Shaping Your Real Estate Tech Stack with Justin Benson | [Techtember] Ep 041

Do you ever feel like your technology is in part dictating how your team operates rather than the other way around? If so, you're in the right spot. This is our first episode in our Tech Timber series and I've got a fantastic guest for you. Justin Benson, CEO and founder of Bara Agency, a fractional chief technology officer agency as well as the brand new Shiloh AI. The most important question to ask and answer when you're evaluating your tech how to plan a technology budget, how to, how to add or change technology without disrupting your business. Ways to increase agent buy in and adoption of new tech. The three key pieces of tech that every agent, team and brokerage needs. All that and much more right now with Justin Benson 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.

Justin, thank you so much for coming onto Real Estate Team os. I'm so psyched to have you as the first guest in this Tech Timber series.

I can't believe you picked me. Of all of the people that you could have picked, you picked me. I feel so honored. That's, that's so awesome.

Yeah, I picked some, I picked, you know, a bunch of winners. It's going to be an awesome series but you know, you've obviously worked with and, and, or are currently working with like, I don't know, a couple dozen people who've been on the show like George Lawton and the Lawton team. Awesome group there. Chris Lindahl, Gary Ashton, Justin Havre, Kendall Bonner, Barry Jenkins, Daniel Dixon, Lori Reeder. Like I could go on. So like, you know, you've been inside the organizations, operations and specifically technology of a number of folks that we've been honored to have on the show. And so I'm curious to learn you've learned about them and their businesses. Generalized of course.

Yeah.

Because of the commitment you've made to it. But we're going to start, Justin, where we always do, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. When I offer that, what comes to mind.

Oh man, really great salespeople. At the end of the day, that's what matters the most in a sales organization. It's funny, I get asked that question a bunch, especially from teams that are younger in their trajectory of growing as teams. Right. They go, hey, hey, you're the tech guy. What kind of technology should I focus on like, how many deals a year are you doing right now? And they're like about 50. I was like, just get. Follow Boston. Stop there and go sell a bunch of houses. Please, like, don't. Do not complicate this. Because the technology is meant. Great sales organizations are built with really great sales teams and leads at the end of the day. Right. So let's, let's start there and get that bedrock in place. And when things feel really chaotic and out of control and you don't feel like you can scale it and you're hitting ceilings. Now we can introduce the technology because the technology helps support the sales organization, but it doesn't make the sales organization at the end of the day. The people do make the sales organization. So.

Yeah, I love that call out too. I mean, I, you know, obviously I don't know how much time you spend in. I'll just generally bucket them all together as the Facebook groups. But you know, so many, so many people are asking those questions. First of all, they're not asking them to professional and an expert like yourself. They're asking it to the world at large, which is already problematic. But then they're also asking me like, like the assumption is that what I'm missing is a better lead source or a piece of software or a subscription or something, when in fact what I'm missing is the habits and the skills I need to have conversations, create connection, and ultimately to create contracts.

Oh, you mean like the hard. The hard things to do? The non sexy things to do that are required to become masters at our skills? Yeah, those things. Unfortunately, there's no magic bullet anywhere. I wish there was a piece of technology that made my life easier, but ultimately it just kind of chalks up to me being a. Developing as a person and then helping develop the people that are around me at all times.

Yeah, good call. I want to dive into that for just a minute. I do not want anyone to miss the fact off the top of this. And then I promise we'll dive specifically into technology. Insights, advice, guidance, common problems and questions. You encounter technology at different stages of growth. And you just kind of gave us a tease to that earlier. Like early stage teams. How many houses are you selling? Cool. Go sell more houses. Um, you started a real estate team that sold thousands of homes. You've personally sold hundreds of homes yourself. And after a long, winding, wonderful road of life experiences and professional experiences, as a true entrepreneur, you eventually started a Bara agency solo. You were doing it all yourself and then built that team out. I'd love for you to share your journey and experience in the real estate space on the team side and on the sales side yourself and then transition that into bara.

Yeah, that makes sense. I usually start there with people to give them context. I was, I was a tech guy. I got a biochem degree, dropped out of med school, started a tech company. That's, that's what I did. Sold that, started another tech company. And the way I got into real estate was by accident, just like almost all of us, right? So I, I exited that company. The day that I exited, I was on my way to a brewery to go celebrate with some friends and I was just going to take the month off because I was getting married at the end of that month. I was going a honeymoon, figure out what I'm going to be all over again when I get home. And that day a friend of mine, John Glutch, called me and said, hey man, I know you're building that software for elementary schools. Ever think about building a real estate company? No, never in my wildest dreams. But like his daughters, my goddaughter and his father in law married my wife. They're real close. So I kind of said, I don't know, sounds fun and I like hanging out with you, so let's give it a go. So instead of taking the month off, I went and got a real estate license and came back and it was just him and I in our hoodies and board shorts just high fiving every. The phone rang and then we built that all the way to operating in three states and selling lots and lots of houses. And I think that's, that's how I got good at the technology side of this, right? Because I was the stressed out team leader. I did not know like the good thing is that I didn't know real estate that well as far as building teams and the format for it. So I naively just did what we did when tech from the tech world, right? If tools needed to exist in our organization, I built them. If integrations needed to exist in our integration, I built them and I shaped the technology to our way of doing things to help support and expedite kind of the dreams that we had for expansion as a company, right? And I somehow lived under a rock for, I don't know, 10 years thinking that the rest of the big teams were doing the same thing. And this whole bar agency thing happened actually on accident. It was at this retreat that Kyle Whissel and Dan Beer were doing out in Mexico for their like fast forward movement. Thing. And I was there literally at that time, I was actually just taking six months off. And everybody always asks, like, why did Justin, why did you stop building the big team? Me and some friends got signed to a record label. It's a story for a different time, but it was a once in a lifetime deal that I just went on that adventure for a few years, right? So after that, taking a few months off, I got an invite just to go hang out at that event. And I was, I was there and people were like, hey, is there anybody that does that thing that you were doing at the Glitch group? Like that, that thing. I'm like, what do you mean that thing? They couldn't even name the thing like that. It just, everything talked to each other and it worked perfectly and nothing ever broke. And like, can you just, can you do, can you do that thing for us? Like, I'll give you like 20% of our company's revenue. Like, just please come be my partner over here and do that. And I went, well here. I'm not going to go build another real estate team right now. And honestly, I feel like I'm probably going to get burnt out if I do that. So it's a disservice to you guys, but I've never heard of a fractional cto, chief Technology Officer, agency in my entire life. I've heard of fractional CFO and cmo. Like we got one of those in our industry, grant wise. Really great dude, and very, very smart. And I've never heard of fractional cto and there might be a really good reason for that actually. So let's try a 90 day trial with three people as Becky Garcia, Tina Call and John Glutch all Follow Boss users. And I said, hey, let's try it for 90 days. This thing could fall off the, like the wheels could fall off the bus here very fast. And I honestly don't know if I want to do this in 90 days. So if it doesn't work for either reason, we can high five and I'll stay friends because everybody was friends when we started it and they hired me to be their CTO for a fractional amount of time. And the reason for fractional is because like I wasn't spending full time doing that stuff when I was in a real estate team. Most of my time was spent on training agents, generating leads and selling houses. Right? Like it should be. The technology was like maybe 20 hours a month actually, you know, like it's not even a full time job. And to hire your Own CTO and your own developer. Geez, now you're staring down the barrel of at least 300 grand of salary and you don't even have 40 hours a week. So it's definitely always going to be a fractional position. And it worked. I mean, obviously we know the end of the story is that it worked and we raised a bit of funding, we scaled and we now have 16 incredible humans standing in as CTO for some of the top names that exist inside of real estate. So it's been a really fun adventure getting to see the different formats and the ways that people operate their businesses, because everybody assumes that real estate teams are all the same and actually that some of the foundational aspects are the same, but the minutiae of how they operate is wildly different from team to team.

So well done on covering a lot of ground in a concise manner that had a narrative arc to it and saving that other story for another day. I can't. Yeah, next time I see you in person, I want that story of committing to do a few years on a recording contract and how all that went. But a couple other things. One, agree. Just in the 60 plus episodes I've recorded of this show, it became very obvious very early on in this journey that there's no one right way to do anything in particular. And that's what's so delightful and probably daunting is that you can really do this business however you want. You know, whether that's I want to do it with six people or I want to do it with 60 people or 600 people. I've had all three of those levels. You know, in these conversations. By the way, you mentioned two more people who've been on the show. Becky Garcia and Grant Wise have both been on the show as well.

Becky's been on the show. Becky just actually like she just about a month ago she crossed into 20 years in real estate. So really she's an awesome human. I love her to death.

Absolutely. I got to do that one in person too. So that was a privilege. So you already did something I wanted to do which is kind of get into fractional, which essentially for anyone who's not familiar with hiring anything fractionally, it essentially means contracted out on a part time basis rather than hiring that role in full time cto, obviously, Chief Technology Officer. I think in most real estate organizations, the functional cto. First of all, my assumption is that there aren't any. I mean, do you know of any real estate organizations that have a dedicated CTO in house?

Your large brokerages like a ReMax or you know, those, those people. But real estate teams know the closest one that exists probably is like Scott Hulf or Gary Ashton as far as like a true blue cto, like coding stuff from the ground up for the Ashton organization. But no, that doesn't really exist because it's hard to find somebody that has that knowledge and real estate knowledge at the same time. And so, and if you go just try to hire a developer, like best of luck communicating to them.

So my observation is that the CTO role, because it is being performed at some level, it may be performed well or poorly. It doesn't, definitely doesn't carry that title. But my observation is that that typically falls on the CEO or the director of Ops or the VP of OPS in general. Like in my mind, in my experience talking team leaders and operators, the CTO is really that function or that challenge and that opportunity and that responsibility is absorbed by the operations leader, whoever that is. Would you say that that's about right?

That's right on. And we get a lot of, a lot of clients come to us when they've reached a certain juncture where like that director of operations or their zapier wizard that exists in their organization, kind of the keeper of systems in the organization, they have dreams of where it could go, but they've kind of reached the ceiling of what they're capable of doing right. And it's awesome because then we become a Swiss army knife for that person. We can actually build their dreams and make them come true for them. And it's a really cool kind of exchange because it's encouraging and inspiring and a pressure relief valve for them. And it's a lot of fun for us to kind of build these crazy edge cases all the time as a company. So you're right on there. That's, that's usually what ends up happening. And we end up coming in to not replace that person but actually compliment them because ultimately they're the one that's in the organization. They have organizational buy in relational rapport with everybody. We're just the crazy outside bar agency people, you know, just trying to help make the dreams come true.

Yeah, I don't want anyone watching or listening to Ms. The fact that you've now two or three times mentioned a fundamental truth about all of this that I want to echo throughout Tech Timber, which is the technology and the subscriptions and the solutions. Follow the dreams, the goals, the ambitions. You need that vision, you need that goal, you need that plan. The technology is just there to Support some aspect of it when you run out of bandwidth or capacity or ability. So one of the things I like about the term tech stack is that it takes all of these. And I bet you encounter this all the time. We'll get into that too. But these disparate tools and puts them all together and says, we have this arrangement, this organized, interconnected technology. I guess it was referred to as that thing you do on that team that you were on. I like that language because it suggests that we're being intentional, we're unifying it. It's a little bit more interconnected. It's a little bit more of a holistic approach. A. How do you take the term. This is very specific, but, like, how do you take the term tech stack? How commonly understood or even commonly used would you say it is in real estate? And what is its. What is the purpose of a good tech stack? Did I characterize it well?

Yeah, yeah, No, I get what you're going out there. I mean, I think every. Most people, even solo agents out there, I got lots of really great friends that are incredible solo agents. They all need some varying level of a tech stack to help support them. And it just varies from where you're. What you want to do as a team leader or a solo agent or whatever. Because the tech stack for somebody that wants to run a lean and mean small team looks crazy different than, like, a Lawton tech stack. Right. I've gotten calls from people that are like, oh, I want whatever Lawton is using over there. I want to use what they're using. I'm like, no, you don't. That's a terrible idea. Actually. That thing costs a lot of money to keep online every single month, and it's. It's absolutely overkill. I think it should probably grow with your dreams and way of doing things. And I think where people get stuck a lot of the times is not knowing how to assemble a tech stack in the first place. Like, FUB is obviously the commonality. Like, that's the center of the wheel as far as spokes are concerned. Like, it's the hub of the wheel, right? All of the data flows in and out of your CRM. Or at least that's how it should go anyways. Right? But after we get out of that, we get a lot of people confused about, man, what do I use for this or that or that? Or what's the best way of doing X, Y and Z? I'm not sure. And my very first question is, well, what's your SOP on That process, like what's your what? Like do you have it written down like your way of doing things there? Oh no, we don't like, okay, well that's step number one. Because picking technology is as easy as this. We get our, our SOPs written down on paper in front of us, our system, our process of doing things. And then the way we pick technology is we go look through the different options and see which one helps us accomplish that process in the most efficient manner that fits our budget. Right. Is sometimes there is one that could fit it in a more efficient manner, but it's just outside of the budget range right now. Right. So those two characteristics have to kind of come into play. But you're hunting in the dark until you actually know how you want to run that part of your business. Right. You're just guessing at stuff or believing what somebody said on stage. And that is not shaping technology to your way of doing business. That is just signing up for technology and then ending up shaping your business to the way that those technologies are telling you to operate. Right. So we don't want that to happen. But in order to get there, you have to do the non sexy work of writing that stuff down on paper or Excel spreadsheet or somewhere first. Right. So hopefully that clarifies kind of like how we go through that. And we have this whole discovery month period when people onboard with us to help expose all the low hanging fruit and kind of build a three to six month initial roadmap to get them initially where they want to go. But it all really starts at the core of like, do you actually have written down how you want each part of your business to operate?

It's really good because, because I mean, you're not even evaluating tech. Like what are you evaluating tech on if you haven't done that step? Right? Like, like how do you know does this do what I need or want it to do or. I think the most common thing is what you just said, which is, well, my buddy uses it and I like the way he runs his business, so I'm going to too. But you know, again, everyone does things a little bit differently and that's the privilege and the challenge of this business. You mentioned budget. I'd love to hear from you a little bit more on that. Like, I know that you can't answer this with well, someone like this should be at this spend, someone like that should be at that spend because there is so much variability. But just kind of ballpark, how should a solo agent, how should a small team let's just say small team is, you know, four to six agents with a couple assistants or admins or some kind of support around them. You know, that kind of mid sized team. How, how should they think about their budget? Do you think of it as a percentage of revenue? Do you think about spend what you need to get the job done in order to, you know, improve that SOP in some kind of a measurable, dramatic way? Like how should people think about setting a budget? And, or if you can, to the degree that you can wanna actually throw some numbers out. What are some of the types of budgets you've seen at different levels? Just to let people know, like, am I way underspending or like am I way overspending or like what kind of, what are you seeing in general? And kind of bucket it to the size of the operation to the degree that you can.

Yeah, that makes, I get. It's. That's a hard question to unwrap and I love that it is a hard one to unwrap. Right, you're right. Like getting down to a very specific number, that's it's just going to vary wildly from team to team and their temperance and their panels and the way that their teams are structured and how profitable they are and what lead sources they're even servicing. There's a lot that goes into this equation here, but I would say in a very simple way of looking at it, I'm an oversimplifier. It's what I am at heart. I get accused for being an oversimplifier all the time and that's fine, that's what I'll be for forever. But I really want to boil it down to like, how do we make this decision a little bit faster? And when people get on a call, even with bar agency, right. If I can tell that they're going to be really stressed out paying for us every month, I say like, this just isn't the good, this isn't the best time. You shouldn't be stressed out about paying for your cto. This should be like a fun, like, oh man, we get to unlock all these fun things. It's going to be cool, it's going to be adventurous. Right. I believe that technology also falls into that bucket as well. I don't think that real estate teams should spend so much money on technology that they are stressed out about trying to figure out how to pay for that bill on a monthly basis. They should be stressed out about how to pay for their agent training, for the really cool culture that they're Building for the fine touches that they're doing for the client gifts and the parties that they're throwing, the stuff that's going to actually build their real estate organization. And the technology, like I keep saying, is just a supporting function of that. And if it is a supporting function of it, yeah. Don't dedicate half your budget to a tech stack. That doesn't make sense. You're not a technology company. You know, your sales company, your relational business, most of your capital should go to that instead. Right? That with a caveat. Right. There are growth cycles for companies at the same time and we're okay with decreased margins as long as a growth plan is in order and the things that we are doing right now are helping us grow towards that. Right. Any company that's in growth mode is going to sacrifice their margin for a little while to grow to where they need to go, whether that's hiring more people or signing up for a specific technology that's going to help them generate more leads, whatever that looks like. I'm okay with them sacrificing their profit margins to a sort of uncomfortable degree if it's going to be momentary because there's a plan to be able to relieve, to alleviate that pressure down the road. But I don't want that pressure to sit with them as a team leader or organization for more than like a quarter. We should be able to figure out how to start alleviating that pressure within a quarter. Or this is just probably something that's not worth like stressing out about. We should put our attention and our energy somewhere else. So hopefully that answers it in a more like grandiose way as far as like costs at different levels. I mean, geez, man, that big, big, big teams are spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on technology stacks because they have hundreds of agents and more multiple locations and multiple states and things like that. And it makes sense because they need all this custom stuff to actually make that run. But that's an anomaly. That's the 1% of the real estate world. Right? These big massive team leaders that we see on stages and stuff, most of the world is sitting in, you know, somewhere closer to like maybe a 10 agent range, things like that. And honestly, you need a really great website, a way to generate leads and point people to. You need a CRM to service all of them through. And you need a way to track your transition, your transactions and monitor agents. And there's tools out there that exist where you probably don't need to get past three systems to actually Hit all of those points that I just mentioned there. Right. So I would say that would be a rubric for that size team is like if you're using 10 different systems on a day to day basis, maybe maybe look back and figure out how you can consolidate that. Because I bet there's a lot of of redundancy that's happening for you right now.

Yeah, you just introduced an area I wanted to go. And I'm going to ask you to restate yourself once to kind of kick off the response here. I would love for you to name those three categories again so that no one misses them. Like I'll get them because I'll watch this back and make all my own notes and it'll be in the write up that shows up in YouTube, in the podcast apps and on the website realestateteamos.com but I would love for you to say it again just so that people don't miss it. And where I'd like you to kind of layer in there is, you know, this idea of we have this imagination. We know that technology should be able to help us do it. We don't know how to do it. We'd love for you to come alongside us and help us bring this dream closer to a reality. But I think you just acknowledged in that last offering the challenge that most people have, no matter what type of organization they're running, which is if things are going well, you know, my phone's ringing. We already have files that are open. We have stuff happening. We have past clients we need to stay in touch with. We already have these 12 different subscriptions to these 12 different tools. I'd love for you to speak specifically to that person watching or listening who has those three categories. Again, say those off the top, those three categories covered and beyond. Or they have them like redundant. How should they go about kind of untangling this mess while they're still trying to run their business, while they're reliant at some level on, you know, these nine of these 12 different tools. Like if you know that you're not using three of them, it's easy just to turn them off. But they're probably all being used at some level. Like that's. I'd love for you to share some advice for someone who's like, I know I need to drop 25% of my tools or I know that I need to add something in this category and it needs to work with these other things. But it's all running, it's all flowing. I don't want to break anything. There's a lot here like how do I make sense of my Franken stack?

Yeah, so I mean those three categories again. And I'm for all the broker owners that are listening right now, I'm excluding the brokerage backends because I'm kind of just speaking the team side of things. Right. So of course if you're a broker, you have some broker compliance things and paying agents and all that stuff on the back end. Right. But on the team side of things, yeah, a website, some kind of digital presence that you can drive people to as a digital beautiful business card that represents your brand really well that people can come to and search for homes that goes directly into your CRM where you can manage those leads, follow up with them, track their transactions, kind of know who to follow up with at the right time. That's my favorite thing about follow up bosses, like the smart lists, like just telling you hey, that person was on the website right now. It's a great departure from the old time based way of following up with people. Like okay, new leads in our database from one to seven days we do this. That's the old way of doing things. Right. And then we need a way to coach our agents and track our transactions so we can automate the transaction management portion. Because when you scale an organization, that's the first part that actually bottlenecks is that whole transaction management section. Because the transaction managers happen to be one of the salaried positions inside of your organization. Then it comes to do I hire another one or what do I do? Is there technology that can help me with that? We'll see. What's your process for doing it again? I'm going to go back to that question, but I'll give away kind of this is bar agency's way of untangling that web. When we get a client in the very first month, so very first month for us is discovery month and nobody escapes it. So we sit down with the team and we build a big master mind map of all of their lead sources and all of their systems and where all of the data is flowing from thing to thing to thing. And we draw dotted lines and solid lines to sign it. Like signify whether things are automatic or it's manual entry or there's some human in the middle there. And then we also document their agent recruiting and onboarding and off boarding systems and build a huge picture that we can lay out in front of us to go, okay, let's look at this together. Is there anything here that looks redundant in the first place. Just right out of the gate. Oh yeah, man, that, that and that looks like that. That doesn't belong. Okay, great. Is there anything here that looks like it's like triple entry that shouldn't be triple entry? Oh my gosh, there's like seven places where that exists. Okay. And then we start creating that three to six month roadmap to get there. And I think that's where things get it dangerous for people is when they try to make too much change too fast in their technology systems because it will drive your organization nuts. And we get that question all the time. Bar agency. Like our average, our clients have us on retainer for 20 hours a month. Right. And I do get asked from time to time, like, can't you just like make all of that? Can I just pay you for like 100 hours this month and like, let's just get it all done in one month so we can go. I'm like, yep, sure, you could do that. But here's what will happen. You're going to change three core systems in your organization all at one time. It's going to be chaotic and then nobody's going to adopt it and this will all be for naught and it'll be a waste of money and you'll be worse off actually than if you would have just stayed on your older inefficient system. So is that what we want? No, that's not. So we need to create a game plan that is a digestible way for starting to swap out some of those systems that maybe we want to sunset and move into a different system. Or God forbid, it's like giant CRM transition. Like that's a really big one for an organization to move into that. Thankfully FUB is great and you don't have to move for forever if you're on follow up boss, which is great. So that's our way of doing it. That three to six month roadmap is taking those tools that you're right, the ones that we're just not using at all that we just forgot about. Great. Cancel the credit card on those. Let's just forget they existed. But the ones that are still in our organization from time to time, let's put that on the roadmap and create a transition plan for those and how we're going to transition and train the agents. Let's give that to everybody, to the organization for a month to get used to before we even dream about making another change. One change at a time, not multiple, just one at a time. And I, I know team leaders get, they're like, man, but it feels so slow. Is it really going to take six months to make this transition? I'm like, I know, I get it. I, I'm sorry that it's going to take that long. But I promise you that your organization is going to thank you and love you for this and this will go well if you just do one thing at a time. Don't try to do three.

Yeah, really good advice. I'd love for you to. You mentioned a couple times there the agent training. I'd love for you to speak to that a little bit like do's don'ts in a really broad kind of a sense. And then even more specifically, are there any aspects of the tools and tech that an agent is going to be using that they need to understand the why behind in general? You know, I think a lot of training is go here, do this, do that. Obviously some amount of why, especially in the transition, like why is this going to be better for you? How is this going to make you more money? Is the question I would be trying to answer as someone who is like leading this implementation. But you know, I think that's, I think besides the acute pain of making a switch versus the chronic pain of dealing with something subpart or substandard or not really meeting your needs, comes in a variety of formats. And I think that the idea that I need to train my agents, whether that's three agents or 300 agents, as part of that acute pain, I'd love for you to kind of relieve a little bit of that. Like what have you seen be successful do's don'ts and how deep do we need to bring the agents into how this is set up and why?

Yeah, that's a really great question. I mean, there's a simple start to that and it's where we start every single time, is we have to get team leader, whoever is the mascot inside of that organization that everybody loves and respects and is. Therefore, we need you to be on board first and be the greatest cheerleader of the shift. If you are absent from the process, then this isn't going to go well. Like, it's just not going to go well. We really need our team leader, our owner, our broker owner to really lead the charge on this and be vocal and repetitive about how great this is making their lives as they're starting to test these new tools and giving case studies their team. Look at this thing that just happened. Look at that thing that just happened. Getting people excited for it. And you're right. The why telling agents what is in it for me? Because at the end of the day, as a team leader, your job is to build successful agents and they're not going to want to make changes. If something's working for them right now and they're comfortable and they're happy, if they're going to make a change, they're going to need to know why they should disrupt their status quo right now that they're used to and they're comfortable with. Right. So that's going to start with you getting them very, very excited about it. After that, if you don't do that as well, like no one's showing up for training, like, good luck, they're just not going to show up to the meeting. You know, we got, we got to create a lot of excitement, incentive behind it. After that is happening, then yes, group trainings are very, very necessary. And we've facilitated a lot of those for our clients and helped them kind of formulate that and get ready for that. And it needs to happen repetitively. It cannot just happen once. It has to happen repetitively. It's going to feel like you're hitting the same old gong over and over and over again. But when everybody in the room starts rolling their eyes and making jokes about you talking about this thing over and over again, that's when you know you've done your job correctly. Yeah, they should want to like be, they should be texting other coworkers behind your back saying like, oh God, Justin just keeps saying that same, same thing over the. Fill out the form, fill out the form. You know, I want that to happen. That's great. Like our, our organization over here I've got a whole thing like read the documentation. Because developers used to come to my office and go, ah, Justin, I can't figure out. And I would just pull up the documentation, I would find it right away and I would just. People would march into my office and I'd go, did you read the documentation? Without them even saying anything. And then it became a joke at Bar Agency. But guess what happened? People started reading the documentation before they came to talk to me first. Right. So that repetitive nature of training, a new system is necessary. It's never a one and done thing. It's continuing education. And as more features continue to roll out, we need to continue to understand and implement and train and inform the organization on those things as well. But it is all predicated on like your formulation of the training is all your start is, hey, agent, this is why this is important for you. This is why this is going to be good for you. They do not care about the product. They don't care about what thing you're excited about. They care about what is in it for them. And that's us as human nature. Right. Apple's genius at advertising products that way. They don't even talk about their products. They just talk about the change that it's going to make for the person and then you just buy automatically. Right. So that's the way that you got to formulate your trainings and it has to be repetitive. So hopefully that answers the question.

Yeah, that's fantastic. One follow up here. What have you seen? And you may not even know because of the way that you're engaging these teams, but I know that you know a ton of these people socially as well. And knowing people socially sometimes means talking business. I would love for you to give, to the degree that you can, a recommendation to a team leader about. Because you just raised. It's not just about this one launch of this new tool that we're adding or this thing that we're switching. We used to do it this way, now we do it this way. And I'm with you 100% on. It's not a short game, it's a medium game. At a minimum, we need to say the same thing over and over again. You know that things are really clicking when people are saying it back to you, or better yet, making fun of you saying the things you've been saying. That's when you know that it's stuck. You're bored of it. You were bored of it 15 mentions ago. But it's just catching on inside the organization. But then you also introduce this new layer of. Yeah, these tools all evolve with you. So they are introducing new features and you're going to be changing some of the organization's workflows because this new feature now allows them this thing. That's my long setup to the question of if a team leader has X number of team meetings a month, what percentage of that time? Because we need to cover a lot of ground. We need like just the general housekeeping stuff. We need. Definitely need sales skills, sales training. We need to pat people on the back and bring up the leaderboard and all. We have a lot of different stuff to do in our team trainings. What amount of time do you think or do you know some of the teams you're working with are spending on tech training and tool training in particular?

Yeah, the best ones are doing it weekly. They're Talking about it weekly. They continue to bring up, they celebrate wins, that people have used the technology correctly. They continue to reinforce the positive traits that are happening there as well as they continue to do it in one to one coaching. So it's layered through everything, right. It's not just at some big mass team meeting because it also needs to get broken down. Like what's applicable for your sales agents is different than what's applicable for your ISA team is different than your transaction managers and your listing team. They're all going to utilize that technology differently. Right? So we do need to have dedicated times with the people that are responsible for that section of the organization to also kind of take the overarching thing that happened in the big team meeting and break it down into these individual departments and continue to train on that as well. Right. So I would say it's a weekly thing because if you are a team, technology is a core part of your organization and it is a big piece of you operating efficiently. I know, I don't. Again, I don't want to get back to like it's the main thing because it's not the main thing, but it is a thing that is constant and is required for teams to operate at the end of the day. So I short answer is just weekly, like constantly, all the time. It needs to be there and sign up for like I love getting follow up bosses update emails. I mean obviously I know about some of that stuff before it actually shows up in an email, but the I love getting those update emails because we go to our clients and like hey did you see this? Did you see the call recording? Did you see the transcription? And start getting them excited about it. So that way they go and train their teams about it and like prepare them. So we're even doing it from a bar agency level of constantly talking about it to our teams. So yeah, weekly for sure.

Totally separate topic. AI Good, bad and ugly. What excites you about it? What concerns you about it? What do team leaders and ops leaders need to know? Where should they be right now? Are you more excited about custom solutions that are artificially intelligent or are you more excited about AI being infused into all the tools and tech that we're already using? Give me a. Give me your go at AI.

I love it. So I spend a lot of time in this tank. Obviously. I'm also CEO of Shiloh AI Integrated and Fault Boss and lots of really cool people that we've mentioned on here using it on a day to day basis. But here's my take on AI, it is the invention of the Internet all over again. It's a technology that's proving that is hitting all of the kind of thresholds to be a world changing technology. Not in the way theoretically, like maybe bitcoin will replace money one day like that. That's still theoretical, right? AI right out of the gate started getting adopted. Very. Let's not forget that it as of like right now at this podcast. OpenAI has not even been chat. GPT hasn't been around for even two years yet. Just it's two months shy of being around for two years. And here's my analogy for it. CG new technology for industries is always scary. So when CGI came for the movie industry, CGI meaning like all the graphics effects and cool stuff that happens in movies present day, it showed up for the first time in a movie called Westworld 50 years ago. And it took 50 years for it to be adopted. But by 50 years later it's 80% of movies utilized CGI. And we thought that CGI was going to replace filmmakers. That was the fear when cgi, it's going to replace all these jobs people aren't going to. And that didn't happen actually the same amount of filmmakers are there. What actually happened was it allowed filmmakers to. To create things that were never possible before. But the implementation of CGI as we all know is the difference between a crappy lifetime movie versus a Oscar award winning blockbuster hit. Right? So if we compare that kind of like revolutionary technology in one industry to a more global technology like AI, that's going to kind of touch all aspects of our life. Let's just dial that down to realtors. So OpenAI came out, ChatGPT came out less than two years ago and currently the estimate is about 40% of real estate agents use it on a daily basis. 40% and it hasn't even been two years. The adoption rate of that is insane. It's way faster than Facebook. It is an incredible trajectory at how fast this technology is getting adopted. So it's here to stay. But is it going to replace real estate agents? No, it's not going to replace real estate agents.

It's.

It's going to empower real estate agents to do things that were never possible before. Just like cgi. But your implementation of it will be the difference between Lifetime movie or Oscar award winning blockbuster. So which one do you want in your organization? So take your time to trust the right people when it comes to implementing AI and using it and understanding it. It's not your job to understand it. Because at the end of the day, the industry is taking off so fast that even us that are living in that pit every day still can't keep up with it. But you should have people around you that you can trust that will keep you up to date and make sure that your organization is using the bleeding edge in the best way. And that's like ultimately why we built Shiloh. Not like as a plug or anything, but like we really desired. We saw these, we see all these cool use cases inside a bar agency that we're building day in and day out for people. And we went, man, it would be really cool to give all of this bleeding edge AI technology to the real estate world in a really cool, usable, beautiful way. And that's our trajectory of what we're doing. And I believe that it's here to stay and it's going to be do incredible stuff for real estate agents and make them more productive and make them more profitable if we can learn to adapt it in the correct ways.

So I love the analogy. I mean, no one would want to watch Avatar and the Marvel movies were the first thing that came to mind when you started talking about what you can do with cgi. Those movies would be either impossible to make or generally unwatchable without the evolution of that technology. And I don't know whether what the. It's not a 50 year timeline with regard to your vision here in real estate. But you know, to your point, I see it as being, allowing us to be more efficient with speed processing, memory oriented stuff so that we can spend more time connecting with, empathizing with serving other human beings. And that's the liberating effect and that is how we make more money. To your point, right off the top of this conversation, you know, it's not about the technology, it's about connecting with other people. And that's where that's. We're a sales organization built on relationships. Let's go do that in AI in.

Theory, let's take humans back to the human side of this thing and let the robots do what they do best. You know, like that's just the way. And like Fallout Boss rolling out AI features, I love it. Like, I think it's incredible. Like again, the transcription and the call summaries and action items, like all of that's incredible. And it's just the start for Follow Boss. I'm really excited to see where that goes. And as well Follow Boss, as a CRM company, you will have other companies that focus every day on AI and That's all that they do. Right. And the beautiful thing about Follow Boss's open, you know, AI and the ability to integrate multiple tools to it is that, yeah, you can take tools that are serving different use cases and integrate them into your way of doing things. So as far as like the difference between your current platforms rolling out AI features in them versus other AI tools showing up and doing that again, it's all going to go back to what's your process for doing this? And does this help you accomplish that process faster? Do not shine up for a shiny thing because it sounded cool and somebody else is using it. Please think long and hard before you subscribe to another thing. Right. But if it does, check all those boxes. Great. That's awesome. And I think that there will be a depth that comes with that over the next five years. I mean, you nailed it. It's not going to take five, 50 years. I think the landscape is going to change pretty drastically as far as tools in the next five years. Right. In five years might even be an overestimate. I don't even know how fast this hockey stick of AI is actually going to go. I'm just trying to hold on to the rocket ship as best as I can. So I'm excited to see what happens. I do not have a doomsday view of AI. Yeah. Should we not give it to like weapons and stuff? Like probably not. Like let's those larger concerns about artificial intelligence and hacking and things like that. Right. But as far as a realtor or team leader's day to day life, I'm excited. I'm not scared of it. I'm very, very excited.

Cool. I'm with you on that. I'm a little bit more hedged, but it's because I don't have as much exposure to it obviously as you do as someone building an AI company. Okay. And I think that exposure is what, by the way, that familiarity. That exposure is what brings it down to earth and makes us much more comfortable with it as it is with any other human being in our life. One more zone I want to go into with you in kind of two topic categories and I'll only ask one this time first. I'll ask the other one after that. It's this. You mentioned the word, you know, trust. And I think especially around technology, it's a challenge for a lot of people. Where do I turn? You know, how do I know that this person knows what they're talking about? Can I trust this person's insight, advice, guidance, model framework, etcetera how do you know when someone really knows their stuff? Whether you're hiring them for Bara or you know, if it's a. Let's just say it's a team leader that's watching or listening who is at a point where they want to hire an operations person specifically around technology. How do you know when someone knows their stuff? How do you know when you can trust someone's approach and you're not just getting talk that you don't super understand but it's because you're not familiar with the language. Like how do you not get taken advantage of? How do you know when someone knows they're stuff?

Yeah, I mean at the end of the day, if you're trusting outside sources outside of your organization, like my old, my dad used to say it all the time, just like, follow the money, make sure that the money. Like there are situations where people are incentivized to say certain things. Right. That's the reality of our world. It's marketing, it's all of that. It's neither good nor bad, but it is a real reality. Right. So I want to preface it with that Bara, like on purpose. We have had lots of tech companies offer us affiliate fee like agreements and things like that and we've said no to all of them because we want, we want to be Switzerland. We want to just be able to suggest the correct tool for the correct use case here, right. And not be incentivized to offer a square peg to a round hole just because we're going to make money on the backside of it. Right? But when it comes to actually hiring that person internally, there's nothing better than history. Right? Like at Bar Agency, all of our CTOs that serve inside of organizations because it's not Bar Agency the cto, it's a person, it's a, it's Jamie, it's, it's Josh, it's Taylor, it's. It's one of, It's a person that serves in that spot. They all came from real estate. There's nothing better than history. Russians before they showed up at Bar Agency because that's very hard to try to have organizations because it's not Bar Agency, the cto, it's a person. It's, it's Jamie, it's, it's Josh, it's Taylor, it's, it's one of, it's a person that serves in that spot. They all came from real estate and demonstrated proficiency in real estate operations before they showed up at Bar Agency because that's very hard to train, how do real estate teams work, how do they operate, how do you communicate with agents, how do you communicate with TCs? Knowing the personality types, knowing how all of that operates, we can actually train tech way faster than we can train that skill set. We learn that, that very early on. So I would say that like a trajectory and a success record, if you are going to be hiring that skill from a real estate related field would be the first and foremost thing that I would be looking for. And that's what we look for. If I am going to grow somebody green from the ground up, then I'm looking for a history and success record in technology in general and either past jobs or even for developers, right? When we hire developers, developers, I do not care about their resumes, not even a little bit. Like why do all of the best engineers get into engineering? Because they want to build cool stuff, right? So I don't care what they got forced to build at school or by their job or whatever the heck they. My first question to them is like cool. So like I put the resume to the side and go, so what, what have you built? Like tell me about some of the projects that you're working on and what's fun and like what you're interested in and like what you're doing exploring right now. And if they say nothing, great, we're done here. Actually, you know, I want to hire the person that got into this because they love it, because they enjoy it, they keep doing it. When they go home at nighttime, they obsess about it. So if you're going to hire somebody in that tech seat, they better really love technology and nerd about out about it and probably use a team leader or a COO or whatever might have to fight them sometimes and say like ah, that maybe that thing is not necessary actually. But you don't want to like, you don't want to tamp down that flame, right? Because with all that energy they're using their time and expertise and knowledge to go find all of these new things that could be beneficial to the organization. And it's their job to bring it to you for review and audit to understand whether or not that fits our systems and processes. And in due time as they grow into that spot again because we're about talking, talking about a somebody I'm growing from the ground up, right? As they learn the process and how real estate works and how teams work and how your organization works, they'll be able to make some of those judgment calls as time goes on, but they will not Be able to do that right out of the gate.

I appreciate the call out to the ground up person. I've heard that story so many times in my seat here as host of these conversations of people. Just the skills just keep unlocking. It becomes emergent. The passion emerges in the person, therefore the, the competence and eventually expertise emerges from that person and it's identifying the potential for that and nurturing it enough to see if it's going to start blooming and then just let it run the other side.

You know, just to preface that really quick like that. Yeah, we know like when you hire an A player, you know it right away that you don't have to second guess it. When you hire an A player, even if they don't know what they're supposed to do today, they will find something productive to do and you'll be pleasantly surprised with like, whoa, that's pretty cool. Yeah, good job on that. That's awesome. Like you went through all of our documentation and read all of the sales manuals. Like great.

Yes. Cool.

You know, there's a, there's initiative in an A player and that's the thing that you can't train for. You have to look for that deal. And especially when it comes to technology, you need that. If you don't understand it yourself, you need somebody that you can trust in that spot.

Yeah, especially when you're surrounded by entrepreneurs. I mean that real estate team is largely a team full of entrepreneurs. Even though they're all working together in a uni.

A lot of yes. People. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like that initiative, I think is a key characteristic. No one's going to tell you what to do. I mean, they'll give you some advice or they're available to help. But you know, this idea of designing and implementing your own solutions to the problems and opportunities in front of you is, is to me absolutely characteristic of the A player. I guess for the sake of time, just rip through a couple that are just off the top of your head. For someone who has enjoyed this conversation, they're going to check out some more of these tech timber episodes. What are some of the sources you trust to keep up with real estate tech? Which someone be subscribed to or watching or listening to or reading? What are a couple like when you want to stay on the edge or when you're talking with other people? Like, oh, you want to invest a little bit more time and energy into learning and understanding what's going on. Where do you point people?

Yeah, this leads me to, we should probably create Something as bar agency to help do this for people. But my. I'm not saying this because I'm just on a FUB podcast, but Follow Up Boss is like the I forget it's Friday roundup or whatever that email is. Does a incredible job at continuing to promote not just FUB things things, but also things that are happening in the industry and things that will be useful and webinars that of new technologies that are showing up and stuff like that. That's honestly one of my favorite ones to pay attention to because it's really well done and it's very, very information rich. So it's one of those newsletters that I don't just like throw aside whenever I see it. Like everything else outside of that, what I like to do is I actually don't follow many real estate companies companies around that often. I actually like on Twitter or X now. You know, like just like the rest of the tech community, I follow the bigger companies. I follow zapier, I follow OpenAI, I follow the people that are kind of creating the technologies at the top. And I get notified every time they post things because that's actually where they're posting a majority of their updates and their announcements and things like that. And I'm constantly on there being fed with like the newest and best thing that like Anthropic, which is another big AI model is doing or perplexity or whatever that is. So that's honestly my preferred route to gather information is getting it directly from the source and following them on X. Because I learn a new thing every single day being on there. And again, you can follow all of the big companies if you want to. And not just that, but like service based companies, you can follow them because for some reason Twitter slash X. It's so weird that I still feel like I have to say Twitter, but I know if I say, I feel like if I say X people are gonna be like, huh, what's that? But yeah, for some reason it still seems to be the place that like a lot of these companies are talking about their newest and greatest things. So I would definitely do that as well.

Good call. I shouldn't have even narrowed it to real estate tech. I feel like my, the farther I go into these real estate team conversations, the more they're building organizations that don't look like anything like a real estate organization from a decade or a half a century ago. And our technologies the same way.

Yeah, being interdisciplinary in your sources from where you're getting information is very, very important because then you can Synthesize the best of for your organization, not just the things that exist inside of your bubble of a industry. Right. There's things that people are doing outside that I love and it's genius and it's incredible and can be applied to real estate in really strategic ways.

Justin, this has been an absolute pleasure. I'm so glad to kick the series off with you. Thank you for doing it. Before I let you go, I've got three pairs of closing questions and you only have to answer one or the other. The first one is, what is your very favorite team to root for besides bar agency? Or what is the best team you've ever been a member of besides your own agency?

Oh, man. Well, I'm like a golf nut and there's not really teams in that world. Right. But like, like, if I'm going to say sports team, definitely the Diamondbacks because I'm a big underdog fan. Anytime that I can root for an underdog, I love it because I'd really love seeing like the person that was not expected to dominate or win in that situation actually show their potential when the, like, the light is on them and step into their own. Seeing those stories, like, gets me every single time. So anytime I can root for an underdog, I'm in. And well, thank God Arizona Sports is nothing but underdogs at all times. So, yeah, I have that to root for all the time. Right. So when it comes to real estate teams and stuff like that as well, like, I love seeing young, ambitious teams that want to grow and have really great vision for the future, but are maybe five or five years behind, maybe these big giant teams that are in the industry right now. And I love seeing them continue to win and continue to grow. And I love rooting for that underdog, like undercurrent that's happening in the industry right now. So I think it brings more innovation, it brings more competition, it brings more of the stuff that makes the end user consumer experience better. At the end of the day, when more underdogs continue to win and challenge the status quo, things just get better in the world. Right. So if I was going to generalize it, it's more of a philosophical answer to it. That's the, that's who I would root for.

That's really good. I was just going to say I am with you 100% on that philosophy. I am glad you see it the same way. It's like it, it. I think it's natural in us at some level to, to be excited about the underdog for A variety of reasons. One of the things I really enjoy about it is watching that team realize what they always knew was inside, but has never been played out in real life. And like, watching that come to life in their own own discovery and joy in that process is, is, is a wonder to behold. And I think there's something inherently attractive about it.

Yeah, but it's. I. This my favorite. Like watching in individual sports, like tennis and golf and things like that. You see somebody break through and win for the first time and they just crumble in tears. Right? Like, you get to see the excitement and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the sacrifice that got them where they wanted to get. And they finally saw it for real for the first time in their lives, you know, and that doesn't just happen in sports, that happens in business as well. Because, dear God, the amount of times that my wife has heard me come home and say, I'm done, I'm gonna go get a real job now, is, I don't know, every other day, honestly, you know, so when you, when you see that happen for people, you can't help but root for it.

Yeah, really good. What is one of your most frivolous purchases or what is a cheapskate habit you hold onto even though you probably don't need to?

Oh, geez. All right, Cheapscape is closed. Dude. I live in these bar agency shirts, not because I'm trying to promote bar agency, but because I have just seven of them in my closet and I refuse to buy new clothes for myself until I have some event to get ready for. And that forces me to go buy new clothes. And I don't know why, because, yeah, I'll go ahead and turn around and buy a brand new motorcycle just fine, you know, but I won't go buy a $50 pair of shorts or something for myself. So I've got like a really weird disconnect with that. But most frivolous purchase probably had to be like chartering a jet. That was, that was the most obnoxious thing for an absolute waste of money. Just to check off a bucket list thing that I've probably ever done in my entire life. And it went against all of my financial standards that I hold my life. But I was challenged by some mentors to just do something that I wanted to do that was absolutely selfish. So there it is. Chartered a jet.

There's a 10 minute set of follow up questions in that alone, but we don't have time for it today. How do you invest your time and attention in resting, relaxing and recharging, or into learning, growing and developing. When you're doing either of those things, resting, relaxing, recharging or learning, growing and developing, what are you doing? What does that look like?

Dude, I love that question. That's the journey I'm constantly on. For those that like, know the enneagram thing, my like tri type is 7, 8, 3, which means there's no chill in me at all. Like I'm just always go at all times and it's a real struggle. 8 and 3, 7, 8 and 3. So I'm a 7. But then like my tri type is 8 and 3. So it's just all like 7 adventurer, 8, challenger, 3 performer. You know, it's all outward energy, focus. And it's been a real challenge of mine. I had a. I hired a mental performance coach for this specific area of my life. And the first thing she did was she said, you don't work 40 hours a week, you work 30 hours a week. We're going to subtract 10 hours out of your schedule. And I'm like, this is. Seems counterintuitive. This is not what I hired you to do. This makes no sense to me actually. She's like, I need you to trust me. So we cut 10 hours out of my life, of my work week, to where I could just be Justin and just do whatever I wanted to do. And that's. That kind of freedom was actually super helpful for me because I had built such a structured schedule that was not conducive for me being the creative person that I actually am. So for me, when I'm resting, I'm actually forcing myself to do something that feels unproductive to me. Like, yeah, like I'm. I love golfing, but I honestly feel guilty every time I do it because I'm like, geez, man, this is four and a half, five hours of time that I could have been improving these AI models or like hanging out with my kids or hanging out with my wife, or doing something for the team. Like, this feels selfish of me to do this in the midst of it. But the more that I do it and the more that I prioritize that rest for my personality type specifically, the better I actually am able to show up for everybody else around me. And the continued learning thing, I'm a learn by doing person. I'm the person that goes, I wonder if that's possible. And then I start trying it, and then I gather all the information that I need along the way to learn it and do that. But I am a huge biography nut because I am a big. A lot of the most successful people that I know are also very big biography nuts. And there's a podcast called Founders that I love by David Senra. And. And it's incredible. He distills all these biographies down to like two three hour podcast episodes. And learning from the cautionary tales and successes of other great people that have existed before us actually seems to be my best way of learning to predict the future of where the world and where my life might go and all of those things. Because there's nothing new under the sun and history is doomed to repeat itself. Right? So learning. It's funny, you just read a biography from like 50 years ago and you're like, whoa, that same thing is happening again right now. That's crazy. I thought this was a once in a lifetime thing that's happening in our world. Nope, it actually has happened again. We just forgot about it already. So biographies is my main source of learning.

That's awesome. I appreciate that so much. Especially the idea that we think that today is the thing. We think that the thing in front of us is the thing, but the thing in front of us is just an iteration of a thing that existed 100 years ago and in many cases a thousand years ago. And understanding it from a more foundational or principled approach, problem framework, potential solutions, is absolutely laid out in biographies. It's such a smart approach and it also serves this kind of interdisciplinary thing that we talked about a little bit earlier. You're awesome. I appreciate you doing this.

Thanks, man.

If someone wants to learn more about what you're up to, obviously, but where else would you send people to follow up on this conversation?

Oh, man. Well, I mean, Follow Up Boss is the title sponsor of the podcast that me and George Lawton and Lindsey Fricks are doing, sponsored by state media. And you can learn a lot about us over there because we're interviewing some really cool people and like unraveling their life stories in a really unique way. So you can go to the Inspection Period podcast and follow us there and kind of do that. If you want to learn more about the AI stuff that we're up to. It's Shiloh AI. And if you want to follow me personally, Instagram is probably the way to do it. But you're just going to see pictures of me and my children and my family and my dogs, and probably nothing about technology other than some stories every now and again. So if you just want to follow me as a friend, that's where it's at, but that is not the place to go to learn more about technology and what we're doing day in and day out as far as our day jobs are concerned.

Cool. All that stuff is linked up down below. Whether you're watching YouTube, listening to Apple podcasts or Spotify, or checking it out@realestateteamos.com where you can watch or listen to every single episode. Those links are right down below. Justin, thank you again so much. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Thanks man. This was really, really, really fun. You're a very great interviewer, man. So thanks for having me on the call.

Appreciate that feedback.

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