Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Leo Pareja - CEO of eXp Realty (EXPI) | Ideas Mean Nothing Without Execution

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Leo Pareja - CEO of eXp Realty (EXPI) | Ideas Mean Nothing Without Execution · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  I think in the summer of 0506, my account told me I was worth five million dollars at 14
• 1:14
  and then within like a six month period, that same account. So that was where negative a million
• 1:19
  dollars. At 19, he was selling homes. By 28, he was the number one Keller Williams agent worldwide,
• 1:24
  closing 4,000 deals over his career. He built Washington Capital Partners, a two billion dollar
• 1:29
  private lending giant and co-founded Remind. Very early on in my college process, I was like, I don't
• 1:35
  want a job. I want a path that lets me be in control. I read a book that changed my perspective,
• 1:41
  which is rich. I turned for one opportunity where knocking on dollars and co-calling say,
• 1:46
  hey, I want to do some of this stuff. They asked me to do these things, which paid like 40 bucks,
• 1:49
  but we did like a hundred of them in 30 days. After two major exits, he took his expertise to
• 1:54
  EXP Realty, where he now leads a CEO, shaping the company's growth and vision. After the worst
• 1:59
  year ever, we sold seven homes. And then within 12 months, it was like 99 homes. And within like a
• 2:04
  four year period, we did 603 homes. Too many people try to learn sales into like, how do I get you to
• 2:10
  do something? Versus identifying, like, is there a want or need? 99% of everything we fear
• 2:17
  or keeps us up at night at some moment in life is literally irrelevant at a later day. Beyond
• 2:22
  business, his Pareha Family Foundation is opening doors for minorities and tech, helping them break
• 2:26
  barriers and build better futures. A powerhouse in real estate, a visionary in leadership, a force for
• 2:31
  change. This is Leo Pareha. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Cleary. The success story
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  All right, dude. I'm excited to do this. It's going to be a lot of fun.
• 6:43
  Yeah, I'm excited. Let's kick it off here. So think of an inflection point. It could have been
• 6:49
  somewhere along your career path. It could have been when you're growing up. It sort of pushed you
• 6:52
  down the path. You're on today, pushed you into real estate, pushed you into entrepreneurship. What
• 6:56
  was that point? So I feel like I've had a couple of them. I remember being like 14, 15 years old
• 7:04
  and just understanding the traditional path. It was like, wait, I got to work really hard for
• 7:10
  30 or 40 years. And then I have like six years to play golf in South Florida. And I was like,
• 7:15
  that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. So I think even as early as high school,
• 7:22
  something about the traditional path was not that interesting. But the real inflection point
• 7:30
  was college. So I went to college in the year 2000 and my plan was to become a graphic designer.
• 7:39
  And interestingly enough, I was being recruited from like career fairs, even my freshman year
• 7:44
  of college by companies that don't exist like World Common, AOL in their original form,
• 7:49
  because I grew up in the northern Virginia area. And that's what the tech corridor was down
• 7:54
  Dallas corridor. And that was really interesting, because that was the first time that I felt my
• 8:01
  cheese get moved. Because I was told that if I finished my college degree, because 20 years ago,
• 8:07
  you needed a college degree, I could make $150,000 as a graphic designer or
• 8:14
  design your website a lot for a graphic designer. Well, and adjusted for inflation,
• 8:18
  that was like $300,000, right? But in a six month period, I saw those same opportunities
• 8:23
  disappear or turn into like 35,000 more jobs, right? So very early on in my in my college
• 8:33
  process, I was like, I don't want a job. I want a path that lets me be in control.
• 8:41
  Was it, did your parents have influence on your thoughts at this time or in the opposite
• 8:47
  direction, both my parents or PhDs? My dad or very much the opposite or my father worked from
• 8:52
  the same company for 28 and a half years. So no one in my family had gone the entrepreneur path.
• 8:59
  Okay, so your family then was very similar to mine, very, very safe, risk adverse family.
• 9:06
  So you have this thought and you realize that these jobs that you're lining up aren't so great.
• 9:12
  But now you don't have a playbook for entrepreneurship. So what were the first steps that you took?
• 9:17
  Yeah, so freshman year college, I thought I was going to become a graphic designer and go work
• 9:23
  for a big tech company. I actually took an entrepreneurship class in college where they made
• 9:31
  us write a business plan to see what it would look like if I went and started a design company.
• 9:38
  And back then, you had to buy servers because there was no AWS. And basically the punchline was,
• 9:44
  I did the math on just basic gear. It would have been like $400,000 to get the type of hardware
• 9:52
  you would need in order to be able to host and create web content. Which again, it sounds crazy.
• 9:58
  That does sound crazy. And based on what you could build, which I think you could charge quite a bit
• 10:03
  to build the websites that are basically now self-serve on I go daddy, right? But it would have been
• 10:09
  like three years before I even got to like break even. And so very early on, I was like, oh,
• 10:14
  I'm not sure that this is going to be it. But I read a book that had a very kind of a picture
• 10:22
  of Dory and Gray effect on me that kind of fundamentally changed my perspective, which is a very
• 10:27
  cliche answer in real estate because there's just Robert Kiyosaki's rich app for that, right? And
• 10:32
  would it fundamentally shift it for me was the concept of leverage of people time and money, right?
• 10:36
  It was the first time I understood that there is an alternative to trading dollar for time.
• 10:44
  And you can leverage whether it's it's high commission, right? Of you're not being paid per hour,
• 10:52
  but for the service or rendered. And then when you hopefully go from the S quadrant to the B quadrant,
• 10:59
  now you are leveraging other people's talent. So you're not limited by hours of the day.
• 11:03
  And then eventually when you go from the B quadrant to the I quadrant, you become just a capital
• 11:08
  allocator and you can actually leverage other people's businesses and time. So you had this idea
• 11:14
  before you even started as an agent. Well, at that point, I'm assuming that means that if I'm
• 11:18
  just like reading between the lines, agent was never the main objective. It was broker,
• 11:24
  it was building my own business in real estate. It was actually being a real estate investor,
• 11:28
  right? So I read the book and go to the last quadrant. And then decided, okay, real estate seems
• 11:32
  like an interesting path. I kept reading every book I could could on real estate at that point.
• 11:39
  My father met a gentleman who tried to use a very traditional real estate prospecting script
• 11:45
  on him, which was, would you like to invest passively in real estate? And my dad said, no,
• 11:51
  but my son's obsessed. Will you go to a coffee with him? I went to coffee with him. I came prepared
• 11:56
  to offer to work for free. Then he actually turned me down. And he said, if you want to learn about
• 12:01
  real estate, you should call this guy in Colorado. He can teach everything you want to know. I called
• 12:07
  the stranger in Colorado. And he said, I can teach you everything you want to know about real estate,
• 12:13
  but it will cost you $10,000. And so unbeknownst to my parents, my friends, I sold my worldly
• 12:19
  possession of my car and entered a contract with a stranger and wired him all my money.
• 12:25
  I was 19 years old, 18 years old. And it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.
• 12:31
  When one who was like, I think I, for the first time, bet the farm, right? Like the proverbial farm.
• 12:36
  And I did it super young. And it was a high commit, right? But unlike some other high ticket
• 12:42
  things that exist in the world today, this was a legitimate relationship where he actually
• 12:49
  taught me the art of selling in the sense of like, hey, all human beings make emotional decisions
• 12:55
  and then justify them logically, right? Like, you know, I think too many people try to learn sales
• 13:01
  into like, how do I get you to do something versus identifying like, is there a want or need?
• 13:07
  Like, ready, willing, enable. And like, I think that's actually the best part about sales.
• 13:12
  As first of all, it's to identify if the person needs the product or service
• 13:18
  and get to a no very fast versus trying to sell somebody something they don't need.
• 13:22
  But if they, they are ready, willing, and able and qualified, then it's more like problem-solving
• 13:27
  you to advise me. So I mean, you're sort of insight and wisdom around sales. That was like
• 13:34
  exceptional at a very young age. Even, I mean, even the people that I speak to about sales, they don't,
• 13:38
  they don't qualify or disqualify. They, you know, it's almost like trying to beat this person
• 13:44
  into submission and manipulating them with everything possible to try and close the deal. So I think
• 13:47
  that's probably why you were so successful. You learned this very, very early.
• 13:52
  When it's very different right, if you actually focus on qualification up front,
• 13:56
  then you actually have a much, much higher chance of having a successful transaction,
• 14:01
  but more importantly than long-term referral. You know, it's interesting. So what you're describing
• 14:07
  about sales is how I learned sales in tech. And this is, I think this is like very forward
• 14:11
  thinking salesmanship. I don't find that this idea permeates real estate. I think that there is
• 14:18
  negative connotation between real estate and sales to some degree. And I'm curious why you think
• 14:23
  that this, but maybe I'm wrong. You can challenge me on anything by the way. This is just my
• 14:28
  very uneducated opinion. But I feel like true salesmanship is not properly taught with real estate
• 14:36
  agents. I would argue the true salesmanship is not taught anyway, right? I think sales in general
• 14:42
  has a bad connotation, right? I think, you know, there's all kinds of terms for like commission
• 14:47
  breath. And like it doesn't matter what we're talking about cars, like insurance policies.
• 14:53
  You know, and so, you know, and again, I have a different approach because I feel sales is one of
• 14:59
  the most honorable things that can be done in the world. And if you actually look at like potential
• 15:03
  income, you know, to be verified, but I've read in a couple of places, it's it's typically like,
• 15:10
  you know, a list of liberties, right? Athletes and movie stars, followed by public company,
• 15:16
  CEOs, and then typically right behind that is the top salesperson of that company, right? At
• 15:21
  most scale enterprises, especially on the smaller side, the top salesperson will probably out-earn
• 15:30
  the executive team and or the owner because there is no business without the sales fall.
• 15:36
  How did you apply that when you first started? So now you go through this $10,000 program,
• 15:41
  you understand what true sales is, how to identify pain points, how to qualify, just qualify.
• 15:46
  You were, I mean, give me numbers because I have I have numbers that I found on the internet
• 15:51
  bit. I mean, I'll be real numbers. Yeah. So number one. So the journey was interesting in the
• 15:56
  sense that I did not want to be an agent. I wanted to be an investor, right? I didn't I didn't
• 16:01
  see that that was an interesting path. And so I was I was learning how to become an investor and
• 16:07
  halfway through the the when your program, you said you have to get your license so you can at
• 16:11
  some point buy and sell yourself without having to hire somebody. You get access to the MLS. You'll
• 16:16
  you have, you know, it kind of like you in developing podcasts like how much of it do you need to
• 16:22
  do yourself versus outsourcing? So I get my license. I have a, you know, pivotal experience in the
• 16:29
  sense that I had to find a new place to live. My landlord and I disagreed on acceptable volume
• 16:35
  on a Tuesday. And I'm in the office because at that point I get my license and I was looking for
• 16:40
  a rental on the MLS. And the owner of the office says you should buy a house. I said, I'm a child.
• 16:46
  I can't buy a house. I'm 19 at this point. And so I get into a conversation with a loan officer.
• 16:55
  And in the US, we have the FHA loan, which is a low down payment loan product that has a
• 17:03
  flexibility for something called a non-occupant co-bar or so someone that can be on the loan
• 17:08
  and title with you, who's not going to live in the house. So for qualifications for a traditional
• 17:12
  mortgage, you know, to be owner occupied, you have to be on title in the house. So I'd not to be
• 17:18
  concerned investment, which require much larger down payments. But this one government backs
• 17:23
  debt instrument allows an immediate blood family member. So like your parents, an uncle,
• 17:29
  to either gift a down payment and or be a co-bar. So I asked my parents to co-sign my loan,
• 17:37
  but more specifically to lend me the down payment for basically the day. Because as a licensed
• 17:43
  agent, my commission was about the same size as the down payment. So I get qualified. I had bought
• 17:50
  this car and paid it off after I sold it. And so I was able to qualify for $184,000 purchase.
• 18:00
  Negotiated the seller to pay all the concessions, all the closing costs. And then
• 18:05
  effectively bought the property no money down with my own commission and paid my parents back.
• 18:10
  But more importantly, I rented out three rooms of the four for enough to cover the mortgage.
• 18:17
  And that was the Ohio ad, right? So it wasn't, you know, I think when you hear some of
• 18:22
  story or you read stats on the internet, it's like, well, that was kind of a very straight line.
• 18:26
  It's the opposite, right? It's, it's, hey, I need somewhere to live because my landlord doesn't
• 18:30
  like me anymore. Well, hey, I actually qualify in this regard. But once I had that one singular
• 18:36
  experience, I, I only had the one proof point or one script. And that became, you know, I was a college
• 18:46
  kid. And I wrote down a little script and back to like asking the right question or identifying
• 18:54
  the right need. I said to my fraternity brothers, I said, let me talk to your parents about your
• 18:58
  housing needs for next year. And when I got them on the phone and I knew I only had 30 seconds,
• 19:02
  I would say, how would you like me to show you to pay for your kids housing for the next four
• 19:07
  years with the money you're going to spend next semester? And I, like, that was like, okay,
• 19:11
  I'm listening, right? And at that point, 3% on anywhere between 250 to 350 was about one year's
• 19:21
  room and board. And so I said, you're, you're going to deploy that money one time. They're going to
• 19:25
  run out all the rooms. And in four years, when you sell the houses, you'll probably pay for the
• 19:30
  entire tuition. Again, timing is everything. I did this between 2002 and 2006. So a lot of my
• 19:36
  fraternity brothers, you were able to either sell the house and make six figures and go home,
• 19:43
  start a business, like go on to a pretty, pretty good head start. But the part that was crazy is,
• 19:51
  I only had one transaction and it was myself. I'd never sold real estate. I was, I had barely turned 21.
• 19:58
  And at that point, that summer, I sold a ball at 11 houses. So in, in a time where, you know,
• 20:05
  most kids are working at a mall, I made about $60,000 in gross commission in my summer vacation.
• 20:12
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  code success for 30% off your first order of these amazing dummies. That's amazing. I think it's
• 21:22
  I mean, when I look at sort of the framework that you deploy for yourself and now for all your
• 21:28
  fraternity brothers, I mean, that's that is almost showing mastery of real estate and the different
• 21:34
  levers and mechanisms you can use at a very early stage because I've worked with a lot of different
• 21:39
  real estate agents and between government programs and I'm not a real estate investor. I don't
• 21:46
  pretend to be I don't tend to be knowledgeable, but I'm just I always find that real estate is the
• 21:50
  one category of investment opportunity where there's so many systems and opportunities that are
• 21:54
  actually built to support it. Like there's all these creative financing rules. There's all these
• 21:59
  government programs like it just seems like everything is built to help real estate investors succeed.
• 22:04
  But the real estate agent that I speak to is not knowledgeable about or they don't bring these
• 22:10
  things to light. Like if I have ever had very few people have ever told me when I'm looking at a
• 22:14
  house, oh, these are other ways to finance it or have you thought about buying a fourplex and
• 22:19
  living in one of the units and then renting out the other three. So I think that I mean part of your
• 22:23
  success just outside looking in is the fact you just had like you immersed yourself in not only
• 22:29
  the surface level of the industry, but like all of these again, not just selling, but investing
• 22:35
  and that investment actually led you to become a better salesperson. But it's just interesting why
• 22:39
  I don't see that happen quite often in real estate even for like mature 10-year experience
• 22:45
  agents. So the one thing I figured out early on that I still preach is that the riches are in
• 22:51
  the niches, right? Like you know blue ocean strategy. Like I much rather become masterful and maybe
• 22:57
  just a couple things that resonate and then I can actually be an expert at it, right? So like do I
• 23:03
  want to compete with Walmart? No, thank you. Because like if everyone's going after the same product
• 23:07
  or service, then you're, you know, competing on prices, consumer acquisitions, expensive versus like,
• 23:13
  hey, let me become really, really good at a couple things and demonstrating value to be picked
• 23:19
  is much easier at that one. Yeah, and that's what you did. So, um, so 11 home 60 grand
• 23:25
  in commission. So I blow it on a BMW because I'm 20 something. But by my senior or college,
• 23:31
  I was, I think my senior full senior that year, right? Because I graduated and then still had
• 23:36
  more time. I did about $300,000 in gross commission as a full time real estate agent. And that's
• 23:42
  like now like a year and a half, two years into this? Yeah, two years in, right? So, um,
• 23:48
  and like, I mean, just tell the audience about statistics. I mean, that seems like that is
• 23:53
  unusually high for two years into real estate. That is unusually high for today standards, right?
• 23:57
  So I think the average agent American makes about 42,000. So it's probably like eight to 10 X,
• 24:02
  especially back then with the average agent full time professional made. Now eventually,
• 24:08
  this obviously ends up turning into like thousands of homes and real estate transactions completed.
• 24:13
  So what was the, what was the sort of the playbook to sort of expand on those whatever,
• 24:18
  first 11, first 300,000 dollars of commissions. And then now you at one point, you were number one
• 24:23
  agent at color Williams. Okay. So what's the journey to get there? That's the like the highlight
• 24:28
  on the internet, right? Of course, the journey is that, you know, more is it just hard work and
• 24:33
  well repeat. It's also a lot of this, right? So the journey is like, I'm not that special at all.
• 24:41
  300, 6000 dollars happened in O5, right? I was a licensed real estate agent with a heartbeat
• 24:49
  in the greatest bubble in history of the world. And so what that translated to is I wouldn't
• 24:53
  bought as many properties I could with a ton of leverage because it was available knowing
• 24:57
  coming to asset loans. You know, the real pivotal moment was I think in the summer of O506,
• 25:05
  my account told me I was worth $5 million at 14 rental properties at the next five.
• 25:09
  I thought I was God's gift to real estate. And then within like a six month period,
• 25:14
  that same account, so that was where negative $1 million. And in the subsequent like 24 months,
• 25:20
  I gave all that back to the banks after doing a lot of crying invovers. And so that process was
• 25:28
  you had achieved last quadrant, you had turned into a real estate investor very, very quickly actually.
• 25:33
  But without any of the fundamentals in place, right? Like not real free cash flow and real
• 25:38
  sustainable fixed debt versus variable debt and all of the things that were skipped through in the
• 25:47
  in the exuberance of the moment in the market. So the, you know, legislative safety measures
• 25:53
  and the lending system didn't exist. That exists today, right? You can't do that again today.
• 25:58
  Because we collectively as a country learned, that was a bad idea. But did you hold onto,
• 26:01
  did you hold onto any of that? No, no, it was all, it was all get the reset button.
• 26:05
  But what the lesson was learned is like, hey, there's a whole lot of crying. And then you,
• 26:11
  it's one of those moments in life, which is again, a philosophy I prescribed to it's like, hey,
• 26:17
  the rules of the game changed. You can be mad about it. Or you can just decide, do I still want to
• 26:24
  be a market participant? And I feel like this, this thought process applies to everything, right? Like,
• 26:30
  you know, email marketing worked really well in 2001, right? They made a movie about it.
• 26:35
  You got mail and like people get excited versus like, we just don't even open it anymore. And so,
• 26:42
  whether it's a marketing tactic or, hey, this, this rule changed by the federal government,
• 26:47
  where you can't do that anymore. Do you decide, okay, I could have big feelings about it for like
• 26:53
  a day. And then you have to make the decisions like, okay, do I still want to be a market participant
• 26:58
  and learn to plan new rules of engagement? Or I do, I just move on to do something else. And
• 27:03
  you also, like as a human being, you always have that free will to say, I want to participate. I
• 27:07
  don't want to participate. So for me, it was, okay, the world ended as I knew it. What do I do now?
• 27:14
  Do I want to get out of rails to stay in real estate? And in that point, it was like, hey,
• 27:18
  people have lived before me. Let me try to get in front of older wiser folks who've seen this
• 27:23
  before. And as soon as I did, they were like, hey, this movie's played before, right? Like 1992,
• 27:28
  the SNL crisis, there's going to be these things called foreclosures. And on the bank ledger books,
• 27:34
  they're going to call REOs. So now you need to find out where they're at, right? And you know,
• 27:42
  Ariana, my amazing wife, she was in the business and she had been to a settlement with an agent who
• 27:48
  had a bunch of REOs. And she's like, hey, they told me a lot of these banks are in Dallas. You
• 27:54
  need to go to Dallas and go get some of these contracts for us. And I turned for one opportunity
• 28:00
  where, again, showing up and knocking on doors and co-calling, say, hey, I want to do some of this
• 28:05
  stuff. And they asked me to do these things called broker price opinions, which paid like 40 bucks
• 28:11
  for an opinion of value. But we did like a hundred of them 30 days. And then they're like, hey,
• 28:16
  you want to sell some houses? And then it went from like at the worst year ever, I think we sold
• 28:21
  seven homes. And then within 12 months, it was like 99 homes. And then that turned into 280 homes.
• 28:27
  And within like a four year period, the best year we had, we did 603 homes in a 12 month period
• 28:33
  in 2010, which by today's standards, there's teams that do much more than that. But back then,
• 28:39
  before the accelerant of high speed internet and the technology that we have available today,
• 28:45
  I think our team was number five in the Wall Street Journal of all teams in the country.
• 28:51
  You know, most people that I speak to that now look very successful from the outside. And
• 28:58
  there's always, they've achieved a significant market of success and then seemingly lost it all
• 29:03
  at some point in their career. And this is like not, this is the story that plays out again and
• 29:06
  again and again. I could always see it in a rate of passage. It is a rate of passage. It's always
• 29:10
  like, oh, I made a business. And it's always, you know, a million dollars for most people is,
• 29:15
  especially people that are not entrepreneurial. If you're entrepreneurial, usually you have the
• 29:19
  the foresight to say, okay, if they suppose well, I'm going to be making well over a million dollars,
• 29:24
  my business will be making well over a million. But for the average like nine to five W two,
• 29:28
  that's like a big amount of money, a big sum of money to get in one year. But most people that are
• 29:33
  entrepreneurial, I think what happens is they achieve this milestone. They achieve money that
• 29:40
  they've never thought possible. And then there's sort of two paths they can go on because there's
• 29:45
  going to be a point very rarely will that first success ever turn into the success that you're going
• 29:49
  to talk about in 20 to 30 years from now. Usually there's some shit hitting the fan moment when it all
• 29:53
  goes to crap and all goes to hell. But I think that that that point that moment when you again,
• 30:00
  like what you said, just to pair it, you can choose to be a market participant, you can choose to
• 30:04
  opt in or opt out, you can choose to just complain and cry and, and, and, you know, like, what was me?
• 30:12
  Like, I can't, I can't continue like all these different, all these different negative feelings
• 30:16
  you can have at that point, you can choose to take those lessons, those learnings and just
• 30:20
  continue to build or you can opt out. And I think that's actually the biggest indicator of success
• 30:25
  what you choose to do in that moment. So I heard a quote once it's sitting in order to acquire a
• 30:29
  great fortune. You must first lose a small one, right? I like that. You know, but you mentioned also
• 30:34
  like, so this happens in every industry. So I mean, in in in podcasting, Apple podcasts where
• 30:41
  majority of podcasts down those come from, they used to auto download. So when I used to upload as
• 30:47
  well as every other podcast in the world used to upload an episode, all the people that subscribed
• 30:52
  to your podcast automatically downloaded it onto their player. So Apple updated this feature
• 30:58
  about a year, a year and a half ago, where you don't auto download anymore. So if I subscribe to
• 31:02
  you five years ago, and I haven't listened to you since, it doesn't make sense that I'm still auto
• 31:07
  downloading because downloads count towards advertiser. But yeah, well, it counts towards advertiser
• 31:12
  downloads and CPM and it that that fuels the whole commercial model of podcasting for every
• 31:18
  podcast in the world. So when Apple did this, I mean, that's on a on a low end, about 20% of downloads
• 31:26
  and then revenue were cut overnight for every podcast in the world on the high end, like 30 to 40%.
• 31:31
  So again, this is something that you just have to deal with in every and it doesn't matter what
• 31:34
  you're doing. It could be drop shipping. It could be you could be selling on TikTok shops. If you're
• 31:39
  in this space, that doesn't really matter. It's always going to happen to you wherever you've been
• 31:43
  building. Eventually, the rules are going to change and you have to find a way to persevere
• 31:48
  in spite of it. So I hear a lot of people say that they think the American dream is dead.
• 31:54
  What is your perspective on the American dream after going through all these ups and downs and
• 31:58
  highs and lows? Yeah, my advantage point is someone who didn't grow up here, right? I didn't get
• 32:02
  here until I was 12. So you know, my dad worked for an NGO. So we moved around to six Latin American
• 32:09
  countries. So like I actually did kidnap injuries as a kid, right? Like I fundamentally believe
• 32:14
  if my story was in a different country, someone would have kidnapped my family because that's what
• 32:18
  you can do when you get mad at your competitors when there's no rules, right? In in foreign countries.
• 32:22
  So like just like simple things like our legal system works. If I get mad, I sue you and
• 32:29
  for performance or non-performance or you know, for payment, right? If I fail horribly, I hit
• 32:36
  bankruptcy and no one puts me in jail. Like there's there's debtors jail in other countries,
• 32:42
  right? So to me, this is still the greatest system on the planet. Is it perfect? No.
• 32:48
  Is there a better one? Show me. Like I just I haven't seen a better system.
• 32:53
  So you know, cost of living, everything. Yes, maybe it's a tough moment in history and I don't
• 33:00
  want to take anything away from that because I'm hyper aware that there is a lot of pain in the
• 33:05
  system post-COVID with inflation. But I don't know of a better system on the planet than this one.
• 33:13
  If you fast forward from from where you started to to where you are now, what is one belief
• 33:17
  that you held about entrepreneurship, about about success that has radically changed after you've
• 33:23
  gone through all sort of different iterations of building success even though the one that I think
• 33:28
  about and again, it's because of the moment in in my journey, right? So I truly believe
• 33:34
  there's seasons to everything in life, right? So when Ariana and I because we've been together
• 33:39
  our whole life is like, it was a very prolonged period of time where we stayed in the office
• 33:44
  like 10 o'clock every single day, right? And it didn't and like youth is a super power of energy,
• 33:50
  right? Like I tell young people like the thing you have on everybody is stamina. Like you can work
• 33:56
  12 hours a day for five, 10 years straight and still have a social life and go out and
• 34:04
  still until two in the morning and wake up the next day. Like at a certain point either you like
• 34:08
  you have kids and then you have to make the choice of like, do you not want them to see you?
• 34:14
  Or you just don't have that level of energy, right? Like if I don't get eight hours in sleep now,
• 34:19
  can you make fun of me? Because like, you know, if actually no, okay, so I make fun of you but I was
• 34:25
  after thinking about it when we went for dinner at like four in the afternoon, that was the perfect
• 34:29
  night. So I actually take it all back. It was actually great. Like somebody if you ever text me
• 34:34
  like after nine, right? You know, I'm not gonna respond, but I'd respond to you like six of the
• 34:38
  morning, right? But like I just know that to perform at the level, I perform it today.
• 34:45
  I probably need to not have a cocktail and go to bed at nine and have like eight hours of energy
• 34:50
  because for me to do what I could do at 22, I just don't physically have that anymore.
• 34:56
  But you also recognize, yeah, so to your point, seasons, the seasons to your life, right? Like you
• 34:59
  don't want to be, you don't want to be absent from from your kids. But what I was gonna say is that
• 35:04
  the season, it's like also know that what you're doing. Like I am going to sacrifice the next
• 35:10
  season to have a type of season I want, right? So also know that like I think a lot of successful
• 35:17
  people don't realize it's like, if sprints are in moments, right? For the most part it's a marathon
• 35:22
  but just know that they're all gonna be times where you have to sprint. Okay, so if you think about
• 35:27
  sort of the seasons of your life, so you were Keller Williams and then you were Remind and then
• 35:32
  you were Washington Capital and now you're EXP. Those are sort of like the four. Yeah, but it was
• 35:37
  Keller Williams, Washington Capital, Removix or EXP. So when you think about, when you think about
• 35:43
  that season that you're building after Keller Williams, so it was Washington Capital Partners
• 35:48
  and then Remind. Washington Capital and Remind, you were still going in thinking like I am
• 35:54
  entrepreneur, I can work unlimited hours per week, I want to build things, is that where you were
• 35:59
  at when you were going into those two ventures? And then the cool part that I think again from the
• 36:04
  outsider in River Mirror, it looks like this chapter ends and this one starts. What entrepreneurship
• 36:10
  normally looks like is like you're always testing stuff, like you're always saying is this an
• 36:14
  occretive side business to what we're currently doing and sometimes it's a tremendous waste of
• 36:20
  time and money or it becomes so successful, it dwarfs the previous thing that you were doing
• 36:28
  where you just have to let it go because it's like I'm gonna sell that. You know, that's how you
• 36:32
  always have started Boxy Tram. Of course, he was doing like he was like shipping and then selling
• 36:39
  off like liquidation merchandise, right? And then he started only focusing on beauty and cosmetics
• 36:46
  as one of the categories of merchandise he was liquidating and then he found that that was
• 36:50
  outperforming all the other categories and then he just spun that off into Boxy Tram, which is
• 36:54
  which I think is like the best way to build businesses, right? Where you have you, it's almost a
• 37:00
  less risky way of finding product market fit, right? And the times I've seen it be done successfully
• 37:07
  is purely bootstrapped, right? It's an entrepreneur itch that's being scratched versus I think,
• 37:13
  you know, we just lived through a decade of ideas being backed by dollars that were not,
• 37:19
  you know, held accountable for product market fit. I don't think that's done. I mean, we're an AI,
• 37:24
  we're in the age of AI right now. We're in the next phase. You tack AI onto your business and
• 37:29
  all of a sudden your valuation goes through the roof. I don't think it will ever be done. I think
• 37:33
  that that will all I think that as long as there's people that are trying to push and break things
• 37:39
  and create bleeding edge, super disruptive products and there's some hype around the technology
• 37:45
  they're using, there's always going to be some capital that flows in just because of flow.
• 37:49
  Absolutely. Yeah. I was just saying the ones I've successful. Yeah, they're very successful.
• 37:54
  From my vantage point, it's normally been like, they were trying to solve a problem.
• 37:58
  As a as a doer market participant expert, domain expert, and those seem to be the best solutions.
• 38:06
  So if you think about how you graduated from Keller Williams into Washington capital and
• 38:12
  Washington capital remind you built with Ariana and for the listeners, that's your wife.
• 38:16
  Yeah, and some other co-founders, but yes. Yes. Okay. So what was the goal? And we can focus on either
• 38:22
  or whichever one is like more meaningful to you from like things that I've learned building this
• 38:26
  that I can teach the audience, but which one we can focus on either. What was the goal going
• 38:31
  into either of those two? It was always like, is there is there an opportunity to solve? So Washington
• 38:37
  capital partners was in 2012 post financial reform. So post dot frank and CFBB. So before the
• 38:46
  financial crisis, we could walk into a bank and borrow a line of credit and go buy real estate
• 38:52
  based on the valuation and asset based low, meaning if the house was worth 500,000,
• 38:56
  a bank would lend me up to 250,000 against that property. But there was no ability to repay
• 39:01
  baked into it, which again with development or refurbishing, that's not a thing. So
• 39:09
  too many people bought too much money with no ability to repay. And so that was a foundational thing,
• 39:15
  mostly for like owner occupied loans, where it's like you can't borrow money unless you can
• 39:19
  afford to service the debt through cash flow. So that single rule change affected a lot of
• 39:26
  investment based loans that don't have the same goal as owner occupied, but it was one of those
• 39:32
  unintended consequences that come from changing rules to protect the whole. There was a small
• 39:37
  segment who was like, well, now we can't borrow money either, even though our goal is not to
• 39:41
  service the debt, it's to fix it up and sell it. So it was again, and when you see a finished
• 39:49
  product, you know, that entities lent billions of dollars and it start like that, it was like, hey,
• 39:57
  we were borrowing money to buy fixing sell houses. We stopped buying and fixing during the
• 40:02
  bottom of the financial crisis. And then the investors who were lending us the money said, hey,
• 40:06
  can you keep using the capital, say, well, let's try lending it to other people. And so I went
• 40:11
  from like, hey, let's do a couple loans to let's do more loans to like, okay, this is becoming a
• 40:18
  business. Well, now we need to raise money. Well, now are you still, are you still like, like,
• 40:22
  sell on our system, you're still selling houses, you're still buying fixing flipping while
• 40:26
  simultaneously running like a loan business on the side. It was like an Excel spreadsheet,
• 40:31
  and we're doing a couple loans. And then it's like, okay, now we probably need to take,
• 40:37
  and the beauty of the journey, it's like, we have this office that incubated the next
• 40:41
  business almost always sequentially. And then this is what it actually led to a remind as well.
• 40:46
  And so in the lending business, we needed an LOS, a loan origination system. But hard money lending
• 40:53
  was very niche. So it wasn't like a robust marketplace because the total dressable market is not
• 40:57
  big enough. So we started speccing, went out and hired some engineers to build it for us. And one
• 41:03
  of the solutions, we, one of the inputs we wanted was public record data. And so we went out to
• 41:10
  the marketplace and said, hey, where can we buy this data? And we were quoted some
• 41:15
  egregious pricing from the couple of companies we called. And at that time, we heard that Zillow
• 41:21
  is advertising a public record MLS API. And we had to compete in a hackathon to get access to it.
• 41:29
  And so we, we attended just purely because we wanted the data. But we had to present a
• 41:35
  product that was a UI. And we actually won the whole thing because we actually understood
• 41:41
  the realtor journey. And when we won, Zillow said, why don't we keep the API and build a product
• 41:50
  that could be deployed to MLSs. And four months later, we are invited to do a presentation at a summit.
• 41:56
  You know, we came up with the name over a weekend, bought a URL, made a PowerPoint and a three minute
• 42:02
  pitch. We just happened to present to some of the biggest MLSs in the country, who then said, hey,
• 42:08
  do you actually build this? We would be a customer. And so then that took us on the next journey.
• 42:12
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  Just go to Indeed.com slash Clary. A huge thank you to Netsuite for supporting today's episode. Now
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• 44:49
  Scott Clary. So a lot of the businesses you've built, I mean, to your point. So it's almost been
• 44:56
  like this natural progression. It's not like you ideated on 50 different business ideas and then
• 45:03
  you went out into the market and then you pressed your test of these ideas and got feedback and
• 45:08
  spoke to people and started to build one and then tried to take it to market and find product.
• 45:12
  These were all these natural progressions of all the activities you were already doing.
• 45:17
  And I think that's how most, you know, especially bootstrap entrepreneurs, right? Like if I were to
• 45:22
  quote Michael Gerber's e-meth, right? It's like, you're really good doer. And then all of a sudden at
• 45:27
  some point, either you're like, I can do it better than the owner does or I can do it better than the
• 45:32
  the franchisee does. And so you then have this entrepreneur fit. But when you've been an entrepreneur
• 45:39
  your whole life, I think I feel like you're always testing stuff, right? And like some of the most
• 45:43
  successful entrepreneurs I've ever met in any industry, it's like, hey, like, you know,
• 45:50
  I've met a gentleman here in Miami who builds like these phenomenal large scale projects,
• 45:56
  400,000 square feet hotels, mixed use. Like how did you start? He was like, I was literally a
• 46:01
  opinion. I was painting then I then then like I figured out how to make money and most of these
• 46:06
  guys didn't. And I was actually getting a line of credit from the bank. And they get like they
• 46:11
  told me this drywall guy's about to go under. You should probably call him. And so the bank put
• 46:15
  put him in touch for the drywall guy. And he's like, well, I already do the pain. I might as well
• 46:20
  get drywall business. And so he upstreamed his flow a little bit. Yeah. And he's like, well,
• 46:25
  this is a marginal increments. Not. Yeah. It's like, well, if I got the paint, I got the drywall.
• 46:29
  I might as well get the frame. Right. And before you know it, he's like, he's a developer. And so
• 46:33
  like he just kept going a little bit upstream and downstream in any direction where it's like,
• 46:38
  okay, why don't we vertically integrate a little bit more? And so sometimes it's adjacent
• 46:43
  into your point about our mutual friend. He's like, wait, this outperforms everything with more
• 46:49
  margin. Right. So. And that's that ideating and testing is what's important, right? Because,
• 46:54
  you know, the real estate peen sales was the cash flow that created this space to go test
• 47:03
  stuff, right? Because like the part that's not on the internet is like all the stuff we tried
• 47:06
  that didn't work, right? Like, well, like, hey, let's do assisted loom facilities and we lost
• 47:10
  all hundred grand. And it's like, we tried developing some stuff early on. We lost 750,000
• 47:16
  dollars. And it was like, but like none of it was an end of life moment because thankfully we had a
• 47:22
  cash flowing business that allowed us to take risks. And I mean, like, that sounds like large sums
• 47:27
  of money for people that have never built anything before or never. And that's just as there was a
• 47:31
  large sum of, you know, okay, sorry. Yes. My point is it is, it is still a large sum of money for
• 47:35
  anyone to lose. But I mean, if you have that cash flow, then again, it's not going to, it's not
• 47:40
  going to end your life. You're going to wake up tomorrow. You're still going to be able to try new
• 47:44
  things. It's, it's also a risk tolerance that you build over time. So it's a risk tolerance. It's
• 47:48
  the ability to bounce back from risk and failure that I think is again, like a hallmark of a good
• 47:52
  entrepreneur. So if you lose 400,000 dollars because you put money into crypto, not, not this week,
• 48:00
  not this week. But in the past, if you lost money, put money into crypto, I mean, you,
• 48:06
  you're taking an uneducated, investing opinion. And I think that that's actually what causes people
• 48:11
  to make emotional decisions as opposed to the logical ones. But if you have built things repeatedly
• 48:17
  and you understand that there's potential product market fit for the solution that you're trying to
• 48:20
  create and, and you build it and it doesn't work. I mean, you can take a less of an emotional
• 48:25
  stance on it. And I think it allows you to take more risks and not let those failures
• 48:30
  completely destroy you mentally. Because again, like you, you, you sort of like exposures,
• 48:36
  I think a bit awkward or like gradually exposes themselves to more and more risk over time.
• 48:41
  So a couple of things you said, one is I actually say a sentence that I think is very important in
• 48:45
  sales is that all human beings make emotional decisions and then justify them a lot. Correct.
• 48:49
  Yes. Right. So that's why I focus on qualification. But then secondly, like the tolerance thing,
• 48:53
  it's like we're parents to younger-ish kids, like our daughter turned 10 years or so. It's not
• 48:59
  feeling younger anymore. But seven and 10. And you know, when you have a toddler, like,
• 49:03
  if they don't get the banana or the toy in the second, they want it, it's the end of the world.
• 49:10
  And then by the time they're like, you know, tying their shoes like back and trigger them. And
• 49:15
  then it's like, I got picked on at school. Like, and in that kind of progression of entrepreneurship,
• 49:22
  take that as the same thing. It's like, oh, I couldn't close the deal. Oh, I lost the deal. Or
• 49:29
  oh, that marketing campaign returned zero dollars, right? Like we invested $10,000 in a
• 49:34
  mailer and we got zero and ROI. Is it because we didn't do it long enough? Like, did I actually have
• 49:39
  to do that eight times before I got the return I wanted or on a CPM or anything like that? And
• 49:46
  then it's just through experience, you start to have that tolerance. It's like, okay,
• 49:51
  most things have a risk or a word quotient that I'm solving for. And you know, how much risk
• 49:56
  am I willing to take? And then also, I think the one that I think the superpower that comes from
• 50:02
  those small failures that lead to larger failures even though that moment is everything is, uh,
• 50:08
  did you die? And that's a crazy concept, right? Like you just said, most like every entrepreneur you've
• 50:13
  ever interviewed had an ass whooping super early on. If you choose to get up, which is not always
• 50:19
  the case, right? Some people I've met, try it, get their ass whooped and go get a job and never
• 50:25
  look back and then actually tell others a cautionary tale of don't risk anything. But the ones that
• 50:32
  get back up, you actually have very real tangible experience that like he didn't kill you, right?
• 50:41
  Like did you die? Do you still like the next day you wake up and your your wife is safe,
• 50:47
  your kids are safe, your parents are alive, you know, before your head, you have food in the
• 50:51
  refrigerator. Was it really that bad? And what's the worst that could happen? You have to go get a
• 50:56
  job. That's always the worst. And I think that when you, I think that when you look at
• 51:00
  the skill sets that you've built as an entrepreneur and you realize how employable you actually are,
• 51:06
  it really takes a lot of the stress and the fear out of it. Because what's the worst that can happen?
• 51:10
  A company wants to, a company will always want to hire somebody. It's able to build something
• 51:15
  from scratch where nothing existed now a couple of years later, whether or not it was successful,
• 51:19
  you built that whole thing from scratch, you figured out sales, marketing, ops, HR,
• 51:22
  finance, you figured out every single business unit that is a very valuable skill set to a company
• 51:26
  that's going to pay well over 100, 100, 200,000 dollars to employ you. So if that's the worst case,
• 51:32
  zero to one, I think it's probably the hardest skill in business. Yeah. I think that I want,
• 51:37
  I want you to teach over a lesson for like entrepreneurs that are listening because you,
• 51:41
  you sort of evolved your business into different businesses based on, based on like what the market
• 51:50
  was telling you to do, like with Washington Capitol with Remind the market was saying we need this
• 51:55
  and then you built it. So I think that's even too much credit. Really? Yeah. I think why do you say
• 52:01
  that? Because it was like, well, I was going to, I'll tell you what I was going to ask you. So I was
• 52:04
  going to ask you what do entrepreneurs do wrong when they start businesses? Yeah, no. If for us,
• 52:08
  it was always like, we need it. We're just literally building it for ourselves. I don't know
• 52:14
  you're giving yourself enough credit. And then we showed it to a couple of friends and they're like,
• 52:17
  oh shit, that's pretty cool. I'll pay friends that have significant impact on the market,
• 52:21
  well, whatever. Yeah. But I go back to sample size of one, right? Like I think human beings
• 52:27
  undervalued their own, their own vantage point and attention. So like the amount of times I've sat
• 52:31
  down with an agent who's like, hey, I'm going to try this for marketing. What do you think? I'm like,
• 52:36
  would that work on you? Like, how do you part with the eye? I don't think enough people stop and go,
• 52:42
  I'm a sophisticated consumer of products and services. Like, does that work on me? Right? Like
• 52:50
  and I don't think enough marketers put themselves through that lens. Like, hey, I'm going to try
• 52:54
  this. Like, okay, would you click on that? I agree with that. Would you open that envelope? Would
• 52:58
  you pick up that phone? Like the second I hear, hey, is this Leonardo? I'm like, click.
• 53:02
  You don't know how to say my name. You have no business talking to me, right? So but like the
• 53:09
  amount of times I've clicked on a funny product ad on Instagram lately in the last like two years
• 53:17
  because that's where my attention for my demographic lives. It's like, oh, wow. Like, I just need to see
• 53:24
  the right ad at the right moment and I am a ready willing and able consumer. Well, I think there's
• 53:29
  so much waste in marketing spend and marketing effort because I agree with you. I've actually,
• 53:34
  so I want to talk to you about about average because you speak a lot about what what average is.
• 53:40
  And I know that for example, you throw out most of the flyers that you get to your house before
• 53:46
  they even get inside the house. You throw them out when you're right beside your mailbox.
• 53:50
  But I think that and I've never really understood this because again, I've never led like a fortune 500
• 53:59
  marketing team. But if I look at their socials or if I look at their fliering or if I look at
• 54:05
  the majority of the marketing campaigns that they put out, I find it to be like really half-ass.
• 54:10
  Like it doesn't hit home with me. It doesn't resonate with me. Most of my buying decision is based
• 54:15
  on my research. Now, maybe those marketing campaigns, those shitty posts on LinkedIn, those flyers that
• 54:22
  you know, like overwhelm my mailbox that I throw it just as quickly as you do. Maybe they're just
• 54:27
  meant to keep them top of mind. But it almost turns me off from the company. Like I, I defer to
• 54:35
  somebody who was innovative, who doesn't suck at marketing, who is like a little bit against the
• 54:40
  grain from somebody that's doing it for the past 100 years because I feel like they have my best
• 54:45
  interest in mind. I feel like they think more like me and this is whether or not they do. This is
• 54:49
  the perception that I get. So I bank with a different kind of bank. I bank with Mercury. I don't bank
• 54:53
  with like a chase or a JP Morgan. And I like Mercury because they're very convenient and the features
• 54:59
  they set up are great for me. But I'm curious if you have opinion on why do companies put out such
• 55:07
  average content, such average marketing F companies of seasons, right? So a startup who's
• 55:16
  being scrappy and creative and against the grain has a limited budget, right? And I think, you
• 55:22
  know, you also have to appreciate like you are their ICP. You're their ideal customer profile for
• 55:29
  what they're selling. And so the bigger an enterprise gets, the more
• 55:34
  less specific ICP they have, then they do like that general population is my chases and cities.
• 55:41
  ICP is America. Like we want 20% of America because at that point, they've just acquired and
• 55:48
  conglomerated so many business and services where like the lifetime value of you is not just the
• 55:53
  bank account. It's all the other auxiliary products that will cross sell you. And when you are,
• 55:59
  you know, double digit market share of a country, at that point, it is top of mind, right? It's
• 56:04
  Coca-Cola, right? Like I just need you to remember that when you're at the restaurant and you're
• 56:09
  about to order and they say Coke or Pepsi, you say Coke, right? Because at that point, you're competing
• 56:15
  just for top of mind attention versus like, hey, we're an aggressive startup. We have a niche and
• 56:21
  like we're going to focus on that B world class at that. And so you like again, also like I tried not
• 56:27
  to even let the poor marketing bother me in a sense of like, hey, I'm going to choose to do like
• 56:33
  for example, we bank with a local regional player where what's most important to us is that like
• 56:39
  I can walk in, ask for the manager and like I can send a wire remotely when we're traveling.
• 56:44
  It's service versus features. Like I don't actually care what the tech looks like if you give me
• 56:49
  the service I'm looking for. Well, by the way, the feature set is like the service is tied into
• 56:53
  the feature set. So one of the things I didn't have in Canada was TD bank. I had to walk into a
• 56:57
  branch to send a wire. I cannot fucking stand walking into a branch to send a wire. So now I can
• 57:03
  send wire. I can send ACH from my desktop, from my laptop, whatever, just so service is now
• 57:09
  congruent with the features they've built up. But yes, sorry.
• 57:11
  Yes. So and again, depending on the product and service and the phase of life you're in and
• 57:16
  the like the what the value proposition. And to me, that's the beauty of capitalism. Everybody
• 57:20
  gets the compete on all that stuff. And I think the what I would say to most entrepreneurs is like
• 57:25
  you don't need everybody. Like where the single at EXP where the single largest real estate brokerage
• 57:30
  in the United States. And I'm and I have 4.2% of every agent who's licensed in the US in the US
• 57:37
  in like, you know, long term, I want to get that to 10 or 12%. But even if we absolutely knock it
• 57:44
  out of the parking, we get to 10 or 12%. That means 90% of the agents will never be with me. And that's
• 57:49
  okay. Let's talk a little bit about what EXP does differently because I think a lot of what we're
• 57:54
  talking about conduct hell and do that quite nicely. Because EXP does things differently than
• 57:58
  traditional real estate firms. I mean, if I again, you you make a point of saying like the average
• 58:04
  consumer is very smart. Sometimes I think legacy institutions, I do not consider EXP to be
• 58:11
  legacy by any means. I think it's very new and forward thinking legacy institutions do not
• 58:16
  consider how smart the average consumer is becoming because of access to information.
• 58:21
  Is that something that I think he hold that belief to be true? How does that impact like what you
• 58:26
  what you do at EXP or what you do differently? So first like this is my first job. So I did not
• 58:31
  found the company. I didn't set the vision from the beginning. But it's a 15 year old company,
• 58:36
  return 15 like a month ago. And I think Glenn was way ahead of his time as the founder.
• 58:43
  And and and and it was born out of an entrepreneur glitch. It was born in 2009 post financial crisis
• 58:49
  where he goes, I can't afford rent anymore. Like I mean, they're going to have got a business
• 58:53
  or I create a cloud based model. And so when he created a cloud based brokerage, never been done
• 58:58
  before. Like there was a can I ask why? Because it just seems like that's like reducing a ton of
• 59:04
  costs. So it makes a ton of sense. But because now it's normal, right? Like in 20 in 2009, the thought
• 59:12
  was foreign. And by the way, legally speaking, there was a bunch of states where like we still have
• 59:18
  to have like a 500 square foot office somewhere and put the license on the wall. Why is that?
• 59:22
  Um, just, you know, it's how it's been done, right? So we were able to legally comply with state
• 59:29
  rules and create an environment and a platform that allowed us to go fully virtual. But it was like,
• 59:34
  hey, we can get rid of the single largest expense on everyone's BNL, which is often space.
• 59:38
  Because real estate was dominated by franchises, which was literally a store on every corner,
• 59:44
  right? So he was able to eliminate the biggest expense and the biggest hindrance because
• 59:52
  before XP, no one had ever recruited without having a store on every corner. No, I know. I
• 59:57
  mean, like if you think about like legacy industries, I mean, like real estate is right up there
• 1:00:01
  with banking. I don't think it's changed that much in X amount of years. I think you're in it.
• 1:00:07
  I don't know for a fact, but I mean, I feel like outside of exp before exp, like it probably operated
• 1:00:14
  pretty much the same for like a hundred years, a hundred year, like it does not change significantly.
• 1:00:20
  So this was Glenn's vision. Um, what were the, what were the biggest issues that you dealt with say,
• 1:00:26
  I mean, or that he dealt with even before you joined, um, that sort of emulates like market,
• 1:00:33
  like how did you get, how did you get agents to get on board with this? How did you get people to
• 1:00:38
  trust, um, uh, listing, you know, the biggest purchase or sale of their life, which somebody
• 1:00:44
  doesn't have physical offices went again. He hasn't been done for like this. So I think the
• 1:00:48
  overcoming the objection was purely to the agents because what Glenn understood is that consumers pick
• 1:00:55
  the professionally they want to work with no matter what jersey you're wearing, whether it's
• 1:01:00
  skeletons or remax or center 21 or EXP, like they had a relationship with Scott and like
• 1:01:07
  yourself on like they didn't have you saved under KW or EXP or really just Scott. Yeah. Okay.
• 1:01:13
  So like you could have switched companies between your last purchase and this purchase and
• 1:01:17
  they're going to use you regardless. The over the overcoming the objection was convincing that
• 1:01:23
  the agent didn't need a physical office. And again, Glenn very creatively did it by like we
• 1:01:26
  have an enterprise relationship with Regis. So like we have more office that anybody else does,
• 1:01:30
  right? Because you can walk in and use a Regis office anywhere on the planet. Um, but you know,
• 1:01:36
  EXP's journey is no different than every other one. It's like, hey, it was a fist fight for like
• 1:01:41
  10, 11 years. And then there was an inflection point which for EXP's journey was COVID, right, where
• 1:01:48
  the world went into a collective experiment of becoming virtual. And I mean, they went from like
• 1:01:55
  10,000 to like 70,000 engines. It was crazy exponential growth in a two or three year period.
• 1:02:01
  Um, and now in 2024 going into 2025, every new national corporate leon brokerage will look more
• 1:02:09
  like us than the legacy players. What is, I mean, we just established it real estate. The majority
• 1:02:15
  of it is very outdated and it's a legacy industry. But would be one belief it's still held in
• 1:02:20
  real estate that could be harmful. Well, I think one of them still is physical office space like it.
• 1:02:26
  Again, we're only 4.2% market, right? And if you were to take every copycat brokerage who's
• 1:02:31
  modeled us, they're probably maybe 1% state to get not even 1%. Do you see, do you see legacy companies
• 1:02:37
  copying you know? No, it's mostly new startups. Right. So what, so they don't, so they haven't,
• 1:02:43
  they haven't said, oh, we don't want to be blockbuster. So I think that's a reduced
• 1:02:50
  statement that doesn't give credit to the like true baggage of any legacy incumbent competing,
• 1:02:56
  where it's like, wait, like everything we have is built around this legacy thought process.
• 1:03:02
  So to disrupt this one thing that seems kind of like obvious in the rear room here,
• 1:03:07
  might be completely and fundamentally disruptive to our entire model. And so so do you burn the
• 1:03:13
  bridge and decide to reinvest yourself? Or, you know, are you either Apple jobs with the
• 1:03:20
  iPod to the iPhone, which cannibalize its most profitable product, or you code act where you say
• 1:03:25
  film is everything. We're not going to touch this digital thing. And then Canon meets your luxury.
• 1:03:31
  Yeah, that's interesting. It'll be interesting to see what what they do.
• 1:03:35
  Well, and again, I'm I'm I'm of the opinion like it doesn't have to be binary, right? It's like
• 1:03:40
  we'll get a piece of the market. They'll keep a piece of the market. And everyone co-exist.
• 1:03:46
  But he's in most industries. You still see legacy folks. You do so. I know that you're saying that.
• 1:03:52
  But there are there are case studies of people that no longer have any market share. There are
• 1:03:58
  a bit again, the brokerage business is a service fulfillment business for 1099 entrepreneurs,
• 1:04:03
  right? So at the end of the day, like I view what we do as a platform to allow real estate entrepreneurs
• 1:04:09
  to build their businesses on top of that. So like for me, we are an operating system. We're a
• 1:04:13
  platform. And some other companies have a different model, right? So we tend to attract a very
• 1:04:18
  entrepreneurial type of agent who who our platform is ideal for. But there are other agents who like
• 1:04:28
  are probably more attracted to a brand. And they're like, hey, I'm going to join this company
• 1:04:34
  because of the like maybe tens of millions they do consumer spending for facing which we are not.
• 1:04:40
  But I think that I think that a platform that enables a realtor to become entrepreneurial or
• 1:04:46
  something that is a platform that attracts entrepreneurs. I mean, I think the agents at the end of the day
• 1:04:51
  are going to be most successful when they adopt an entrepreneurial mindset because I mean, again,
• 1:04:57
  I feel that my perspective outside looking in, if I'm going to be in real estate and I'm betting
• 1:05:05
  my entire career on a brand that I'm missing the mark on what's actually going to make me successful
• 1:05:10
  in real estate, I feel like I'm I'm over investing in legacy player versus sort of taking that
• 1:05:19
  external locus of control, putting it inside and saying, I'm responsible for my own success,
• 1:05:24
  let me like partner up with an agency that supports my entrepreneurial vision for whatever I want
• 1:05:29
  to build. I think that's probably a fundamental. It's a very scary shift. But I think that at the end
• 1:05:34
  of the day, the agents that are entrepreneurial understand that their success is yes, supported by
• 1:05:40
  the broker, but executed on by them, they're going to be the ones that make way more money, close
• 1:05:45
  more deals. Correct. And the entire industry is entrepreneurial, right? Because every agent is
• 1:05:50
  a 1099 agent. So every single one of them, whether some realize it or not, own a small SMB
• 1:05:56
  business, and they need to treat like gross dollars as top line revenue, which should have a portion
• 1:06:04
  allocated to reinvestment, whether it's technology or marketing or staff or something else. If you
• 1:06:09
  plan to make a sustainable not, you know, kind of as quadrant self-employed practice, what makes the
• 1:06:17
  best agent in your mind? You know, I feel that in my journey, it's like what makes the best entrepreneur,
• 1:06:25
  right? It's like, hey, and it's it's pretty clear to me. I think you need to have a lot of
• 1:06:30
  introspection figure out how you're wired, right? Like most everything can be learned, right? I
• 1:06:37
  truly prescribe to that if you have at average or above average IQ, you can actually learn anything.
• 1:06:44
  And especially in this era where like I just go on YouTube and I don't even get to pay people for
• 1:06:48
  it. But where where my thinking is very specific and probably a little different than most is like
• 1:06:55
  anyone can do anything outside of like brain surgery or like coding really complicated things.
• 1:07:01
  But if you can actually figure out how it is that you're going to make the argument that coding
• 1:07:05
  is becoming more accessible to it, 100% with AI. But when you figure out what your God-given gifts
• 1:07:13
  are and then actually lean in on that. So like, for example, if you take like the dis profile,
• 1:07:19
  which is a personality profiling test that I'm kind of obsessed with, I know statistically from
• 1:07:27
  the results of the test that there are things I'm better at, natural state, meaning I can actually
• 1:07:34
  get on stage, be handed on my account as long as I'm in my like in my cohort in my domain,
• 1:07:40
  and freestyle like to 5,000 people for an hour. And by the end of that hour, I'll probably have
• 1:07:49
  more energy than when I got off stage, when I got on stage. Because like, I mean, that's when you
• 1:07:54
  know you're doing your best work and you're in the right spot. Because I'm in my gift. Yeah.
• 1:07:59
  AI had a predisposition for it. But then I have actually spent 23 years in my life honing.
• 1:08:05
  Right. The opposite of that is like the S&C, like the detailed and the spreadsheet part of what
• 1:08:11
  are you, by the way? You're a 99D, 99D. Isn't that most sales people? Not that pronounced. But some
• 1:08:17
  variation of that and then like a 10, 10 on S&C. And so like, once a month, I have to do consolidate
• 1:08:23
  financials for three hours in a public company. Right. I can do it. I can pay attention. But that
• 1:08:30
  actually drains my energy. Like for me to take a sales call after that is not a good idea.
• 1:08:35
  Right. I'm not going to show up at the same level of energy with the same level of attention.
• 1:08:40
  And like that night, I probably don't want to do date night or spend time with the kids
• 1:08:45
  where I have to be super presence. Like, hey, let's, you know, maybe watch a movie,
• 1:08:49
  by where you don't need my level of engagement. Because I might not show up the way I want to show
• 1:08:53
  up. Yeah, it's, it's not your, it's not your gift. So, so tags are the questions. Not
• 1:08:58
  a, I didn't forget the question is, how do you, how do you get to live in your gifts?
• 1:09:04
  Because I think that's how entrepreneurs show up passionately, right? When people like,
• 1:09:08
  a live in your passions is like, what are you good at? So, verse, and I think that's how,
• 1:09:14
  like people get confused about the passion statement, right? Like, you don't have to be
• 1:09:19
  passionate about selling houses. You have to be passionate about spending time with people
• 1:09:25
  or even like, let's just go into Legion, right? Like, in whether you're filling the blank
• 1:09:30
  real estate agent or anything, it's like, okay, there are many forms of Legion, right? Like,
• 1:09:36
  in person, if you were not high, I is probably not going to work, right? If like, you're super
• 1:09:42
  detailed and you can build funnels with click-through rates and a call response to action, like,
• 1:09:46
  that's not me. That's a very successful way of doing it, but I'm really good at like,
• 1:09:51
  pitching a room, which statistically speaking for a good percentage of humans is scary to die.
• 1:09:57
  Right? So, if you don't have that eye, don't do that. Because you'll probably create anxiety,
• 1:10:04
  create fear, create failure because you're fearful, and then you're like, I had a bad experience,
• 1:10:10
  sales suck, right? Versus like, sales suck that way for you, versus like, if you're highly
• 1:10:17
  introverted and highly analytical, it's like, figure out some funnels stuff on the internet,
• 1:10:21
  and you might make more money than you ever dreamed, because it's actually living in your gift.
• 1:10:26
  Whether or not you're an entrepreneur or an agent who is an entrepreneur,
• 1:10:32
  what is the, what is the wisdom for them to figure out how to find out what their gift is,
• 1:10:37
  so they can live in it, and they can outsource the rest as quickly as possible?
• 1:10:41
  Yeah, so I think it's both, you know, maybe taking tests and taking a bunch of them until,
• 1:10:48
  how did you find your outside of doing a disc profile?
• 1:10:51
  I luckily, like, inside the kill room system, like, they taught us that very early on. So,
• 1:10:56
  like, I started taking discs when I was like 19, in AVAs and Myers-Briggs and like,
• 1:11:01
  Strength Finder. So, like, once I kind of figured out that this is something I'm going to learn,
• 1:11:05
  I wouldn't found more. Then the cool thing was, like, I started doing it so young,
• 1:11:11
  I actually saw my change over time. Like, if you study this stuff, it says, like,
• 1:11:15
  it's fluid through your formative ears, and typically, kind of like you said, the entrepreneur
• 1:11:22
  has a ass-woping, that normally is when it sets. So, like, my eye was a 50, and then the
• 1:11:29
  financial crisis, and we had to start over, and my G went to 100, right? It was like, I survived
• 1:11:36
  a traumatic event, and it could be personal, or it could be business, and then it's like, okay,
• 1:11:41
  now the thing is said and stone. Like, that's how I'm wired. That's how you want to operate,
• 1:11:44
  and that's how you are wired to operate. But, like, I've also noticed, it's like when I'm
• 1:11:49
  low energy, and like, I get stressed, my eye drops dramatically. So, I don't have as much patience,
• 1:11:54
  I don't show up as friendly as possible. And so, like, to me, operationally, like, if I know
• 1:12:00
  this about myself, it's like, hey, don't schedule meetings in the afternoon on a Friday, where I need
• 1:12:08
  to be a high-eye, because it's not going to be a good experience for the people receiving
• 1:12:12
  hearing me, and it's not going to be a good experience for me either, because I should not get
• 1:12:18
  I'm not going to be having a good time. This is like, this is beautiful. It's a self-awareness. I
• 1:12:21
  don't think, I mean, yes, a fair amount of people have self-awareness at the level that you do,
• 1:12:26
  but I don't think that everybody does. I think that everybody, especially if you are entrepreneurial,
• 1:12:31
  you just do everything, and you try and apply the same amount of energy to it, and you can't
• 1:12:34
  understand why some things are giving you energy and taking energy away, and you're spending
• 1:12:38
  your time over a course of years doing things that you shouldn't be doing. So, I think that it's
• 1:12:42
  actually very smart to understand that a lot of this sort of this self-awareness and the tools
• 1:12:47
  to discover the self-awareness that exist, and there's really no reason for you to be suffering
• 1:12:51
  through things that you shouldn't be doing. Well, and if you go down that rabbit hole, and you
• 1:12:55
  preach it and believe it organizationally, once I remember we had a small team with Ariana
• 1:13:01
  in real estate where we not only had the discs, we actually had you print yours out and put it
• 1:13:06
  by your space. Do you remember that? No, so I know how you're wired. Oh, okay, okay. I understand.
• 1:13:14
  Right, like to compensate, so like this is a perfect one, like Ariana and I both are high
• 1:13:20
  eyes and knees, and like we wanted to do good things for our people, like hey, let's give them
• 1:13:27
  variable comp on bonuses, because like we make more money and we want to pay them more money.
• 1:13:32
  Well, for an SC, I just ruined their life. Like a detailed oriented stability driven person
• 1:13:39
  actually wants stability in their income. And so by me saying, hey, I'm going to take away your
• 1:13:45
  guarantee floor, and I'm going to share my food and bounty with you. You're like, you just
• 1:13:53
  rocked my world and what's important to me. Right, so even becoming a student of how other people
• 1:14:00
  are wired, I think makes you show up as a better leader, right, where it's like, hey, instead of a
• 1:14:04
  cash bonus, you know, we spent more time asking questions like, hey, Ariana wouldn't got her a
• 1:14:10
  gift of something she would have wanted, but never spent on herself. And that was a much
• 1:14:15
  better way to celebrate somebody, or like you take someone who's in detail and support, go,
• 1:14:21
  hey, you crushed it this week. Let me bring you up to the front of the room and have everyone clap.
• 1:14:26
  And they're like, why are you torturing me? Right now. Like someone would love it, some people would
• 1:14:32
  why are you want to just die? And you're like hurting me. Like you're you're like I may quit
• 1:14:37
  because you made me so uncomfortable. Maybe that person just wanted you to take him out to lunch
• 1:14:42
  and celebrate them one-on-one and not make a big deal about it, but give them attention versus
• 1:14:47
  if you don't have that. If you don't know how they're wired, because some people show up a certain
• 1:14:51
  way as a defense mechanism. It's like, hey, I need to be social because I don't want to not get
• 1:14:57
  recognition at work, but like it drains me. I actually don't like it. Like it's an act.
• 1:15:02
  Do you have it just thinking about the environment that you're working in right now with EXP,
• 1:15:07
  because you don't have brick and mortar, and you're not in office with people?
• 1:15:13
  I've worked in virtual environments as well, but I always found it hard to build relationships
• 1:15:18
  virtually. I always was fine building relationships, hiring, onboarding, in person, and then moving
• 1:15:25
  into virtual, but I found it very hard to start a relationship with somebody virtually.
• 1:15:31
  If we're talking about getting to know people in the most intimate sense that you can actually
• 1:15:35
  serve, how they want to be served, and engage with them in the way that they want to be engaged with,
• 1:15:42
  how do you deal with that in a virtual environment?
• 1:15:44
  So a big distinction that I learned, right? Like, Ariana and I were both in office only.
• 1:15:49
  When we were at Remind, Ariana's office was where she could see all the enterprise salespeople,
• 1:15:55
  and she could hear their calls, and she could walk past them. Same for me.
• 1:16:01
  And then we were forced to go to this virtual world. That company, Remind, was not born digitally.
• 1:16:06
  It was very much in office. I could hear and see you, and we go to events, the very analog company.
• 1:16:12
  Versus Glenn's entire vision was virtual, and he was an early adopter of the Metaverse,
• 1:16:18
  which was way ahead of its time. I actually have a different appreciation for our Metaverse technology
• 1:16:25
  now, which again was once a client server and hard to render, but now it's really fast,
• 1:16:31
  asset-like, browser-based. But what he was driving towards that he created in the Metaverse was
• 1:16:39
  we actually have this serendipitous moments, right? Like, the other day I needed Glenn, and before
• 1:16:45
  I called him on the cell, I just popped into the international room where I know he spends most
• 1:16:50
  of his days, and I walk down his hallways. Chills in the Metaverse. Oh, yeah. No, we operate very
• 1:16:55
  much certain teams completely in the Metaverse. And my point was I saw Felix who runs growth internationally,
• 1:17:03
  and I just popped in and hit a 10-minute conversation, as avatars in his office was completely
• 1:17:09
  serendipitous, right? And it was like, hey, real quick, like, you know, my actual call with him
• 1:17:15
  was going to be in eight minutes, and I was just there, and I walked inside, I had Felix asked how
• 1:17:19
  the launch Peru was going. And so, you know, and, you know, there's very recognizable data that,
• 1:17:27
  like, when you go from an office to a virtual productivity spikes, but over time, it starts dropping
• 1:17:34
  because people get detached from it. Okay, so I was like, my follow up was sort of like going
• 1:17:38
  back to the question I asked was, do you not feel friction building relationships for the first time
• 1:17:43
  and engaging with people in a virtual environment? So again, like, there is the human element of it,
• 1:17:49
  but our entire DNA was born in the cloud as a business. So there is a much different expectation
• 1:17:56
  of like, I can actually pop into your office digitally. And like, they have welcomed.
• 1:18:02
  Well, it's expected. It's not only welcome, it's like, it's what people do. Like, it is not
• 1:18:07
  uncommon for someone to call you on a video format where your phone rings and it's workplace video.
• 1:18:14
  Right? That in another format, that's kind of intrusive, right? But it's okay, from nine to five
• 1:18:18
  or teammates, if I call and you're available, pick up in a digital format, like it's the expectations
• 1:18:23
  you're working. This is the alternative to me walking over to your desk and saying hi.
• 1:18:28
  Exactly. So you have to build, I mean, so I think that that's probably the best
• 1:18:31
  implementation of virtual digital remote, because if not, then you've...
• 1:18:35
  Yeah, and again, I can't back this up with data, but intuitively, I think that's where we're
• 1:18:40
  probably the most skilled enterprise that runs the kind of revenue we do in a fully virtual world
• 1:18:47
  leveraging the type of virtual tools that we leverage. A quick shout out to the HubSpot podcast
• 1:18:53
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• 1:21:04
  What would be some lessons? Okay, so let's think about one positive and one negative that came
• 1:21:09
  from your background and entrepreneurship that impacts how you run a publicly traded company.
• 1:21:14
  Like, what would be one thing about an entrepreneur that does not translate into publicly leadership
• 1:21:19
  and one thing that definitely does? Well, the one that does, and I think that's why Glenn wanted me
• 1:21:25
  involved was it's like the actually, I watched a Steve Jobs speech to a class at an Ivy League
• 1:21:36
  from 20 years ago that was actually really the same as viral clip, right? He's got many, but the
• 1:21:41
  one that he was that I'm referencing is he was kind of like lecturing a bunch of young people
• 1:21:47
  who are about to become consultants, right? Where it's like, and this is analogous to maybe just
• 1:21:53
  going up the corporate letter, like if you've never had to live with the outcomes of your decisions,
• 1:21:59
  that's a very different wiring. Like whether it's your consultant or you're actually just,
• 1:22:05
  you know, a participant or contributor into a very large enterprise. It's like, hey,
• 1:22:11
  you've never been like, I mean, Ariana, I'm like, hey, if we kind of mess this up, we just blew
• 1:22:16
  through our entire savings. And we got to go create five or 10k of excess capital a month to get
• 1:22:24
  back to the hundred. We just blew on this idea, right? So the entrepreneurial dearlessness
• 1:22:33
  or being committed to your decision-making process. And it's like, hey, not only am I going to make
• 1:22:38
  decision, like even if there's backlash, I'm going to be okay with it for a long period of time.
• 1:22:44
  Just you. That's it. And so that's it. That's to me what translates really, really well
• 1:22:50
  in the sense of companies are collection of people. And whether it's, we have a five-person team,
• 1:22:57
  a 20-person team, a 50-person team, a 300-person team, or a 3,000-person team.
• 1:23:03
  At the end of the day, you're just, you know, navigating human interactions,
• 1:23:08
  harnessing people's disparate talent sets that, you know, collectively contribute more than others.
• 1:23:16
  And then it's just operating human interactions. So that like, I think the, the downside to
• 1:23:24
  going from a small computer, big company is for getting that, right? Like, it's like, oh, now we
• 1:23:29
  need to do things differently. It's like, how much, how much of a do we, like, could this have been an
• 1:23:34
  email? Like, do we need to go through these like three meetings to get to the outcome? Like,
• 1:23:41
  because I think the biggest problem, like, and even when, when asked me to join, he's like, hey,
• 1:23:47
  just because something is done in a certain way, question everything, be willing to break it,
• 1:23:52
  write a full mindset, right? So if you see bureaucracy or inefficiency, just question, like, why?
• 1:23:59
  Why do we do it like this? Why did we do it like this? And like, because we've always done it
• 1:24:04
  that way, it's never the acceptable answer. And sometimes, I mean, sometimes, memory is short,
• 1:24:10
  sometimes a company can grow and creates all these inefficiencies. And people only remember, like,
• 1:24:17
  people, I remember, like, last week, so they actually don't even know where these inefficiencies
• 1:24:21
  came from. So this is the other thing I've learned about leadership, whether it's, you know,
• 1:24:24
  someone being the leader to me or me, then being a leader to somebody, it's like, also remember
• 1:24:30
  that how humans learn. And whether it's your kid or your employee, sometimes you have to let them
• 1:24:37
  go through, like, hey, I want to do it this way. I'm like, that's a terrible idea. And sometimes,
• 1:24:43
  you say, hey, that's a terrible idea, but go ahead and do it anyway. Or you can say, hey, I
• 1:24:47
  wouldn't do it that way, but I'm going to let you make that choice. And they're most likely going
• 1:24:52
  to do it anyway. In the decision trees, like, how, how detrimental is this learning experience for
• 1:24:58
  them to our enterprise? Like, if it's no big deal, they get to, like, I said, my piece, it wasn't
• 1:25:03
  like I hung you out to dry. It's like, hey, I don't think it'll work because, you know, I've tried
• 1:25:08
  it 10 times last 15 years. And it's never worked. But go ahead. As long as it doesn't detriment the
• 1:25:14
  enterprise at scale, no, it's going to be a learning experience. And they're going to be a, and
• 1:25:18
  like, even me getting more educated person up to the experience, like, Glenn, I want to do this.
• 1:25:22
  He's like, yeah, it's a, this is not going to work, but if you think you can do it, go ahead. And
• 1:25:26
  then like three months later, exactly what he said was going to happen. I'm like, okay, I get it.
• 1:25:31
  But that, especially for someone, you know, coming up in business or entrepreneurship, like,
• 1:25:37
  you want to test and ideate and iterate. And that, and like, and that's the difference of education
• 1:25:42
  versus wisdom, right? And there's just some things that are experiential. And whether it's
• 1:25:47
  Mateo, it's seven years old, or me at 42 running a business that's like, sometimes I just, it
• 1:25:52
  doesn't matter how much someone tells me right, read it. Probably going to have to try it and learn
• 1:25:57
  it and experience it. And then have a very firm conviction of why I believe that. One thing that I
• 1:26:01
  think you've done really well. And I've asked you how you've done this before because you've handled,
• 1:26:06
  I mean, you jumped into EXP at like tumultuous is putting it lightly. It was not an easy time
• 1:26:12
  for the industry. And I really know nothing about what happened in the industry at all. I just know
• 1:26:17
  that it was on the news a lot, which was on the real news. Yeah. Wasn't in the industry.
• 1:26:21
  It's in the real news. I figure that it's like a gray hair at the very minimum. A lot of
• 1:26:28
  but one thing that I found you do remarkably well is, and I've asked you this before, how do you
• 1:26:33
  manage all these situations that are kind of unprecedented? And how do you make smart decisions?
• 1:26:39
  Because it seems like you've made some very smart decisions that have worked out very, very well.
• 1:26:44
  And feel free to go into his books. I'm not going to, I'm not going to ask you one detail like about
• 1:26:49
  things that you cannot speak about. But so teach what you can. But talk to me about how you, first of all,
• 1:26:55
  some of the things you navigated with sort of like the ups and downs of the real estate industry in
• 1:27:00
  the past year sort of just a brief disclaimer for what happened, because I think that some people
• 1:27:05
  don't still understand what actually happened if they're not in real estate. But then also your
• 1:27:09
  decision making process, because I think that's, I think whatever it is, it's worked out very well.
• 1:27:15
  So yeah. So again, going back to like boiling down to like what is the downside of something happens
• 1:27:21
  versus something that doesn't happen, right? So specifically your reference. Some of the decisions
• 1:27:25
  you make, there's massive downsides. Yeah. Yeah. So the specific thing you're referencing,
• 1:27:29
  there was a class action lawsuit basically against the industry, right? So the national
• 1:27:34
  social rotors and then co-defense, the biggest brokerage, including us. And so there was massive
• 1:27:40
  litigation in which ours is still not personally settled. So there I can't speak to the specifics
• 1:27:44
  on that. But through it, you know, there was, there was some moments in time where I was like, hey,
• 1:27:50
  I need to go live in a couple hours and make some very big decisions on behalf of our agents
• 1:27:57
  and potentially the industry. And so just like everything else, it's like you have to have a decision
• 1:28:03
  tree, right? Like there's the stuff that like I'm going to make a decision in a vacuum, whether
• 1:28:07
  it's myself and a couple of the leaders based on my collective journey. And that's actually why
• 1:28:12
  you end up in leadership where you're willing to make that decision and live with the good or bad
• 1:28:18
  outcome as the owner, which is why that entrepreneurial experience definitely helps. And so that that
• 1:28:22
  one just, that's the wisdom part of the journey, right? We're like, hey, we're not 22. I was just not
• 1:28:27
  equipped to make that decision. And then because I've gotten older, it's also understand that like
• 1:28:33
  if there's, you're not the only human necessary to make the decisions, be as open as possible
• 1:28:38
  to many important points as possible. And so then it's like like in outside counsel, inside counsel,
• 1:28:45
  top, you know, leaders you trust that are experts in that domain. And then also say, okay,
• 1:28:53
  what's the worst that can happen? What's the best thing? So for us, it was our industry collectively
• 1:28:59
  chose to be quiet, retreat, let attorney speak on their behalf, and kind of like
• 1:29:06
  batten down the hatches and jump in the fox hole versus that one weekend where it was very
• 1:29:12
  pivotal in our industry. We were on with general counsel, we were on with clan, and I said, hey,
• 1:29:17
  I think I need to give very loud and become the call me voice for our space in this moment.
• 1:29:23
  Been more importantly for always a signal that made you think that the hundreds of text messages
• 1:29:29
  and emails that I received from our people with genuine fear in the voice. Like, I'm not sure I'm
• 1:29:35
  going to be able to feed my family. And I'm the breadwinner. I can't sleep. Like, please tell us
• 1:29:41
  what's going to happen or what we need to do next. And so that was one of those where like I told
• 1:29:46
  Glenn, I was like, I think when you get really loud, but like if I get really loud, I could affect
• 1:29:52
  our negotiation position. I could affect our our outstanding liability. And that's that's, you
• 1:29:58
  know, I can make the decision of like, I think this is what we need to do. But at the end of the day,
• 1:30:02
  you're the majority show shareholder. What do you think we should do? And to his credit, he said,
• 1:30:07
  get as loud as possible and we'll deal with the potential up or down because that's the
• 1:30:12
  calming voice for our people and like the leadership position is more important than the downside.
• 1:30:19
  So everything, everything, every, every problem that you solve is looked at through the lens of
• 1:30:24
  agent first. This is who we serve. So that, that, that is the exact tagline that is his north star.
• 1:30:31
  Right. So like again, and for me, I've always been the founder CEO. So right, this is a different
• 1:30:37
  role where it's like I, I, I joked with him. I said, I get to be the fun uncle. You're dad.
• 1:30:42
  Then, you know, not that long after he gave me the dad role. Yeah. He gave the dad. But the
• 1:30:49
  difference is it's, it's, you know, I've never had a job and I was like, Hey, I'm not sure I know
• 1:30:54
  how to have a job. He goes, it's super straightforward. I only have one one north star. And it's,
• 1:30:59
  I want to build the most agent centric real estate company on the planet. So that's the
• 1:31:03
  prism that we look through every single thing. And it actually makes it very simple. Right. So
• 1:31:09
  it's like, if I'm stuck on a problem in my head and I'm like, should I be building this? And it's
• 1:31:14
  like, am I solving this for the right ICP? And sometimes I'm not. It's like, oh, no, I'm trying
• 1:31:21
  to attract independent brokers. But that's not my ICP. I actually, it's not who I'm building
• 1:31:27
  the company for. It's for the actual agents who are here. Or maybe the agents I'm going to compete
• 1:31:32
  with him for or her. So at that point, it's like, as long as I remember with the north star,
• 1:31:38
  is it actually makes the decision making process very simple. So in these moments where I've made very
• 1:31:44
  bull decisions in the last 12 months, like we made one about changing policy,
• 1:31:49
  company wide, that ended up in the news. And it was like a rough couple of weeks.
• 1:31:55
  And I remember one day I was quite stressed also about it. And I'm going to go tell my face. And
• 1:31:59
  she goes, but are you right? That's it. I'm more right. I feel more right in my head about this
• 1:32:03
  than just about anything else. And she's like to see it through. And in a couple of weeks,
• 1:32:09
  the chatter quieted down in a couple of weeks later, just about every other major company followed
• 1:32:14
  our lead. And like a couple of months later, entire states are adopting our position. So
• 1:32:19
  you know, it's like, did you die? Do we have the ability to recalibrate and change our position?
• 1:32:28
  Yes, we do. And so, and again, if the prism is this the best thing possible for the people I serve,
• 1:32:36
  then it kind of makes it super easy to go down the decision tree. So two thoughts. First of all,
• 1:32:40
  super important, have a supportive partner. When you're making these decisions, I think that's like
• 1:32:44
  half the battle and entrepreneurship that somebody who's like just like sort of checking you and
• 1:32:50
  checking your thought process. I find that to be one of the most, I mean, Gina is again, like you
• 1:32:55
  with Ariana is one of the most important pieces of my life. Like I tell young people, the person
• 1:33:01
  you marry will dictate most of the happiness in your life because whether whether they you choose
• 1:33:06
  to have them be your business partner like I have or not, it's still like the entrepreneur
• 1:33:11
  ride is a hell of a roller coaster. And so if someone, if your other partner, depending on who's on
• 1:33:18
  the entrepreneurial side of the spectrum, is not prepared for that, or is not comfortable with that
• 1:33:23
  risk, it's going to create a lot of friction. And, and you know, whether you're doing it together or
• 1:33:27
  one of you as the entrepreneur, you, you need somebody like I remember in the toughest moments of
• 1:33:33
  every moment, because there was lots of ups and downs, it's like we took turns being the one freaking
• 1:33:36
  on and crying, right? Like our rule was like we both can't cry tonight. It's your turn to cry
• 1:33:42
  and I'll be yours rock. And the next day it's my turn. And so you have to be able to have those
• 1:33:49
  very clear boundaries of support system and like even be okay with like hey, I you might need to
• 1:33:58
  go get some some advice from somebody else because I'm going through it too as well. So
• 1:34:04
  and then just having super open communication. I had so smart. Everyone who I know who's built
• 1:34:10
  anything meaningful. I mean, this you can't have any trauma or stress in your home when you're
• 1:34:14
  trying to build or if you do, it's just going to make it 10x harder. I think that person is super
• 1:34:19
  super important. No, my second thought on on sort of that decision tree framework that you just
• 1:34:25
  discussed. What would be like I'm just trying to pull some lessons for people that are trying
• 1:34:31
  to understand how they can apply what you've done to their own story. So you have your
• 1:34:35
  ICP, you have your avatar, you have your lens that you look all all these problems through.
• 1:34:39
  What would be some other just thoughts around a decision tree framework that someone listen to
• 1:34:45
  this can apply to how they navigate in their own business. The first one and the simpler one
• 1:34:49
  that I think most people over complicate is decision fast. Especially like we're not talking about
• 1:34:55
  like industry changing hundreds of millions of dollars liability. Like I'm just talking about like
• 1:35:01
  the amount of people I see get stuck in paralysis by analysis at any facet of business building
• 1:35:08
  is the most dangerous one. Like I think aim, shoot, readjust aim, shoot, readjust is so much better
• 1:35:17
  than aim, aim, aim, aim. Let me get it perfect. Like let me get the best copy. Like just get copy
• 1:35:23
  out there. If it sucks, the market will tell you because you spent a hundred bucks and nothing
• 1:35:27
  happened. Then you adjust the copy a little bit or have 10 versions of the ad, which now you can
• 1:35:33
  ask AI would spend a work better. But you should test like I was just listening to Gary V.
• 1:35:41
  Tino yesterday was like the cool thing about social right now in this moment in 2024. So for
• 1:35:47
  context end of 2024 is that the it's less about like who you follow but like what interests you.
• 1:35:54
  So like if a organic post gets a lot of engagement then turn it into an ad.
• 1:36:00
  Right versus like if I'm going to coast get zero ads, you're missing a message.
• 1:36:04
  Yeah. I mean this is half of my my content strategy. So like I have my my testing ground is like
• 1:36:09
  Twitter and threats. I can put out 10 ideas a day and I can in you know in under an hour or two
• 1:36:15
  hours, I can immediately see feedback from the market from the audience. Then I'll turn that
• 1:36:20
  highest performing tweet into it. Well, I don't run a lot of ads but I would turn it into a newsletter
• 1:36:25
  into solar podcast. I mean you like there's all these different signals you can look for.
• 1:36:30
  I think that's actually very smart. I mean it's so funny how people don't like there's so many
• 1:36:35
  ways to test for free. You're marketing and people don't take advantage of them and they for some
• 1:36:40
  reason think that all that great organic social to putting out has to be different from all the ads
• 1:36:44
  that they're running. I mean we can talk about like what companies suck at marketing all day but
• 1:36:47
  that's besides the point. But no, I want to I want to just sort of sort of tie a bow and like sort
• 1:36:53
  of the exp and real estate conversation. What would be some what would be some views that you have
• 1:37:00
  on the future of real estate that may not be popular views or maybe like against the grain.
• 1:37:04
  Things that you think are going to change that the rest of the industry you're going to be making
• 1:37:08
  predictions now and hopefully we can like clip this in like five years to now be like oh my god
• 1:37:13
  look at how look at how right Leo was. So what are some things that you believe that are not
• 1:37:17
  like generally accepted right now. So answering that question is probably a little different than
• 1:37:22
  you would probably expect me to say it because I've actually been in the business long enough where
• 1:37:25
  I've seen probably two big shifts. The first one was high speed internet right so you're dating
• 1:37:33
  yourself. Very much very very much. So I got licensed in 2002 but like for the folks who remember
• 1:37:39
  that or not are young enough like high speed internet was not something you had at home. Like
• 1:37:44
  the first plugs for high speed internet went directly into office buildings because that's where
• 1:37:48
  they were necessary. So like the first up and down. So the real estate industry evolved from
• 1:37:54
  books where they were dropped off once a week with all the listings for sharing of properties
• 1:37:59
  to these like portal mainframe things you would log into for the first versions of MLS where
• 1:38:05
  you can actually browse from home. So like you had to physically drive to the kind of like why
• 1:38:10
  EXP never it was invented previously. It actually was the catalyst of a combination of the two things
• 1:38:17
  I'm going to talk about where I remember seeing the acceleration of a real estate transaction. So
• 1:38:24
  when I started selling real estate in 2002 the fastest you could sell a house if you were lucky
• 1:38:29
  to get like an offer was like if it was a hot hot market and there was a lot of interest it would
• 1:38:35
  probably be about a week right because I had to log into this portal hit print call a bunch of
• 1:38:42
  landlands leave a bunch of messages people coming back. The seller I would tell the agent when I
• 1:38:46
  wanted to see the property they'd have to call the agent on a landline get a call back
• 1:38:50
  take me like two or three days to schedule a showing then I had to drive back to the office.
• 1:38:55
  I'm really dating myself these these contracts that had perforated ripaways and one was white
• 1:39:00
  one was pink one was yellow and had a press hard in blue ink and rip it apart and either hand
• 1:39:06
  drop it off or stick it in the fax machine hope the fax machine didn't eat it which it did half
• 1:39:11
  the time then I had to go get another one and start over. And so like the best case scenario
• 1:39:17
  it was like a week or two on a hot property the internet sped that up quite a bit because I could
• 1:39:24
  now do that from home and then like that just accelerate everything and then the the second
• 1:39:30
  accelerant was about three four years later when the iPhone came out right the the true smart phone
• 1:39:36
  where it was like oh I don't need to I could just call the agent I can just look up the same
• 1:39:42
  endless information on my phone and so now the agent can answer emails while they're showing
• 1:39:47
  a house as opposed to waiting till they get back into the office or exactly so today if I
• 1:39:52
  list a house that's hot it will be syndicated through hundreds of websites simultaneously which
• 1:39:58
  will trigger safe search criteria that will notify me an app and the consumer can now collaborate
• 1:40:07
  with me through a shared calendar and schedule the showing directly if I'm available we could
• 1:40:12
  physically both be available and see that property within one to two hours and then the agent can
• 1:40:19
  write up a contract on their phone get you to digitally sign it with a digital signature tool
• 1:40:25
  and it's delivered within hours of the property going live so the two fast the two transformative
• 1:40:32
  accelerants I saw one was high speed internet and then followed by mobile in every one of their
• 1:40:38
  shifts I've seen agents not make it right the internet didn't put real estate agents out of business
• 1:40:45
  mobile did not put real estate agents out of business the agents who adopted these massive shifts
• 1:40:50
  in technology and society put the agents that did not out of business so the way I see that
• 1:40:58
  um to answer that question is I think AI is as big or more transformative than those two
• 1:41:04
  other shifts I've witnessed in my lifetime you know I've seen some people exaggerate and say it's
• 1:41:08
  like it's fire it's not fire like fire was the one that made us change it as homo sapiens but I
• 1:41:15
  think it's as powerful as either one of those or more and so um how it affects it I don't know
• 1:41:23
  that's the part that's super fascinating to me because like I have the iPhone 16 and so do you
• 1:41:29
  iPhone 1 was nothing more than a toy like it was it was like blackberry was for grownups
• 1:41:35
  that was a toy but that toy was an iterative process that's become like it's the remote control
• 1:41:42
  to the car intro here it's the key to the car it's my banking app it's my credit card like I can
• 1:41:50
  actually just leave the phone that leave my house with my phone and you can do everything and I
• 1:41:56
  don't need anything else anymore you don't need a wallet you don't need a iPhone 1 was not that
• 1:42:00
  yeah right so when I see large language models or tech that enables me to go faster stronger
• 1:42:06
  there are parts like I can tell you that right now we are doing stuff in the last six months
• 1:42:12
  internally that will streamline processes to to a dramatic point where like when I look at
• 1:42:19
  per-human cost to fulfill a transaction to say that over time I don't know how long
• 1:42:26
  I'll drive that cost down by 80% in efficiency is not out of the question anymore which a year ago
• 1:42:32
  I couldn't say that right like there are you know the technologies evolving at a speed
• 1:42:39
  that I think things that we didn't think could happen two years ago are going to happen in the
• 1:42:43
  next five years so the the the confidence they might I can say is that the companies and or agents
• 1:42:49
  pet market participants and remove industry from it who adopt the accelerating tools that are
• 1:42:56
  driving down costs and efficiency are going to be transformative right so like there's early
• 1:43:02
  indications that you know contributors contributors that companies who are using
• 1:43:11
  large language models film the blank your favorite one on a daily basis as a like a sidekick
• 1:43:18
  are like 25% recession right are removing like 40% are adding 40% more accuracy right like
• 1:43:24
  perfect example for me I don't read or write well because I'm pretty sure I'm undiagnosed
• 1:43:31
  dyslexic but in the 80s we didn't have labels like that it was just like he does he doesn't read good
• 1:43:35
  it versus like now I can actually write and post without asking for any help at scale from a marketing
• 1:43:42
  standpoint or like a social media standpoint because like I'm very articulate so I can
• 1:43:46
  voice the text and then have Chad juby to check for grammar and spelling and then I'll buy
• 1:43:50
  all the sudden I'm like hey I can talk a lot in multiple formats versus like confidence wise I was
• 1:43:57
  probably limited to public speaking versus like I don't enjoy writing because now you can have
• 1:44:03
  a newsletter and you can transfer you can try to let that newsletter into multiple languages
• 1:44:06
  multiple languages and it's all you know and I can just like I can write what I'm trying to
• 1:44:11
  communicate and I can say hey change the tonality for LinkedIn versus Instagram versus like
• 1:44:16
  and it's like all of a sudden I'm a marketing genius but but it's not like write me a post about
• 1:44:22
  this like no I wrote a post in my own voice and like one of the things is like learning to use
• 1:44:27
  the technology correctly in the sense of like my promise say proof free for spelling and
• 1:44:31
  remember but keep my tone and voice I train so whenever I use like any sort of LLM for content
• 1:44:38
  I actually train it on pieces that I've written myself so it knows my my own voice but it's
• 1:44:43
  interesting I find that people when they when they approach and adopt new technology or one
• 1:44:48
  new technology is presented to them they either they either over index on it and use it as a crutch
• 1:44:54
  or sort of push back against it and under index and don't use it at all and I think the actual
• 1:44:59
  answer is somewhere in between in the middle where you use all these tools she just
• 1:45:04
  optimize and improve and help but ultimately none of these tools especially in 2024 can replace a
• 1:45:10
  human if I just say LinkedIn posts add copy newsletter um copy for a listing whatever on chat cheap
• 1:45:18
  you own copy for a listing actually it's pretty rough listing so maybe it would do better than some
• 1:45:21
  but for the best for the best in class which is really what everybody wants to be nobody wakes up
• 1:45:26
  and wants to do a shitty job um if you use these tools it's the first step in a creative process
• 1:45:33
  or it's the first step in whatever you're trying to accomplish but now you can spend your time
• 1:45:37
  and your energy to take it from just okay to exceptional because you're applying that human
• 1:45:43
  touch to it as opposed to doing the the bullshit really difficult creative work the the first
• 1:45:49
  concept of creative work or the first draft of something like that's what gives that's what
• 1:45:55
  chat GPT would all these different LLMs allow you to do it allows you to spend time focusing on
• 1:45:59
  the things that actually matter well and where I would say to people especially living through a
• 1:46:04
  couple big shifts it's like whatever is in in year one or two it's like ultimately that might not
• 1:46:10
  even be the highest and best application of it so the the the the suggestion is to
• 1:46:17
  play and test and try stuff so it's not just like hey it's not just for writing it's like
• 1:46:26
  you and I were out at a restaurant and I took a picture of the wine list and said hey for price
• 1:46:31
  and value and quality pick a big-bodied red for us and it did right yeah and it was like order
• 1:46:37
  that one and we were both pretty happy with it was great yeah yeah right and so you can actually
• 1:46:42
  just snap a picture of an image and ask it to do analysis and like funny enough you were pulling out
• 1:46:48
  your phone start googling and I was like I beat you we're ordering this a big thank you to
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  indeed for supporting success story because hiring people is one of the hardest things you're ever
• 1:46:57
  going to do as an entrepreneur as a founder as somebody's trying to build a business because
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• 1:47:07
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• 1:47:52
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  clary terms of conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need one yeah no it's um listen
• 1:48:33
  I think that in all industries people get nervous about AI because they're going to say well okay so
• 1:48:39
  now the the seller can do x amount of uh research on selling their home and they don't even need an
• 1:48:47
  agent anymore and I push back against that because all of these all listen any sort of transaction
• 1:48:55
  business is just transactions is repeated transactions there still is again they they make they
• 1:49:01
  make an emotional decision they justify with logic there still is a human component to a transaction
• 1:49:05
  so even if I did all the research in the world I still want somebody that's been doing that for 20
• 1:49:10
  years and I want their experience and I want their wisdom because I can look at all the data
• 1:49:15
  points as to what I should do and in theory maybe I could sell my own house but I still want somebody
• 1:49:20
  who can guide me through that process because you can't you can't google and you can't AI wisdom
• 1:49:26
  and experience you you really just can't yeah no I it's it so a couple of things because I'm
• 1:49:32
  sure people bring this up with you all the time every time yes it's so and so the reality is
• 1:49:36
  everything has to do with the context right buying and selling real estate is highly frequent the average
• 1:49:42
  american moves six times in the entire life three times as a tenant three times as an owner
• 1:49:48
  um and they don't sell their homes on average right now every but nine years right so if I don't
• 1:49:53
  move every nine years first of all I probably forgot what happened the first time um everything's
• 1:49:58
  different right like literally like nine years ago you probably used paper like we don't actually
• 1:50:04
  have physical paper contracts anymore right they're all digital right and so every everything
• 1:50:09
  about the process is different now and it's full of friction like it's buying and selling a house
• 1:50:15
  and not not from the practitioners standpoint but literally from like transferring title
• 1:50:20
  indebting the property taking an insurance policy making sure like getting insurance in self-floor
• 1:50:26
  did you get wind in and flood right like it's not a simple process and it's full of friction
• 1:50:31
  and it's highly emotional because one thing is like hey I'm buying a business on behalf of
• 1:50:37
  my company as my job versus it's like hey this is where I'm going to raise my children with my
• 1:50:44
  partner and this is going to be home it gets highly highly emotional so the the analogy I always
• 1:50:50
  give in today's world that I think is super applicable is is how we learned youtube has democratized
• 1:50:56
  learning in a way that's never been done in human history and I'm a huge fan of it like I learned
• 1:51:01
  to cook different things or I basically learned to spearfish watching videos but at the end of the
• 1:51:06
  day like once I jumped in the water I wanted to go with someone who've done it before who knew
• 1:51:10
  what to do and the best analogy I always give people is today if I were to want to summit
• 1:51:19
  Mount Everest I would do a lot of research on the internet and you know I couldn't get all the
• 1:51:22
  training videos I could watch the how-to videos like don't do this don't do that I could watch
• 1:51:27
  reviews on like the best waterproof gear the best camera the best like radio in case of this
• 1:51:32
  emergency but like that doesn't mean I'm gonna get to the bottom of Everest and be like all right
• 1:51:37
  I'm going at it myself 100% of the people probably should or do higher a Sherpa the 100%
• 1:51:45
  who was born and raised and has done it 400 times right so like that extra layer of like
• 1:51:52
  you want some to hold your hand go you know that's that's not a big deal let's just hang out
• 1:51:56
  it'll pass or yeah let's get out of here right right now right now let's go right now
• 1:52:01
  so and then I think that's what an expert guide does on any difficult high friction transaction
• 1:52:08
  right like the promise that like we've gone the way of the travel agent was a fallacy in the
• 1:52:14
  sense it was that's a highly commoditized government regulated you know pork belly if you
• 1:52:20
  will it's it's a commodity versus like hey real estate is hyper local and there's nuances to
• 1:52:25
  neighborhoods from like the school the zoning what you can and can't do like is it in nature or
• 1:52:30
  is it not in nature like what I don't know what I don't know about something super expensive that
• 1:52:36
  I only do a couple times my life I want to I want to finish this up with just some last sort of
• 1:52:41
  words of wisdom from you because I pulled some sort of core entrepreneurial beliefs that you have
• 1:52:46
  and you can just sort of like rip through these and give a couple thoughts on why you believe
• 1:52:51
  these things I think these are these will be like great little reels we'll clip them out into sound
• 1:52:55
  bites but I love sort of all these ideas so let me just go through them and tell me just a couple
• 1:53:01
  words about why this is so important for an entrepreneur so first one is success comes from consistency
• 1:53:07
  rather than special talents so how do you want me to respond do you want me to repeat it?
• 1:53:11
  no I mean no no you don't have to actually format it for reels that we do have good editors
• 1:53:17
  no no just why is this why why are these so important I'll read through them and just tell me in
• 1:53:21
  your mind why is this good insight for an entrepreneur yeah so the first one is success comes from
• 1:53:26
  consistency rather than special talents I think so much of the world assumes that when you see
• 1:53:33
  someone talented they were gifted and even entrepreneurs it's exact somewhere like
• 1:53:38
  not using um uh like those are filler words that I beat out of my own communication style through
• 1:53:47
  lots of reps right repetition is the best teacher and you know whether someone is extremely
• 1:53:54
  talented they will almost always get outworked by someone who's consistent and I think that implies
• 1:53:59
  from you know sports very easily in your head but everything in life is like that I love that
• 1:54:06
  why should you focus on operational excellence and removing friction I go back to the analogy
• 1:54:12
  that I said that most human beings don't give themselves enough credit as a super sophisticated
• 1:54:16
  consumer I obsess with operational excellence and removing friction because I think that's the
• 1:54:22
  goal of entrepreneurism like the reason I am all in on the apple ecosystem from the watch that's
• 1:54:28
  on my wrist to the film that's on my pocket to the AirPods that's in my um other pocket
• 1:54:34
  and and like five other products is because it's frictionless it makes it easy for me to
• 1:54:40
  communicate transfer my um contacts upgrade pay it's a seamless ecosystem we vote with dollars
• 1:54:49
  every single day of the year in every moment of our existence in capitalism and so if you focus
• 1:54:55
  on removing as much friction as possible from the system you become the no-brainer answer to
• 1:55:03
  the selection for product or service why should people prefer painkillers or actually let me
• 1:55:09
  rephrase that why should entrepreneurs focus on painkiller products versus vitamins yeah one
• 1:55:14
  thing I learned very painfully is that most consumers of our product will always pick the easy
• 1:55:22
  button right like um one of the things we learned while building remind was that it would have
• 1:55:27
  probably applied to people that were super like minded and whenever you're building a product
• 1:55:31
  service in your own echo chamber you actually get a false positive right so it might resonate for
• 1:55:37
  your peer group but you always need to understand the total addressable market and uh
• 1:55:43
  someone pulled me aside and sat me down as like your mistake was you built a vitamin regimen
• 1:55:47
  versus a painkiller and again like in 2024 the best example that is like I hear some crazy
• 1:55:53
  statistics eight percent of Americans arms on like now statistically and logically every single
• 1:55:59
  person knows how to get fit avoid high sugar intake and high fat intake and be in a caloric deficit
• 1:56:10
  whether it's by working out to create it or you know putting less stuff in your mouth like you
• 1:56:14
  actually don't need a trainer you don't need to google it like I think just about the average
• 1:56:18
  human being knows that just from being alive today but olympic got to zero to eight percent
• 1:56:26
  in like 24 months they have a larger market i i just i'm gonna i'm not gonna remember the stat
• 1:56:31
  life but whatever what it there's like this one company and go everyone listen go google because
• 1:56:39
  it's absolutely wild the market cap of whatever leading company crato's epic is is now like
• 1:56:45
  surpassing some of like household name brands that you know so i don't know the exact number on it
• 1:56:50
  but there's one company that's just blowing it out of the water and again like under two years
• 1:56:54
  they they accomplish it like product work if it yeah that's it why is it important for entrepreneurs
• 1:57:01
  to understand their time value and focus on high ROI activities i think that's the only way you
• 1:57:06
  actually progress right if if the dollar productive activity is relative to your skill set right so
• 1:57:12
  i think the entrepreneurial journey is figuring out what you're talented at figuring out if that's
• 1:57:17
  actually a high dollar productive activity and continue to constantly do a math problem so you
• 1:57:24
  know if i'm i'm i'm meeting with entrepreneurs i would say take your revenue from last year and
• 1:57:29
  divide it by 2008 especially if you're an army of one that'll give you according to the labor
• 1:57:34
  department what a full-time gig looks like in entrepreneurship it's probably higher than the
• 1:57:39
  two thousand and eighty but just for a simple math do that right and so you will get a result right
• 1:57:45
  it'll be like okay i earn fifty dollars an hour seventy five dollars an hour a hundred fifty
• 1:57:48
  dollars an hour and then for the subsequent week right down what you do every every ten minutes
• 1:57:55
  like a lawyer with keep track of a no pad then you'll actually see what you do every day right and
• 1:58:00
  so the math problem is first of all identify what is a dollar productive activity and then the
• 1:58:06
  first point of leverage whether it's VA is another country or a in-person assistant everything
• 1:58:13
  that's not a high dollar activity and you can almost you can pencil buy it what that costs right
• 1:58:20
  like is this data entry that could be four dollars an hour right is is this something a large
• 1:58:26
  language model can write for you right like did you spend two hours editing and you're not good at
• 1:58:30
  it right so and then you're constantly refining that activity and in my again especially how i'm
• 1:58:37
  wired in my brain works it's like i never let go of lead generation activity because that's always
• 1:58:42
  always always the most important thing to do in a business but maybe you optimize by hiring a
• 1:58:47
  phenomenal lead generator where you know the big company's called a crow and with small
• 1:58:52
  companies they're like head of sales right so but like as an entrepreneur like to me it's always
• 1:58:59
  product market fit and how do you scale that and and and whether you're you are in the beginning of
• 1:59:04
  the journey you're a product an army of one i would always be willing to learn every role
• 1:59:10
  before you hire it's like how do you manage someone or hold somebody accountable if you actually
• 1:59:15
  don't know what they're supposed to be doing what would be you know it could be one last
• 1:59:20
  one last insight one last word of wisdom or even like a question i should have asked you that
• 1:59:24
  i didn't what would be one last thing you want to leave with the audience look if you choose the
• 1:59:28
  entrepreneur route it is painful it can be very lonely at times but the reward of just the experience
• 1:59:37
  has been one of the you know outside of being happily married and having children like the best
• 1:59:42
  experiences of my life right sometimes i describe it as oversimplifying into my highs are higher
• 1:59:48
  and my lows are lower than most people can imagine but it's it's that for me it's been a different
• 1:59:54
  form of like artistic creation right like building businesses can be a very creative process that
• 2:00:03
  is very fulfilling i love it um okay where should people connect with you they want to i mean
• 2:00:08
  obviously you have the exp website but where do people object with you instagram by the way you
• 2:00:13
  have a podcast i found it on the on the website ours is targeted to realtors and you know what i
• 2:00:20
  tried to make sure to showcase is that zero to one process four realtors because i think a lot of
• 2:00:24
  people come into the space in this failure rate four realtors is very high right so it's 66%
• 2:00:30
  in the first year most realtors don't make it to year five like 90% fail within five years
• 2:00:35
  so you know one of the things i tried to always show them it's like how did you go from zero to one
• 2:00:39
  in our world and not overcomplicated and did yourself out of the way but the best ways to connect
• 2:00:44
  with me are on instagram linked in facebook they're cool we'll drop everything in the show notes
• 2:00:49
  last question i asked everyone uh you know you've had multiple seasons to your life um
• 2:00:54
  if you look back and you want to define success like what does it mean to you right now
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  right now is being able to spend time with the people i care about because
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  having had you know several moments that externally are defined as success
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  um i think i and i kind of redefined it it's like it's the people that you care about you spend
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  time with it's actually what matters right so whether it's the moment in recognition from a role
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  or an exit or a success um what what you learn of a time is like a lot of that fades and you know i
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  had a very singular focus in my early 20s of certain titles and then when i achieved them
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  it actually felt like an empty me with my moment so the the for me personally in this season it's
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  i don't want to ever miss out on something i can't undo like for example i'm never missing daddy
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  daughter dance uh last night was Natalia's birthday and like i had to be at a very very important event
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  but it was like i'm leaving at one o'clock and i will get home when she's walking in from her music class
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  maybe i was an hour late but it's like i'm not missing that and it's non-negotiable so
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  and again that's spoken from a police of privilege and i recognize that but in this season
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  that's actually my decision tree i i love that and by the way you i know you're saying it's spoken from
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  a place of privilege but i think the beauty of what you're teaching over is like also understand
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  what you're optimizing for so there's there's levels to this game and you don't have to be playing
• 2:02:34
  at the level that you are at or that you have played at or that many of our mutual friends play at
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  to achieve that and some people i find it over again they over index on titles
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  financial and they realize actually don't need all of that to actually live the life they want to
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  live so i think that even when you're young just starting out or if you aren't where you're
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  want to be financially like understand where you want to go and optimize for that
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  don't always optimize for what you think success looks like i think is very important
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  and the only downside to that because i completely agree because you don't know what you don't
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  know yet right so most like the rigor of which we protect our time is only from the wounds we
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  created from not right like are you and i spent years where i was on the road for 200 days and
• 2:03:22
  shoes on the road for like 150 days like years where we missed stuff like we don't remember certain
• 2:03:28
  months like did we even go to that like did we even see that versus now like that's the non-negotiables
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  that go into the calendar for 2025 before we read anything else um and so and and that's
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  you know there's another quote that i love it's like youth is wasted on the young like you can tell
• 2:03:47
  like i was given very sage advice many many many times in my journey that was like
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  go whatever old man you don't know better i'm smarter than you whether like parent mentor yeah
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  anyone else so that's kind of the the beauty of the journey like you actually don't know what's
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  important until you kind of fumbled that ball and make sure you don't do it again once you have
• 2:04:10
  another opportunity i know i said that was the last question but i lied um what would be one last
• 2:04:16
  said i use i'm gonna change this question because my question that i usually ask is will be a lesson
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  you tell your 20 year old self which is a great question but i actually want to reframe it and you
• 2:04:24
  would be the first person that i'm reframing it with and the question will be what would be a lesson
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  that you want to leave your kids with i think i would have answered this somewhere yeah
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  sometimes i'll tell you what i'm changing it because sometimes people say i wouldn't change
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  anything because all the the hills and the valleys it sort of led me to where i am today and
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  and i i don't want like the same clip from every single person so no and that's that would be my
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  answer but uh i will answer differently because you put question differently which that's why i
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  said i would have answered the same way um which is enjoy the ride whether it's my 20 year old self
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  or my kids i think especially when begin like maybe i'm wired differently but like it was like
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  i need to achieve x by y right it's like no you don't 99% of everything we fear
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  for keeps us up at night at some moment in life is literally a relevant at a later day
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  like if i look back at those moments where we made a bad bet and we lost the 35th or something
• 2:05:25
  with your 400 or whatever the guy remember both of us up at night crying or freaking out or
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  losing sleep or like that feeling in your stomach or you think you're you know go lose your mind
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  now i can't even pinpoint what triggered it or how it felt but like it's like it was no big deal
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  like so you know are you spending time with the people you care about in the moments that are
• 2:05:52
  important and outside of that's like you'll be okay enjoy the ride