Leo Pareja - CEO of eXp Realty (EXPI) | Ideas Mean Nothing Without Execution

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