Conversation/interview (YouTube) between Ethan Butte (Real Estate Team OS) and Howard Tager covering characteristics of high-performing teams, Tager’s founding and leadership journey with Y Lopo, the company’s early pivots and resilience (including nearly failing multiple times), and lessons about experiential intelligence and learning from failure. The discussion includes concrete anecdotes about revenue concentration and near-termination by a major client.
Questions this video answers
Around 2016.
Four discrete times.
Approximately 75%.
About 90 days.
Chapters
No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.
Howard. Great to spend time with you again. It's been a long time since I've seen you.
Same here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. And you've done a lot since I've last seen you. So we're going to get into some of that.
All right. All right.
We're going to start where I've been starting with everyone, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. What comes to mind for you on that?
That I think a must have characteristic is to have a village that's diverse, that just has a lot of synergies. So in other words, it's just a village of people with varying strengths. And that's the critical thing you can't have. You know, for a high performing team, you cannot have a people with. With too much overlap. Right. It's really, you've got to curate a team that is, you know, each person brings this unique thing and then you create this magic and this energy. So that's what I really look for, is to create that village of not all the same people. Right. And not. And I don't like group think where someone says something and then everyone just agrees. I like a little bit of the clash in a healthy way to get down to the right path and the right answer.
Yeah, love it. I did watch the Y Lopo Inside Edition episode with you so that it takes a village concept that like really resonated with me when I heard it. And I love the way that you broke it down here and implied in that approach is that some level of self awareness. As you said, this isn't your, your first rodeo in building a company. Talk about your own journey into self awareness from a leadership perspective where you knew, for example, starting Y Lopo almost a decade ago, looking forward to 10th birthday party coming up, not just the future. What has that process been like for you? And what did you know you wanted to surround yourself with starting the Y Lopo journey.
Right. So you know, G had come to me, you know, two, two of the years in the decade we really kind of, we were kind of zigging before we zagged. So it's, it's almost like the Google story. Like they didn't even know when they started Google that they were going to do pay per click. Right. Like that was something they fell into and it became the world's largest business. Right. So when G came to me, I was actually sort of on this other path and I was going down this other path and I was set on this other path. And then he came to me after, like a whirlwind tour and I've got this idea for Y Lopo and this is what we're going to do. And I just thought about it and I, and it was a really difficult decision. The other path was safe for me. And this path with Krazy G, who was the most brilliant person who had ever worked for me, I just thought it was too exciting, it was too much fun. And so we did it right. And, but it was two years of just learning and zigging and before we actually sort of in 2016, kind of went really like down the, down the journey here. So, you know, I, I, I think, like, honestly, for the first, like four years, the number one characteristic, which is talked a lot about today because of the light of the macroeconomic, you know, real estate condition, was the number one thing that I had to lean into was resilience. And that, you know, I don't want to lean into it as this cliche term that everyone's talking about here, but we literally almost lost this company four times. Four discreet times of bye, bye, you're no more. And so I think it was tapping into that reserve of, yes, sleepless nights, but waking up, although you're not waking up because you're sleepless and saying, yeah, we're not going to give in. We're going to figure it out and, you know, or die trying. So, so not a lot of people know that. They just think, oh, why? There was always this success.
Yeah.
But, you know, we had to come back from the grave four times and be super, super flexible and creative to then find the path to kind of where we are now. Yeah, yeah.
Would you be able to share some version of one of those four stories? When did you see that threat? How did you adapt to it in the moment? And what were some of the positive and negative or, or even more interestingly intended or unintended consequences of the decision you made in the face of that?
Right. So, you know, people are always asking me, like, so what book should I read?
Right.
You know, tell me the books I should read.
Yeah. Where's the magic answer?
That's right. And so, you know, I always tell them, you know, I could give me a few titles, but I always tell them it's really this book of life. And I studied intelligence, the psychology of intelligence. And one of the. One of the strands of intelligence is experiential intelligence. It's just your ability to actually learn from experience and, like, really learn from it. Meaning that you change your behaviors over time to the plus. Right. And so, you know, I'm always learning. Like, literally this week I'm learning, which I. Which is why I get up in the morning. If you're not learning, like, you've got to do something else. So one of the times we had kind of put all of our eggs in one basket from a revenue standpoint, and we had one major client that literally accounted for like, 75% of our revenue.
That's overweight.
Okay. Yeah. But, you know, you're a startup and that's a lot of money and it's paying the bills and you're hiring engineers for it. All of a sud. I wake up one day, don't see this coming. I wake up one day, basically get a call and it's like, yeah, we bought that company that was providing 75% of your revenue, and we're going to turn you off as soon as we can. You've got 90 days. Okay. So that was like episode, like number whatever of four times you almost lost the company. And I was just sort of like, you know, I had raised a little bit of money from a bunch of people who had always wanted to fund me, and I'd never taken money before. We took a little bit of money.
