The Little Things That Can Maximize Your Income with Bob Stewart, VP of Customer Success and Training at PLACE

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're talking to Bob from PLACE all about the latest technology shaking up the real estate industry and how to reduce customer churn. You're listening to the Modern CTO podcast.

(Bob at 00:00:17) Joel, how you doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) Dude, good. I was so excited that I get to talk to you. I met you for a brief moment about twelve to fifteen years ago.

(Bob at 00:00:28) Yeah. I remember. And, you know, it's funny. I was trying to jog my—it was something related to ActiveRain, and I know you were doing something, and I don't remember exactly what the details were because, like you said, it's been a long time ago. But, yeah, when I saw your name come up, I'm like, I know that guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) Yep. Yep. We were doing something with ActiveRain. I think there was a guy named, like, Mark Frederick over there too or something of that, something close to that. It's jogging my memory, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) I can't believe that that is so long ago. It's crazy.

(Bob at 00:00:57) Right? That community still lives over there, and there's still some really engaged people over there. And for the longest time, the kind of the claim to fame over at ActiveRain was that you could rank really well in the search engines, and that stuff's all changed. Right? Like, basically, in real estate, you've got these behemoths like Zillow and Redfin and realtor.com or whoever that just dominate the search engines now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) Yeah. So how did you get involved with PLACE? What is PLACE? I love real estate. I'm curious.

(Bob at 00:01:24) So PLACE is a business platform for real estate teams to partner with us, and we basically manage all of the business functions of their real estate team. So we help them with their accounting and finance. We help them with, you know, payroll, stuff like that, the legal side of their business, the marketing side, the recruiting, the training and onboarding of their agents. And then we provide to them a tech platform that they can manage and run their business off of. That tech platform is called Brevity, and it's a platform that we've been selling to real estate agents for a number of years.

(Bob at 00:01:58) But we've started to do a bunch of work on it that kind of helps a team kind of run the financial sides of their business and the recruiting side of their business, and they're starting to build a bunch of functionality to support these teams. So these real estate teams, I think we just—oh, I think we onboarded our hundred and sixtieth team and we signed a 175 or something like that. They partner with us. There are teams from all around the country. At a minimum, they're doing about a hundred transactions a year.

(Bob at 00:02:25) Our top team we just brought on is a lady out of Orlando, Florida, Veronica Figueroa. She's the largest eXp team in the country. She did about 2,200 transactions last year. But, essentially, we partner with these teams. We run all the business operations side or we partner with them to run those things.

(Bob at 00:02:42) And then we basically partner in the profits of their real estate business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:47) Oh, okay. So teams will apply and you'll accept them and then support them?

(Bob at 00:02:52) Yeah. Yeah. And there is a—we don't accept everybody. Like, we're looking for teams that have a chance to become profitable. The dirty secret in the real estate industry is there's all these teams.

(Bob at 00:03:03) And a lot of them are—you know, you go to the conferences. Joel, you've been to these conferences. Right? The Keller Williams conference or eXp, Inman. Right?

(Bob at 00:03:10) The National Association of Realtors. And they put these people on stage who do a lot of business. But most of these teams and the owner—the person that owns the team and started the team—most of their actual income comes from their own personal production. And when you actually break the business down and you look at, like, okay, this team where, you know, they've got these agents coming in and they're paying for the marketing and they're paying for the leads and the agents giving them some percentage of the commission, most of these teams are not actually making money on running the team. Most of the owners of those businesses are making money on their own personal production.

(Bob at 00:03:44) And in a lot of cases, they're actually covering the cost of that team out of that personal production. So even when they get up to places like they're doing a hundred deals as a team or a 150 or 200.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:56) So some teams are profitable, some teams aren't. You focus on profitable teams and help make them even more profitable and support them.

(Bob at 00:04:05) Yeah. Probably the biggest piece there, when most of these teams engage with us in the beginning, one of the things we—one of the very first steps is this kind of financial review process where we go in and look at, you know, what are they spending money on essentially. And almost all of these real estate businesses are ripe with inefficient spending. Right? They're spending on lead sources where they can't even tell us if they've ever closed transactions out of that lead source.

(Bob at 00:04:30) They're spending on employee costs. Like, a lot of these teams that get to, let's say, a hundred and then a 150 or 200 transactions, they have three, four, five people managing just the transactions in their business. And in some cases, the salaries they're paying these people are kind of out of whack. And, you know, a lot of times, these are really hard conversations that a business owner has to turn around and kind of have with their team, but our first effort is to get their costs under control. And in almost every case, we can reduce their costs pretty significantly.

(Bob at 00:05:00) Then when you add in the tech piece where we're delivering—we're saying, okay, we have the tech now. Now some of these teams that are partnered with us are already using our tech. Right? They were using our tech on the Brevity side before.

(Bob at 00:05:11) But we get plenty that are coming in, and there's a pretty massive cost savings when we absorb the tech fees in their business and they kind of transition over to running our platform. A lot of times that, off the top, is, you know, 3 to $5,000 a month in savings right there. So there are a lot of people who—because we split the profit with the team. It's like fifty-fifty. And a lot of people go, wait.

(Bob at 00:05:34) What? And almost immediately as a team owner would say, no. No. I—no. I'm not giving them half my profit.

(Bob at 00:05:40) But the reality is that the actual profit when you break it down and you look at, you know, what's profit that you're making from your team and what's profit that's coming out of your own transactions, they realize, like, okay. I'm actually not making much money. And a lot of them don't even know that. Right? Some of this is discovery for them where they've just—they were a great real estate agent, Joel, who got really good at doing transactions.

(Bob at 00:06:02) Right? And they convinced a couple people to kind of come along with them, but they were never a business owner. Yeah. So PLACE's role in the ecosystem is to try to help these team owners become business owners.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:13) And then how did you get involved with this? Were you just hanging out at ActiveRain and then tapped on your shoulder? Like, come on, Bob. Let's go.

(Bob at 00:06:20) Kind of. Kind of. Yeah. So Ben Kinney is one of the cofounders of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:24) Oh, really?

(Bob at 00:06:25) Yeah. Yeah. So of PLACE. So he—him and Chris Suarez. Chris Suarez is an agent that kind of came up out of Keller Williams as did Ben.

(Bob at 00:06:33) So in 2015, I had left ActiveRain. And so ActiveRain had its own little journey where, you know, we were ActiveRain, and then Market Leader did an investment in us in 2010. And then they took us over. It was kind of a leveraged takeover scenario, but they took us over. We were young and didn't know what we were doing, and they got the upper hand and then they took us over.

(Bob at 00:06:54) Then we just went along for the ride. Market Leader got sold to Trulia. We—ActiveRain just kind of went along with that. Right? And then Trulia got sold to Zillow, and so everything went along with that.

(Bob at 00:07:02) But I give Spencer Rascoff a lot of credit. You're like, love or hate Zillow. I think that they do some things really well, and I think they actually give agents more opportunity than if they didn't exist. Spencer, when they bought the whole Trulia and Market Leader and ActiveRain was this dusty little corner, essentially, of that acquisition, he used to blog on ActiveRain. In the very beginning of Spencer starting with Zillow, way back when Zillow was just getting started and, you know, did it get started in 2005 and ActiveRain in late two thousand five, early two thousand six, Spencer used to blog in there all the time.

(Bob at 00:07:33) And so I think he just had this little—he could've just closed it down, and he probably didn't want the bad press that would come with a blogging community, right, getting shut down. And so he reached out to a few people, including Jonathan Washburn, my original cofounder at ActiveRain. And John had kind of moved on into a different industry, and so he wasn't looking to get back into real estate. And so the next call Spencer made was to Ben Kinney. Spencer called Jonathan one day, and John—so I was working with John again.

(Bob at 00:07:59) I'd left real estate. And he called John, and John said, what do you think? Should we buy ActiveRain back? And I'm like, no. No.

(Bob at 00:08:05) We're in the automotive industry. Like, you don't have anything there. I think just stay focused on what you're doing. It's working. Well, the next day, he called Ben, who called me.

(Bob at 00:08:12) Like, that next day, and Ben said, hey, Spencer Rascoff called me. You think John would be mad if I bought ActiveRain? And I'm like, you know, it's funny because Spencer called John yesterday, and John basically said no. So, no, I don't think he'd be mad. And he said, alright.

(Bob at 00:08:26) Well, if I do it, will you come back and work with me and kind of run it? And so I said, yeah. And so in July 2015, I went to work with Ben, essentially, to start kind of reviving ActiveRain. But along with that acquisition came a product called Qwickly, Joel, which is a text to lead service. And so Ben bought Qwickly and ActiveRain from Zillow who'd acquired both of those things kind of through Market Leader. And I spent about the first month just digging into Qwickly—what is it, reaching out to the clients that we had, figuring out how they were using it.

(Bob at 00:09:02) We had, like, one day. Zillow gave us one day with the guy that was running Qwickly for them, essentially, just kind of keeping it alive and be like, here, learn what you need. And we ended up taking the developer. We kind of assumed the developer when we bought it. And then right about that time, Ben was starting to put together this idea for what would become our Brevity platform.

(Bob at 00:09:22) So Brevity, back then in 2015, at that time when I joined, was essentially just a transaction management platform for real estate agents. Did a little bit of automation around transactions, allowed them to kind of create some a system or some consistency around their transactions, and then also kind of showcase to the consumer, the buyer, the seller, what the real estate agent was doing to get their house sold. And back then, there wasn't really any other software that was kind of making that process transparent for the consumer. So when I started with Ben, that's what Brevity was. But real soon after that, he went out and bought a company called BlueRoof out of Utah, which is a kind of a custom website company.

(Bob at 00:10:05) And we combined our CRM and their websites and kind of started down the process of building this Brevity platform. So pretty early on, like, right in—I don't know. Must have been, let's say, October 2015—when really, to this day, ActiveRain's just kind of sat on the side. We've had some developers kind of make sure it doesn't crash or whatever. But since then, we've been fully focused on the idea of building kind of this one place that a real estate agent comes each day to run their entire business from end to end.

(Bob at 00:10:33) Joel, you've been around this industry for long enough. You know, like, if you're a real estate agent, you probably have four to eight vendors that you deal with that give you the tools that you need for your business, which means you have four to eight logins, four to eight places you put the data in, four to eight bills that show up every month. Just creates a lot of inefficiencies in their business, and Ben's idea was—and the reason this was his idea for—he had a real estate business. Right? He had his real estate business up in Bellingham, Washington, which today does, I don't know, 400 to 450 transactions a year.

(Bob at 00:11:05) And back then was probably doing 200 or something, whatever it was. But he built this platform because he realized, like, if I just make my own team more efficient, I could save up my own bills. And over time, it became something where we obviously, you know, sell it to other people. And it—but it didn't start like that. It really did start being something for his little business in Bellingham, and then he was starting to expand.

(Bob at 00:11:25) He moved into Seattle and down into Austin, Texas. And so what we started finding out is every little efficiency that we could make in there so a real estate agent could talk to one more person that day in the same amount of time could be magnified over, you know, however big Ben's business would grow. And today, when we make those enhancements in the software, we have a 170 teams that are benefiting from those enhancements, and that's PLACE. I don't know. That's a really long winded answer.

(Bob at 00:11:54) That's PLACE. That's how I got involved. But I've been here with Ben since 2015. And, again, it was a connection from ActiveRain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:02) Yeah. And it's great to see all of these people that—yeah, I was in the—I did a couple real estate deals and then I left the real estate world. I grew up in it. So my parents were real estate agents. Like, my mom and my stepdad were.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:14) And so I started building software, you know, around them. And so I had done that from, like, 2006 to 2015. And so I was like, okay, I've been here. And then I had sold some software and I met some financial advisors through the aspect of selling the software, and then they wanted me to build some stuff with them. And so then I did some fitness software, some financial services software, and sort of figured out all the different types of things you can do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:42) And so I haven't ever actually been back to the real estate world, but I still follow the news every once in a while. I still check in, like, every year to see what's going on. It's amazing. Like, you mentioned Qwickly. I can't remember his name, but whoever the founder of that was—

(Bob at 00:12:56) Tony Romero is his name.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:58) Tony. But I remember sitting in a hotel lobby with him and him, like, pulling up the back end because, you know, I was a software engineer, and we were just talking about it. So it's so cool to see everything, you know, come full circle. And, of course, all the other people you've mentioned. It's amazing what can happen in a decade.

(Bob at 00:13:14) It is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:15) I want to talk about your title change. Like, five minutes before the interview, one of your amazing PR people sent an email and said, hey. Just so you know, Bob's title changed. What was your title? What did it change to and why?

(Bob at 00:13:27) You know what's funny? So we took an investment from Goldman Sachs, a pretty big one, right, back in November of last year. And prior to that, if you'd ever asked me what my title was, I would have told you I was the dash. And people went, the dash? Well, so Ben Kinney has this philosophy around here that we're all the janitor to the CEO.

(Bob at 00:13:48) Like, we play all the roles from janitor to CEO. And so in my head, I'm like, and in between those is a dash. So I'm the dash. When Goldman took over, right, and you become with this more kind of formal structure and you start to put these things in place. Right?

(Bob at 00:14:03) They had to give everybody titles. So I think my actual title, which I don't even have business cards, by the way, Joel. So I don't know where this title, like, lives. Right? Maybe on my LinkedIn profile or something.

(Bob at 00:14:14) But my actual title today is vice president of success and training.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) Okay.

(Bob at 00:14:20) So it was kind of bestowed upon me. But essentially, I lead a team here that is responsible for churn at the very end of the day. And then on the other side, kind of in our—so that's on our software side of the business, Brevity. Right? Because we've got, you know, thousands of clients that aren't our PLACE partners.

(Bob at 00:14:38) On the PLACE side of our world, I lead our training organization, which essentially ensures, or goes out each day and shows up to work to make sure that our PLACE partners are leveraging our software. So what do they say? The best CRM is the one you use, right?

(Bob at 00:14:56) In any part of your business, I think the best tech is the one you use. And there's a lot of really awesome solutions in real estate for an agent or a team to run their business on, but the best one is the one they use. So my team is responsible for making sure that our partners get in there and use the product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:15) Yeah. So you reduce churn. We have a lot of tech leaders, engineers, VPs, managers, all across all industries. Churn is something that I'd say at least 80% of us are familiar with or deal with in some regard, whether we're building tools to reduce it or we're somehow part of a churn conversation.

(Bob at 00:15:33) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:33) What are your best thoughts on reducing churn?

(Bob at 00:15:36) It's a great question. Here's how we tend to think about it around here. So the first thing would be to really get a good handle on why people cancel, would be the first thing. I think there's two sides to that. There's what the reason they tell you they cancel, and then there's what you can kind of see in their usage patterns and the data about why they canceled.

(Bob at 00:15:58) And so the first thing, what I mean, we had a bad churn problem. There were months where had we done that the whole month, we would have churned out all of our customers that year. Right? In the beginning, it was pretty bad when we really started to realize, like, crap, we gotta get a handle on this. And so the first thing we started looking at are, what are the key things that, are there anything that we just never really see people get to churn stage because they did these things? Right? And so we've identified five key elements that are a part that we've now made a part of our launch and onboarding process, and we really drill in and focus on those things because we know, and this is getting kind of down into the weeds of real estate, right? But for example, we know that when somebody comes in, if they don't upload their database into Brivity in the beginning, there's a good chance they're probably gonna churn in the first 30 to 60 days.

(Bob at 00:16:54) So we built a team that helps people upload their database. We literally have a team of people that during the launch process, we reach out and go, okay, where does your database live? Give it to us. We'll put it in all the right format, and we've got virtual, you know, VAs that will go in and do all the work to get that thing in there. Right? And so then, and there's just a series of steps along the way that it was like, oh yeah, this person churned. Duh, they churned. They didn't have their database imported. Right? Next step would be market reports is a good example in real estate. We've got a tool that allows them to kind of drip on past clients and sphere and different people like that where they know where that person lives, and they can kind of keep them educated about the real estate market right around where they live. That was another tool that if people went in and got those things set up and engaged, then they were much less likely to churn.

(Bob at 00:17:43) And, you know, when we started, this gets down to tactical stuff, right? When we started doing that, the market report tool was a tool where we had to basically do it one at a time. So if you brought a database of 2,000 people, Joel, and a thousand of them had an address, right? You have to go in there a thousand times. And that was a very easy problem to solve with tech. Right? We were like, oh, let's just build it so they can apply a thousand of these things all at once and it, you know, does some algorithm to figure out what's the right radius or whatever based on the attributes of the home to set that thing up so they're seeing properties that make sense. So we just, you know, we basically started to kind of look at churn by saying what makes people churn, and can we stop those things?

(Bob at 00:18:27) And then there's probably still more work to be done on the database side where we could take a more technical approach to it. So sometimes we throw people at it, obviously, not the best solution, right? And sometimes we go and make the tech solution. So we just really looked at those. In our business, there's five massive pillars on the front side of a launch of a customer that if they don't engage one of those or all five of those things, any one of those missing things tends to show up in churn, whether it be 30 days in, 90 days in, or maybe at the most, about 180 days in. So that was the first thing that we looked at. It's just why do they churn, and not just what do they tell us, right? But what are the actual practical things that they're maybe not doing? That'd be the first thing. The second thing I would say that's really, I think, helped us a lot with churn, but it's hard to measure, we spend a, we didn't used to do this. We used to, because we ran a real estate business, right? We used to kind of make things and think we knew what was, like, oh, real estate agents are gonna use this, and they're gonna use it this way, right? And we would make the thing. Josiah, who leads kind of our design team, and then look, this is a time we were bootstrapping, right? We didn't, the design team was two guys, right? And then today, we've got a little bit more developed design team, for example, where we now have, I don't even know what you call these folks, but they go out and sit with our customer and be like, hey, here's a feature we're gonna build. You know, here's how we built it. Use it now, right? And we'll literally sit there and watch them use it, right? Kind of track it. And then you start to realize, like, we're not actually as smart as we thought we were.

(Bob at 00:20:08) Right, Joel? We just, you know, at some point, your ego gets in the way and you're like, we know what we're doing. And you realize, you know, when you're putting this product in front of a 28-year-old millennial and a 70-year-old, you know, boomer that can barely turn the computer on, and then you're like, oh my gosh, we gotta simplify this thing, right? And so there was a lot of that that's happened, let's say, in the last year and a half. And on almost all of the new stuff that we build, we go through this pretty rigorous process of sitting down with the customer and actually watching them use it. Here'd be the third thing, I think, is, and it seems obvious, but I'm convinced, especially in real estate, not a lot of companies do this. We build what our customers want. And we used to think we knew so much that we just build what they, the right, you know, in a past life, we would have said something like, yeah, if Henry Ford wanted to build what his customers wanted, he would have built a faster horse or faster carriage or whatever, right? We used to think that way because we thought, oh, we're, but the reality is, in real estate especially, there's a certain way that things are done, and you can't necessarily just upend that and be like, hey, do it this way now. And so you do have to kind of work inside of even the routines of a real estate agent, right?

(Bob at 00:21:32) In our head, they were all gonna sit down for three hours at their computer every day and prospect. And that's how our business runs. And so we thought, well, we realized that's total pie in the sky dream. And so we had to build an app so that they could be out on the go, right? It had to have, in the beginning, we thought, well, they only need this much functionality in the app. And we realized they're like, no, I need to do this and this and this. So the way that we kind of break our dev, you know, kind of cycles down and what we're gonna build in any given sprint, we've got about a third of our resources dedicated in three different lanes. The third of the resources are dedicated in, and this isn't, you know, it's not hard and fast, a third of the dev time. But about a third of the resources are dedicated to technical debt or, you know, Twitter, keeping up the underpinnings and making sure everything's up to date. And about a third of the resources are spent on enhancements that were asked for by our community of users. So for Ben, it's really important that our users see us introducing features or tweaks every sprint, right, every couple weeks that are based on something they asked for. We probably beat the drum just as hard on those stupid little things that somebody asked for as we do on when we release a new feature. Because we want our clients to know that their feedback matters and that we actually are listening to it and that we're trying to make improvements based on things that they're saying.

(Bob at 00:22:57) And then about a third of it is saved for those ideas where we think they need a car and not a faster horse, right? Things that, you know, ideas that were introduced. Recently, we introduced a recruiting mechanism into our platform because most of our users are teams, and that wasn't something people were asking for. They weren't asking for us to go out and build a bunch of connections to Indeed and Monster and LinkedIn Jobs and be able to automatically feed their postings up for new real estate agents or director of ops or whatever. But we realized that, you know, our teams were gonna need this. A lot of teams, as we've turned into a real estate, I don't know, recession or whatever this is gonna be over the next year, you know, Goldman's telling us that sales numbers are gonna be down 20 to 30% in any of these markets. And so a lot of our, we're looking around and going, crap, if we're gonna do the same kind of business or we want our businesses to grow, we're probably gonna need to find new talent to attract into our world. So we started thinking about recruiting. Again, wasn't something people were asking for, but now that they have it, they're like, oh yeah, this is great. So about a third of the time on technical debt or just making sure everything, you know, comes along smoothly. About a third of the time on features that people ask for, tweaks. A lot of times it's tweaks. It's not even features. You know, they're saying, how come when I click this button, it loads a new tab and doesn't just pop a modal up? That'd be way easier, right? Just even little stuff like that.

(Bob at 00:24:21) Ben's idea and we've really taken this to heart. If we can save you a second or two or three on some action that you take 50 times a day, Joel, over a year, all of a sudden, we saved you two weeks because you didn't have to click that little thing, right, every day a hundred times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:39) That's crazy.

(Bob at 00:24:40) That's how we think about churn. Just two main variables, build better product based on what they want, and then make sure that they're using it in kind of a succinct way to get them to a place where essentially, we call it time to value. Right? How much time does it take this user to find value out of our product so that they're like, I need this. I need to keep this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:00) Oh yeah. When I was doing software, I would track DTV, time to value, right? And it would be the measurement of an average person, like a time clock for them to complete an objective because then your focus isn't on anything other than how do I get them to achieve that outcome that they sat down to achieve fast. And then that is a completely different scenario than just building software to achieve an outcome.

(Bob at 00:25:26) Yeah. You know, we, and again, we spent years not even thinking about this mainly because we didn't have the resources to have somebody on staff that even knew, like, you just explained things that somebody would have to know. We didn't know those things, right? A lot of times then, you don't know what you don't know, right? And then, you know, maybe you're lucky enough to get to a place like we got to where all of a sudden we had access to capital and could be like, alright, we've been bootstrapping this thing along. We've been just getting by, right? What would a real organization look like around designing products? Right? You start to go out and find people that do user experience testing, and you start to find, you know, people that make the things that you're making better, more efficient, more likely to please your customer. Yeah. But in the beginning, you're just basically trying to keep your head above water.

(Bob at 00:26:19) You know, for years, Ben's shared this in a number of, I mean, Brivity did not make money. It was actually supported by Ben's real estate business. For a lot of years, he poured his own personal funds into that thing. And up until the Goldman investment in PLACE, we've never taken an investment in Brivity. It's been bootstrapped, which look, there's some good there too, right? Like, we've never been a company that loses, I don't know, some of these tech companies in real estate...

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:43) It's crazy.

(Bob at 00:26:44) They lose freaking hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and you're like...

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:47) How is that?

(Bob at 00:26:48) Never gonna be profitable. Yeah. I don't know. The economics of some of that stuff is nuts to me. Place like Compass that gets these massive investments and just is burning through cash quarter over quarter. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:00) I know. I know. Now I wanna know, there's a lot of things going on. You guys got the Goldman investment. You're growing. What is the most exciting thing that's happening right now at PLACE? Other than your new job title.

(Bob at 00:27:17) For me, I'm excited about the three to five year vision for what Ben wants to deploy here. And I'll, I'll give you a little bit, I'll back you up, and here's why. And look, everything will be that Uber of or the Amazon of, but we wanna position PLACE as the Amazon of home services, essentially, right, where we believe that the connection with the consumer in five years will continue to be some local trusted professional that we believe could be the real estate agent. And what we're interested in, well, here's how real estate works today, right? Every seven to 10 years, you need a real estate agent, and they kind of show up in your world then to help you buy and sell, and then you don't see them again for seven to 10 years. Maybe they send you some recipes or a calendar to put on your fridge every year or something, right? There's pies at Thanksgiving or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:07) Spam. Don't forget about the email.

(Bob at 00:28:09) Spam. That's weird. So Ben's kind of grand vision is that the agent becomes that resource for the consumer during the time they live in that house. And so PLACE, our five year vision is that we will build up all the consumer services that go along with living in a home, not just buying or selling a home. So there's some real early obvious ones that actually go along with buying and selling a home, things like mortgage or title or home warranty or some things like that. But once you get into living in the home, there starts to be things like home, all the home maintenance, right? My roofer, my plumber, my, the people that do my yards. If I live in Arizona, the guy that comes and does my pool. I moved to Arizona, Joel, at one point. And my wife and I lived down there for two years, and I was constantly calling my real estate agent, right, and saying, hey, Fred, who do I use for my pool here in Mesa? And the problem was my real estate agent wasn't from where I bought. He was from 45 minutes away, which for a pool guy down there, you can't, I couldn't use his pool guy because there was 7 million pools between his house and my house. That pool guy wasn't coming 45 minutes down to my house, right? But Fred knew an agent down in Mesa, and so he said, you know what? I'm not sure, Bob, but call Jack. He lives down in Mesa, right? He's on my team, and he's down in Mesa. He'll know the pool guy to use. And so I had to kind of actively seek that stuff out. I think most people don't, right? They go to Angie's List or they go to HomeAdvisor or they go...

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:42) Next door.

(Bob at 00:29:42) Yeah. Next door. They ask their neighbors. So we really want to fill that space where the real estate agent today, thought of as a real estate agent, becomes more of like a home advisor for this person during that time they live in the house. But that is, for us, we're heading towards that. Today, we're really focused on building real estate teams.

(Bob at 00:30:04) But here's why that's exciting for me and why I can get behind that. I've known Ben Kinney since like 2008, 2007 or 2008. He was on our board at ActiveRain really early on and right as he started his real estate career. And I started working with him in 2015. I can remember the first time we ever went to a conference, and you've been to these conferences, and we were going to sell the Brevity platform.

(Bob at 00:30:26) And we didn't even have the platform, by the way. We had the concept of it. We bought the pieces of it, but we hadn't pinned it all together in the code and all that stuff. But we were going to go, we're going to sell this thing.

(Bob at 00:30:37) And he said, it's a four-day conference. We're going to sell 150 of these. And after the first day, we'd sold like two. And so he comes in after that day one. He's like, how many did we sell? And we're like, we sold two. And he's like, alright. Here's how we're going to pitch it tomorrow. And there was like zero, what? Or shit. We're not going to get there. It was just like, alright. Here's how we're going to do it tomorrow. So the next day, we sell like nine, right?

(Bob at 00:30:59) And so we're like, alright. We got 11. Now he's day two. He's like, how many we got? We're like, we got 11.

(Bob at 00:31:06) And he's like, okay. Cool. So 11 and 2, we got 13. And we're like, no. 2 and 9, we got 11.

(Bob at 00:31:12) And he's like, alright. Well, here's how we're going to pitch tomorrow. And so we get that last day, right? We've sold about 30, and we've got 120 to make up. But he has like no question we're going to do it. And we don't do it. We hit like 115. The last day, people at the very end are like handing us their credit cards as the security's kicking us out of the place. And that tends to be the case at one of these real estate conferences. People wait till the last day or even the last minute to buy the thing, right? And we did like 120 out of 150. But he came in afterwards and he said, you guys did a great job. He's like, in my head, we were going to do 100. I know I set that goal out there.

(Bob at 00:31:47) He's like, and here's what I took away from that. It didn't matter. We were going to hit that goal, right? Now we ended up selling 150 when we left, right? We went home, and then we followed up with all those people. And we ended up getting to that goal. And what Ben, I really believe this about him, we are going to hit our goals around here no matter how long. It might not be on the time frame we want it to be, but we will hit them. And so our goal is to become, you know, a place that people go when they think about what they need while they live in their house, and then obviously once they go to sell it and maybe buy another one. But so I'm just excited about the big vision that Ben and Chris put in front of our company. And I really do believe that we're going to assemble a team to go out and build that vision. On the timeline that we want, I hope so, Joel.

(Bob at 00:32:38) But if it takes us another six months or a year or two years, it's still going to be a really worthwhile endeavor for our entire team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:45) Absolutely. Who's Chris, the co-founder with Ben?

(Bob at 00:32:48) Chris Suarez. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:50) Yeah. What was he from? What projects did he—

(Bob at 00:32:52) He's a Keller Williams agent. He built a big team in, you know, so he had an expansion world. It was called Experience that probably when him and Ben combined, I think each of them brought somewhere in the neighborhood about 8 to 12 teams to the table spread all across the country.

(Bob at 00:33:10) So Place kind of started off as a combination of those teams that Ben and Chris were already partnered with, which was about 20 teams when we started. And today, we're up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 170. Nice. It's funny because they are like freaking yin and yang, night and day, totally different dudes, but a really great complement. Chris is the systems and models guy. And if we say we're going to do something, we do that thing, and we systematize it. And Ben's the big vision thinker and constantly driving the organization ahead. And so they're a great combination. And I've known Ben for 15 years. I'm getting to know Chris, but man, we have really powerful co-founders that just have amazing vision.

(Bob at 00:33:53) And then you've got Chris who's just an operator and executor who goes out and just makes those things happen. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:01) Well, you have that credibility, right? If I'm going to trust a software or a service to participate in my business, I mean, Ben's a force. He's done a great job personal branding and all of that. I first learned about him from my stepdad. And then I think at one point, I talked to him when I built one of the platforms. If I'm right, if it was him, it was this very casual conversation where I think he was like walking around outside or something, like his house, and it was like a Tuesday afternoon. I don't know. It just seemed to me like this guy makes deals happen.

(Bob at 00:34:30) That's exactly, it was definitely Ben Kinney. Yeah. That's totally how he operates. He would be outside kicking the bushes around his house. Yeah.

(Bob at 00:34:38) I mean, that's, but he is a deal maker. Like, I think at the very end of the day, he loves making a deal, whether that be around buying a product, whether that be around acquiring a company, or whether that be around finding talent to bring into his world. We've bought a couple of companies, and then he just shut the company down essentially to attract their talent. Yeah.

(Bob at 00:35:00) Or the company's, you know, their product sits on the sidelines today. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:03) Well, if they have industry experience and they're talented at what they do, I mean, that's worth gold, right? It's worth buying it. I know we're coming up on time. I want to give a shout out for your podcast. Tell me about the podcast. Where can people listen? What is it about?

(Bob at 00:35:16) Podcast is called Win, Make, Give. Basically, we talk about health, wealth, leadership, and legacy. Comes out of the mind of Ben Kinney. I think one of the coolest things that we've done on that podcast, you know, it's pretty good listens. We've had over a million downloads.

(Bob at 00:35:31) But one of the coolest things, so you can find it at winmakegive.com or, you know, anywhere that you listen to your podcast, right? Just search for Win Make Give. One of the, I think the best things we've done is what we call the Wealth Series. And it's kind of the framework that Ben has used to manage his wealth over the years. And it's an eight-part series. It comes with a bunch of workbooks. It's free. When we did it live back in 2020, we gave away like $25,000 to the people that went through it and completed it. And there was like, I don't know, like 12 kids.

(Bob at 00:36:02) And Ben at the end gave them all $1,000 just if they were under 17 and they'd done this Wealth Series. But it goes through, you know, how do you manage your money? How do you know how much money you need for retirement? How do you figure out, you know, how to cut expenses? And what does the process for raising your income look like? It's a real practical guideline to starting to think about wealth. Because, Joel, most of our parents didn't talk with us about money or how to manage it or how to grow it. Almost all of us are left to our own devices to go out and figure out how to learn about money. And so the Win, Make, Give is about managing your money, leadership, and wealth, and they can find us at winmakegive.com. And if they wanted the Wealth Series, winmakegive.com/wealth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:44) Nice. And it's a free series? They can just download it?

(Bob at 00:36:47) Yep. It's all free. Ben jokes all the time. We should charge, we should do advertising. We didn't do advertising on the podcast. I think we advertised a couple of our other podcasts. We've got some other podcasts in our little network or whatever. But yeah. No advertising. It's all funded by Ben.

(Bob at 00:37:00) The Wealth Series is free. And we've had a lot, we had about, I don't know, 22,000 people or something go through the Wealth Series, and we just heard amazing feedback. And people that have literally changed the financial trajectory of their life by just really applying some pretty simple models. I mean, it starts with like tracking your net worth every month and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:20) Oh, yeah.

(Bob at 00:37:21) Figuring out what are your expenses and what are your fixed expenses and what are some of your variable or, you know, nice to have expenses. And it's just a great framework for thinking about money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:31) Yeah. I made some money selling my software. And then a financial advisor, he said, hey, you need to come talk to me about that. And I was like 18 or 20 or something. I was like, yeah, I got this. I made the money. I can manage the money. Well, I subsequently spent all the money. And then I went back to him after and I was like, hey, so, you know, I'm broke. And he said, well, why don't you spend, you know, the next couple years with me? We'll start a business together. You can build software to make my financial company, he had a financial advisory firm, more productive. And through that process, you'll see thousands of people plan their retirement and how we do everything. And so I did, and it was like some of the best three years of my life learning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:14) And so then when you go around to build the next business, you have all those principles. But I'm definitely always learning, and I'm excited. I'm going to download the Wealth Series and sort of compare and contrast it.

(Bob at 00:38:26) Check it out. Check it out. If your audience is interested in financial literacy and kind of expanding on that in their own world, it's there as a resource for anybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:35) Okay. We'll wrap up. Tell Ben if he's in Nashville, we have a studio. We can record an episode. If you're in Nashville, same thing. It'd be super cool. I am excited to check out the Win Make Give podcast. Dude, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Bob at 00:38:48) I love it, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:50) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.