Transaction Coordination and Your Tech Stack with Lisa Vo | Ep 044

You can add a ton of speed and efficiency to your real estate business with technology solutions, obviously, but you need to make them work together. The good news is there are low code and no code ways to do this. You don't need to be a programmer, you don't need to be a software developer. You can do this on your own and to lower that barrier to welcome you into this conversation to get specific tool recommendations, I have a great Tech Timber episode right now for you with Lisa Vo. Lisa does transaction coordination in multiple states for clients of Hoozy AI. She does follow up boss consulting and she does operations coaching for a handful of teams. In this conversation, of course, she takes us deep into transaction coordination, sharing how to make the function better and what tools and technology we need at various stages of team development.

She also shares some really fun stuff around how to know if you have.

Too much tech or too little tech and what to do in each of those cases. Specifically, specifically how to undo untangle that Franken stack of technology that you may.

Have if you have too many tech tools.

This is a great conversation, a helpful conversation, a tech Timber conversation. Check this one out. Featuring Lisa Vo 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 Bute.

Lisa, thank you so much for joining me. I'm super excited to have you in particular as part of this Tech Timber series because you have such a depth of passion and expertise in this zone. So I'm just really excited to have you on the show.

I'm so excited to be here. I always watch Team OS on my drive or whenever I have free time. So super excited to be here to help share and just partake in it.

I always love having a viewer or listener on the show as a guest, so I appreciate you investing your time and I'm glad it's useful to you. So you probably know this question is coming then, which is what is a must have characteristic of a high performing team?

I think definitely flexibility. In our industry, things changes all the time. So there's not one set standard way of doing things. It never goes how you expect it to. So being flexible, not getting your emotions involved and just knowing that hey, it's going to work out at the end of the day.

Talk a little bit about that tension. I mean obviously one of the things that's required to build an efficient and successful business and Certainly one that has the ability to be scaled is some of that standardization and standard operating procedures. Standards are what allow us to be efficient and scale, but they also, you know, in certain instances we may need to violate them or it's okay to deviate. Like that seems like attention to me.

It is just a person who writes a lot of operations, SOPs, things like that. There are things that, by the book, that we should be doing in an ideal unicorn, perfect transaction. Then we have this other really long SOP of when things go south.

When.

We deviate from that path. What are the scenarios? If you ever do conditional logic, if you ever build things and make what that has a route and a workflow, hey, it could go one of two ways. If this, then that. If this, then that. So building that into our SOPs has been like the hardest because you've got to think of every fire, every wall, and then train somebody what to do to respond to that. Right. Like, you don't really know what to do in a fire until you're in a fire. Right. I don't have a fire extinguisher. I didn't know that there was an expiration date on it. Right. So those are just things I think people don't really know. But every single time we have a use case, an instant something happens, we document it. Having team meetings and talking about this happened to us at one time or this happened to us yesterday. How do we prevent that from happening in the future? And then work your way backwards from there.

Really well done. I also like that you introduce this idea that there's sometimes a gap between the theoretical and the real or the experienced. And, you know, we can teach people in theory, but it's not until they actually face the thing that they really understand. Oh, yeah, I'm really gl. I have some preparation for this. And hopefully it's not the kitchen or the house on fire. Okay, so you've been on a mega team, like one of the top teams in Texas. You've been a solo agent, you've been an operations leader. You've helped agents and teams of all kinds with their tech stacks. I would love for you to do two things. A stitch these together into a timeline and story. Give us a little bit of your background, you know, over the past, I think, dozen plus years in real estate and then kind of as a subtopic there. How many of those things are you actually doing today? Because you strike me as a very dynamic person who's involved in a number of things.

Oh, that's so sweet. Thank you so much. So, yeah, my real estate journey has been about 13 years. I transitioned from hospitality hotel management that kind of naturally guided me into real estate. But a really good friend of mine, Alex Resende in Houston, he brought me into the real estate world, said, hey, I'm drowning, I need an admin. And he knew my spiritual gift was administration. And so he has solicited me for many years. I had turned him down with when I had an opportunity, I said, I'm ready to get into real estate. Knew nothing about it. Became a real estate office assistant and just kind of had him guide me through the whole process and was building operations along the way because I was learning the process. And so I was their right hand person for many, many years. Became an office manager, got my license a year afterwards just because I read, write, speak Vietnamese and they needed a Vietnamese person to do real estate transactions for the team. And so kind of was doing transactions just on my own with some, you know, of my spe. I never did lead gen. I still don't do Legion until today. All of mine are word of mouth referral. So that's how I got in production as well as like managing an office and a team. And so I found Follow Boss along the way. Very early on, I think it was 2015, one of my agents had brought it to us and said, hey, I really like the CRM. It's really helped me keep organized and we think we can use it for the team. So we did use it for a while. We felt like agents weren't using it as the best of their ability. So then we took it away for about six months and then we had agents screaming and crying saying we want Follow Up Boss back. So that was the only time in my life I left Follow Up Boss for a short six month period, came back and never looked back since then. But going along the journey, I went from the mega team after 10 years being with them to working with smaller teams throughout the Texas market. Migrated to Denver after I got married about three years ago. Had a couple babies in between. And so I was just in between real estate and trying to figure out what to do. One day Alaina just messaged me on Facebook and said, hey, we think you know some things about deals. Would you like to do Bosses in Action webinar? So I did about three years ago and kind of launched me into this real estate tech space where I became like a approved consultant. And so that's kind of, kind of what I do now. I consult agents about their tech stack. What to use specifically for Follow Boss, specifically about foreign transaction management. Because that's more. My heartbeat is. And then so yeah, so I, as of today, I am a transaction coordinator for four to five different states with Hoozy. They are AI prop tech company coming up and they use, you know, a lot of different tools. Follow Up Boss is one of them as, as well as like open and close, a couple of tools that we use. And I do that on a daily. I do my consulting with Follow Up Boss still on, you know, a side project kind of thing. And I'm also coaching operations for a couple of teams as well.

Awesome. And you're a mom.

Yes, I am a mom.

That's a lot. That's fantastic. I mean, obviously you had a bias toward or a default toward or an appreciation or leaning toward operations, transaction coordination, deals. When and how did that bleed and blend into tech? What I want to kind of like start moving the conversation into a little bit is what role did tech play in this shift for you and in general for, you know, the agent and team community?

Yeah, it was almost from day one just being in administration and that was kind of like office management was my thing. I needed to always stay organized, even my personal life. So from early on, adopting Google sheets and moving that from like paper files in real estate to just, you know, digital online, Google Drive, we've always used that, you know, from the beginning. And so just transitioning a lot of agents over to that. Like, hey, what if there is a fire, right? And you lose all your files, right? Or you're halfway across, you know, the, the city and you got to get to one of your files and it's sitting on your desk, right? So having that collaboration real time, I update something, my agents see it, my broker, my rainmaker sees it. Having that collaboration tool, Google Drive and Dropbox has really brought like collaboration to that. And it kind of just keeps building from there. Right. That's how I knew Follow Up Boss was really like the best for us. Because anytime I could update anything in there, emails would be real time coming over. I don't have to say, hey, Ethan, can you pull on the side of the road and forward me that email? Because I don't have access to it or I'm locked out. Right. Having that real time collaboration was just really, really crucial. So that turned operations into, hey, I need at any time, at any point, at 2 in the morning, my agent needs something. How do I get them the quickest? And using tech into real estate just makes the whole process faster.

So when you're talking with an agent or a team about their tech stack. What kind of questions are you asking? What are you looking for? We'll kind of make maybe move into common problems that you see here too. But like you know, when you're sizing up what's going on, like someone engages you, they have a question. I assume that you probably look at the thing as a whole not just like you know, you get a question about this one thing but you obviously have been involved enough to know that it's probably not just this one thing, it's involved bigger for. For someone who's like is my tech in a good place right now? How do you kind of size that up scope it kind of. What questions are you asking? What level do you. I assume you start high but like what are you looking for when you're looking to say do these people have the right stuff set up about the right way to do what they want to do? Yeah.

So usually I start off with my consultation calls like tell me how long you've been a follow up boss user and tell me what your pain points are. Those are usually the very basic questions I start off with. First of all how long they've been using it tells me how much they may or may not know about follow up boss. What features are available? If they're a long term user, maybe they haven't fully utilized follow up boss. And that's what I hear a lot is like I've had it but I don't think I'm using it to my fullest capacity. Right. Somebody brand new may not know all the features like custom fields, automations, things like that. So having that second question of what is your pain point? What would you like me to solve today? And you're right, it's almost like a band aid kind of peeling back the onion. Like what is it that's really deeply rooted into your operations and that's where we usually end up is like I'm Talking about within 15, 20 minutes what your full operations is, what your setup of your team, what your makeup or your DNA is. Is it you by your solo agent wearing all the hats? Are you bringing on a virtual assistant pret soon or do you have 20 virtual assistants and 100 person team and you're just trying to get better, organized and maybe like look at cost. Right Budget for your tech stack? Do I really need everything? I usually have one or the other. Either somebody doesn't use tech enough or somebody uses tech too much that has way too much and maybe needs some trimming done. So really look at how everything's organized. I usually like to do blueprint for them. So I will take their follow up boss. Usually if they hire my services, they, they get a Google sheet. I organize what stages they use, what deal stages they use, what email templates. And at any time where you're trying to reorganize and restructure your follow up boss, you'll have that be to be able to get back to you and take a look at that. But yeah, usually those two are the main things that will get me under the hood of somebody's operations.

Cool.

I would love for you to give advice to those two people. First of all, describe them so people can say, oh yeah, that is me. I thought that might be me, but it is me I would love for you to talk to in either order. You prefer the person with too little tech. What are some of the characteristics? What are some of like what are they suffering? What are they experiencing because they have too little tech and maybe what steps can they take moving forward? Then on the other side, people have too much tech. How did they get there and what benefit? Like what's their process for kind of pruning and thinning? So take those in either or you prefer. But I'd love for you to kind of give some, you know, diagnose this person or allow them to self diagnose and then maybe give them some advice to start moving in the right direction. Yeah.

So for the person with the low tech, right. Because that's usually most of our friends and family specifically in my world. But they're just like, I can't remember if I have an appointment on Thursday or oh man, I missed this meeting that was really important and I had written it down. Those are usually the commonalities that I see that they are just losing track of things. It's all in their head and they probably have an incredible brain. But at some point you've got to lose something to gain something to put that input in. So not having to remember where you put that, or not relying on one person to have that one source of truth, you'll need to be able to delegate that to other people. So if you imagine if I were to take Ethan out and you're gone for three months, you went on vacation, right. And I got to take over your business and run the way exactly the way you want it operated, or even that 60% operations. Right. I need to be able to pick your brain and say this is how Ethan would do it. Right. Or hey, these are the Notes that Ethan had from the listing appointment or from that conversation he had. So one, the dialer, the recording, everything inside Follow Boss, all the features that are automatically there that come in day one from your account is automatically going to be so much more helpful, right? I no longer have to pull to the side of the road. I don't have to take notes, I just have to remember, hey, I set aside 7 to 8pm I'm going to go through my Follow Boss, listen back to all my phone calls and then now with the AI call summaries they'll be able to do so, right? And pull out those summaries and say hey, these are my next tasks based off of this phone call. Right? So that alone would just help with just those who are low tech that don't have anything. Use the feature side Follow Boss. It's there for you. I pay for the dialer myself as an add on. So if you're lucky enough to have one of those included plans that have it, utilize it. I cannot stress that enough. So I no longer use my cell phone number. I don't give it to anyone except for my family. Sometimes my family doesn't even get my personal number, they get my follow up boss number. So I would ingrain to people user dial or number use the emails connected all to follow up boss. Flip side, someone who has too much tech. Probably I'm more on that side of things just because I research so much. It may be convoluted, it may be too complex, right? And nothing connects and syncs together. So I've become more like an automations expert where I use zapier or I use use make.com or even like web hooks. Now I really dove deep into the Fallout Boss API documentation. If you don't want to know what it is, find somebody who does and talk to somebody about API documentation. But definitely like just connecting things very easily. Like hey, I have a new email that came in and I want that to go to my Google Sheets because that's where I'm tracking all of my incoming email. Right? You can very easily connect those two together. But sometimes we have Google Sheets, we have Excel, we have a SmartSuite, we have Airtable, we have 10 different places that we're storing things but nothing's connecting together. We don't know why we have that information, we don't know what we're going to do with that information and we don't know who's checking up on that information. Is it valid? Is it invalid? Right? Did somebody put in a Test dummy account in my follow up boss and now my data is skewed. Right. So having too much is tech is one, a problem because you don't know where all your workflow is and you can't expect somebody else to come in behind you and understand all of that tech stack and how it works. Two, probably the biggest thing is financial. Like if you take a look at your credit card bill or your debit card bill, you can take a look at your bank account and just see, wow, how much am I really paying for these things that I'm actually not using on a day to day? That's usually where my first conversation starts with people who have too much tech. Like I'm spending too much and I don't know if it's really useful or not.

Okay. So I know that there's someone who's like, oh yeah, I did that a couple of months ago. I didn't actually make any decisions on it, but there were a couple 999s. There was a 1799, there were a bunch of 4999s, there was a 79.99, there's a 129.99 for that person. So you know, they're, they obviously are running a business. They're obviously doing well enough or have aspirations to do better such that they're investing in the business. Some of that investment is going into new and technologies. We've all agreed now and I'm sure this person who's watching or listening is like, yeah, that is me. Understands that they have a situation that they need to improve. But this is also one of those flying the plane while we're trying to fix it, or driving the car while we're trying to fix the engine situations. They're actually running a business that's healthy enough or has strong enough aspirations to be investing in it. How do we get into this? Let's just say to, to characterize it very negatively, like monstrosity that we've built. How do we start figuring out what to pull out and what to leave in while we're still trying to operate this business that's built on this tech stack. Like how do, how do we do that?

Yeah, I would start by listing out. I usually start just with Google sheets, like all the tech stack that they have. Right. Regardless of how much they're spending and things like that. And I'm usually asking what are we using this for? And if they can't respond what it's for and what the purpose is, it's probably the first thing to go, right? Because I'm very guilty of this. I am on appsumo. My husband probably shouldn't look at my credit card bill and how much I spend on that. But I'm always trying the newest things like I have calendly and I have tidy Cow. Do I really need both or can I look for a low code, no code free solution? Right? So if a lot of people don't know, you can use Google appointment slots, right, to build out one on one appointments and doesn't have full complexity like some of these calendly apps and stuff, but you can totally make that switch. And so having someone that can come in as a consultant or take a look at it, I know me, Alaina, quite a few of my other mastermind friends out there, they do free systems analysis, tech stack analysis and we'll just go through and like, hey, like do you really need this? Yes or no. And then here's an alternative that you could possibly use that you don't have to pay for. And then when you feel like, oh, I hit my limit, I need more settings, more advanced features, then go into a paid account. But I usually start with a free seven day trial. If it doesn't entice me enough to like put in my credit card to want to keep it, then I won't move forward with a paid plan. So I'm still on a free Slack plan. I'm still using Gmail on my personal things. I've never had to really upgrade. So just learning how to use those tools in a good way. But also like the biggest thing is probably data like management. So for instance, if you have a free Gmail, I'm sure most real estate agents have because I've seen all the Facebook messages about when we had to switch over to Google Workspace or Outlook. But if you're on a free Gmail account, you only have X amount of storage in your Google Drive or X amount of emails that you're able to put into your Gmail. Once you hit that limit, you stop getting emails and you stop being able to add, you know, more documents. Very similar to like Apple and their storage unit, right? So then you got to upgrade. If you just did a little bit of management and cleanup. Hire a virtual assistant, had hire Fiverr, hire your kid for the summer, right? Go through and clean up things that you don't really need. Maybe files are like 10 years old and you're still keeping inspection reports and listing photos from 10 years ago that maybe is just eating up a lot of that space. So looking at cleaning up most of that, even just same thing with Follow Boss, your CRM, make sure those are cleaned out at least once a month or most at the most, probably every three months.

You mentioned off the top of that response, a term low code, no code. I would love for you to kind of like peel into a few things you've mentioned so far. So for folks watching and listening, what I want to do is kind of at least lower the mental barrier and make this seem more approachable. You may not have the disposition of lisa, you may not have the background of lisa, you may not have the passion, and you probably don't have the expertise of LISA yet, but I think some of this stuff is more approachable than it seems. To be clear, you have no background as a software developer.

True, true.

Okay, so low code, no code solutions, APIs, give that a little bit of definition. Zapier and make are essentially rules engines where you can connect two different things. If it doesn't integrate directly into Follow Up Boss or whatever CRM you're using, you can use Zapier as kind of like a middleware between two other pieces of software to create automations. I would love for you to just kind of like lower the barrier in whatever way you've done for other people before. Like, no, you can do this. This is more approachable than you think. You don't need to be a software developer to make the software that we have available more powerful and make it work together and to make it unified and all of that. Now you may wind up hiring someone to help you do this stuff obviously, but make it approachable for people who are like at the cusp, like, they're basically technically savvy, they're just unfamiliar, they're just like, honestly, in the purest sense ignorant of what's on the other side of this doorway. They may not even know the door exists.

Start with the Follow Boss automations that are already built in. That is technically a low code, no code. Right? If you understand like, hey, if the stage changes, I can trigger this to happen. So it's what we call in the conditional logic world, if then that scenario. That's a fantastic way. That's how I kind of started building my Follow boss when automations came out and I'm like, this is amazing. What can I do? When I add a tag? This happens very similar to low code, no code. There's a lot of tools out there and there's a whole space, whole world that's called low code, no code for what we call citizen developers. You'll hear that term probably in Google or Apple development. Those are people who are using tech tools and they don't know how to code the developer. They don't know Python, they don't know JSON, they don't know a lot of these coding. But if I use some kind of tool like a software retool I'd probably say is also really popular for those who are low code. No code and bar agency actually introduced me to retool but Zapier is probably the most popular. I'd probably start there. There is an AI bot in there that you can literally just speak out what you want. Like hey, I want to connect my follow boss leads to my Google sheet. Every time a new lead comes in I want it to be added as a new row to Google Sheets. You can literally just talk it out with the microphone or type it out and it'll automatically build what that Zapier flow would look like. So it would say new deal added to follow boss, then trigger to add it to Google Sheets as a new row. And then you could also do something extra like when a new Google Sheet row is added, then zap that over to Slack and mention this channel. Right. So very simple, simple flows. It doesn't have to be complex. And as you start building that's probably the best way I learn is I just have to sit down, watch a couple YouTube videos on how to use Zapier, how to use make and then that way I go and I'm just building certain things like how can I take this thing that I'm building putting in two, three times in different technology stacks. Right, tech stacks. And how do I put those softwares together using Zapier? Does Zapier have something for me? Great. It doesn't. Let me try and make. Is there something over there I can build over there? The other popular one is API Nation. So those between those three, one of those solutions should probably work. If it's not there, then I would go and talk to my developer cousin or friends that would just say hey, I'm trying to do this. Do you think you have time to build it for me without charging me an arm and a leg? So yeah, I have gotten to know a little bit of cold, but I don't like it. That's not what I want to do on a day to day. So usually somebody out smarter than me will help. But the follow up is fantastic for that. We have a lot of really smart people who do low code, no code or even develop their own code to make it work. And so anytime, put it out there, search the forum. If somebody hasn't responded, put it out there. Somebody will respond to you.

So good. Okay, I've got a couple like housekeeping items that you've created for me. First, you've mentioned Elena. That's Elena Key. She was our guest on episode 34. You mentioned Bara Agency Justin Benson, founder and CEO as part of this Tech Timber series. So be sure to check that episode out as well. You mentioned the Follow Up Boss Success community which you are a moderator of. Thank you so much for your commitment to do that. If you are using Follow Up Boss and you're not in that community and you're provoked by some of these episodes in particular, fantastic resource, but it's just great to be a part of. Anyway, if you haven't joined it, you should. They're like which is kind of borderline shocking. There are over 100,000 follow up boss users and I think this is not a small number, but only 20 some thousand of them are in that group. So like that's you know, one in five. So I love what you broke down here. I would like to speak now to that person who's like, I'm just not feeling any of this. There are a couple of solutions. One, you've already mentioned it. There are people available who are ready, willing and able to do a discovery diagnosis prescription with you.