Planning Your Real Estate Tech Stack with Lee Adkins | [Techtember] Ep 042

To know if you have the right tools and technology organized in the right way to solve your business problems and capitalize on your business opportunities, you need a plan. It's not going to be a perfect plan. It doesn't need to be an incredibly detailed plan, and you do need to stay flexible around it. Your plan will obviously change, but that plan is the foundation for making better tech decisions. You can start with something as low tech as a piece of paper and a pencil or a pen, just like we can generate real meaningful business simply by picking up the phone and talking to people. But a well organized tech stack that's designed the right way and set up properly will help you know exactly who to call and in what order. This is all advice I got from Lee Adkins, a co founder of Amplified Solutions, a team that designs tool and technology solutions for all kinds of real estate agents, teams and brokerages. I've intended to create an episode with Lee for some time now in Tech Timber is the perfect time to do it. Lee has served as a real estate agent, a partner in a brokerage, an operations leader for a real estate team, and of course now serves as a real estate technology consultant. He shares many great high level strategies, but he also shares some very specific things that you can do today or this week to improve the way that your tech is operating on behalf of you and your business. Including the two most common problems he encounters when he's diagnosing a real estate tech stack and how to overcome those. Why to click through and explore all of the admin tabs in your CRM. A simple thing you can do to improve all of your reporting inside your CRM and exactly how easy and powerful a pixel can be. Spoiler it helps you know who to call. I know you'll love this Tech Timber episode with Lee Adkins right now on Real Estate Team os. 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. Lee, I am so excited to have you on the show. I knew I was going to have you at some point, but this Tech Timber theme that we developed and put together was the exact right time. Welcome to Real Estate Team os.

Awesome. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. And yeah, Tech Timber is is where it's at. So whatever it takes to share the good word and talk about follow. Boss, I'm in.

Cool. Yeah, we'll be talking about anything you encounter, by the way, because you're helping a lot of different types of people and organizations in a lot of different ways. But before we dive into, into that and your own journey into being a man about the real estate tech world, I'd love for you to share what is a must have characteristic of a high performing team.

You know, it's funny when I say this, I think people don't love this answer, but it's just have a plan. It doesn't even have to be a great plan. You just need to have a plan because then you can measure it. You know, if you do it somewhere for three months, then you can measure it. Did that work? Is it good? Everybody wants to get to like a V5 straight away and I get that, but you really gotta have a V1 that you can measure. Oh, that didn't work. We have too many agents. Ah, we don't need that tool anymore. And then go. So just a plan is my number one answer.

Love it. And the thing that about a plan in general, a, it's iterative and it's alive, as you said, because nothing goes exactly as we plan. And then likewise, it's getting everyone onto the same page. It's something we can share with everyone and or develop with everyone or some people and say we're going over here and it's part of what the team is.

Right. And empowering in turn of that just to kind of tack onto it, empowering those people that you have and that you put in those roles. Like if you have a marketing person, then great, let them go market. Like give them parameters, give them guidance, but you know, let them do their thing. So, you know, the more people you have, the more simple your plan actually has to be.

Yeah. For the types of folks who watch and listen to this show, you know, certainly most of them people who started teams were very high performing agents who did things obviously very, very well or else you wouldn't be super high performing. And some personality types in that group of people really struggle to let some of that stuff go. So I always appreciate that. Caution, you were a member of a real estate team. I would love for you to share your journey from professional touring musician to real estate agent, to real estate team operations leader to now real estate tech consultant. I think I hit all the high points of that. But like, give us a quick run through of how you landed where you are today and how maybe some of that experience in the past served you in the next role or even today.

Yeah, it's interesting and I love telling the story. I'll keep it short but you know, in hindsight I'm like, what an amazing plan. Of course none of it was was planned. Same thing with my career. Yeah, makes sense in hindsight, right? I could explain it beautifully now, but at the time I had no idea what was happening. But yeah, so in I went to school. I grew up in Texas. I went to school in west Texas. Had a really interesting opportunity to drop out of school and play in a rock band. So I moved to Atlanta in 96 I toured for about six years, almost seven years pretty successfully. Had a really good run and then in I got into some music educa again to keep it short, I got into some other businesses tied to music. But in 06, 04 I bought a house. In 06 I was like, you know what? Like this real estate thing has always been interesting to me. People laugh at this. I actually attended a career night that was on to show my age a little bit on monster.com how to be a real estate agent.

By the way, shout out to whoever was running Monster ads for a career night at that time. I still hear that proposed. It's now more indeed than Monster. But like I still hear do the day in the life of a real estate agent for recruiting, especially from outside the industry. Do it as a webinar or do it as an event and advertise it. And yeah, shout out to whoever was doing that 20 years ago.

It totally worked. And it was a small Weikart brokerage. Weikart was new to our market like it was. Again, in hindsight, it's beautiful and perfect the way it all went. But you know, just was day by day back then. But yeah, so got in the business in 06 knowing that I didn't really want to be an agent. But that was just like how you. There's no other way to get in the business unless you like work the front desk, you know. So I got my license, had a pretty good run. Shortly after that I joined a bigger franchise as a team member because I was kind of like, I know what I'm doing but I need some support. I need a mentor basically. And I had a mentor at the other brokerage. So I joined the team. Really cool guy. I still to this day hear his voice in my head whenever I'm making a decision or coaching or training people. But anyway had a great run at that. But just kind of in 2012, 2011, I started kind of getting burned out foreclosures. We got to see this today, the industry was changing and I had an interesting opportunity to jump into an existing team. For those of you not watching, I said that with very big air quotes because the team existed in some sense, but there was no structure. They hadn't even had meetings. So I came in after a long interview process and they're like, wait, you did stuff before real estate? And I'm like, yes, Is that relevant to running a real estate team? And they're like, yes, we need you to run this team. So in 2012, came out of production fully into running this team. Follow up Boss came along in 2013 was a huge part of I'm going to get leads to agents and keep them accountable. I'm going to have stuff to train them on now. Like we have a plan. Not an amazing crazy plan, but a plan. I'm going to give you leads, you're going to call them. I'm going to make sure you do. So I did that from 2012 to 2019. But while I was doing that, you know, I started going to all these national conferences and everybody's like, what do you do? You help us figure out what we're doing and what tools to use and who to hire and their roles and when to let people go and when we need more people. And I was like, yeah. And so it just kind of grew into this consulting business. And then, you know, recently we've just really leaned into Follow Up Boss as the brain of all the things and using it, you know, within your business. So that sort of gives you 30, 40 years of history in a nutshell.

I love it. And so to be perfectly clear, even though a lot of people think you're a follow up boss team member, you're just a customer with the deepest of histories who went all in on it and learned enough to be of super value to other people.

100%. And what's funny is I largely did it through support tickets. Like Dan used to answer my support tickets. You know, in 2014 I'd be like, hey, what's it, what's going to happen if I do this? And they'd be like, we don't know, let's ask Dan or Tom. So yeah, Truly learned it from like using it with the team in the real world. And you know, obviously I've suggested feat, hey, be cool if it did this. Hey, it'd be cool if it did that. But yeah, truly Follow Up Boss one early. Caroline and I looked up the number recently. I'm in the top thousand first clients. And she thinks the first 500 were maybe like demo instances early. Early. And just love the platform, love the people and said, you know what, we don't need to look around anymore.

We're good. Awesome. I would love for you to pull back, like, super high level again. You've been going to national events for years and years now. Now you're also in the offices and in the tech stacks of a variety of different businesses. What are some of the most common problems you see or hear or encounter with regard to real estate tech? Whether it's at the agent level, a team level, or a brokerage level, there's.

Really, I think, two core things. And maybe, maybe it's an A and a B. They're probably related in some sense. Well, they're definitely related in some sense. You know, one is just simply, what is the plan for this? Like, what gap does this fill? Are we going to put everybody on it? Are we going to try it with, like a couple of leads? Is there a big training curve? Like, is this a whole thing? We're going to have to train the team constantly. I'm like, you got to do this and you got to do that. So, like, what's the real use? And adoption? And then I think, I know people don't like it when I say this, but, like, use the software for what it's for everybody. It feels like there's a lot of people in this business in particular that are all about, like, I wish it did this. We need mass texting. We need this. Like, we gotta have this thing. And I think your life is so much better when you buy software for what it's for and use it for what it does. Again, people don't love that answer because they're like, well, I think I need it to do this, or I need it to magically email everybody who was on my website yesterday, which it can do, by the way, but, you know, just being really clear on what it's supposed to do and what it does and using it for that. Not always trying to jailbreak stuff or just complaining about what things don't do. And again, maybe too simple of an answer. And I guess if that's an A and a B, maybe this is a C. Like, have a budget. Like, don't just buy it because it's a thing or it's new or it's neat, or you saw a webinar, if you have like a $5,000 a month tech budget or a $2,000 a month tech budget, you know, what are you going to give up to get this Thing or what are you going to change if this thing is that valuable? You know. And again, the bigger you get. I always use a boat analogy, like, the bigger you get. A cruise ship can't just be like, oh, we're going over here. You got to like, no, we got to stick with the plan. There's like nine people driving it. There's people doing other things. You know, it's a real thing. We when you're little and it's a speedboat, you can try stuff and pepper it in. It still makes your agents crazy. Then they stop listening to you because you just change stuff every six months. And they're like, well, I'm going to learn this because he's going to change it in six months. But I think again, having a budget at a high level is another great way to say, do we really need this? And does it fit into our plan?

Yeah, a couple of things here. First, I love that you teed up kind of two directions I wanted to go in. Next, I'll make one observation. Then I have one follow up on something very specifically that you said. My observation is what some very. This is just for folks watching and listening. You know, the speedboat versus the cruise ship. Obviously we've interviewed a bunch of people in cruise ship organizations on this show and what a lot of them will do is they'll build a speedboat to kind of go alongside it, pilot programs. And you know, we are going to take eight of our, you know, 37 agents or 137 agents and we're going to go try and do it this way so you can like have the speedboat alongside. It's there, there are, there's hybrid in all of this. But the one thing I'd love for you to kind of double down, which kind of relates to the two directions I want to go in, is this idea that like, oh, it actually does the thing that I've been complaining that I wish it would do. In this case, magically emailing people today who were on your website yesterday. Talk a little bit about that because I feel like it's a super common problem that we run into not just in real estate situations, but even in like general consumer applications like, oh, I didn't know it could do that. Basically, I never read a manual for anything.

Right.

I might, might join something like the Follow Up Boss success community if it was Follow up boss or you know, go watch a couple training videos. But in general, how often do you run into people asking you things? I guess because, you know, follow up boss so intimately things that people say they wish follow up Boss did. You're like, oh, it does that and you don't need zapier or make to make it happen.

Yeah, right? Yeah. I'm like, ask and you shall receive. This is great. I mean, I think, I think, you know, I hope this answers your question. Doesn't pivot away from it. But you know, I think it ultimately also still goes back to that plan and kind of a real self assessment of your best role and your team members role if you have them, or that growth projection pattern purpose if you're not there yet. But you know, some of these people love this stuff. I know people that would rather spend all day in the Facebook group than go sell a house as like owners of a team. And that's awesome. If that's your thing and you want to learn it. There's a million resources from this podcast to the YouTube channel, to the help debt, to the unified search feature. Like there's a million ways to figure those things out. But if that's not your strong suit, if your best use is still sales and providing revenue for the team, then look to hire that, look to outsource it. Like there's a thousand ways to do it. Like you don't just have to, oh, hire whoever. They're the greatest. Like some people have kids that are that age that are like digital natives, that like, hey, can you run my Facebook page and do my marketing? Like I've seen all kinds of cool solutions, but I think if you love it and you want to understand follow up boss, then dig in, learn all the things it can do and do all those things. You know, if it's not find somebody or hire somebody or contract somebody that knows it. And you know, it's funny, I was looking on upwork with somebody recently and kind of comparing hourly rates and I've done the same kind of with my hourly rate as well. It's like, do you want somebody that's $5 an hour, that's gonna take seven hours to do it, that's gonna have to figure it out, or do you want to pay somebody $20 an hour who knows it, who's gonna charge you one hour because they know it? And so I think having that in your corner, whatever that means, whether that's. And look, if I'm being real, you could lean into your follow up boss CSM for that if that's a thing. So again, it's not like you have to pay somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars to be your operations person every Time. But yeah, just understanding, utilizing this feature, somebody who's paying attention to it, that was my role on the team. That was the real success. So my role was to roll out follow a boss and make sure people use it as long as along with the other tools that that it worked with. And that was my only focus. And so I got really good at it because that was my thing. So I hope that in essence answers your question. I know I kind of.

No, it does. And it actually answered my next one too. I was going to ask the in sequence kind of recommend a process for someone watching or listening to determine who should be evaluating and implementing tech in their organization. And you kind of addressed a lot of those buttons. I guess I would also raise up in that scenario the idea of an agent watching or listening who like you and like the person you just described, who would rather be doing fill in the blank than selling houses. Fill in the blank being any of a variety of operations, functions, or even finance. Like there are very sophisticated teams looking for specialists to do any of a variety of things in their organization besides sell. And oh, by the way, you happen to sell for four years and that's going to be really useful to you doing it in this context. Yeah, right. And the follow on then, I guess you've been speaking to this a little bit. And the word that I would associate with your answer so far, which I'd love for you to kind of pull it together, is plan essentially, but kind of the follow on question to that, one of who should be evaluating and implementing new tech. You know, what I heard from you is whoever's really good at it and is excited about it, if that's not you. The process of when and how to evaluate and implement new tech, you already spoke to. The idea of have a budget, I think also implied in the plan is like what are we trying to do? And you also mentioned using tools in the way that they were designed to use. Don't take a hammer and try to make up new use cases for it. Just hammer things with it. Go get another tool if you want to do a different thing. But you know, I knew that knocks down a couple of problems in this area, but I'd love for you to take one good swing at when and how to evaluate and implement new tech. What should drive that process, what should the process look like? And maybe what are some different versions there? I mean, obviously migrating from one CRM to another with A database at 35,000 people is different than do we have a better texting solution? Maybe. But like speak to that big zone in kind of a, like a practical way.

You know, I think on the tech, you know, just being really clear like what is the problem and how is this solving it? And I know that's almost a gross oversimplification, but I talked to so many people that, well, I've got Real Scout and Ylopo and a real geek site and this thing and Texting Betty and I'm just like, wow, that's. That sounds like you just added on stuff over time and there's no real strategy. I'm all for saying, hey, we have Texting Betty to do this for new leads in this thing that do this thing. And we use Y Lopo with our past clients to keep them on a seller alert to keep up their home value. And we use Real Scout for middle of the funnel buyer. Like that's a plan and you could have all those things and utilize them well in doing that and getting great.

ROI on all of it.

Right, right. I mean that's actually probably. Those were all made up examples in some level, but that's probably a pretty decent system. But again, like, what are these pieces? How do they interact? And further, again, depending on how big you are or how big you want to be, what is needed for adoption and execution at the agent level, does the agent have to add nine tags? They have to remember, if this is a seller, I got a do this thing or if it's a what. One of the cool features. I'll get a little bit tactical with this and I'll go back way up. One of the things I love about follow up boss notes is triggering them in interesting ways. Whether it's scripts or things like when a. Back to our example, before somebody's active on your site, it can send them an email or reassign them or do whatever. Putting that into a note and follow boss that says, hey, this is an old lead that was back on our site. Read the notes before you call them. Because the value in being able to say, hey, I know we talked six months ago and you guys were waiting is so different than hey, you want to go see this house? Like that's the difference between being an expert and being a friggin order taker.

You know, it's a soft signal to say, this person knows me and is prepared to help me versus something more transactional and shallow.

Right. What do you need? You're gonna buy a house. Okay, bye. Like, nobody, literally nobody wants that and nobody wants to make that call either. But I think some of us do because we're just, we're kind of the moment I got a lead, I got a thing, I got a column. As the industry is changing, I think a couple of things are going to happen, one of which there are going to be more agents looking for other roles, people that have good skill sets. And I think another thing is just truly smarter, not harder. Like really good messaging, good segmentation, you know, that that's really, I think where that's at. But to jump to a really high level. And this is funny because when I used to, I also have been a partner in a brokerage. Like literally I say I've worn all the hats, I've worn all the hats. We're actually located in this fancy tech startup hub. And I would go in probably once a quarter with a piece of paper and I'd write down all the stuff that either I was supposed to be doing or was doing or whatever. And it was so funny because literally people were like the guy that invented Calendly like started at a desk like three, three people down for me, you know, now they're a billion dollar company but I'm there with my piece of paper writing, you know, do this, do this, never seem to get to this and then put those into categories like this is marketing, this is operations, this is finance, this is that. And you're going to see a lot of patterns around like either what you never get to or what you don't like doing or what you do like doing. And also as you do that, you're like this. I mean I shouldn't admit this live on a recording, but I still do it. And I look at it, I'm like, that's marketing. We have a marketing person. Why am I doing that? Hey marketing person, here's a three minute loom on how you can take this off my plate. And so I think again, as simple as it is, kind of that deeper self assessment maybe if it's not all the things you do, it's like all the things that need to get done and then putting them into those buckets and you're going to go, wow, look, I have a lot of operational things I need to try to solve for this. And again, I know this isn't always the go to of the successful real estate agent who suddenly has a team, but if somebody's looking for actionable advice, get a piece of paper, write down all the stuff that you do or should be doing, put it into categories and then go, oh look, here's a, here's a plan. It's not an amazing plan, but It's a good V1.

Yeah, I love that. I would also imagine, I am imagining right now that you could do similar with your tech stack. What are all the things that I have and why do I have all of them to kind of go back to? I use this tool for that reason. I use this tool for that reason. I could probably use it. The other thing I love about the weight that you propose that is close the laptop, ditch the phone or the tablet, Go somewhere you can take a pen and a note paper anywhere. You could take it to the ocean side if you're anywhere nearby and sit down and do this, like create some space, be reflective about it. And this is the way we figure out our org structure and our tech stack, among other things. You know, what am I doing that I terrible at? Or you know, you could. Maybe I'm even now seeing an intersection of these two things. Not to dwell on it too long, but like, here are all the things that I'm doing and here's kind of how I would disperse them. You could layer maybe from an agent perspective or even from an organizational and operations perspective. What tech do we have in place and where are the gaps, where are the overlaps and where are places that we don't have solutions? Right. Do you like that idea?

I love that. I think it's brilliant. And again, just sometimes people. And what's funny to me, a lot of times the people we work with and the people in this business, they are more visual people. And it's so funny because I can see people trying to like imagine this flowchart in their brain. I'm like, why don't you just write it down? Why? Just. I mean, we will do it for people. Like, let's make a flowchart. The problem is they're often three dimensional. Because it's like when you think.

And I'll just write it down.

Right, right. You know, just give it to me. But I think part of the problem, as much as it's great to hire a third party to do that, as much as I personally love doing it, you're the only person that knows yourself, that knows your goals, that knows all the other players, that knows what you want to spend to do this, that knows, hey, if this doesn't happen in five years, I'm just going to go back to me selling houses. Like, it's just important to do that. In fact, it's funny you said that because I read our final operations manual for our team sitting in a Starbucks in a Target over the holidays. Like, I mean it's probably 10 years ago but like literally just focus time, head down here. Here's your 50 page. How to do everything ever for this team. But yeah, sometimes it's not about you know, playing in follow up boss to figure out all the things. Sometimes it's, it's bigger than that, you know.

Love it. And you did another nice job just coincidentally of teeing up for where I wanted to go next, which is at Amplified Solutions. The business name, the team that you've built. You have both a quick assessment and then like a really deep audit process around this stuff. I'm sure it's anchored in follow up boss, but it's impossible to talk about follow up boss without Talking about the five or 50 things someone has plugged into it. That's its power and its beauty. You know, when you think about that, either that quick assessment or the deep audit, what are you looking at in a tech stack or in a CRM instance kind of in what order is that a priority order? And like what are you looking for? Like what are like oh good, check, check, check. You know, I'm thinking of like the diagnostic I get after I take my car in for 30,000 mile service or whatever and you get like the all green here, all green here, got a little yellow here. We may want to be on the lookout but you know when I bring.

It in for tires next time.

But yeah, yeah, I know and I know when I'm going to bring it in for 150,000 miles even though I maintain my cars very well and have historically it's going to be. There are going to be a lot more yellows and cautions and do we want to invest here? Do we want to invest here? And so I would assume that you're walking in somewhere in the middle that with a lot of cases rather than you know, building a tech stack clean from the ground up. But break that down. How should someone evaluate their tech stack in general and maybe their CRM in particular for like is this doing what we want? Do I have the pieces I need? I know that's massive and we're not going to be able to do in 10 minutes what you normally would do over a multi. Probably multi touch engagement. But that's why I introduced both the assessment and the audit concept. Maybe land somewhere in the middle on that.

Yeah, yeah. So I'll cover it at a high level and you said it very well but I'll just reiterate it too. So the assessment for us is really it evolves over time. So I'm going to give a high level answer and then I'm going to give a little more of what we do and then we can talk a little more about like a deeper audit. But on the assessment level, you know, we're looking for basic things like is the lead flow set up on purpose? Like, are the leads going to people? Are they all going to the owner? The first thing we do in both scenarios is click on admin team. Are there 4 users in this account? Are there 700 users in this account? Like what, what are we dealing with here? And then I, I like to think, I kind of think about it chronologically. So it's like, okay, a lead comes in, so let's start a lead flow. Lead comes in, what happens? Are they going out to a bunch of people? Are they first to claim? Do you have different groups set up for sellers versus buyers? Do you have advanced rules for higher price point, lower price point? Or does it look like the lead flow just created itself and all the leads are going to the owner, which I see astonishingly more than one might think, and then just kind of going through the lifecycle of that lead? Like, are there action plans in the lead flow? Look at the reporting on those action plans. Are they working? Are there pawns to nurture long term things? To your point, obviously we look at integrations. The thing that again kills me to no end on the assessments in particular, I'm like, follow Up Boss Pixel isn't installed. I'm like, you have Ylopo and you have all these things and you're not using Follow up Boss Pixel. That's a pretty huge deal because you're really missing out on all that.

90 seconds. For someone who's like, oh, I've heard of that. What should I do with it? Give me a quick go. Like, how easy is it and what are my benefits?

Yeah, so this was the most, one of the most brilliant things Follow Boss did besides processing leads automatically. So Pixel is a snippet of code that's tied to your Fallout Boss account. You can install it in any website, incredibly easy, mostly probably by yourself. If not, it's incredibly easy to get the code and email it to a webmaster or support@agentfire.com or whoever. But it's a snippet of code that goes in the back end, goes in the header of your website, any website you have access to add code to. And once people are cookie, which in essence is largely, you have to email them once it's installed and they go, they Click on something and go to your site. The cookie has now identified that user as that user. So if they go back on your website now, you got intel. You can use automations, you can use Smart List to say show me all the people that have been on my site in the last five days. It shows you what they're looking at. It'll show you if they're on live right now. It's unbelievably handy and incredibly easy to set and forget. But you gotta set it before you forget it. But it's unbelievable. I'm a big believer. The behavioral predictive is great. Behavioral is 10,000 times better. This person I mentioned to you right before we hit record, like I was working with somebody this morning going through how many people have been on your site in the last 30 days who have not been contacted in 30 days? 209 people. And this is a solid team that like is crushing it all the time. I'm like, here's 200 people to call today.

Yeah. Based on your real behavior. I mean that's the thing, we're always yeah, yeah, I love the call.

Oh my goodness, so funny that you called me. Like don't tell them. I have this weird thing that tells me that you're on my site today. But like, oh, do you want to go see a property with a basement today? And they're like oh yeah, I was just looking at houses with basements. Like okay, you know, so yeah, native tool, easy to use, no additional charge, super easy. But you know, in that just yeah, thinking about all the pieces of that and frankly if you were trying to do this yourself today as the owner of a Fault Boss account, I would just click on admin and run through the tabs. I mean that's not specifically what we do anymore but like even billing like how many users do we have? And is it time to look at a platform versus Pro? Is that going to save us money? Like just go across the tabs in your admin because you're going to get more familiar with them. And then when you go back to look at it again, the other thing I tell people that would be really helpful I think here, although not technically an assessment thing, set your reporting to the same time frames. I go into people's accounts all the time and they're like on this month and it's the second and I'm like that's not useful reporting data. Like you're comparing two days to something like leave it on 30 days, leave it on seven days. If you're going to check it every seven days. You can check it once a month, leave it there. So you're getting some apples to apples. Like how many calls did we do last 30 days versus this 30 days? How many leads do we get last 30 days over this 30 days? I mean the short answer to the whole assessment thing is just being intentional about looking at what's happening and also being honest about what's happening. Like okay, this isn't great but like it's a little bit better. Like we said v1, v2, v400. Like you're learning as you're doing this and so then you start to go. It's funny when we engage with people like they're like, they're so excited to have help all of a sudden they're like oh my goodness, we can do that and we can do this. And we're like okay, but let's get the core. We're not doing automations on day one. We'll get there. But yeah, I would honestly say hit admin in your account, scroll through all those tabs, think strategically about what's happening and then you know, assess. This is good, this is bad, this doesn't matter to me. You know, that's fine. And it's okay by the way to have things that don't matter to you. You can't do all the things all the time. So it's okay to say hey, you know what, we're not going to, we're not going to get into action plans today. That's a whole other rabbit hole. Just focus on our lead flow and assignment and initial follow up and then we'll go from there.

Love it. So we have look at all the tabs, think about what's there, set all your reporting to similar windows so that you are thinking and viewing at things that are relevant to each other in a proper way. Make sure that your lead sources are all pointed in and think about the experience from that first touch through kind of the next series of engagements. Whether that's emails, phone calls, texts, et cetera, et cetera. That's what I heard so far. So. And then you also tease like let's not get into action plans yet, let's not get into automations yet. Give us a couple like for that, for that CRM user in general or the follow up boss user in particular, what are a couple unlocks like once you have like familiarity with someone's CRM instance and the integrations are all set up well they've got most of the things handled for the general Life cycle from, you know, initial website visitor, initial contact through, let's just say initial, close or contract and close. What are a couple advanced things that people are really excited to unlock?

It amazes me still to no end that when you're feeding the machine well, when agents are making notes, when they're making calls, especially with the call transcription stuff now, obviously the recordings have been there for a while. It's amazing the things you can actually start to see when you're just putting good data into it and you're doing what you're supposed to do. I think here's another thing that's really hard for people. It's exciting to set stuff up. It's exciting to connect it and go, I got this thing. We just got five new leads. Because I just got this thing that's super exciting. Here's the bad news. You need to set it and leave it for a minute. Three months, six months, a year, whatever. Then it's just doing the work. But something that occurred to me recently and I really want to share this. I'm glad I just popped in my brain. I'm really glad. I really, really, really want to share this. Here we talk, especially those of us, like vendors, which I hate that term, but like those of us who are in the space, but not definitely specifically running a team at this point in time.

We.

You got to do the work. The most successful people we have are the people that actually you integrate and utilize like a smartless zero system. Here's five people to call today. I just want you to call them. I don't care. I don't. It doesn't matter. I don't care if you talked to them three days ago. It doesn't matter if. Well, I think they may be on vacation, whatever. Like, it doesn't matter. The people that just do the work and have a simple thing. But the thing, the point I want to make super clear. We are not trying to get. Maybe I'll get in trouble for this. We are not trying to have people sit in, follow boss all day. That is not where they make money. People need to prospect and follow boss and then go out into the real world. I call it tennis. Like, you got to hit a. Hit a bunch of balls to people in the morning and then go get in your car, go do some preview, like whatever it is, go to a CE class. Like what? Go sit at a Starbucks and introduce yourself to somebody, like, whatever. But you just need to be doing that prospecting in the morning and then go on. You need to make notes and stuff during the course of the day. But I think too many of us kind of have this made up idea that we're going to like our agents are going to sit and follow a boss all day and do stuff. Like nobody got into real estate to do that, myself included. And I love that part. Like, so I think it's important for us to understand that we don't want our agents in follow up boss 24 hours a day. We want them going in, doing the things they need to do and then go sell. You know, I always say you can't make money in real estate unless you spend time in houses with people. Like, that's it. You can make a million phone calls. You ain't getting a check for making a phone call. You're getting a check for getting an appointment with somebody. So I just think it's really important that we start to really kind of reframe this idea that like they're not in there all day and we don't want them to be. We want them to call 10 people and then go field those, you know, responses all day or 300 people, whatever, whatever it is. I don't want people to get caught up in a number. But I just think it's really important for people to realize that, like set it up, do the thing and then go do the work.

Yeah. I mean that's what the whole thing is for.

Right.

Essentially it's a central place to bring all the people and to organize all the data, to have that data organized for you at some level to surface the right things to do now to get you out talking to people sooner rather than later.

Right, right.

Job is to get you out of there, prioritize the right stuff, go through the smart list, zero it and then you're inherently naturally going to be out and about talking to folks.

Yeah. And so just to cap the assessment, audit thing. So an audit is something in particular in our case. I do with a client. This is like somebody that has been set up. They've got smart list, there is a plan. But even still, I go, I did a couple yesterday. I've literally gone through people's accounts and I'm like, there's so much opportunity in here. There are like 300 people that have done something that are in these smart lists. Like people just aren't calling them like they are. Here it is working. There's just 1400 people in the smart list across, you know, a 30 person team. But like there's literally money. Like I am. My other favorite thing to do is Go in the trash. I go in the trash all the time. There's like a Zillow inquiry from yesterday. It's like, we'd like to see this property in at 5 o' clock today. And I'm like, that's why you don't put people in the trash. So. Yeah.

Oh man, you just unlocked so many things. Like, first, I just want to double back a minute and say a lot of the team leaders that I've talked with on this show who are working with either new agents or, you know, agents that were not super productive in their first year or two because they didn't have kind of like the leadership guidance, accountability systems that they needed to be successful, are doing exactly what you just said. Like, everyone's in by X o'. Clock. We're all role playing and doing a little bit of training until X plus. And then for 30 minutes or an hour, all we're doing is cranking through our smart list and then ideally we're all out of here at lunch, like going out and making money.

Right.

You know, getting signatures and making friends.

We don't talk enough about that. Right. We talk about, oh, you gotta do this, you gotta make this smart list. You gotta like go to this webinar. It's like you need to call a couple of people every day. You know, this is embarrassing, but when I was in the business, I actually had a BlackBerry and I would, I would literally spin the wheel down and just call whoever Atlanta, get in the car, just call whoever landed on.

So yeah, imagine how especially in a market that's already got, that's already tough, you're a relatively new agent or one who hasn't really got found your feet under you yet. You just haven't found that success or that groove and you're still on that edge. Is am I going to be one of those folks who gets driven out or flamed out or burned out of the industry, or am I going to like, actually you're somewhere in that zone of like, which way am I going to go here? And now you're doing activities at random versus having, you know, working inside an organization that has a good setup, that is prioritizing opportunities. So your hit rate is just much, much higher. You're having better conversations, you're better informed going into those conversations and therefore it's going to be more, more fun for everyone because you know why people want someone to talk to them and you're mostly talking with people who want someone to talk to them.

Right, right, exactly. It really is true. And to be fair, this is pre fall Bosses when I was personally in production and that was the easiest way to do it. It was like, I don't know, spin this thing down. Like Bobby, I haven't talked to him in a while. Hey man, what's up? Like, and people may or may not believe this because I do a lot of webinars. I'm obviously really present in the community, but like, I'm pretty introverted. I don't want to call people on the phone. But when that's your job and that's your business, you just got to do it. And again, I think we just spend a lot of time. There's a joke obviously that people read the notes to figure out why to not call people. And I think in some sense we've just gotten away from those core basics. There are a lot of things we could do now instead of calling people, but we still just need to call people at the end of the day. You know, said and done.

So like, yeah, if you find yourself avoidant of these activities that really produce money, maybe you're in the wrong seat inside the organization. Maybe you do belong in the organization, but you're in the wrong seat. I want to color up a few different things here that you mentioned and what I'm the category I'm talking about here is money in your database that you're unaware of or ignoring. You mentioned, it's right there in the smart list, but we haven't called through them. Another one that I hear a lot is too many leads in agents names rather than pulled back into a pond because the agent isn't working it properly. Another one is, is a horrible story about being in the trash. There was no, like, there weren't. There wasn't enough understanding of definitions of what's what and what do we do with different things. And people were essentially taking, you know, I'm looking in six months or nine months or 12 months and instead of putting them in some kind of a nurture zone, they were putting them in the trash. There is money. No, I don't care what CRM you're using, there is money in your database right now. I just offered three examples or kind of gathered them up based on what we've already covered. Any other ones? Top of mind? If someone's like, I want to have like five high quality conversations this week that I didn't anticipate and Lee pointed me into the zones in my database that would help me maybe find them. Do any other things come to mind besides the three that I Just covered there.

I mean, I always forget this one, to be fair. And it's the most obvious and the best source of business call your freaking past clients. Like, period. It's. It's. You don't have to even talk about real estate. Like, it amazes me. And somehow I think even in our list, it's like, number nine now or whatever is like, past clients every 90 days. You know, last communication. Like, every single person's account I go into. Those smart lists are just. They're just full, and I get it. And some of them. Maybe you Facebook message or, you know, there. Maybe there's a reason, or you see them at the gym or you play golf with them or whatever. Make a freaking note that you play golf with them or just something. Because I just. That's such a missed opportunity. And again, I think people aren't thinking of those for referrals as well. Like, people are like, oh, well, they already. They just bought, and they're not gonna. And they. Whatever. So first off, easy, easy button. Hey, are you guys settling in? Have you done. Have you made any changes? Anything cool? Any.

Any.

You know, did y' all finally. And again, you spent a bunch of time with them doing it? Oh, did y' all finally paint that back bedroom from that terrible red color? Like, whatever it is, like, you're not going to have a hard time talking to them. And you also don't have to. Do you or anyone, you know, need to buy or sell real estate. Have a nice day. Much respect for the people that do that and the coaches that teach that and the people that actually execute on it. But you don't have to, like, you don't have to do that. Like, they know what you do for a living. Oh, yeah. Business is great. You know, we added two new team members. Hey, did you guys ever fence in that backyard? Like, it's not about you, but that's just such. Again, a massive missed opportunity. Whether it's Popeyes or calls or client events or just texting them. Hey, I was thinking of you. But again, log it and follow up us. Even if you use your cell phone number, like, I get that. Just log it in. Follow up, boss. So it's intentional. It'll feed the machine. Your smart list will pop up again. But, yeah, there's. I mean, I should probably start doing this. Dan and I did a live audit of somebody's account once, which is pretty fun on a webinar. But, like, it's fun to go find these opportunities. I mean, it's maddening at first you know, fellow introduced this real sellers thing that basically shows you, like, look at this person in your database that just listed with somebody else. I guarantee you right now there are a minimum of 10 people. If you have 100 leads in your database, there are a minimum of 10 people in there that could be money if somebody did something, period. Yep.

Really good. Okay. I would love for you to share what you're doing with office hours. Anyone who got to this point already got a taste of like, oh, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in there. There's a lot of opportunity. We're only barely scratching the surface of it here in this conversation. For someone who wants to go into and go into the software, see some of this stuff, get very specific. So office hours is an amazing resource. I watched hours and hours of it as soon as I joined Follow Up Boss. So I felt like I knew you before we ever connected. And I know a lot of Follow Up Boss employees do. And you're doing these very often with Follow Up Boss team members. Share a little bit with folks about what office hours is and where they can find it and connect with it who want to kind of carry on and continue this type of learning.

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. And thank you for that. So, yeah, a couple years ago, I guess maybe four or five years ago now, started out, Dan and I had lunch. He was like, you want to do some client interviews? I was like, sure. That kind of turned into webinars. And they were like, we should just make this like a consistent thing. And so, you know, thus. Thus is born. There's no marketing department. There was none of this back then. It was just like, well, not no marketing department. But, you know, it wasn't. It was just two dudes like, hey, I have an idea.

Yeah.

So we started doing these sessions. And the thing we also realized is that the follow up boss CSMs, which are basically the. The people at Fall Boss who either have assigned clients that they help mostly in a strategic level, or if you just, you know, 100 follow boss, that's not really the number, but like. Or you can just get acsm, but you know, it's kind of born out of starting to do it with them. And they were seeing client things, I was seeing client things. We're like, wow, everybody's having a hard time with action plans. Let's do a session on action plans. And so now the evolution is twice a month. Typically the first and third Thursday is at 1 Eastern. We do a live webinar. It's very topical, usually pretty Tactical. I mean it's usually pretty like click here. This is how you do this. So it's me and a follow up boss CSM who are both literally living in the space. I've seen people do it this way, I've seen people do it that way. Just sharing some of those things and we try to keep it pretty basic because frankly I think a lot of even the longtime power users sometimes need to come back to basics. So they're not like crazy, you gotta do this like they're very attainable for people. And yeah, so all the recordings are available as well. You can find them in the follow up Facebook community. There's a YouTube playlist, maybe we can link that in the show notes as well.

Yep, 100%.

But yeah, there's a playlist for years and years. I think there's over 70, maybe 80 videos in there now that are very like how to use first to claim how to make good action plans, how to make your first automation like they're very, very tactical and hopefully very approachable.

Yeah, I know I enjoyed them and learned a lot from the gosh, I watched maybe a couple dozen and I certainly should see more of them. If you are watching in YouTube there's a description down below this video and I do a short write up I give you actually in YouTube I give you in times if you want to jump to a particular topic or send someone into a particular part of this conversation. I have little end times down there. But there will also be a link to the YouTube playlist as well as to the follow up boss success community as well as other places to connect with Lee and Amplified Solutions. Same thing if you're listening in Apple podcasts or Spotify, there's a little description down below that takes links and. And of course if you're watching at realestateteamos.com or listening@realestateteamos.com you can do either. We write up all these episodes in their descriptions and links. There's no reason not to go check that out, especially if you're a follow up boss user. Lee, before I let you go again, three pairs of closing questions. The first is what is your very favorite team to root for besides Amplified Solutions or Follow Up Boss or what is the best team you've ever been a member of? So favorite team to root for. Best team you've ever been a member of.

You know, frankly from, from a memory perspective, without giving a specific example, I'd have to go back to like my band days because like that ironically that is A team. And it's unbelievable. But all the musical things that apply to what I do now, like right people, right seats, what's your role? Are you the drummer or are you the lead singer? Like, what's the thing? So I think for me, honestly, deeply, the answer has to be several different musical things. But like that creative, work hard, have a strategy, have a plan, have clear roles. Like, that's the most powerful unit I've been in that's really had that.

I've heard some version of a band. I think this is the third time and I've done like 60 plus episodes. But I love that one. And it absolutely does work, especially the other, like specific layer. And there is specialists at each position that are all required for the whole thing to work, which is the power of the team.

There's something really powerful about having a musical, like a classical musical background coming into this. And it is the idea that you have a role, you have to prepare, you have to know your stuff and then you have to show up and a whole group of people depends on you to know and do and be ready for your stuff. Applies in sports, dance, like any real estate, like any of those things. And I know this is supposed to be a rapid fire question, but I couldn't resist a minute to just. I love the idea of you do your thing, learn your craft, show up, add that to a group and just magical things happen.

Yeah, it's great. What Lee is one of your most frivolous purchases or what is a cheapskate habit that you hold onto even though you probably don't need to.

Oh man. You know, it's funny. I think that would actually apply to real estate tech, the frugality part of it. Like, as exciting as it all is and all that, I just know how easy it is to like 995 yourself to death. And it's just crazy and it's not worth it. And it's way harder to clean it up than to not do it in the first place.

It makes me think about the way we all buy television or entertainment programming these days. Like this $70 cable bill is terrible, right? Let me add six versions of 999.

To 1999, $30 later with like nine new logins. And you can't watch that on this screen, but someone else is watching on another screen. Like, yeah, right. That's a great example.

That's funny. Okay, when you are learning, growing and developing, what are you doing? What does that look like? Or when you're resting, relaxing and recharging what are you doing? What does that look like?

I do a fair amount of both. I do love to get away. I love to, like go camping, like just off the grid. I don't use my cell phone for work. Like, I got to, got to, got to be out. It really is the rest and recharge even internally with our staff. Like, people are like, oh, I'm going to check emails. I'm like, nope, you need to go away so you can come back strong. Same way that when we work with people, we teach them, like, you gotta pause. You gotta have a vacation policy. You gotta pause leads on people. You gotta, like, you gotta have a plan. This business is way too hard and it will absolutely eat you alive if you don't set aside time for dinner once a week or something just to recharge your soul. So I gotta stick with that one. Good call.

Unplugging. If someone's gotten to this point, they obviously want to check out in the description and check out that playlist, but anywhere else you would send people that want to learn more about you or the work that you do.

Yeah, I'm not hard to find. I mean, our website is amplified solutions.com. i know that's a long name, but with my musical history and the fact that we provide solutions for people, it's not too hard to remember. Not real active on social, but feel free to connect with me there. If I don't answer you or accept your request for five days, it's nothing personal. I'm maybe recharging and camping instead of checking Facebook, but. So any social platform is good to connect. Just know I'm not not going to be the fastest and I'm probably not going to like every single one of.

Your posts, but this has been a joy. I appreciate you, Lee. I hope you have a great afternoon and I hope you don't wait too long to find another opportunity to unplug.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I love what you're doing with this. I got to get caught up on all the episodes, but I'm such a fan of what you're doing, the value you guys provide and how great a job you do both preparing and executing the session. So thank you for having me on.

Thank you. Thanks for checking out this episode of Team OS. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up at realestateteamos.com.