Hannah HammondFounder & CEO, HB Capital & The Firm RE · CEO of HB Capital | Helping CRE Developers & Investors Fund Deals Nationwide | Host of The Hannah Hammond Show

Watch The Full Podcast Out Now. Just Search: Hannah Hammond & Jesse Burrell

Name: Watch The Full Podcast Out Now. Just Search: Hannah Hammond & Jesse Burrell
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T00:24:59+00:00
Duration: 7 s
Channel: Hannah Hammond
Description: In this podcast excerpt, host Hannah Hammond asks guest Jesse Burrell to recount the events of 2022 that nearly crippled his company. Burrell explains…

12 Feb 2026 · 0 min

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In this podcast excerpt, host Hannah Hammond asks guest Jesse Burrell to recount the events of 2022 that nearly crippled his company. Burrell explains that after four years of rapid growth—$100 million in sales and a dominant position in outbound cold texting for real‑estate investors—the business faced a cascade of challenges. Carriers began receiving complaints from homeowners, prompting carriers to change policies and leading to a wave of lawsuits (even on gray legal grounds). These regulatory and carrier shifts caused the company’s massive texting volume (30 million messages per month) to be flagged, dramatically reducing response rates and phone‑number purchases. Simultaneously, rising interest rates slowed the real‑estate market, cutting demand for the company’s services. While the firm continued to scale its workforce, operational expenses ballooned, eroding net profit month over month. Attempts to sell the business failed, and ultimately the company was forced to conduct a round of layoffs, a decision that Burrell describes as emotionally painful. The segment ends with Hammond probing how Burrell handled the layoffs.

But what happened in 2022 that almost took you down? And take us through that emotional journey.
Our first four years, we did $100 million in sales. Really, really nailed our ICP for the investing part of things. That's when you can do a lot of, you know, outbound cold texting. And we had the best phone numbers and emails. We also had batch dialers, so it's like call text. You could do all these things in our ecosystem, and people were just going rampant. And real estate investors at that time were making money, and we benefited from that greatly. But as it got more and more adopted homeowners. No. Started complaining to all the carriers and everything. And then regulations were changed by the carriers. There's no, like, official laws put in place, but people are also suing. You could sue for any reason, even if it's legal or not or gray or whatever. As those changes happened, we were one of the biggest in the space. We were sending out, like, 30 million text messages a month through our app. And as that changed, the response rates changed, and they started flagging everything. And if people are sending out less text messages, they're buying less phone numbers from us. So it was like this whole snowball effect right after that. That's when interest rates went way up and just everything kind of stopped. We were like, oh. And we were scaling employees this entire time. Our operational expenses got crazy expensive, and it was just like, month over month. I'm just seeing net profits go down, really just tried to sell our way out of it because I didn't want to let anyone go. And it finally came to a point to where it's like, we had to do a round of layoffs. For me, it's. That's a part of business. But, like, it was just really hard.
How did you handle doing those layoffs? Like, were you the one to do it?
Me, Andy, and Evo did everything we did draw out of the company for 16 months. I didn't take a dollar. None of us did. It's hard going into work every day, working your ass off, then also having people bitching about how they need a raise when I'm like, I haven't taken home a dollar out of this company in a year, to be honest with you. That's a part of it. And if you can't stomach stuff like that, then being a business owner might not be for you.