Business & Burgers: Season 2 Ep. 3: Scott Duffy interviews Big Block Realty's Sam and Oliver

I'm Alan Taylor. My buddy Scott Duffy and I are in search of the best burger in America. Each month we visit a new city to try some of the top restaurants, pubs, and brewhouses while sitting down for a candid conversation with some of the top entrepreneurs, athletes, entertainers, and celebrities. I don't know about you, but I love talking business over a burger. Welcome to business and burgers.

Today we return to the Grubb burger bar for our third and final round of burgers. Joining us to round out our tour tour of Grubb's best burgers are Sam Karamian and Oliver Graff of Big Block Realty. Oliver and Sam founded their brokerage firm a few years ago, and with the intention of doing things differently, they focus on creating the best work culture imaginable and putting their agents first. With 100% commissions, it's no surprise agents love working for Sam and Oliver. Having recently landed at number 26 on the Inc. 500 and having been named San Diego's best real estate brokerage four years running, it's clear that Oliver and Sam are onto something big with their unique approach to real estate.

You know, I love what you guys did here because you hacked the real estate world. You started over.

So talk about how you got on a roll like this.

We were in a mastermind as. As investors at the time, a great group, and everyone was talking about residual income, which is, you know, the name of the game for us. We thought to ourselves, how can we make residual income in real estate without owning a bunch of doors? So the idea kind of hit us, man. I bet you we could get a bunch of real estate agents to pay us maybe 300 bucks a month for.

100% commission in the model today for most places out there is you don't pay anything a month, but you pay most of your commission.

Yes.

When you sell a house.

Yeah. When we were starting out, we were kind of. We were looking at the. The real estate model and it just seemed like there was like you were saying people have been doing it the same way for the last hundred years. Right. There seemed like there was a lot of noise and a lot of choice, just fat that could get cut out of the real estate business. And so being entrepreneurs, we wanted a brokerage that where we could get support when we needed it, but they kind of left us alone and let us do our own thing. And after looking at all the different models that were out there, we couldn't find anything that was kind of hit all the buttons because there was the virtual platform where People pay a flat fee per transaction. There was no service. There was no nothing. It was like basically like a rent a broker. And then there's the full service model, which they generally put you on, like, a 25 to 50% split with the broker. And the problem with that model is most of the brokers aren't really providing any real value for the amount of money that they're taking. So we came up with, hey, let's kind of hybrid the two models and incorporate some sort of recurring revenue. And that's where the whole idea kind of started.

So did you get any negative feedback? Did you have haters?

That's all we got.

I was gonna say everyone told us.

That it couldn't be done, which told us we were on the right track, to be honest. Right. No one was really quite doing it the way we were doing it. And they said, look, it won't pencil. You can't make this work. And that motivated us to just put our heads down and figure it out. So we looked at the challenges in the business and said, how can we make this better? How can we put the customer who is our real estate agent? How can we put them first and build a model around that? For us, we got really real with the fact that, look, if we want to create something that makes a big impact, we're gonna have to give them a thousand reasons to join and zero reasons to leave. What I mean by that is thousand reasons to join the company and zero reasons to go to our competitor. It forces to ask ourselves, what do agents really want? Like, what do they really want in the business? And more than anything, at the end of the day, it's about profitability. Right. They want to make money. So we said, well, we gotta fix that. 100% commission solves that. But look, I could give you 100% commission and drop the ball on support or drop the ball on service, and you'll be out the door as fast as you came in. So we knew that we had to really create an environment that gave them all the support that they wanted as fast as they wanted it.

What's interesting about this is that your customers are the realtors.

Yes.

And so you are literally, like, serving their needs so that they don't have to do all this stuff for themselves.

You hit the nail right on the head with who we look at as our customer. Like the traditional brokerage, they look at the people buying and selling real estate as the customer, and we, from the top down, look at the agent as our customer. So we really built the business around serving our agents, and we've had to say no to a lot of things that we could have used to make more money but would have been not beneficial to the agents.

We started a broker hotline, which means any question you have, any time you pick up the phone, you call the broker hotline and it's real brokers in our office that are there to answer your question. And then we said, okay, well there's obviously the broker contract compliance side, we need to help them with that. And that's really our job as a broker. But what about everything else? So that's when agent concierge was born. And the idea was, look, agents have a million things they got to do from A to Z. In closing a transaction, if we could provide a service that supported them when they need it, we would win. For us, it's really just the idea of delivering the yes whenever they ask, and we've continued to do that and.

It'S worked really well for us.

I think I see some burgers on the way.

Last time I thought grub had gone all out with the onion ring top beast they served us, but they one upped themselves this week with the Mac and cheeseburgers they brought out for Oliver and Sam. It's become clear that the grub burger bar is all about the toppings. For Scott and I. They brought us a couple of morning glory burgers which are merely topped with chorizo, queso bacon and a sunny side up egg, and it all sits atop a nest of skinny fries. It's no Mac and cheese burger, but I guess it'll do.

We'll be right back for these tasty burgers after a word from our sponsors.

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So we talked a little bit about culture. What are the most important steps to creating a killer culture?

To me, culture is bringing to life, really an environment that you want to be a part of. In general, the real estate brokerage space is pretty, pretty stiff and uptight. And we said, well, first thing we want to do is create an environment that doesn't feel like every other environment. So. So when you walk into one of our offices, it really feels like you're walking into a hip technology business as opposed to, you know, a bank from 1984 or something. You know, it's. It's just a lot more of a fun environment. You walk in, there's a foosball table.

Which is so important because the culture is a direct reflection of the founders.

Yes, right.

And what they're bringing, that energy they infuse into the business.

Absolutely. And that passes on to the staff.

Right.

So when we're hiring people, the first thing we do is tell them rule number one is taking good care of the customer and creating a fun environment. And we just instill that with everyone from the receptionist to people in all different parts of the business, that our number one job is to create an environment that they are excited to come back to, create an environment that they feel welcome and one they want to tell other people about. And again, I think that comes down to the basics. People like to have fun. People like to know that people care about them. People like to know that when they need help, someone's going to be there to help them.

For me, I would say that it really comes down to loving your customers. And I don't mean like loving your customers like the customer is always right. I mean like really loving your customer. Like looking at the customer like is, if this person was my mom, would what they were requesting from me, would I gladly and happily do it? And if the answer is yes, you should always do it.

It seems to me that your culture is so important to you because it is what attracts people. It's like the fun boat, the party boat. But not partying, doing business. The business is the party.

And sometimes there is party, and that's. And that's okay, right? I tell people all the time, I don't think it's 100% commission that got 600 agents to join the company. It's the culture. Because I really true believe if Oliver and Spencer, if big block, if we offered a traditional split, but we backed it up with love. We backed it up with great culture. We backed it up with good service. I think that we could have similar growth because people will pay when there's value.

What were you guys doing before this to lead you into this?

Me and Sam have actually known each other since college, which was probably what, over 15 years ago now. And we started out selling phones in the mall. We were those guys that used to stop everyone and try to sell them a phone right there on the spot. And we were always ranked in the top 10 of the whole company for sales. And so we just kind of developed a really great relationship. And then from that, it was like, okay, well, if we're going to be salesmen, we want to sell something expensive, right? So it's either jets, yachts, or houses. And we didn't know anything about jets. We didn't know anything about yachts. And we figured, hey, there's a lot of houses.

We live in a house.

So this is perfect.

I've been in one or two of those before, right.

So we did that for probably four or five years. And then 2010, that started to dry up. And then from there we were like, okay, the short sills have dried out. Let's put that in the rear view mirror and let's proceed with this new brokerage model.

So has there ever been a time where either in this business or in your last business, like, it just blew up? Like everything that you'd been working on, it went south. Maybe you guys ran out of cash and you seriously thought about shutting things down. And if you were there, how did you get yourself out?

Yes, I've gotten kicked in the teeth a number of times, and I've always been able to work my way out by taking a moment and realizing that slumps are going to happen. You're going to get stuck, you're going to get hurt. Hurt. You're gonna, you know, you're gonna feel like the world is crumbling. And we feel that, I think, as an entrepreneur all the time, Right. There's no normal days. You either feel like the king and queen of the world or you feel like you might be on the verge of death. Right? It's really, really tough.

All in the same hour.

All in the same hour.

Right, Right. That is the emotional roller coaster that we go through every day in life, too. I mean, that's life.

So the first thing I think we have to remember is it's just normal, right? So if you're starting to feel like you're in a state slump or if you think that the market is adjusting and it's your fault. Look, it's just called normal. Everything has cycles. Everything's going to go up, it's going to come down. You got to be mentally tough to understand that it's normal. So if we understand it's normal, the number two is, how long do you want to feel bad for yourself? How long do you really want to be stuck? And sometimes, Scott, you might just say, you know what? I really want to feel bad for a month, and maybe I'll just go lay on the sand and feel bad for myself. And if that's what you want, then that's okay. But I think you got to ask yourself, how bad do I really want this feeling to last? And then the third question is, what are you going to do about it? For us, the moment that this hundred percent model came up, I'm telling you, we went from being investors to starting a brokerage in a matter of weeks.

I want to buy a franchise when the time comes. It just sounds like a really great idea. I mean, it's going to change the whole realtor world, I think.

We think so too.

You're actually enabling and empowering the truest entrepreneur, the salesperson.

Right.

And you're saying, look, you're going to be in business for yourself, but not by yourself. And by the way, that's kind of the franchise idea.

Right?

But you're actually helping all these little individual entrepreneurs by giving them 100% of what they earn, less, some fees.

Right.

I love this model.

You know, one of the things that's really worked well for us is just social media. What we found in the real estate space is brokerages and real estate companies don't even talk about this. So we said, let's bring social media into the real estate world. Let's talk about real Internet marketing. Right? Not just posting something on a social network, but how can I take targeted traffic and send it to perfectly crafted content and pages, and how can I turn that into business for myself?

So you're trying to turn a big industry. It's been around for a long time, and you want to turn that on its head. How do you sell the vision?

I think that feeling comfortable and confident with where you're going yourself is where it starts. If I'm not really confident where I'm going and feel it in my bones, it's going to be hard to pass that feeling off to you. Right. Number two, you have to not care what other people are going to say. You know, one of my mentors always says, if you're going to let someone else's reaction to your efforts determine where you're going, then you're on a very slippery slope. And number three, I think you got to seek counsel.

Right?

And you know, when we started this, Scott, we were talking a lot. We picked your brain. We said, hey, how should we do this? How should we do that? Then let's seek counsel from people that have disrupted something in their space or have done something different and say, you know, you did that with this. How can I apply that to what I'm doing?

This is truly amazing. Empowering the entrepreneur, the salesman, the unsung hero who is out there in the arena working his or her tail on underappreciated.

Absolutely.

And getting chewed out all the time. And all of a sudden, now they get to reap all the rewards. I love what you guys have done, and I totally applaud it.

Thank you. You know what that means is when you can create a true win win environment, that's when you really win. And for us, we said, look, let's help our customer win, really win. Not with really good marketing or really good copy. I mean, let's really help them win so that after they get involved, four months later, they're still excited, they're involved. And then number two, let's make it an environment that we can win. Right? We're not going to do this to not make money. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, sometimes they say, I want to grow so fast that I'll jeopardize profit for moving the needle. And sometimes we might need to do that. But you can create a true win win that makes you a good opportunity in a good living, put your customer in a better position. And when those two things come together, that's when you really win at a big level.

Guys, I think you guys rock. Absolutely killed it.

Sam and Oliver have clearly created a stir in the real estate industry. Their unique approach has left us with some some fascinating food for thought. Culture is king. Create an environment that your clients want to come back to. Slumps are going to happen. It's important to remember that this is a normal part of entrepreneurship. When starting a new venture, seek counsel from those who have already succeeded in your chosen field.

Next time, right here on Business and burgers, we stop by my hometown in Grants Pass, Oregon to meet up with world renowned tattoo artist Jeff Gogue. Jeff threw himself into the tattoo world at age 26. And through his artistic ability and innate business sense, he built himself into one of the most sought after tattoo artists. In the world. Join us for the story of Jeff's inspiring rise from trailer park to success right here next time on business and burgers.

Check out more episodes of business and burgers and our B and B blog at our website, businessandburgers.com and don't forget, visit business and burgers on Facebook and give us a big thumbs up. See you next time right here on business and burgers.