113 - StageGlass’ Sales Blueprint: Utilizing Quantifiable Proof and Emotional Impact with StageGlass' Jack Burlinson

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Jack Berlenson, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and founder of StageGlass.

That's right.

Yeah, that's stageglass.com. Welcome to the show, and let's start off start by you telling us a little bit about your backstory.

Yeah, uh, backstory. Um, first, wonderful to meet and thank you for having me on the show. Um, second, um, I guess my backstory is Silicon Valley cliché.

Um, I don't think I've had anybody— I've had a lot of tech entrepreneurs on, but I don't think I've had anybody say that before.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think I, I checked, I checked the boxes of I grew up in Palo Alto. I studied computer science at Stanford before dropping out and then moving to San Francisco to start a software company. So yeah, my background is really just being born and bred to, I don't know, build a company. But I wasn't really, I don't know, I wasn't really thinking about it even like 2 or 3 years before I dropped out when my best friend, dropped out of school. He was a year ahead of me. I thought— I remember thinking he was crazy. And then I spent more and more time with him when COVID started. And I got the bug. I got the itch where, like, at a certain point I was like, I don't think I could imagine doing anything else. And so a year after he dropped out, I dropped out of school as well. And interestingly, though, when I left school, like, I really looked up to this guy. His name is Sam Laurier. He's much more successful, but also a younger founder. I wanted to be like him and the people that he surrounded himself with. And so I left school, but I didn't have really an idea for a company yet when I dropped out. And that was a really weird time in my life where I was kind of thrashing around, staring into the abyss. I had left school and I was convinced I'm never going back., but I hadn't really solidified an idea for a company. And so what I did is I asked him and a bunch of other founders how they founded companies, and most of them gave me terrible advice. Truthfully, I actually think not listening to people can be a skill. I decided not to do ayahuasca in the middle of the desert like some of them. I don't think that's a repeatable method for coming up with good ideas for companies, but—

Pretty man, huh? Yeah.

But my friend Sam had said, I Googled it. I'm like, what do you mean you Googled it? And he said, I looked up what were the largest asset classes that had super low tech adoption. And he saw that logistics had, you know, it was a massive space, but really hadn't developed. There wasn't a lot of technology that really impressed him in the space. He believed it could be tremendously more efficient. And so what he did is he called up a bunch of manufacturers and started asking them what their manufacturing process was like. He toured a bunch of factories, found an inefficiency, and then he was like, I think I can start a company that can make this a little bit faster. And so that's what he did. Now he's raised a tremendous amount of money, he's got a bunch of very, very happy customers. And my thought was, okay, well, I should do that. And so instead of coming up with my own method of starting a company, I just used his. And what I did is I Google the exact same question, largest asset classes in the world, lowest technology adoption. And at the very top of that list was real estate, an industry which I didn't know super well. And so I called up the people I knew in the real estate world, and one of those people was my aunt. And she told me that the best listings or the best deals are the ones that look terrible on Zillow. And I remember hearing that little bit of her explaining her process that got me excited because my thought was, I thought that with an asset that was as important as a house, that the fluctuations in price would be small based on how you present them. And, well, it turns out I was wrong. And how you present a property actually really does matter. But anecdotally, that makes sense. But I was also skeptical because I'm a generally skeptical person. And so I looked up the data and we've recently ran a regression doing this that showed after scanning something like 15,000 homes, that if you use different presentation technologies, you can actually change the final sale price of the home by 8 to 12% on average. So virtual tour and staging, it's like a $40,000 difference in the final sale price of the home on average.

That's significant because that's all profit for a new vendor. Yeah.

And so my thought was, okay, that's a tremendously large inefficiency in a humongous asset class. I think I've found something. And so that was when I first turned to investors with this vision of, hey, I think that I can solve this problem, especially because I known a little bit about the world of 3D and said, hey, I think that there are ways that we can build a better solution than the current virtual tour offerings out there right now that can remove the need for hardware or remove the need for actually having to go to a service provider to go conduct this service on your behalf. We could do this with software. And instead of selling to the broker, we thought we could sell to the owner just because they were the ones who benefited from this increase in final sale price the most. And we found the groups that resonated with that at the time were the actual builders, because selling to an owner was very difficult when they could just go to a broker to get the service provided for them for free. But the actual builders, very often they both built and sold their own properties, and so they were our Goldilocks customer. And so we, instead of developing technology to help scan spaces that did exist, we presented a product offering to help builders basically sell properties as if they exist before they exist. And so that's, you know, and then we got some bigger builders to adopt the platform and bring them into their communities like Toll Brothers and Brookfield. And now we're rolling out with them and a few others. So that's the story of StageGlass and me.

Wow. For those who are listening that haven't visited stageglass.com, I visited it twice and Really what you have here is, is if you can imagine a virtual tour of a home before it's even built, and you can change the interior looks. You can— I mean, I presume the contractor or the builders kind of specify how they want, what the variations are. Yeah, but it's really quite impressive, uh, just to actually see how these homes and residences are presented. And from what I can tell, the, the builders are loving it because their conversions are a lot, a lot greater when their customers can visual— can actually see what it's looking like. And the other thing that I thought was really cool was that you guys can have a rendering up, uh, a virtual staging up in 3 weeks after you get the construction plan, the plans and drawings. I'm sure it's a trade secret, so don't tell me if you don't do, but I just think the process of taking a set of drawings and turning it into something that visual and that has that sort of emotional impact is quite the process. And you guys must figure out how to scan in the drawings and convert it and put it onto, I think you said you use a gaming platform. It's just fascinating what you're doing.

I appreciate that.

We've worked.

It's cost a lot of money and time and blood, sweat, and tears to build a product to really help accelerate the pace that you can go from that construction document into that basically digital replica before it exists.

Right.

It's been hard.

I have no doubt. But the fact that you've landed some big builders suggests that you're onto something. Something really powerful. I hope so. Yeah. And so I was in— one of the things I did when I was a trial lawyer was I was in construction, and, uh, I did construction litigation. Not too much residential, a lot of commercial and industrial. But, um, I know how competitive the building industry is, and once one company in a region picks up your product, the others are going to follow because they got to compete. Are you seeing that happening? Yes. You're hypercompetitive people.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. It's slow to adopt initially. And then when you actually have quantifiable proof that something works, and I mean, it's quantifiable proof coupled with names that they recognize, then adoption starts to really accelerate. And so You know, we've gotten some great groups that are willing to be early adopters. And what I really want to do is I just want to make sure that we, we don't just have a compelling story, but we have a compelling story backed by a bunch of like numerical evidence. It's way easier for me to tell a story when, you know, if I, you know, if I get tired of telling the story, I can just point to the numbers and be like, just go ask them. And so I hope to get to that point.

Yeah, well, you know, you, you, you sell on emotions and decide on, decide on, uh, on the numbers. That's the way it works. So people see this and they see these beautiful renderings, so they emotionally, they get hooked. And then when the numbers come in, they get to say, okay, we can do this. Yeah, yeah. And that's the way it goes. So what is it that gets you excited in the morning other than the fact that you're working your butt off?

I, I think the people make the place. I think at the end of the day, like entrepreneurship is just problem solving with a bunch of other people helping you figure out how to solve those problems. And I just know that when you surround yourself with people that you really enjoy working with and you get to solve problems that are just, just a little bit more difficult than like what you believe that you're capable of solving, that's something that I really enjoy. And so for me, I chose a very weird combination of problems to solve where the problems that you solve in the real estate space are very different than the problems that you would solve in the video game space, which is effectively what our technology solution is. And so learning how to solve problems for both builders and as well as the engineers on our team, It's exciting to get to work with what I think are world-class people. So for me, it's the getting to work along with a great team is the thing that is bringing me to this desk.

And if I recall from our Authority Magazine interview, that it didn't start out that way. No. I think you learned an important lesson. This is something that I hear over and over again from successful entrepreneurs is your hiring decisions as the CEO founder are the most important decisions you make. Yeah. And you have to make sure that your first 5 hiring decisions are exactly right, or you're basically screwed. And I think you've— I, as I recall, you ended up firing everybody at one point, or almost everybody, because you didn't make the best decisions. No. So would you agree with that? Hiring is pretty important. Uh, Yeah. Yes. So when you, when you, you now you assembled, it sounds like you've got a team that you're very proud of. Yeah. How did you, how do you shift from the first errors you made in your hiring decisions to finding success in recruiting the right people in? What was the difference?

I mean, there were, this is a great question. There are a few things that I did differently. The first one is I stopped, I stopped trying to be like when I started this company, I had very little experience and I think I didn't recognize why that mattered until I realized, oh, I actually haven't spent my entire career evaluating XYZ type of leader. And so when you do anything for the first time, you're, you're probably going to be bad at it. So what I started doing is, I feel like I have a reasonably good pulse on on people, but I have a— I had at the time a pretty terrible ability to discern their ability to execute on whatever skill set that I needed them to be good at. Because, you know, I believe that you need to be in the probably top decile in order to spot the top 1% of any given field. And I was not in the top decile of engineering or product or sales or marketing or anything or Truly anything. And so what I did is I went to some people who were truly exceptional at what they did. And it was obvious that they were exceptional because they'd run great companies or been leaders at those great companies. I said, hey, can you help me, you know, help discern here? So I'd say the first thing is I stopped trying to make all of those decisions on my own because I didn't, I wasn't equipped with the necessary experience in order for me to figure that out. On my own. So that's the first one. The second one is I also believe that just by talking to a lot of people, you start to figure out like who really knows what they're talking about versus who doesn't. And so not only would I delegate a portion of the, I guess, deciphering process, I also increase the volume of candidates that I would speak to in any given position. I'd say the third thing is I just got much better with what questions I would ask, where I would ask them, you know, here, here's what we're trying to do. How would you go about doing it? And then I would probe further and further and further. I remember reading a book called Plays Nicely with Others as a book about a bunch of random things about human behavior, but it talks about how the FBI tries to spot liars, and that people are incredibly bad at spotting lying, um, at, uh, with, with just one lie or two lies. But as you dig deeper and deeper and deeper, it just becomes incredibly difficult to uphold your story. And so, as it's one of those things where it's just, if the further you probe, the more impressed you are by somebody, it usually means that they actually know what they're talking about. Like, if their story starts to really come together and make sense versus people who really don't know their stuff, their story starts to unwind a little. So I guess the third thing is I just kind of got better at asking those questions. But the last and most important one is I think that it doesn't matter how— like most of the people that I've let go were actually very talented people. It's just that I shouldn't have even been hiring for that role in the first place. And so the book Who, I think it's by, I think Jeff Smart, I think that's the name of the author. But the entire first half of the book is dedicated to just making sure that you have a very good scorecard around who you're hiring. And You know, truthfully, it doesn't make sense to hire like a VP of sales before you have product market fit. It doesn't make sense for you to hire a tremendous number of people before you really even know what they're, what they're doing. And so for me, I think I've just gotten increasingly better at being reasonably specific with, hey, here are the actual responsibilities that we would need delegated. And here's like a very consistent job description that neatly packages these responsibilities. But if you don't really define that, you just draw a bunch of smart people on board. Um, I think that can go, that can go fine if you eventually do really try and put some guardrails up. But, um, I think the biggest reason why I had failed at hiring early on was that I was not really considering exactly what I needed solved and what responsibilities needed handling. And so it doesn't matter if you have the people who are best at deciphering for this role, that role shouldn't even exist in the first place.

That's a really excellent and wise answer. I think that's an answer that probably every CEO in the world should listen to because, because there are, I mean, there are so many companies that are dysfunctional, probably for the reasons that you've described, and you've learned early on the hard way, um, how to, how to, how to navigate through that. So good for you. Um, what is it, Jack, what is it that's unique about you that you bring to the table? I mean, obviously you're a pretty smart guy. You didn't graduate from Stanford, but you're smart enough to get in. And, and, and, but what is it, what is it really that, that's making you successful?

That's a really tough question. I'll preface this with, I think that most humans are as bad at predicting the future as they are accurately assessing the past. And I think that whatever successes I've had, I'm probably not going to do a great job actually like pointing out what is good versus what actually isn't. It's really, really hard to develop the level of both self-awareness, but just awareness of like what has caused things to work because I haven't had like replicable success yet. Like if you've been able to produce one thing and another thing and another thing, if you're able to consistently find product market fit, hire an exceptional executive team and manage them really, really well and figure out how to allocate budget properly and things that like each of those, if you're able to do those consistently, then you might be to have some credence on like, okay, this is what has allowed me to be successful. I, I would start off with saying that like, not only do I not believe that I have the self-awareness yet, I just don't, I don't have the reps to really even know. Um, but that's it. I can make some, some guesses on like what, um, what traits have helped me.

The other thing you can do is think about if you, if, if I were to ask all of your colleagues about you, what would they say? What do you think they'd say?

Um, my mom says I have the most obsessive personality of anybody she knows.

Okay.

Yeah, but I love her. Um, but I don't know, I don't work with her every day. Um, Like, I, I, I really try to question everything, which is really tough because it's way easier to not question something and move forward, uh, than it is to constantly be questioning whether or not you're making the right decision or not. Um, And I think the willingness to question, is this how we should be doing it, is what allows you to spot inefficiencies in a market or inefficiencies in processes. And so I think it's a— I think it's a— this is a really tough one. I wish I could give you a better answer than that, but I'd say just an unwillingness to accept that things are the way that, like, people have explained them. Like, there's usually some variable that people aren't considering that is actually, like, the reason why XYZ happens. And I guess the willingness to say, you know, there's probably something more, or actually, I don't, you know, like, why does XYZ— I mean, neatly bundle it in a word, I'd say it's— I'd say I'm relentlessly curious, which actually has some challenging externalities of like, if sometimes it's nice, sometimes I'd say it's advantageous to just not know something and just be okay with that explanation and use that as the foundation of whatever you build towards. But I don't know, at the same time, those people probably aren't spotting the same opportunities.

Well, I mean, I'm just, in the short few minutes that I've gotten to know you, plus your interview with me in Authority Magazine, I would say one, you're exceptionally intelligent. You're pretty self-aware for your age. I mean, far more than many young people that I meet. And you've got a really incisive intellect. I don't sense the obsession, but I do sense a competitive drive to succeed and a willingness to learn from any source that comes your way, regardless of whether it's from failure, success, other people's failures, successes. You're driven to find answers, and you compromise when you have to, but your preference is not to compromise at all. Until you really got the solution that you like. That be a statement?

Obsessive and stubborn.

Yeah, obsessive and stubborn. Well, you know, obsession is not a bad thing as long as you can let go of it when it's appropriate. Because if you hold on to something too long, then, you know, you— analysis by paralysis, or paralysis by analysis, and nothing gets done. But having, having the obsessive drive to make sure that you're working on the best solution at all times when it's cost effective to do that is very powerful.

Yeah, I agree.

And that's probably, probably what's, what's working for you. Well, um, so tell me about listening. I, I divide lists just to give you a framework for where I come from. I've got— there are two types of listening: Type 1 listening and Type 2 listening. Type 1 listening is the kind of listening that you do all the time, I do all the time. I certainly did it as a lawyer where we're listening to gain information for ourselves. We've gotta make a decision. We're trying to gain information. We're trying to understand what somebody else is saying. And it's, when it's done at its best, there's some reflection, probably paraphrasing, but we're, and we're asking open-ended questions and we're trying not to be judgmental or critical. That's the kind of listening that most people think of as listening. And there's another kind of listening called Type 2 listening. And in Type 2 listening, we are not focused on getting information. What we're focused on is validating the speaker's emotions, making the speaker feel heard and listened to. It's a process I call listening others into existence. So just in terms of your framework, Tell us, tell us, how important is listening in your work and in your leadership, and where do you think your listening skills fall?

When you say that first part of that question where you're trying to understand how I listen, I'm, I'm curious, are you, are you asking within that framework, or are you—

or that's my framework, but you don't have to use that framework. You can describe your listening skills any way you want. I'm just curious. I just wanted to give it a framework because sometimes when, when I, when I ask this question, people, people don't have anything to grab a hold of. So I try to structure the data for them a little bit. Yeah. But if you've got, if you've got some insight on that, I'd love to, love to hear it.

Yeah.

I mean, most of— I really like the way that you framed that into the two different basically modes of listening where there's this tactical information gathering, problem solving mode of listening. And then there's how is somebody feeling? And let's actually go make sure that we tend to the human being rather than this like extract information from you mode. And, uh, you know, I'll go into a short monologue and then I'll actually answer your question. But I know for myself that, that second one of actually making sure that you're tending to the other person as a human being and actually evaluating like what's, what's going through their mind, like emotionally, that's something That's something that really took a while. I was so stressed out for a while that like I was just ignoring how people were feeling. I was like, this needs to work. And so like, I don't really care how you feel. I want this. This needs to work. And it turns out that almost every, you know, every single tactical mistake that people make stems from an emotional root cause. And so even if you're able to put the right strategy from the information that you've been able to assess from the markets or from your employees, and then if somebody doesn't really want to do something or if somebody feels terrible, they're not going to do it. And I can't tell you the number of sales calls where I've hopped on with somebody and we've logically agreed that this is going this, they're like, I don't feel like it though. And that's so That second skill of being able to assess how somebody is feeling and then respond to that rather than what is being said, it's, I mean, I'd say it is critically important because I mean, the actual emotional health of your team is what will enable them to actually be in a spot where they are able to problem solve more effectively. But if people aren't psychologically safe because they've never been in an environment where you basically demonstrated that you're willing to listen to how they're feeling, uh, it's gonna be really, really difficult for a team to do their best work.

You just, you just hit on the two most important points. You're a smart guy. Um, number one, when you are talking to customers Customers engage on emotions and decide on— they decide on emotions and validate on logic. So in any kind of sales discussion or pre-buyer's conversation, it— you, you're going to have a lot of success if you can listen to their emotion, the emotional pain they have, the difficulties and challenges they're having, and validate them, and then show them what the, what the long-term solution is with, with, with the numbers. That's how you, that's how you get people on board. And the second point you made, which is equally critically important, is that if you can't create emotional safety on your team by listening to your people into existence, then you don't have anything. Google was— Google did an amazing study 2 years ago that showed that the top 1/10 of 1% of their top performing teams were that way because of one factor and one factor only: psychological and emotional safety on the teams, where people felt safe to be able to be themselves, and there were not put-downs, and there wasn't gossip, and there wasn't crap. And when people were feeling off, there were people— the other team members would support them. Those were the top performing teams at Google. And I mean, the research is showing over and over and over again that as a leader, having this form of cognitive empathy becomes— is probably the most critical skill a leader can develop.

So yeah, I believe it.

Good way to point it out. Fortunately, the skills can be easily developed. They're not something that you need to struggle at, which is great. Um, one last question, I'll let you go. It's been such a fascinating cover. I could talk to you for another hour, but we're kind of getting to the end here. Jack, what's one thing about yourself that we wouldn't know about unless you revealed it to us? I'll give you an example. I'm a jazz and blues violinist.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, I've been playing guitar for 15 years, so that's another one. Yeah, I love to play guitar and for me it's therapeutic and meditative. So that's one of the ways that I find a lot of Oh, that's, that's one answer. The other answer that I could give is a really weird one. I, despite believing that it has tremendous utility, really want to make technology as invisible as possible. And I find that I do my best work when I'm nowhere near a computer. And while computers can accelerate the pace that you execute on something, I don't think a single one of my good ideas has ever happened in front of a computer screen.

It's interesting that you should say that. Albert Einstein said that he never once made any major discovery through logic. All of his discoveries were through intuition and creativity. And then he used his progenitus intellect to create the mathematical proofs to prove whether or not the creative idea that he came up with was true or not. And I think that's true in every creative endeavor. Uh, technology is a tool, but technology does not create— it can't come up with anything new. It's the human being that's got to come up with it. Even AI, we're seeing all, you know, ChatGPT and all this stuff, it's just repackaging stuff that's already out there. Same with, same with, uh, generative images and all that sort of stuff. The true, the truly creative stuff comes from the human brain in moments of, to your point, in meditation, stillness, doing something other than System 1 or System 2 thinking where we're using critical analysis and stuff like that. Critical analysis helps us shape the creative idea, but it will never generate the creative idea.

I like that.

And that's why one of the reasons why music is so important in education. You know, we throw away the arts and music and literature in schools when money gets low. It's the worst thing we can do. Because I won't go into the neuroscience, but— No, I mean— Very briefly, our brains have two systems, the task-focused system and the social system. It's called default mode. The task-focused system is what gets educated. So we learn knowledge acquisition and we learn how to use algorithms and procedures and rules. We learn about logic and quantitative and qualitative analysis and critical thinking and scientific method and all these different ways of applying our brains to solving problems. That all educates the task-focused system. The default mode, which is what is on— and these two systems are antagonistic. So if one's on, the other's off. The, the social default mode is our ability to listen, to communicate, to have empathy, to be self-aware, to, uh, have emotional intelligence, to be able to cooperate, collaborate, you know, resolve conflict. This is all in the social, social brain, and none of that is trained. We kind of pick it up a little bit piece in piecemeal But our educational system completely fails in developing that system of the brain. And what— but what the research is showing is that when you educate the social side of the brain, the cognitive side, the task-focused side of the brain exponentially grows. And that's why the core curriculum came out in 2008, 2009 to include socio-emotional learning. And now, of course, it's considered quote, woke, bad. But it was a smart— it was genius curriculum. It's just been very poorly executed in K-12. But that's the secret. And in my business as a peacemaker, every conflict is emotional. And how do you do so? You can't solve an emotional problem with logic. You got to use emotional tools. So quick didactic there. Jack, it's been an amazing interview. Thank you so much for your time today.

Doug, this has been awesome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this share this episode on social media. Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Thumbs up. Ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.