughtful on the way in, very thoughtful about the way they're engaging with what comes back out. They're vetting things, they're things, it's a partner. It's not a replacement in almost all applications. Brian, I'm really glad to have you in Eptember. We already mentioned toa.com. If someone wants to follow up on this conversation, is there anywhere else they should go?

Speaker 4 (44:31):
So definitely check out my wife's website. It's www.trace.com. If you go there, you'll find kind of what I'm doing in terms of SEO and how I'm structuring things. We get 15,000 plus people to the site in our area every month, I guess. And so it's been very successful. We have the second biggest website in our area. The first largest is the biggest brokerage in our area with a thousand agents being number two is, okay,

Speaker 4 (45:00):
I have a website too, but I only have a website just so that when I work with people, they have somewhere to go and they know 'em. Actually a person that has some website, it's just kria, C-O-N-R-Y a.com. My kids are Connor, Ryan and Amelia. That's where Kria comes from and that's my consulting business. And I really don't have a business. I do help with things, but I use that to share. If I built something that I think is interesting, and I just started doing this, so there's not a lot of content there, but if I hacked my website to do something cool, if I came up with some kind of advertising idea that I like, I might write a blog article and I might share it. There's some things I don't share because they're really, really cool and I'm nervous about it. I built some ad tech that no one really has and I think it's really awesome and it's worked really great for us. So I'm not really going to share the nitty gritty of how that works, but there's lots of things I do like to share that can help people. But definitely check out www.choa.com.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
Cool. Both of us are linked up right down below. Thank you for sharing what you're building. And also you can't share everything. You have to hold some of it back, so I respect that too. So thanks so much for being part of Eptember.

Speaker 4 (46:11):
Thanks a lot. It's good to be here.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up@realestateteamos.com.