Speaker 1 (00:00):
Over the past 10 or 11 months, we've brought you 70 in-depth conversations with real estate team leaders and operators from across North America all to help you make the next right decision or take the next right step in your business no matter where you are on your team building journey. And it's all made possible by Follow-up boss, but it's not called the F Cast. It's not about the product, it's about people, it's about the community, it's about you. In this way, real estate team OS is a wonderful reflection of the customer centric culture and customer led education that follow ABOs co-founder and CEO Dan Corkill has been committed to for years. Dan joins us here on episode 40 to talk real estate teams, real estate tech and agent staff and client attraction. You'll also get a preview of our five episode month long tech timber series that we're kicking off next week. It's all right here right now. Dan Corki on Real Estate Team os

Speaker 2 (00:59):
No 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 (01:14):
Dan, thank you so much for believing in real estate team os as we'll get into. Thank you so much for spending time in this episode. Your appearance is overdue, but the timing is great because about to kick off Tech Timber and you are someone who has spent the past dozen plus years immersed in the ecosystem of real estate tech. So welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Thanks Ethan.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah, thanks for investing in it. I really appreciate it and we're going to kick this off where we always do, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. What comes to mind for you, Dan?

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah, I think they've just got to be really strong at a lot of things, but in particular I think marketing, attracting people to their team and then also attracting consumers to want to be part of that experience of working with that team. And I think that's something which I think sometimes I think especially when people start out, maybe they're not over planning that culture and you probably shouldn't over plan, but I think you should have some vision of this is what I stand for as a real estate agent, this is what I want my team to stand for. And then really build in line with that vision so you don't end up having your team which just is not aligned with what you're trying to do or the level of service you're trying to provide. So yeah, but again, I think it's a lot about attraction and I think even specifically right now, times are a bit tougher in the market or a lot tougher and they're a lot tougher for consumers as well. So it's how do we show leadership and attract people and we are solving a really valuable problem here, helping people have a home to grow their families in and shelter and all this kind of stuff. It's a big part of the American dream or whatever country you're in. It is really important. So again, how can you just align yourself with also the dreams I guess of people in your market and the consumers that at the end of the day you're serving?

Speaker 1 (03:11):
A few themes that I heard in there that I really appreciate first of course is this idea of attraction, this idea that it's not about getting people at a trap and shoving them where you want to go, general funnel concepts, that everything goes better when you attract people to you based on who you are, what you're about. Also what I inferred from what you said there was this intentionality really who are we and what are we about? Who do we want to attract? And then a word that you use that I think is really, really important, especially in this kind of tech conversation is experience. So we are helping people with these problems. There are all these stages and we can leverage tech and people and systems to make sure that all the steps happen in the right order and about the right way. But ultimately this step back or this layer on top of it or what people are really paying for is that experience of going through those steps. So it's not just the mechanics, there's this other layer and so this kind of cultural component, this motivation, this why and how are people attracted is those all kind of wrapped together really nicely for a vision, for customer experience and what we're really trying to do here with people, with tech and with systems. I typically ask folks on the show early on to describe their team as it is today for context going forward. I'd love for you to describe the follow-up boss team as it is today. However you like, structure, culture, size, whatever.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
I guess we've become a bigger team over the last few years, so it's been interesting to see how things change and I've added a lot of great people like yourself to the team. I think to my earlier point, I think we did start off maybe not super intentionally, but again that was very important to me is tech is here to solve problems and then also the customer service aspect is really important as well because if you just throw tech at people, a lot of people are not, they're not as technical as the people that work at Fab, right? Because that's just not their day-to-day thing and it's like I guess I was always the guy that was broke in the house. People were even last night, my wife's like my Internet's slow or it keeps dropping out and like, oh my god, that means I've got to go and work out what's wrong with the router and stuff.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
But it is sort of the same in business again, you can't just throw these technical solutions at people as simple as we try and make follow-up bus and all of that kind of thing. That's what we're always aiming for, but there's always going to be this component of, again, how can we make this experience of switching to follow-up bus really easy And then when you do have a question or you need support, how can we also make that feel really good? And so that's why invest in things like phone support and making sure we've got people seven days a week because we don't want our customers to have this technical solution but then not be able to get help with it and feel good about it. And I think that's something which really helped us a lot over the years and again, sort of attracted people to us then because we're providing that service, we're able to own referrals.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
And I think again, the same things very much applies to real estate. If you are doing a great job, you're going to know that people are going to get referred to you. So yeah, I think we've always had a pretty customer-centric culture and I think again, that's developed a little bit from the start from us as the founders. But then I think as we brought on people, we could sort of see, okay, these are the kind of people that fit with that. And then occasionally we'd hire some people that didn't fit with it and we're like, okay, well this is probably just not the best place for you. You'll probably find another environment where you're going to enjoy it more or thrive. And I would say probably the last five years it's been a very self enforcing thing from the team. It hasn't been me needing to say like, oh, this person doesn't fit or this person isn't looking after our customers. It just becomes something which everyone understands that's really important to us as a company. So

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, customer centricity is definitely fundamental to who this company is. It was one of the things that attracted me to the company. I had known Follow-up boss for a while, but as I started to get to know more people inside the company and had the opportunity to join, that was one of the things. And as someone who hosted over 270 episodes of a show called the Customer Experience podcast, I refer to Follow-up Boss as the most customer-centric company I've ever interacted with in any way as a consumer, as someone interviewing people from all kinds of companies and certainly someone who has seen the inside and the outside of this company. Over the past probably decade or so, I've been familiar, various levels of familiar, of course, a lot more familiar today. I want to get into real estate tech at a high level from your perspective and how you chose real estate, which by the way, if there's any industry where you need seven day a week support, it's certainly real estate providing seven day a week service.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
But before we do one follow up question in this zone, I mean people who watch and listen to real estate team os definitely struggle with kind of this zone. So I'll just kind of describe it and you just take it wherever you want to go, which is like when should we invest in hiring people? Who should we be hiring? The timing, the structure, the pace, there's a seasonal flow to the business. There are so many considerations for whether it's agents but even more importantly staff from a real estate team perspective because that's a hard cost generally agents cost and return based on performance. So it's a little bit less of a risk than bringing out a full-time staff member. Talk about any philosophy you've developed over the past dozen years or so about when and who to hire. Just how did you think about that relative to primarily from a financial perspective, really anticipated revenue and the hard cost of doing it today versus a month from now versus six months from now?

Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, I think when we're getting started, we just really waited to see where the pain was. Oh great, I'm spending all day a setting up customers and it's like, okay, that's a valuable activity, but there's a lot of other things I need to be doing. I do think that's one of the jobs of the business owner and entrepreneur is where do you focus in the business right now? So it's like things are running and there's no way really any probably department or area is running it like a hundred percent as amazing as it can be. So you're kind of spinning these plates and I think it is a bit of a choice where do you focus? But again, I think mostly where the pain is, if something's going okay, maybe leave that alone for now and focus for this thing, that could be a lot better.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
I think we definitely, especially when we're getting started, because finances are tight and this is really the biggest business for sure that I've ever started. Other things were more freelancing really that I was doing. And so yeah, you just don't have a lot of money and you don't have a lot of even experience managing people. And so I do think there's a bit of hesitation to play it safe and just hire maybe some overseas help or some of the lower cost help you can get. I do think if I did it again, I would definitely try and just find the best people I could and try and find a way to maybe stretch a little bit to afford them. Although I do see sometimes entrepreneurs make the mistake of just bringing on a really expensive person, like 200 or $300,000 when their business is very, very small and then there may be leaning too much on that person to drive and grow the business.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
I think that can also be a real challenge. Again, I think sometimes maybe they're trying to outsource some of the pain to this person and that person also by the way, may have been amazing at other companies and bigger companies, but maybe not at a startup. So I do think you should try and find really great people again, that can maybe compliment some of your strengths. If you're a lot of team leaders like the face of the brand, again, you're out there, you're doing all the business, maybe you need to have a great admin and I would say you could also try and hopefully find this great person who is sort of up and coming and maybe paint them a bit of a vision where you want to go, Hey, maybe this job starts at 50 or 60 KA year, but this is our vision to grow the team and this is how you'll play a role and this is how your compensation could be increasing as we achieve these things together.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
So yeah, that's what I'll be looking at. And even the same thing with agents, like you mentioned, it's commission based, but again, do you have too many leads? Right? And when you do, that's probably when you need more buyer agents, otherwise maybe it's a bit premature depending on what the strategy is. So again, I think you've just got to look for where the pain is, not overcommit yourself to some massive salaries on one person and then just try and find the best people you can. And I think being a very local business, I think there's lots of talent out there and I think that's also, by the way, in this remote world, sometimes people want to be part of something where you go to an office and they're just doing everything over Zoom. So again, I think again, that becomes part of the culture and how you can attract people to these opportunities.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
That's great. You reminded me with this kind of like where is the pain? It reminds me of a bottleneck conversation I had with Nick McLean. I think that was something like episode 24, 25 of the show and that's it. Feel the pain, recognize it, define it, and then is there a tech solution? Is there a human solution? How do we alleviate this? Also, just your talk about essentially what to leverage when and how is something that I know everyone listening to this show has struggled with no matter their seat in the organization. And I also appreciate this recommendation that we've talked about a number of times on this show, which is that admin you brought on who's there when you need him or her when they're doing the right stuff. They do everything. They say they're starting to do things proactively before whatever shows up on a task list or a request list or an SOP, they're developing the SOP even though no one asked them to.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Those are the foundations for someone who can grow with the business over the long term. And I think most of the COOs I've had on this show started as an admin alongside a team leader at some point early when the team was in the, so many good tips in there that echoed throughout these conversations. Okay, real estate tech, you've been fully immersed in it. I mean there are hundreds of integration partners with Follow-up boss. I'm sure a lot of people from a lot of those companies, certainly not all of them, but I'd love for you to go back to do two main things here. One, go back. How did you identify real estate as the zone that you wanted to build software for and how has this ecosystem or this world changed over the past dozen years or so?

Speaker 3 (14:04):
Yeah, when we got started, we had this idea for building a small business CRM, and initially we hadn't focused in on the real estate niche. We ended up doing a course, it was called the Software Roundtable, and the goal was to teach you how to really get your first 10 software customers. And by the way, I think this is the thing is we haven't done something before. I really do think it's a massive hack to obviously listen to podcasts like this one, but also if you can get coached or you can find a business owner that's been through it before and either get coached by them or even just talk to them and ask them these questions like, Hey, when should I hire someone? When should I do this?

Speaker 3 (14:44):
It is a shortcut. And the guy that ran that, he actually had a successful product in the real estate space. And I think real estate has a lot of these attributes you're looking for if you want to build a tool because it's a very profit orientated business. People are very willing to try new things. It's very easy to reach the decision makers. It's kind of interesting, you can sometimes even talk to a team leader and they would switch out their CRM and their website solution and all their marketing in one phone call to a different provider. It doesn't really happen in other industries, right? It's pretty rare.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
Yeah. So that was I think what we found attractive about the industry. And then from there I started talking to a lot of people and just trying to understand what their problems were, not trying to sell them anything. I'm just like, Ethan, so what's your biggest problem running this podcast? And just listening and then trying to go deeper and then deeper and then just really try and see what painful problems do they have, which kind of goes back to before, look, you want to solve the pain. You don't want to be this, oh, I don't know this nice to have little solution that makes, I dunno, whatever that email signature look better. It's like you're buying leads from portals or generating leads yourself and you're investing money in that and then you don't have a system to follow up with them or to hold your agents accountable.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
And then at the time, a lot of things weren't even really automated, so they would literally get an email from say, Zillow and then that would go to the team leader and then they would just manually forward that email to their agent so they really had no tracking. This is back in 2011. You could just see that, well, that's a massive pain point paying this money, but then it's also a massive opportunity on the ROI side. Obviously we can do these things even a little bit better. You're going to be making more money on these leads. And so yeah, once we sort of heard that problem, I did a little bit more research into like, okay, well some of these companies are public so you can see how much leads they're selling and revenue they're generating. So that was kind of a positive sign to me like, okay, that's growing.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
I mean, it's kind of obvious as well, online leads the internet, it's just going to get bigger. It's already pretty big in 2011, but it was only going to get bigger. And then also I just looked at all the other tech solutions and I was like, well, why don't you guys use this one? Why don't you use this one? And they just didn't like them. They were pretty old school. I think they were built more for referral relationship, build your database and business like that. They definitely will not built for teams or really for online leads because those things both evolved after these companies and softwares were created.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
And from there we chipped away at getting our first customer and then our first 10. And then honestly after that it's like I almost feel like I woke up and then now I'm here because it was just after that first 10, you get your a hundred, then your a thousand, you're just growing, you're doing the same thing, you're trying to grow the team, you're trying to make the product better. But yeah, I think once we had that very clear problem going from like, oh, we're just going to build a small business, CRM for everyone, very unfocused, very unclear what to do, how to market to people or any of those things. Once we got focused on this problem, then it just became a lot clearer of the, well, this is our niche. This is where we're going to focus, these are the people we're going to serve.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
And then I would say it's also been very much a collaborative thing. Again, even from that start, obviously we were collaborating, trying to understand the pain of what people need, and that's what we've tried to do over the years as well, okay, now you've got a hundred agents and you've got full oppos and you've got all these leads. What are the next features you need? And those things. A lot of those still today I would say we try and drive a lot of the product development through either the pain or the opportunities for our customers. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (18:51):
That niche, the word that you used there of course is a caution back to people about being really clear who you want to attract, why and how. One of the things I've always respected about follow up bosses that when you're talking about features, you're talking about dialing in to make it easier, faster, better or better yet automated to do all the things that the core CRM should do. It's not, oh, let's also build on this whole other tool set. Let's build on this whole other product. Let's be expert at what we're expert at and partner up with people to fill in the rest of the gaps and opportunities that we're hearing through some of this customer exploration. It's really interesting too, the episode 37, I had Greg Harrelson on and his organization did almost like 4,000 transaction sides last year. And I asked him, because he's been in the business for 30 years about the past present and the future of teams.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
And what he said about how they emerge was of course some cracks in the traditional brokerage model. And again, people can go listen to episode 37 for that, but what you identified at that time I think is kind of tease up where I want to go. He said that's what allowed teams to emerge out of brokerages. But what really allowed them to accelerate was this movement toward online leads in general, online buyer leads in particular. And so having these produced by a variety of different sources, some self-produced by the team leader, these visionary folks, folks you and I have known for a long time, like Justin Haver or Gary Ashton who've been on the show, got very good at generating online leads or acquiring them in whatever way they prefer. And so that really drives the need to manage it well and get a return on that investment, whether you're paying another company or whether you're paying through your own time and energy to generate that lead flow. And of course, what too much opportunity produces is the need for a team, which is something you've already mentioned too. So I'd love to know from you, when did teams come onto your radar? When were you talking? You've been talking to customers the whole time, but when did you start realizing this is what they were doing and the models that they were building?

Speaker 3 (20:49):
Yeah, I think it was starting to emerge in 2011, 2012 really, when we were getting started. But it was funny because even our first customer, he was a brokerage and then he kind of had a team within his brokerage. And I remember being so confused at the time because in some different states they call it different things as well. And it's like, I'm a brokerage and I'm a team, and then all these different things. So yeah, it was a little bit confusing, but again, I think it was starting at that time really like Greg said, because driven by you're getting these online leads at some point, or probably pretty soon, especially if you're managing this brokerage as well, you just don't have time to call the leads and to go on the appointments and all this kind of thing. So yeah, really from the start, and I think again, that's what helped set us apart from the start as well because we were able to just really, the first feature in FAB was we could put the leads in the system and route them to an agent.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
So now you no longer have to do that as the person paying for the leads. And then of course, it's so much better for speed to lead and all these kind of things. So yeah, it was really at that time, I mean we certainly had solo agents signing up as well, but I think this was just really starting to take off and it was kind of luck really, I would say is all the solutions were mostly built for single agents. And from the start, I think this was also something just because I came from Australia and I didn't know a lot about the industry, so I was kind of, maybe if I'd known more about the industry, I would've built it for a solo agent, what everything else was kind of built for or for a brokerage. But I just had some business background and experience.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
I'm like, well, this must be other businesses where you have a team of people and you're working together and some people have different roles. Someone's an admin, someone's an agent. Obviously ISAs became an important thing as part of this online lead generation puzzle, I would say. And so yeah, I think coming from the outside, I just do think that helped a little bit. Otherwise it sort of otherwise maybe, yeah, you would've looked more at what other people are doing. And then sometimes even customers give you that feedback like, oh, I want this feature that is in this CRM that I have already, but if they really wanted that, then they would just be totally happy with that and they would have all their problems solved by that company. So we just tried to look a little bit deeper at what was happening. And I think the team trend, pot luck on the timing of that, but it really did just accelerate. And then again, I think companies like Zillow helped accelerate it. They're sort of one of obviously the largest consumer site in the us and so they're out here educating people and Hey, you should be buying online leads. We can connect you with consumers.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
And there's many other companies doing it as well at a smaller scale. And so that was kind of the thing as well that I think helped full help us because we're like, great, now you've got these leads from all these lead gen companies. Now we can help you with the other part of converting them.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
And the other thing you got to tucked in there is this idea that none of the teams that are growing aggressively just have one source. They're doing some of their own thing. They have different buckets of things. Some of it's paid, some of it's with partners and these types of things. So this idea to bring them all in, I remember Justin Haver talked about he had several front facing websites. He was dominating his local market from an SEO perspective, but his agents had to go log into the backends of all these different places. And so FAB just allowed him to point them all into one place, which then creates this massive efficiency in the organization. You already highlighted several of them, but also this transparency, he has a better handle on what's going on across the business because he can point them all into one place, which is of course, especially critical for a team leader. And here we are now with 32 of the top 50 teams per real trends using Follow-up boss. That was my instinct was that your constant and our team's constant being in touch with our customers allowed us to be team supportive, team friendly, and really honor their challenges and help them capitalize on opportunities better than a lot of other systems would. And I didn't know how much was by design, but I think it just goes back to this customer centricity and a little bit of luck just based on timing. Is that about right?

Speaker 3 (25:21):
Yeah, yeah. Again, I think if we were starting today, it would just be a totally different landscape. Teams are already very well established. They probably would already have solutions and online leads have been around for a long time. So it is, again, I think it'd be a lot harder to do exactly the same thing today. So again, it's interesting, there's some luck mixed with customer research like we're saying and understanding them. And even I would say another trend was mobile, right? And it's like a lot of these apps at the time didn't have great mobile apps. And so it's again, you're sort of just looking for these new technologies, and I know we haven't brought up AI yet, but maybe it's a good time to bring it up. It's obviously one of the trends that's going on now. And then how can we take this and apply it to what we're doing and create some value for our customers or efficiencies or automate things?

Speaker 3 (26:14):
And just on the automation, that was I think a very early customer insight where it's like these people are super freaking busy. They're not in front of their computer all day, they're out showing houses doing meetings with clients and marketing themselves. And so anything we can automate, it shouldn't be left up to you to have to go to A CRM and log in and click sign can do something. So I think some of that stuff as well is just user empathy or customer empathy and understanding again, they're busy. How can we make this as easy as possible? And again, I think that's a lot of where AI is going to obviously help us a lot in future as well.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah. Share any other thoughts you have AI high level. We recently tested with thousands of customers and then released a call summaries feature that's AI based, so it turns your call into notes for you or it turns an agent's call into notes that a team leader or a sales manager can coach with an agent alongside AI in general high level or AI in particular. Anything you're especially excited about here. And I guess just out of courtesy for someone that isn't Super Tech Forward, talk about maybe a little bit of the difference between AI and automation. I think some people are mislabeling AI features that it's actually just automation. So talk about AI however you like and maybe hit on that a little bit for the people that aren't as deep into it.

Speaker 3 (27:49):
Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think if I'll even do a good explanation of this. I do think sometimes as well people like, oh, let's use AI for this. And there's a lot of things that could just be basic automation. So automation is more like if this lead in follow up us or whatever system has been contacted, do this thing and then if it hasn't been contacted, maybe do this other thing. Right? So that's, that's existed for, I don't know, 10, 20 years now. It is been around quite a while. And that's more like what's existed say in Op Boss and other marketing and CRM tools in the past. AI is more using these large language models to take these inputs and then output something, which seems a lot more, I guess there's a lot more reasoning and it's less straightforward than just offer on automation.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
So for example, call summaries. Yeah, it's listening to an entire call between you and a consumer and then distilling that down into what's the most useful notes of the call. It could be used in future when you're referencing back to it. And I mean other applications outside of, say within the CRM, this is doing a lot for developers. I was just playing around with the tool the other day. I'm not a developer, but essentially it's an AI editor and you can just literally describe in plain English, build me an app that does this, and then you can highlight the part of the code that is maybe the interface or whatever and be like, oh, could you make this look whatever more stylish, or could you make it look a little bit like this? Or you can even take an image of an existing website or app and be like, can you do it in this style?

Speaker 3 (29:32):
And then it'll just go and code the whole thing for you. And so I think things like that are going to really change tech a lot. I think it's really just the start right now. And the other example that probably comes up a fair bit is all these Teslas self-driving around. And again, you're probably not going to fully let go of the wheel and trust your car to drive you around today, but in five, 10 years, this is very clear those things are coming and I think it's just pretty exciting, I think. Yes. So I always say I'm not an AI expert by any means, but yeah, we're really looking how we can leverage that. Zillow has a very big AI team and they're helping us understand how we can leverage these new models and things. But yeah, I think it's all pretty exciting. And I think really what you're trying to do as a small business, what we always try to do for ourselves and for our customers is there's this new tool, how can I use this to get an unfair advantage in the marketplace? How can I use it to create value? And I think there's going to be, we're still working out all the AI applications today, but I really do think the people that stay on the cutting edge of that, probably going to have a big leg up on the people that are not using any form of ai.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, really good. The automation that's been baked in for a long time, again, just basic rule sets, you get to define all the rules if this is true, this is true, this is false, and that number's between this range do this thing and you can do it natively and follow up boss. You can set up an interface with something like a Zapier and have things happen in follow Up Boss based on what's happening in other tools if there's no direct integration. But this is a whole new level. And I think the term, most people are familiar with this generative, but there's something more creative happening inside the box than you setting up rules in the machine, executing the rules, and it's super promising. So I am a bit overdue in having you on anyway, but one of the reasons I was like, now's the time one, the episode number is divisible by 10, which makes it, I don't know, some kind of a milestone.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
In addition, next week we kick off tech, I decided to turn September, 2024 into Tech te. So I've got Justin Benson of Barra Agency, Lee Adkins of Amplified Solutions, Shaa Herron, who runs ops for the Highland Group in Arizona. Lisa Vo, who's a expert transaction coordinator and ops manager. She works at a variety of capacities, I can't even summarize it with one. And Chase Whitney, who's an agent in a small family-based team who also runs marketing and finance with them, the Whitney team in California. A, what do you think about the series B? Any fun stories about any of those folks that you want to share? But as we're getting into that series?

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Yeah, I've known all of the people there and they've been very important in the fab community. I think Lee, I've known the longest, I'm trying to remember when I first met him, but I think it was a real estate tech conference in Atlanta, and I can't remember the exact year. It might've been 2013 or 2014. And I think what's interesting about Lee, and I think this is maybe what a lot of these teams end up needing as they scale or as they get a bit bigger, and also some of the other people fill these roles, I think is like they need someone who gets tech. And again, how can you apply it to make our business better? So I do think sometimes team leaders go out, they get excited, they got the credit card and they sign up for all the programs. But again, there's got to be a strategy.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
There's got to be like, what are we actually using this for? And then how can we also make sure it's simple enough and we train our agents to actually use it so we get the value out of it versus just like we have this subscription setting there and no one's using it. So yeah, I think those kind of roles are really important. The other thing I think is exciting and probably a bit more of what Justin does is a lot of custom development on top of Follow-Up Boss. So I think even in the case of AI follow-Up Boss is really because we connect with everyone and have so many integrations and we're sort of like your central hub for your database. It's a really good place to build tools and AI and automation on top of. And so I think that's also what's been cool to see that Fava has become this platform within this space.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
And we've had a lot of integrations. And then Justin's business, I think almost not exclusively, but almost exclusively, is building tools for mega teams on top of Fab. And I think that's pretty cool to see that we've been able to help these other businesses specialize in fab. And even a lot of the other people you mentioned like Lee, a lot of what they're doing is helping people with their follow up bus account. So I think that's exciting. And I think it's also a bit of how FAB has become, again, a bit of a platform community versus just like, Hey, here's this tool you buy, which I also think, by the way, is a little bit supported by the real estate community or a lot supported. I think it is a community of people that are often very open to sharing. We know with this podcast, they're sharing what works, they're sharing their challenges, they're sharing maybe how they overcome them or they're looking to overcome. And yeah, so I think it's been just a cool marriage of all those things. Whereas yeah, maybe there's some other industries where you just wouldn't be able to create the same kind of community or bench of experts like that that can come in and help all these customers get more value out of it. So it's very cool. And yeah, I look forward to seeing the tech, what do you call it, tech or

Speaker 1 (35:29):
September? Yeah, it was either going to be tech or Tech. October and September just worked out better. So it's tech, and I love the top of that response in particular because it essentially talks about the themes of all five of those episodes. What is our business plan? How do we shape our tech to match our business plan? How do we audit what's in place? Because everyone has tech in place and very few people are building from the ground up. So how do we assess what's there, make it work better together, maybe ditch some things, add the right thing, how do we use it to enhance operations in general? How do we use it to enhance transaction coordination in particular? How do we use it to enhance marketing? We cover all of that ground, but it all comes back to what you said off the top of this episode and off the top of that last responses, what are we really all trying to do here?

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Who are we? What are we trying to do? And then let's solve some of our own problems on behalf of our clients and the value we want to create and deliver. And some of that's going to be through Tech. You already kind of previewed a little bit of a response to this, but I'd love to ask it out just straight away because I think it's so important and unique to what Fab has achieved as a platform and as a community. So several of those people who are in EM are moderators or the part of the Mod Squad and the Follow-Up Boss Success community on Facebook, which is now over I think 22,000 members strong. Lee hosts a regular series called Office Hours where he partners with some of our team members and or customers to go inside accounts and teach people how to do stuff.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
We offer Bosses in Action, which is kind of a success and advocacy program about a variety of topics. Conversion university, which helps people with sales and sales training. Obviously you make Real Estate Team OS possible, which is Follow A Boss comes Up, but it's not the F cast. And so when did it occur to you? Or is it just natural to you to invest in education and community beyond Follow Up Boss software itself? I mean obviously you need a support team, you need some documentation, you need a support site with some how-to answers so people can find them. You want to do some product videos to show people how to set this up or to tweak that thing. But the assets I just mentioned are so far beyond that. Is that something that naturally occurred to you? When did you start investing this way and why?

Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yeah, I think pretty early on we knew that content marketing was one of the best forms of marketing, but again, that's more like you're doing it with the double usage of educating your customers and also attracting more, whereas I guess some of those resources are a mix of that as well. But some, for example, the Bosses in Action and Conversion use, these are things that are very specific just for our users. So it is not about getting more sales or anything, it's just about educating our users. I think we always knew it was important. I think it was really probably when we started Buses in Action a couple of years ago that we really started just to invest in people doing it. I think the early days probably like I was doing some of that content and webinars and things like that, and that was great, and I think I could see the need for that and even just to teach people how to use the software and so on.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
But I think as we got bigger, then maybe we handed off some of that to our success teams and things like that. But I think where we saw this opportunity was like, we need to make sure that we're, we're not just telling people how we want to do it, we're hearing from our customers. So again, that's why T OS podcast is obviously so great. And again, we sort of brought on people to run those things that were very in the industry. Dale's a sales coach in the industry. Tiffany, our realtor in residence runs a team in the industry. Tristan, who runs Bus in Action, he has a team. So we thought, I think as we got bigger, it just began obvious I'm not the right person to be telling you how to build a real estate team because I've never built a real estate team.

Speaker 3 (39:31):
It can talk a lot about the tech and marketing and all of that from what I've seen. But yeah, I think that was just sort of, we reached the sizes as a company where we're like, cool, let's find some people that are passionate about this and then they can create this content and it's going to be much better than Dan sitting there for an hour trying to tell you how to build your real estate business. So yeah, I think it's really something that if I was going to do another tech company or startup today, I would be thinking about community and this kind of customer led education from the start, really getting them on as sort of advisors almost, or positions like this realtor in residence. Yeah, I think it's really important. Again, well, you can get caught up in your tech world where you're wondering, worrying all about the tech, but then you get a bit further away from your customers and what their challenges are

Speaker 1 (40:32):
Really good. By the way, I'm remiss in failing to mention Tiffany Zenni, our realtor in residence, and also a real estate team os guest back on episode five of the show. Dan, this has been awesome. It's an absolute joy and privilege to be part of your team. It's a joy and privilege to be able to host this show in spirit of this vision that you've communicated throughout this conversation. For folks watching and listening, this is typically where I go to three pairs of closing questions. But a fun thing, Dan and I were on a very, very large stage that the largest stage I've ever been on just from it is like a football field wide. And I asked him those three questions. So there's a link down below. If you're watching in YouTube, it's down in the description. If you're listening in Apple Podcast or Spotify, it's down in the description. If you're at realestate team os.com, watching or listening, which you can do for every episode, it's down below in the description, click that link and it'll jump straight to those three pairs of closing questions that we ask every time on this show. Dan, thank you so much for making time for this. I know how much you've got going on. It's a joy and privilege to have you and to be a part of what you're doing.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Yeah, thanks Ethan. Always love to chat. Yeah, appreciate you making the pod.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up@realestateteamos.com.