Host Steve Trang interviews Sean Grabo and Zane White about scaling their real estate wholesaling business to 300+ deals annually while achieving 5X ROI from cold calling. The episode reveals how they built ResVA, a virtual assistant company in Egypt that generates high-quality leads through superior culture and processes, transforming both their real estate operations and creating a successful service business.
Focus on quality over quantity in lead generation - fewer, highly qualified leads perform better than high volumes of poor leads
Proactive customer service with weekly check-ins prevents client frustration and builds stronger relationships than reactive support
Create career advancement paths for virtual assistants to reduce turnover from industry standard 30-35% to 11% through clear growth opportunities
1:55:06Josh Stech, founder of LendingHome and Sundae, shares how he built a billion-dollar real estate lending company in just five years, scaling to 14% market share. He discusses the venture capital playbook, hiring at scale, maintaining culture with 500+ employees, and his transition to solving the property sourcing problem for investors through Sundae's marketplace model.
1:47:49Tommy Mello, founder of A1 Garage Door Service, shares his journey from massive debt to building a billion-dollar company. He discusses critical business lessons including the importance of systems, hiring for attitude over experience, and how he scaled from a local garage door business to a nationwide operation that sold for $570 million.
Get a free AI-powered review of your sales calls. See exactly where you're losing deals and how to fix it.
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Use systematic hiring processes with multiple decision makers and assessment tools rather than relying on emotional first impressions
Stay laser-focused on one core competency before expanding - master your primary service before adding new offerings
”“Go deep, not wide. That was one of the best pieces of advice I got really early on is, I was talking to a mentor early on, and I was like, we're gonna go to Cleveland. We're gonna go to Cincinnati. Like, dude, you're in Columbus. Like, go deeper, not wider.”
”“If you're the person getting the deals, like, everybody wants to be your friend or you know? So it was really good to build, like, my network and, you know, not knowing anybody.”
”“We just focus so much on quality. Outbound marketing is already exhaust the sales team that's working on it. It requires a lot of follow-up. It requires a lot of time and effort to follow-up with leads, and we just give you, a smaller amount of more qualified leads and buy back some time for your sales team.”
”“Everything in Egypt from a gallon of gas to a loaf of bread is negotiated. It's just it's a natural sales culture.”
20057 words
Sean Grabo: On a big decision like this, I would normally just go off the rails, get the hell out of here, which I get a a call from, one of my really good friends. These guys are doing something. They gave me a website, and I look at the website, and there's so much of the copy. Like, there's, like, you know, five different things where this is absolutely them. We tended like nothing was going on.
I got to the bottom of, like, truly understood what was going on. They were planning to do their own business. It didn't quite work out. They realized how hard it is. They were skimming warm, cold leads to refer to realtors out of our CRM and getting kickbacks there.
And, you know, it was a very, like, deep paper trail to track.
Steve Trang: Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's episode of disruptors where millionaires are made. Today, we have Sean Grabo and Zane White with Resvier. Zane flew in from Egypt. Well, Sean flew in from Columbus, Ohio to talk about how Sean is on pace to close 300 deals this year, getting about a five x ROI from just one marketing channel. Now, guys, I wanna mention to create a 100 millionaires.
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You guys ready? Yeah, man. Alright. Cool. So, been looking forward to this for a long time.
We've been talking about this for a very long time. You and I, we connected at CEG. I wanna say, like, three
Sean: Probably, yeah, three years ago. Approximately.
Steve: So, obviously, you're doing some big things, with between the the real estate and everything else. But before we get into that, let's talk about what was your life like before you got into real estate?
Sean: Yeah. Always been an entrepreneur. School was never right for me. I I think I went to college for two weeks total. Both times were
Steve: Oh, how quick?
Sean: Yeah. Yeah. So community college once. If you dropped out in the first two weeks, you could get your money back. So I did that once, tried a couple years later, realized this still wasn't for me.
Yeah. So I did, like, different fun jobs. I did, like, white water rafting for probably, like, five or six years out west and actually ended up in, Northern California doing, cannabis cultivation out there. Did that for about eight years, got really sick of it, and, I I had really valued my freedom as a entrepreneur and as, you know, having my own business. So I knew whatever I did next, I had to be able to have a lot of freedom.
I I knew I was pretty unemployable. I had to be able to work for myself. And I'd also worked really hard, so I wanted to take a break. So I took six months. I went and traveled out in Southeast Asia.
After a month, I started just absolutely going crazy from not working, not doing anything, and that's when I really just started geeking out on real estate, listening to as many podcasts, reading as many books. I had a mentor who I lived near out in California, and he was always in my ear about real estate and how, like, that was something I needed to look into. So, yeah, after traveling around for six months, I decided that I was gonna move to Columbus, Ohio from California. I didn't know anybody there at all.
Steve: Oh, Columbus.
Sean: So when I was researching, I figured it would be hard to start in California. You know, a higher barrier to entry, people are hustlers out in California, Real estate prices are really expensive. So my logic was and I didn't know anything about wholesaling. I figured I just wanted to buy a bunch of rental properties, and Columbus, Ohio made sense because there's a growing population, a lot of big companies, and then a good, like, purchase price to, like, what you could rent ratio. Mhmm.
So I I just you know, I threw the dart. It landed there, and I packed up and moved there and threw myself completely into it.
Steve: When was that?
Sean: 2018.
Steve: 2018. So you moved to 2018 to start your real estate journey. Yeah. Your mentor was in California. You guys continue like, did he help you with that, or you just went all in?
Sean: He had always only done it on the side, but he he really just opened me up to the idea of it. Like, we're still friends, but he he always just, yeah, very passively did it.
Steve: But Got it. So what was it like starting real estate in '18 in Columbus?
Sean: You know, it was I feel like 2018 was a pretty good time. Like, I always tell myself, man, if I if I knew now what I or if I knew then what I know now, it'd be incredible. But, I got you know, obviously, there's always a lot of luck involved too. Mhmm. I found somebody on BiggerPockets who wanted to partner up, and do wholesaling.
They had been doing it for a year or two and hadn't had, like, a lot of success. And we partnered up and did about 50 deals our first year.
Steve: Wow.
Sean: Yeah. We clashed. Like, we both wanted to run the show. Mhmm. And so after about a year, I decided I I left the partnership and broke off and did my own thing, but it was really good.
I've always been really fortunate, to partner up with people who have different skill sets because Yeah. I'm, like, really good at a few things, but I'm really bad at a lot of things. So I've always, you know, been able to find the yin to the yang.
Steve: So you find your partner through bigger pockets?
Sean: Yeah. Actually, both of them. Like, my current partner and my partner for the first year.
Steve: Interesting. Yeah. I haven't heard a lot of people going on partners that way. You found two of them that way.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah. And, geez, hired a couple different acquisition guys through the years, from doing, like, some posts back in the day there.
Steve: It's fascinating. Again, like, I've never heard anyone, like, building their business through BiggerPockets. Not to say anything to disrespect for, like, a down on it. Just haven't heard that direction.
Sean: Yeah. I guess it just, I think it's people who remote I've always had the best luck with people working with people who are really value education and are just kinda hustlers. And so I think that's kinda been the connection as people would look you know, I posted when I was thinking of moving to Columbus and first moved there, I was really, like, interactive on the forums trying to, you know, figure out Columbus so people would see those posts and reach out to me.
Steve: I see. 50 deals in your first year is remarkable. Yeah. And you're saying if you know then what you know now, 50 is pretty good for your first year. Like, you you just knock it out of park from the beginning?
Sean: I mean, back then, we were getting, like, a 2% response rate on our mail. I think, you know, it's, like, one tenth of that now. Yeah. It's you know, I I've always been really good with sales, and then I've all you know, like, I had somebody who was really good on all the back end stuff. But yeah.
Steve: Okay. So then, like, you knew right away, like, this was it?
Sean: Oh, yeah. Full I mean, right, like, all all consuming, like, once I found wholesaling. Because I always looked down on wholesaling, or I just did like, when I was doing my research, like, for the first six months, I was like, ah, that's, you know, that's not what I really wanna do. Mhmm. But, like, I don't know what else I'm gonna like, it'll at least get my foot in the door.
And then, like, I realized, like, wholesaling is, like, you learn the entire business so much. And Yeah. The other thing is I've always been, like, different relationships and friendships. And if you're the person getting the deals, like, everybody wants to be your friend or you know? So it was really good to build, like, my network and, you know, not knowing anybody.
I really only get engaged with real estate people there.
Steve: Doesn't surprise me to hear that you weren't excited about wholesaling because if you came from the bigger pockets world, like, there's it's just kind of this weird thing. They're not as bad as realtors, but they kinda have this deal where, like, I looked down a little bit
Sean: For sure.
Steve: Yeah. On wholesaling. Okay. So you knock it out of the park, but partnership didn't last. What were you guys clashing about?
Sean: We both, well, actually, we both wanted to run the show, so there was definitely some egos involved. Mhmm. And then different styles. Like, I'm incredibly, risk tolerant, and he was very risk adverse. He was, like, an attorney by trade.
Oh. Yeah. So, you know, a natural deal killer.
Steve: Yeah. We shouldn't do this deal. Now we should pass him this deal. Yeah.
Sean: Yeah. We and We only, like, we only sent mail because everything else, like, oh, no. We can't do that. Mhmm. But, yeah, it was just, you know, like, I I really valued the partnership, learned a lot.
You know, it didn't end horribly, but it was definitely, you know, I just recognized that it wasn't gonna work long term.
Steve: Yeah. So you said, hey. You just keep my half of the company, and we go do something else.
Sean: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: Okay. So then that was the next year? Yep. Yeah. Alright.
So then how was 2019?
Sean: So it was I we had we had hired one person that first year Mhmm. And we both kind of fought over who was gonna get that person. Well, I was lucky enough that he continued to work with me, and he was very he's very much that back he's my partner today. Mhmm. And he's very much a operations person.
Right. So he kinda he filled that seat. And then, you know, we were just doing a lot of we were really focusing on the sales process. We were doing different marketing that where they would do the mail for you. They would do everything, kind of all in one marketing service.
Mhmm. And we just we just hit sales super hard. And, we hold I think one thing that was a huge advantage starting off too was we only I only focused on wholesaling. Like, I I wanted to buy rentals. I wanted to do flips.
I I fought that urge to chase the shiny objects and go in a bunch of different directions. And we all like, we did nothing but wholesale for the first three years, so we got really good at the sales and marketing. Got it. Never really tried to dabble into anything else.
Steve: Did you say you hired an all in one marketing company?
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: But one company handled all of marketing?
Sean: Yeah. You oh, they did all the data aggregation, all of the mail. Yeah. They got the phones to ring.
Steve: Got it. So kinda like an agency of sorts?
Sean: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: Got it. Would you still recommend someone doing that today?
Sean: It worked for us. You know, it's I got one I've seen response for I've seen marketing get tougher and tougher as more and more people have entered into the into the game. So I'm not I could see definitely there are advantages to both. I guess it probably depends on I'm not a natural like, you need a lot of attention to detail Mhmm. And a lot of skills that I don't necessarily have.
It it allowed me to just focus on sales Mhmm. And then slowly building a team. So it worked for me, but I think it would kind of depend on what somebody's natural skill set is.
Steve: I see. Okay. So how'd you do, like, compared to your first year and your second year? Like, you got Noah. He's running ops.
Sean: Yeah. Pretty much every year, we've been able to, like, at least with revenue, grow, like, you know, between 2040%. Mhmm. So, it's been pretty consistent. We I I would guess probably around after the first year Mhmm.
We started doing outbound marketing. We've always done mail, but we started doing, a good amount of texting and cold calling. You know, ringless voicemails were big back in the day, and PPC started working on our digital brand. Yeah. And we we just kind of very naturally, you know, grew from probably two people to three people to six people to 10 people, and it was pretty steady throughout the years.
Steve: So having that steady growth, I mean, what would you attribute, like, that steady growth? Because, like, I mean, there's been ups and downs. Right? So what would you attribute, like, the steady growth to?
Sean: Yeah. I think, like, even when well, for one, we never we never got really dependent on the hedge fund, which was a mistake. We've walked out. We missed out on a ton of money back in the day, but not
Steve: We did too.
Sean: Yeah. But so that advantage was I saw a lot of people who were completely dependent on those hedge funds. Mhmm. And, you know, we always just focus on nothing but, you know, buying on a deep discount. So it was an advantage, I think, in the long run.
But, yeah, what kind of sustained that over time? I think it's, a lot of it's my partner, Noah. He's, you know, just, like, just like Zane is on the VA company, just very steady, very systems and operations driven, and then, you know, able to balance me out and kinda can, you know, be a little bit much from time to time. But Sure. Rein me in and, like, you know, having, like, a lot of respect to where, you know, push and pull on each other and challenge each other to usually kinda meet in the middle.
Yeah.
Steve: So you said something interesting there. Like, you can always grow revenue. That wasn't the hard part. What was the hard part?
Sean: The hard part, I I mean, not growing not doing too much risky stuff, man. Not not draining the bank account. Not, you know, just going out you know, trying to do too much too fast.
Steve: So let's talk about it. Like, what are some of the things you did that you go to, like, that were not beneficial to the company?
Sean: Yeah. Okay. So back in probably, like, 2022, I had a really good acquisition guy, who had told me from the beginning he wanted to go off and do his own thing, and I was really sad to lose him, and I, like, wanted to partner with him. So we decided to go we didn't wanna complete against us in Columbus, and we went and did virtual. And, you know, because a lot of people are talking about it.
It's easy. Florida's a great market. Of course. Yeah. We went down to Tampa in, like, 2022.
And then what was even worse was the first deal we got was, like, an absolute home run. So we're like, oh, man. This is this is easy. And, you know, we just we probably broke even or maybe lost a little bit over a little bit over a year, but it was opportunity cost. It was it was a distraction.
It took us away, and it it taught me a really good lesson, like, to just not take what you have for granted. Mhmm. Like, you know, there's always you know, whether you wanna chase multifamily or development, like, it all looks really good, but, you know, if you got the golden goose or, you know, don't don't take what you have for granted. And, I I definitely learned that when we started to go too big. And then, yeah, I think in, like, 2022 or 2021, when that like, when the little bit of a boom and bust happened, we were overstaffed.
That was actually when I really started, working with virtual assistants a lot because we had, like, eight or 10 people in the office, and me and Noah kinda saw the writing on the wall. We saw other people going out of business. Mhmm. We saw things were really challenging, and we were bloated. So it it was really difficult, but we let go, I think, probably out of the 10 people we had, like, six people.
We went down to four. We got super lean. We're you know, we we we meet every Saturday and talk, just, like, you know, fun stuff, not deal related, you know, just kind of, you know, b s about, like, how we're gonna grow the company. And there's always our, like, our favorite meetings. Like, my favorite three hours of the week.
No. Just me and Noah. Like, we go to coffee like, you're a couple different coffee shops, hang out, and just like really laid back and mellow. And over the course of like two months, like, we started to dread these because we know we were gonna have to like, you know, deal with all these problems.
Steve: Face demons.
Sean: Oh, man. It was tough. And it was like, okay. Like, one week, we just wrote out a plan. Like, we're spending, let's say, 90 k a month right now, and we're like, we gotta get this down to 40.
And just, like, you know, this is what we're gonna do. This is what we're gonna do. We'll do that next week. We'll do that next. And then just one week, it was like, okay, man.
You gotta do this. I gotta do that. And, you know, like, to for the greater good of everything, we're gonna have to restructure this thing. Mhmm. And once again, it was, you know, a huge learning experience because at the time, it was bad and it felt like, you know, a failure to, you know, lay off over half of the company.
But, you know, it it was just this really good lesson to be careful about, you know, like, we always have that in the back of the head back of our head, like, you don't wanna have to lay people off again or, you know, like, you you know, we need to keep a certain or we need to keep that emergency fund fat or else we could get ourselves into trouble again. So
Steve: Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things I was talking to someone the other day. It's like the the the saddest thing for me is at this point in my career is, like, I'm really good at firing people. Like, I guess the worst part.
Sean: And then everyone wants you to do it. It's like, oh, Steve will take care of it. Right?
Steve: Yeah. It's like it's like, man, like, it's because you you carry out this responsibility. Yeah. Eventually, it's like, well, you hire all these people eventually. You also have to, like
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: Fire some of them too.
Sean: I was just, I'm really big on, like, founders podcast. Our our friend Brandon in Austin turned me on to it nonstop, and they're doing one on Elon Musk recently. And his big thing is, you have like, not his theory is to not become friends with the people you work with because that emotion gets, you know, involved. And I don't necessarily I'm not trying to go to Mars, so I don't have to follow that too closely, but I thought it was a really interesting perspective.
Steve: One of the lessons I took from him, though, though, was you've got to cut so much where it hurts Yeah. And then rehire the people where, like, okay. We should not let Yeah. Not let that person go.
Sean: If So
Steve: on a regular basis, like, cut too much versus, like, what happens if we cut it? Like, cut too much and then rehire.
Sean: If you're not deleting, too much, then you're not deleting enough.
Steve: Exactly. Yeah. It's like, oh, man. Like, we're not there yet, but it's great, great, great lesson. So that was the first thing you're saying that if you if you could do it again, don't get too bloated.
Yeah. Don't get too Tampa with a part.
Sean: Go deep, not wide. That was, one of the best, pieces of advice I got really early on is, I was talking to a mentor early on, and I was like, we're gonna go to Cleveland. We're gonna go to Cincinnati. Like, dude, you're in Columbus. Like, go deeper, not wider.
Like, I made that mistake. So, yeah, I always have try to keep that in my head.
Steve: What were other things that you learned where it wasn't hard where it was hard made it harder? Because even again, you're growing revenue, but you aren't growing the bottom line. So or other things you did. And this is, like, for the you know, if everyone else is paying attention, like, there's some valuable lessons here. Yeah.
Anything else?
Sean: Like, in those exact experiences? Or, yeah, I think those are the two that stand out. That's the same.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. And somewhere along the way, you got involved with Sharper?
Sean: Yeah. Yeah. Pretty early on. Probably about five years ago.
Steve: Five years ago? Yeah. Okay. So you got involved with Sharper, and then, got so you're mentioning something you got to work with, your very first, quarterly, you had to meet with Brian?
Sean: One of our fur it was probably a couple years in, but, one thing I love about Sharper is you can rotate coaches and get different perspectives. And so we started working with Brian Snyder.
Speaker 2: Mhmm.
Steve: And then how was that helpful for you guys?
Sean: Well, he's a phenomenal operator. Like like I say, I love Sharper because I can talk to each coach has a different skill set.
Steve: A skill set, a different set of experience.
Sean: A 100%. Effective. Yeah. One thing I loved about Brian is he was an operator, and he had sat in the seat making or he was sitting in the seat at the same time making the same decisions we were needing to make. Yeah.
So that perspective was super, powerful. Mhmm. That was that was my favorite thing about working with Brian.
Steve: But then he took something away from it.
Sean: Yeah. So, he did one quarterly with us, and then he came back to Columbus three months later. Mhmm. And we were going through, you know, our KPIs for the quarter, and he had saw that our outbound marketing had, like, really gotten much better than the previous quarter, and we started talking about that, and I told him how, I was me and Zane had been working together. Zane used to be lead manager at my company, and he was always in my ear, like, dude, let me take over the cold call.
Because I was using a third party at the time, and I'd used a few other third party cold calling companies, and I was actually happy with this one. And I was like, dude, no, it's not broke. You know, we don't need to fix it. Mhmm. But he was always in my ear, and I eventually was like, okay, Zane.
Here, you know, we have 10 callers. Take two of them. Prove it to me that, you know, you can outperform these guys. Mhmm. And within, like, six weeks starting from scratch, he he started to you know, caller per caller, started getting better results.
So at that point, I was all in. We turned all of our up on marketing to Zane. Mhmm. And that was during that quarter, that Brian came back and he saw that our our marketing channel had just, like, blown up. Like, we were doing almost twice as well.
Steve: Got it. And then he came away with a decision there.
Sean: Yeah. He was like, man, like, would you guys do this? Because Brian was the operator of another pretty big wholesale company, and he asked, you know, will you guys do this for our company? And I was, like, my natural instinct was to say no. It's like, you know, like, go deeper.
Not like, I don't wanna try something else. Like, this real estate wholesaling company is amazing, and there's a lot of people that depend on it. Mhmm. But, you know, Zane always being in my ears, seeing that we had the results, seeing what an amazing operator Zane was, and then knowing that Zane would kill me if, we if somebody asked to bring more people on, and I said no. We started doing it with Brian, about three a little over three years ago.
Steve: Got it. So how long were you in his ear about, like, letting you run lead management?
Speaker: Yeah. I think it took around a good six months. So starting off, some of it was a bit of, you know, bullshitting and throwing out the views. But the last three months, it's it got really serious. And I was telling Sean that something that we could do here, and it's gonna be much better.
Because, again, I was inside of systems, seeing the leads, seeing how they're processing everything going on. I just knew that there is a much better way to
Steve: What were you seeing that gave you this confidence?
Speaker: So a lot of the leads being sent is not focused on quality. A lot of them are window shoppers, people who don't have real motivation. Mhmm. People that if you go into the call recording and listen it listen to it, you just hear someone reading off a script, you know, and they're not really giving their all into the call, understanding the pain points and the motivation of the homeowner and submitting a qualified lead out there.
Steve: So You're saying, basically, the company that you liked before, the their VAs
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: Were having conversations with homeowners, passing them along. But in your perspective, they weren't as engaged. Like, it was their business. They were kinda, like, doing a job.
Speaker: Yep. Exactly. And then
Steve: just pushing those leads over.
Speaker: Exactly. Yes.
Steve: Okay. So then at this point, were you more or less a virtual assistant on Sean's company, or were you, like, a consultant? Like, where were you?
Speaker: Yes. So I was a virtual assistant at Sean's company at that point. And even before that, I've been in the call center industry for over seven years right now, and I've been on the operation side before getting into, Sean's business as a lead manager. And on the operation side, it's always something I've noticed with call center companies. So overall is people are just there as a stepping stone or, you know, to make a quick buck, but they're not focused as a career.
We're not here to grow career. It's just something I've always wanted to change, and show people that that it can become a career. And then I've transitioned to become a lead manager, and I knew that this was my opportunity and chance to make that happen.
Steve: Got it. So, we saw people treating this Yes. Out of five. Yep. And you saw an opportunity for someone to build a career Yep.
As a VA.
Speaker: Yep. Exactly. Working at
Steve: a company, working for you guys, like, what was the vision there?
Speaker: Yeah. Absolutely. So but and and Steve, I I just started as a cold caller myself, and right now, I run this company with over 300 people in it. And I think the biggest things is, you can make a career out of it working in a call center. Mhmm.
Call center doesn't have to be a nine to five where you just go in, especially within the real estate realm. You can go into sales. You can go into operations. You can build an entire career out of it, and that was the vision of Press VA.
Sean: Got it. I've definitely, like, seen it happen. So, like, Zane when Zane left, he started getting our sending his, like, best friends and really good people from college, like, over as our lead managers. Zane was an engineer, so, like, over half of our I'd say probably 70% of our Egyptian staff on my, real estate company are engineers. But, you know, that was about three years ago where he started plugging lead managers into my company.
And now, like, our sales manager who manages our in person acquisition guys, he's Zane's best friend from college, and he, he's a nominal sales manager. Yeah. Our dispo guy is one of Zane's best friends who, like, started off as a lead manager with us. And, you know, I've I've used recruiting services because I thought our dispo guy had to be in Columbus and build the relationships. I was complete like, after our guy, Moe, beat out the second guy, I was like, okay.
I'm wrong. Like, you can do this you can do this over there. And, you know, we have somebody from marketing. One of our lead managers recently, like, we're focusing super hard on floor closures and just, like, just really dialing in on every single lead. And it was a a lead manager who's just, you know, incredibly smart.
We turned this whole project over to him, and now he knows foreclosure and probate law better than, you know, like, you know, anybody on our team probably combined. So Got it. It's it's been this huge stepping stone, like, where if you can get really good talent, you create a really good culture, you know, you put a lot of respect out there. I've seen just people rise. Like, I always go to our sales manager where he was, you know, engineer in Egypt, first year engineer in Egypt, makes, like, 5 to $8 a year.
So, like, $2 an hour. And he started with us, you know, and then became lead manager, like, $6 an hour, $8 an hour. And then he became an acquisition guy, and now he's managing fit like, our entire sales team. That's about 15 people.
Steve: Wow. So you are an engineer?
Speaker: Yep. I I've always wanted to study engineering. Probably second year in university, I realized that's not really what I wanted.
Sean: Mhmm.
Speaker: But I appreciated the way they make me think and process things, so I did my education. You did? Yes. I did. Okay.
And I got my bachelor's degree.
Steve: Got it. Yep. Okay. You get your bachelor's degree, then you go work for this guy. But you work in call centers, and then you work for this guy.
Speaker: Yep. Exactly.
Steve: So you're in his ear. He after three months, he finally relines. Yep. Gives you a shot. What did you change in the company that led to this big lift?
Speaker: Yes. So the biggest thing the biggest thing that I did is is just work on culture and starting with you know, we just started with two people to begin with, and then six weekend, it became five people. Just working with these people, understanding, explaining to them the potential for real estate and how they can grow and where they can become in a year, you know, or maybe a year and a half, depends on the time, and really explaining real estate to them really well. You know, when you generate a lead, it's not just a lead that you're generating. You're making a lead manager, an acquisition, a disposition.
A lot of people after you are working this lead just because you generated it, they felt important, and you could hear it in the calls. They're they're giving it their all in. They're trying to do everything they can, and I think that's what the biggest difference was between the leads that that Sean used to receive and the ones that he did receive after I started.
Steve: So the biggest shift then is really just the attitude or the demonstrating not demonstrating, but conveying care in the conversation.
Speaker: Yeah. That's one of the biggest things, especially Steve Goldkong is very hard. You get people hanging up on you all day. You get people cussing you out, and when people have that attitude, they're just prone to have a better conversation, generate better leads. That was the one that had the biggest impact.
There was, other stuff as well, like focusing on quality and motivation. Like, when when when we're cold calling elites, we don't just wanna read a script and collect information, push a lead. We really wanna understand why the homeowner wants to sell. Does does he really wants to sell or, you know, he's just entertaining because maybe you'll hear a good offer and getting that motivation out of the homeowner and sending it over to, Sean's company.
Steve: And so did the script change?
Speaker: A little bit. So what we try to do is is is even with scripts, it is not just a script that you follow from a to z. There are some items in there that are keywords. For for motivation instance, it is not just that you ask about motivation
Sean: Mhmm.
Speaker: But you try to go on different directions of, like, for instance, one easy thing, you look at Zillow, you see if the house has just, you know, been recently bought or if the homeowner has has had it for ten, fifteen years. Really simple thing you can say, like, you know, I see you've had the house for a really long time. What made you wanna sell right now? Is there anything with the neighborhood? Are you looking to move?
So simple stuff like that that changes that that some changes in the script, and then making some keywords rather than sentences to fall.
Steve: Got it. Okay. So you take over the role, and then outbound business doubles? Is that the way what's the
Sean: It was close. Yeah. It was, like, probably, like, from three x to six x or it was Okay. Pretty drastic.
Steve: Got it. And so the key difference is we removed the previous VA company, bring in Zane, and Zane's in charge of it. Yeah. That's the biggest difference.
Sean: 100%.
Steve: Okay. Where did you guys go after that?
Sean: Well, that's when, we got that's when we started working with Brian in Indianapolis. And then after that, you know, we had the proof of concept. It was working well for us. It was working well for them. I've always yeah.
I've been in, different masterminds over the years. I have a pretty good network of people. I and I, you know, I knew a lot of people who were doing cold calling, and I just kinda started working within my network and, you know, offering to do this for other people. And it just kinda snowballed. Like, we've been around for a little over three years.
We just started doing marketing for the first time. Like, in you know, we've gotten up to a 100 clients almost, like, with zero marketing, but just word-of-mouth, and putting a good product out there. Mhmm. So, yeah, it really it just started snowballing.
Steve: You talked about staying focused. Right? Don't stretch yourself too thin. Yeah. And you mentioned that you had some reluctance to add this because this could potentially be a distraction.
Sean: 100%.
Steve: What did you do to safeguard to make sure this wasn't a distraction in case it didn't go well? Yeah. I guess we'll start there. Yeah.
Sean: If you're
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Sean: Yeah. I mean, a cold calling company is extremely operation heavy. Like, for each cold caller, you know, there's there's people in the data department, quality assurance, customer service. There's so many supporting staff. That is not the type like, that is not what I'm good at.
So but Zane is a phenomenal, operator Mhmm. And very good with systems and process. Zane runs the company. I do, you know, level 10 meetings. I probably, me and Zane, meet for a couple hours every weekend.
You know, I I like to get in with the sales and the marketing, but I probably spend five to ten hours a week on it, and I just focus on, you know, sales, marketing, and a vision and leadership. So I I define my role really well, and then I just put a ton of trust into Zane. Mhmm. And, you know, that's that's how we've done it. I believe what do you think?
Speaker: Yeah. And, Steve, reflecting on that, I think one of the things we've done and I was very I wasn't happy with it for the first year. I wanted to explore to other niches, different niches. I was like, hey. Let's do solar.
Let's do roofing. Let's try a lot of stuff. We're a call center. We've done really good at real estate, and Sean has done a really good job of, like, hey, we're really good at real estate. Let's focus at at it.
Let's just do it. And, I believe this has made us much better in in the real estate. And up until now, we only do real estate. We've just started potentially looking at other stuff, very recently.
Sean: But, I mean, even even within that, like, we did proper we would do property management for a couple people or we would just do kind of, like, general admin, and it was always just this, headache. And so we recognized really early on, like, no. We are gonna be the very best at outbound marketing, cold calling, and lead managers, and we're not gonna touch anything else. Mhmm. Like, once we feel like we cannot do any better, okay, let's let's talk about it.
But, we just stayed really laser focused.
Steve: Got it. So this is the second time you mentioned that you have your meetings on the weekends. Yeah. What is the story with having meetings on the weekends?
Sean: Man, I'm I'm a little bit of a workaholic, and, you know, it's, I I saw it's just two meetings. It's one with Noah and one with Zane. And it's like a Working
Steve: on the weekends.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nobody else is working on the weekends, man. That's where, that's a opportunity to get ahead. Yeah.
No. It's, I mean, I love what I do. Like, I'm passionate about both companies. I love entrepreneurship, and, like, yeah. I love to jump on.
Me and Zane meet Sunday mornings. Me and Noah meet Saturday mornings. It's Oh,
Steve: but I'm on the same day.
Sean: No. No. No. No. No.
Seven days a week, right? No. But it's you know, I'm a morning person. It's when my brain works best, and, you know, it's what I love to do. I'd you know, it's not every single weekend, but it's most weekends.
And, it's, it's, like, what keeps me keeps me sane, man.
Steve: Yeah. When did you guys know, like, you had something? Was it when Brian came along? Was it when other people came? Like, when did you know, like, okay.
This we have something special here.
Speaker: I think that was, around six months, and then that was right around the time
Sean: I was 40 people or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker: We've had 40 people. A lot of people Sean was reaching out to a lot of people in his network. A lot of people was hearing more. I was like, we really wanna try this.
Sean: Mhmm.
Speaker: And that's when we knew, wow, that's a really good thing, and it it it's gonna grow really big and, started putting a lot more effort and time and energy into growing it.
Sean: Yeah. When we were starting getting feedback from people, like, that it wasn't just us, that, like, people with a good sales process, they were closing deals.
Speaker: Mhmm.
Steve: Got it. What separates you guys from everyone else? Because, like, there's a lot out there. Not not only are there a lot. There are a lot in Egypt.
Sean: For sure.
Speaker: A 100% true. Yeah. I think the first thing that comes to mind is quality over quantity. We just focus so much on quality. Outbound marketing is already exhaust the sales team that's working on it.
It requires a lot of follow-up. It requires a lot of time and effort to follow-up with leads, and we just give you, a smaller amount of more qualified leads and buy back some time for your sales team. I think that's one big thing. Another thing with Sean being a real estate investor, and me being an operator, seeing a lot of people, a lot of real estate investors working across different markets, different systems, different processes, we are able to identify issues beyond cold calling. So sometimes real estate investors will not be seeing our why.
We'll come to us. We'll look at the reports and what's happening and identify if there is a data problem, identify if there is a sales process problem, we tell them that's where you should look and here's some recommendations you can do. And the third thing that a lot of clients value a lot is data protection. Leads are exclusive to our clients. A lot of companies in the market, you know, they have two clients working in in one market.
They're share shared leads. We never do that. Leads are exclusive, and it's backed up by reports and call logs and systems that, you know, clients can actually go in there, and that that's true and it is exclusive to them.
Steve: Yeah. I've had that experience.
Speaker: Oh. So
Sean: have I. That's that's actually part of a little bit. That was actually part of the reason I started working with Zane too. Yeah.
Steve: I was like, these other appointments you're giving me, that's not from my list. Yep. Right. They're like, oh, don't worry about it. Okay.
But it's not from my list. I was like, where are you pulling? I was like, oh, we got we got to wait for that. Yeah. Alright.
Sean: Just to add to that, though, I think, like, one huge thing is, you know, this company was started out of a need for my real estate company to do things better. So, like, I'm very demanding of, you know, vendors and different people who market, or do marketing for us. And I'm a very difficult client. And so I have and then not only that, like, my reputation, like, was built around this company. So I have just very high expectations that things are gonna be done the right way.
And then, like, we're very detail oriented within our marketing department. And, you know, we have two different marketing people meeting with Res VA, like, every week to, you know, like, why aren't we doing this? Could we try this? My company is constantly the guinea pig to try, you know, like, different things with data. I know data like Zane and the team have invested a lot of time on how we work through people's data.
You know, like, if a call ends with a a a voice mail or answering machine, how often do we call them back? If they answer and it's the right person, but they're just not there right now, Or, you know, how often do we call them back? And they could talk a lot more about that, but it's a lot of that back end stuff where where it's not just a caller. It's that whole support team that goes behind it. And then just to throw one more thing is our customer service.
Like, we're very big. Like, we we want clients to get on and tell us what's working, what's not working. You know, like, if they share their KPIs with us, we try to dive deep and really do everything we can to, help our clients and then have our supporting staff really understand the real estate market.
Steve: Got it. Going back to the other question. Because we're gonna talk we're gonna spend some time talking about customer service.
Sean: Oh, yeah.
Steve: Going back to the other question, why are there so many call centers in Egypt?
Speaker: Yeah. Stephen, if I'm being honest, the barrier there's a very little barrier to entry in that. And a lot of I'm I'm in the market. We've done a research, and we found over 75 call centers. Some of them having a really small amount of people, you know, ten, fifteen callers.
And it's usually someone who's who's who's worked in the real estate industry or or a little bit. Mhmm. They meet a client. Hey. Let's run cold calling in house for me.
Similar to what happened here.
Sean: Mhmm.
Speaker: I think the biggest difference, that happens, a lot of people start running for the client, and they don't know how to scale right. They don't know how to put systems and processes. Mhmm. They don't have, the leadership or business skills required to do it correctly and take it to the next level, or even the real estate knowledge and expertise. And I think that's one of the big reasons that that sets us apart.
Sean: I think well, I got one. Like, why why are there so many cold calling companies in Egypt? Like, Egyptians are sharks, and they're, like, you know, like natural negotiators. I've worked with, like, a lot, you know, a lot of people get virtual assistance in The Philippines. And a lot of times, like, this is a very generalized statement, but a lot of times, like, people in The Philippines are amazing with customer service, and they're more kinda conflict avoided where people like, I've been to Egypt 10 times probably in the last four years, and everything in Egypt from a gallon of gas to a loaf of bread is negotiated.
It's just it's a natural sales culture. Once again, that's a generalization, but, man, it's true. And then another thing is, you know, Egypt has a 100,000,000 people, and it's a very educated society. So they really value education. So you get a lot of just and like I said, a doctor, your first year doctor or engineer makes, like, 5 to $8 a year.
That just blew my mind. So, you know, like, you there's a lot of amazing talent, and I think they're just, like, just naturally gear geared towards sales from my experience.
Steve: Walk me through the buying gas experience.
Speaker: Buying gas experience. It is
Sean: It depends where you are. It it it it it definitely does. If you're in the country, you could just, like, buy some drugs on the side of the road. Yeah.
Speaker: It is it is it depends where you are a lot. But the if you're if you're in the Dahab, it's a really nice city out in Sinai. You don't just go in there and pump usually, there is someone who pumps gas for you in Egypt, but you don't just let them pump. You get off the road. You talk to them about the gas.
You talk to them about the prices. You talk to them like, hey, what's going on here? This is an entire experience. And believe it or not, in some cities, it is you can literally negotiate the gas price, get an extra bucket for a different price. Meters are some meters are not working in certain cities, and you can negotiate that price.
A lot of people that come out from The States to Egypt to us are just blown away with with that nature. I remember a story where, you know, Austin always tells me blown his mind away. They were were buying a towel from a shop, and he wanted to buy the towel. The guy said, you know, price equivalent to $10, and he had two Egyptians with him. They pulled two chairs, put it down, and lit a cigarette with the owner.
I was like, no, we're not doing it for $10 then. And, yeah, he keeps mentioning that story over and over, but it's like Sean said, we're
Steve: It's a game.
Speaker: It is.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. So I just can't imagine. So, like, we're talking about, like, I'm gonna get two or three buckets of gas Yeah. For this amount of money?
Is this is this is this a negotiation?
Speaker: In in some cities, yes.
Steve: Like, I can understand, like, hey. Look. I see that the loaf of bread for is for $2.50, but I'll do $1.50. I can understand that. Yeah.
I can't picture. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, Zane. Look.
I understand you want I don't know, like, what it is per liter over there.
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: Right? But, yeah, I'm not gonna pay that.
Speaker: Yeah. In in Upper Egypt and an area called Sinai, which is a peninsula, you can definitely as well negotiate gas prices. Usually, the the gas stations over there are insane, and and that's not like city Egypt, but gas stations over there are a little bit insane. Meters are not working and Mhmm. You can definitely negotiate with them on it.
Steve: On the flip side of that then, if you're a tourist then Yeah. Would it be fair to say then it's easy to get ripped off if you're not paying attention?
Speaker: I would recommend when you visit Egypt, you call an Egyptian friend to be around with you.
Steve: So someone to keep an eye out for you.
Speaker: Yep. Exactly.
Steve: Got it. Alright. Makes a lot of sense. Before we continue, hey, guys. You know, comment below your biggest takeaway so far.
You know, if there's anything you'd like to see more of, less of, please let us know. I, in person, are reviewing every single comment. So, you know, even if you just share your biggest takeaway below, I would appreciate that. So alright. So you know after six months, you got 40 clients, like, this is a thing.
So at this point, then you started the company or the company's already existed?
Sean: Companies already existed, but that's when we started investing, I think, a lot into the back end infrastructure and, like, looking yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. I think one of the and and and this was was a big challenge for us as well that we've learned from is, you know, six months in, a lot of people were showing interest. We're telling we're saying deals we're seeing deals, telling Sean, hey, we wanna sign up, and we just added a bunch of people, and our systems lagged that expansion. We had a lot of people. We are really happy about the revenue where, you know and even the bottom line, we're making a lot of money, but our systems couldn't support that amount of clients at that time.
Steve: What does that mean? They couldn't support?
Speaker: So right now, for each caller, we have one and a half supporting staff. So if you have 10 callers, we have 15 people supporting these callers.
Steve: Wow. Really?
Speaker: Yep. That makes ensures that we're able to supply the quality we want to and just an overall amazing service. And back then, we just kept adding callers without having, you know, qualified people to to to do team leading, to do quality, to do become auditors, to become trainers. And we lacked some processes that needed enhancement. And we've gotten to a point where we're like, Sean, we need to slow down and stop adding people a bit and work on the infrastructure.
Steve: Wow. Okay. And then a couple different things. So, you you I'm looking at those here. So it's a very low turnover rate.
Yep. 11. What is the importance of 11% turnover rate?
Speaker: So our industry standard for call centers is more around 30 to 35%. Us being at 11% just shows how strong of a culture the company has, and people are not just looking at it as a gig, but they're actually staying to grow their career further.
Steve: So the people that work there. Yep. So the turnover is thirty thirty thirty to 35% of most call centers. Yep. The people, like, one third are gonna quit every year.
Exactly. Okay. So you got 11. Yep. How are you guys doing?
I mean, I I I've heard you say career, but, you know, how what are you guys doing intentionally to retain your your people?
Speaker: It starts from the first day that people step in the company from the training. So the first day is about setting expectations and just showing people that this is gonna be different from any cold calling job you've had previously. Mhmm. It doesn't matter if you've been cold calling for two years or you've never been cold call calling before, you go through our training. And on that day, we just show them the company with the 13 different departments in it, how each department contribute to make sure that helps our clients, and we explain to them the entire real estate industry from beginning to close.
How as a cold caller, they have the impact of generating a lead and helping real estate investors win, and we show them different road maps that they can go through as a cold caller. We show them, hey, if you really value sales and you wanna learn sales, you can become a lead manager. You you join our company. You get trained on real estate. You understand that we score your leads.
You get to a certain quality of of goals, and then you go through our lead managing training program and become a lead manager. If you wanna become an operation person, we have a lot of operations. Like I've said, 1.5 staff for each caller.
Sean: Mhmm.
Speaker: And this is the road map to it. And, you know, you can work as a team leader, as running teams, as managing a huge part of the company, and we even give them examples through the people in our org chart.
Steve: Got it. And then you guys have generated a 100,000 leads?
Speaker: Yep.
Steve: A lot of freaking leads.
Sean: Yes. Shane's an animal, man.
Steve: It's a lot of leads. So you guys handle then the customer provides the data?
Speaker: Yeah. They can or we can provide
Sean: There's kinda three different scenarios. One is, like, you know, people are super dialed in with their data, and they do that. We love it when people, like, take the time to understand their data and provide it to us. Mhmm. We have a couple really good relationships with, certain data companies where they recommend us, and then we actually work with their data company to, like, report metrics back every month so that we can help help the client get a better list Mhmm.
Through reporting with their data provider. And then we also, do data and skip tracing for clients if they want more of a turnkey solution.
Steve: Got it. Yeah. Because I think, I've talked to, Felipe with eighty four. Yep. Right?
They send you guys Yeah. In our own business.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah. We work really well with them.
Steve: Yeah. So then the part I wanna talk about is the customer service part. So, you know, we've we've rolled out our AI service. Right? It was a newer thing, and now it's doing really well.
And I think you're talking about really helpful because, like, I know I'm gonna run into these challenges. But customer service, we had a girl who started yesterday.
Sean: Okay.
Steve: And her job is customer service. Because we've been doing it. Right? But, like, we've all, like, kinda stretched.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: Alright. Like, we're onboarding I don't know. I think at least a client every single day now. Nice. Right?
And so with that, like, customer service is gonna suffer.
Speaker: Yeah. It is.
Steve: What have you guys done? Because, we have a mutual coach, Amanda Dean. Yep. Right? So I hear good things on that side.
I'm a collective genius. I'm in boardroom. So we have a lot of mutual colleagues. They all say great things. And, again, like Felipe.
Right? I know he's said to me personally, like, hey. Like, you know, we recommend these guys all the time. What are you guys doing to make sure you guys have an excellent customer service experience? I'm filming this video for the man himself, mister Ian Ross.
So Guy Krashe is the guy's the best person in sales I've ever seen. I've invested elsewhere, and I haven't got the same results. I've gone from being a setter, making 5 k a month, to being a hybrid role, making 11 k a month, to now be four months down the
Sean: line from 5 k to on a
Steve: closing opportunity, inbound, full calendar with the best return on your investment,
Sean: I don't know what it is is, man.
Steve: If you're a salesperson and you don't invest in sales training, you're gonna get left behind because your job is to be better at sales, and sales training directly makes you want money. If you like what you just heard and would like similar types of success, text close to 33777, and we'll see if you qualify to join objection proof selling. We're taking good sales reps, and we're making them objection proof.
Sean: It's evolved a lot. Like, it used it's yeah. It did not start off great. I'll I'll let it say
Steve: were there some bad stories? Let's let's hit the bad stories first. It's not how we did it to fix it.
Sean: We just didn't put the time into it or value it. And another thing is we had clients reach out when there was a problem. We're very proactive, like, hey. Can we get something on your schedule just like ten minutes? Let's just go over things.
So, you know, we've we've been more proactive. And and, obviously, sometimes, like, it's on autopilot. People don't want to. People are super busy. But we have and we've structured the meetings a lot more.
Yep. But yeah. When it was once again, like, I know how important customer service is because I've, you know, used a lot of vendors over the years where they promise you one thing and you get something else. Mhmm. And then they kinda blame you when things aren't, like, you know, like, when you're not getting the results.
So, I've as I've used different vendors over the years, I've always really valued vendors who have high customer serve who really just cares. So I think that's, like, the big thing is, like, we get a lot of amazing feedback is that we really care. Like, we'll kinda we'll go above and beyond that.
Speaker: Yep. Absolutely. And and and like like you mentioned, one of these bad stories in our early days, a client reaches out, says, hey, I'm having a problem with this, and then we look into it, and, oh, okay, you need that. It's like, what are you guys doing? Why haven't you reached out and told me that you need that?
So we've changed that perspective. Over the last two years, we've been just working a lot on it. One of the biggest and important things I see is for the customer service not to only understand our product very well, but understand the client's business very well as well and is able to offer insights and sometimes talk beyond our product. And then, you know, with real estate investors, a lot of the time, like Sean said, they're on autopilot. They don't even wanna talk.
We don't take that. There's there needs to be at least one check-in a week. Even if that check-in is a text, it's like, hey. Everything going okay? Do you wanna need to hop in a call?
Client says, no. Everything's well. That's fine. One of the most important aspects as well is two way reporting. And in order for this to work, it's a two way street.
We we can just do the cold calling and you let it run. We need to know from you what's happening, what's going on, do we need to adjust something? So right now in our onboarding calls, we tell clients, these are the reports you receive from us, and here's what they mean. These are the reports that we need to receive from you, and we've seen that clients that supply us with these reports have much more success with us and grow with us much more.
Sean: I got one for you, Steve. You want the bad story? It just popped into my head. So, you know, Before we were as proactive, I remember getting a screenshot, and it was somebody who had written out this just horrible message into the CG Facebook group. He was like, I want all of my money back, or I'm pressing send.
You know, red alert red alert red alert. And, you know, it's we weren't under getting with people enough to understand, like, you know, what their what their problems were. And we you know, it got to the point where, you know, real estate investors, a lot of them are impatient and some of our at least me, I'm pretty emotional. So, you know, but it it was a 100 per it it really it taught us a lesson. Like like, we let him get to the point where he that he was that upset.
Like, if we would have been, you know, shooting a text once a week or, you know, try hey. You're you know, like, we're seeing this on your account. Like, is there can we help? It it definitely made us be more proactive.
Steve: I can say for sure, if you look at the PI, predictive index
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: Our colleagues, our avatar, you probably also, the c's all the way to the left, which is the inpatient. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sean: Off the chart.
Steve: Right? And the e's all the way to the left, which is very emotional. Yeah. So inpatient and emotional.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: It's a challenging client.
Sean: Challenging for customer service. Right? Yes.
Steve: And so, you know, so to your point, like, what you said, like, you know, adding this additional bit by being proactive, we didn't I took for granted. So I've been using Zapier, I wanna say, since, like, 2013, 2016. Right? I'm grandfathered into this amazing price that you can't get today. Right?
Like, I have, like, I think, 50,000 Oh, wow. Zaps, a month, whereas everyone else is, like, 750. Yeah. Okay. Because like I said, I've been using it way before it was this big thing.
Sean: Yeah. So
Speaker: I just take
Steve: for granted everyone has Zapier. Yeah.
Sean: So I
Steve: was like, yeah. Like, to plug in our API tool or AI tool, all you gotta do is just, like, you know, set up this webhook in Zapier. Right? Yep. And I didn't realize there are still people out there that don't have Zapier accounts.
Right? So that was the first thing. And second, I thought, there's someone on your team that can just, like, copy the screenshot of how to set up the Zap. Uh-huh. That is not a safe assumption.
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: So, a, everyone's got Zapier accounts. That's not a safe assumption. B, they can just copy the screenshot of a Zap. Yeah. Yeah.
That is not a safe assumption.
Speaker: Not really. Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. So I've learned that
Sean: in the
Steve: last couple of months. Right? Some frustrations from clients.
Speaker: Yeah. We we've had that exact same thing, and we ended up doing it for them. It's like, okay. Don't worry about the integration. We'll do it for you.
Steve: Yeah. Well, we're getting to that point. You solved a different problem, or you mentioned you do something different. So as a service provider, like, I've been doing coaching since 2019.
Sean: Nice.
Steve: Right? A problem that's gotten worse over the years is letting our clients know what we offer, what we do. Right? Like, we had, for example, you know, we talked about the AI lead manager. That program's out now.
Right? And we have, at this point, over a 100 people. I think we're, like, a 130 something, like, clients in our world. But even at a 100 clients, when we roll out the AI lead manager deal, we did a whole webinar and everything. And our clients were, like, opting in to book a call to get sold to buy this lead manager program.
And I told my team, I was like, cancel those appointments. It's already included. They have this tool already. Now, thankfully, they were willing to pay more
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: To get the tool, but it's already built in. Like, we've said, like, hey. Like, if you're in a program, like, it's already you're already grandfathered in. But that really highlights in this day and age between the text bombardment, the cold calling, the emails, Facebook, Instagram. They've tuned us out.
So I can't even, like, hey, Sean. Just so you know, we also offer this now. It's included at no additional charge. Yep. But you guys seem to have created a way to connect and make sure you stay in front of your clients.
Yep. What have you done to intentionally make sure? Because, like, once a week, like, man, if we can connect with our clients once a week, that's huge. What are you guys doing to stay in front of your clients at least once a week?
Speaker: Yeah. Absolutely. And it it comes down to, just having a built in process that, you know, not only ensures the customer success rep is is doing it, but forces them to. So, you know, we we use HubSpot inside of HubSpot. It has a client, and weekly, each CS rep has to clear off that task that he's checked in with the client and say the output of that check-in.
And, you know, it starts by reaching out by email requesting, let's book a call. Let's hop on a call, see what's going on, see what's happening. They don't do that. We call them. Hey.
Everything going okay? They don't respond. We just send a text, and even if it's just a text, everything's good. Everything's good. Perfect.
Sean: I think another thing too is just, like, from the very beginning, like, being really thorough with onboarding, Zane's put together this just, like, really amazing playbook of this is how you work outbound leads. This is, you know, this a lot of the processes that have worked really well for my company over the years. And, you know, giving them this playbook and this guide and just really in-depth onboarding right from the start, it shows them the value. Mhmm. Like, okay.
Like, if I make time to connect with these guys, it's not gonna be a waste of time. Like, it's, you know, they're gonna just by setting the expectation from the beginning and showing them that, like, we're gonna make it worth their time to at least check-in with us, I think that's been huge and something we've gotten better with.
Speaker: And once they get looped into that and they do checkups consistently and send us the reports, they do see the value and they never wanna miss it. They're, like, you know, asking for it, sending us the results. Hey. What do you guys think about this? Hey.
How can I improve this? So once they start that loop, they just get hooked into it because they see the value.
Steve: Yeah. And that's something that I think is probably valuable because, like, we in our tool tell you, like, you know, what you think what we think you should be doing and so on.
Speaker: Yep.
Steve: But we can get their report back. Like, here are the conversations that turn to revenue. Here's how much revenue it turned into. Now we have a tighter feedback loop. It's like, hey.
Like, here's what's working for these other clients when they do this, this, and this in a sales process. Sales conversation. Right? Because, like, what we have right now is, like, is what makes sense to us, what we've trained on. Yeah.
Right? We've trained thousands of salespeople on it. But we've never tied it back to closing the loop. Yep.
Sean: We can
Steve: close a loop, quality of the data improves dramatically. We reviewed, like, 250,000 calls, right, in the last few months. But if we could say, like, here are the ones that actually turn into revenue, here are the best practices on the one that closes. Yeah. Or, like, here are the teams that close the highest.
Here's what they're doing consistently. That would be valuable data for everyone.
Sean: Yep. I saw you're doing that, like, with the competition between the teams, and I'm like, that's I mean, that that's getting people bought in, I'm sure.
Steve: I'm excited about that.
Sean: I was excited to see that.
Steve: So okay. Now, turn it back to what you guys have built out. Feed it back to the real estate team because you're the guinea pig. Yeah. Right?
Like, you're like Tim Ferris here. A 100%. All these things, and then we're gonna see what works, what doesn't work.
Speaker: Yep. And Steve, Sean's one of the hardest clients to deal with.
Sean: I was gonna say I'm gonna complain about it. He's he's
Speaker: yeah. He's definitely one of the hardest. But but it it teaches us a lot and gets us to the next point since we're trying a lot of new stuff with him.
Steve: What are some things he's doing that that makes him a difficult client?
Speaker: One of the first things that pops to my mind is Sean and his team always wants to split test 10 different things, and it is just, sometimes it it feels like it's too much and, like, hey, guys. We need to dial it back and split test one thing at a time. Mhmm. But it turns a lot of the good things comes out of it. But, another thing that Sean and his team has always on like he mentioned, on top of the vendor, they always want better results, more results.
Hey. This is going great. How can we make it even better? Hey. We've got PIFX ROI.
How can we push to six? How can we push to seven? Let's experiment with this.
Sean: Mhmm.
Speaker: And it makes it tough to the customer success team. It makes it tough on the company since, you know, the campaign is going really well. Why do you wanna try and make changes? Mhmm. But on the other hand, it does add a lot of value, and that's why we we let the team do that together
Steve: Yeah.
Speaker: All the time and continue try to making it better.
Steve: Or at least everyone else is better.
Speaker: Yeah. Exactly. And that yep. We everything that works, we take it and implement it across the board.
Sean: Yeah. I was gonna say it also helps that, you know, I've we've hired all of Zane's really good friends that it's really easy to get in his ear. Mhmm. But I know, like, we've been like, we collaborate on stuff. Like, we've been like, we do a ton of outbound marketing, and we do a lot of mail, and we're just really dialed in on data.
Mhmm. You know, like, we use eighty twenty. We pull a bunch of our own data. We we get data every way we can. Mhmm.
And as, like, we've seen a huge opportunity over the last year to understand it way better and go way deeper on it, and we collaborate. So I can we can pull resources. Like, on the Res VA side, we have an engineering team that can pull reports and do stuff with the dialers that other teams can't do, that helps us monitor how data is performing. And so we can get the really smart people from Res VA and the really smart people in the marketing department of my company and, you know, pool resources together. I think that's been really big over the last year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Steve: So let's talk about your company looks like today then. Right? Because seeing on pace, you you said you've closed a 190 so far?
Sean: Yeah. So far this year.
Steve: Yeah. So let's see. That's, almost 30. Right? Like, 25.
Sean: Yeah. 25. A
Steve: month. Right? What are you guys doing right now to do 25 deals a month?
Sean: Man, we had a huge breakthrough back in March. We had a couple sales guys who had been with us for two to three years, really close with them. There was, like, some funny business. Long story short, there was, you know, some funny business going on the side. We made a really difficult decision because, these guys, you know, last 2024, we had three yak guys, and they brought in, like, 70 of the business, 80% of the business.
But we let them go, and we got really lucky. We had somebody who was really experienced come in, then we had, got somebody a couple months later, and we got some new blood into the acquisition guys. And, like, they just raised the bar.
Speaker: Yeah.
Sean: I've gotten a lot better with hiring. Like, we've made some really amazing hiring, and internal promotions. You know, it's funny, you know, there over the years, like, I've implemented a lot of what Gary and Sharper has told me to do. But Finally? Yeah.
Exact oh, man. The last time Gary came in and did our quarterly, you know, I always ask Gary to be brutally honest, which he's really good at. And, at one point he's like, you know, he was comparing me to, you know, Phil Green. And he was like, you would have done if he would have listened to me like Phil would be, you'd be there right now. Like, just, like, rip me apart in front of the entire thing.
I was like, yeah. You're right, Gary. It's like I mean, I wish I I've learned to not question and just listen. But with hiring, I've like, being very emotional. I we've started really following a process.
Like, I'm involved in it, but, it's not only dependent on me. Like, sometimes people would come in and I'd be like, oh, this guy's a winner. Let what's going on? So now it's like I can have that conversation, but I like I'm gonna put it like my sales manager is gonna do, you know, a complete, like, scoring matrix and weigh all of these different things. And, obviously, we're gonna not just look at PI, we're gonna really, like, you know, analyze it.
So
Steve: Well, I'm gonna hit a couple of things here. Right? You did a really good job with Noah
Sean: For sure.
Steve: And you did a really good job with Zane.
Sean: 100%.
Steve: So you've nailed it
Sean: For sure. Twice. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: But on the other side too, like, yeah, the you also think these people are gonna be winners when they're complete flops.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: And I've done that too
Sean: For sure.
Steve: Multiple times. Like, oh, I like this person. This person's gonna make it. And, man, like, that never works out that way. Yeah.
So, actually, you know, our our process now is a little bit different. It's, like, we have to do the PI. We gotta do Working Genius. We gotta do the screening. We use role playing, our role playing bot, right, for screening.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, nice.
Steve: And then, you know, our sales manager does the the the initial interview. But then we can't hire them now until Summer and my team, who you interacted with, you both met Yeah. Has to, like, just watch the the interview on Fathom
Sean: Uh-huh.
Steve: Is, like, yes or no. Because she can sense things that us guys can't sense.
Sean: We
Steve: can't sense it. Right? And then the last thing is then and then at that point, I can say yes or no. Yeah. But if I start off with, like, yeah, let's hire this guy.
It doesn't work out Yeah. Especially because, you know, when the CEO says, like, hey. Hire this person. Like, they wanna argue with you and fight with you. Also, like, do I wanna stick my neck on challenging you on this one?
Yeah.
Sean: Right. So But having a process that gets followed every time gets like, helps limit that because the some emotion's good Mhmm. And you want it to, like, weigh in there. But if you just have a process and you don't break it
Steve: So talk to me about this funny business.
Sean: Oh, man. Alright.
Steve: Because, again, like, these are we're talking about, like, the the the less the the the wins. Absolutely. But, also, like, what did we learn Yeah. From the failures?
Sean: So it was, like okay. So, you know, business always slows down in the fall. Quarter fours always slow. Things were slowing down last quarter. These acquisition guys had just been with us for a long time.
They were comfortable. You know? And I oh, so fast forward, like, to March, I get a a call from, one of my really good friends, and he tells me that, like, you know, I heard it through the grapevine. These guys are doing something. I didn't believe it.
I laughed. I was like, no way. No way. And, I will he gave me a website, and I look at the website, and there's so much of the copy. Like, you know, copy is, like, it's just things that we say.
I was like, oh, wow. There's, like, you know, five different things where I say, again, this is this is absolutely them.
Speaker: Mhmm.
Sean: And so lesson I've learned is, like I said, I'm pretty emotional. And, on a big decision like this, I would normally just go off the rails. Get the get the hell out of here. But I this is huge. Like, these guys brought in most of our business last year.
I slowed myself down. I really dug deep over the next six weeks. Pretended like nothing was going on. I got to the bottom of, like, truly understood what was going on. I got somebody in place.
But long story long is they were they were planning to do their own business. Mhmm. They had all these plans to do it. It didn't quite work out, but part of the reason we slowed down is because they were putting their energy into this, and they were checking out. And so they just they realized how hard it is.
Mhmm. You know, came back to, like, okay. We're gonna do this. They were skimming lead like, warm, cold leads to refer to realtors Mhmm. Out of our CRM and getting kickbacks there.
And, you know, it was a very, like, easy paper trail to track. By slowing myself down, not ove overemotionally reacting, I was able to, like, properly prepare for it. Yeah. Yeah. Alright.
Steve: With you being so hands on on a lead manager side, I don't know how hands on you are today, but being involved in it, can you guys tell? Like, do you guys hold the acquisition managers accountable? Like, what's that relationship like?
Speaker: No. So for lead managers, it's it's it's they're all they work with acquisitions. They push leads to them. They see what's going on. With lead managers, some lead manager, if they're digging really deep to the leads of the acquisitions they're doing, they could see something, but that's not typical.
That's that usually doesn't typically happen.
Steve: Okay. Yeah. So then alright. So hiring better. Yeah.
Letting the wrong people or getting the wrong people Yeah. Out. Yeah. So it's not about your hiring process then. What is your hiring
Sean: process? Well, sometimes it starts off with me meeting somebody and be like, oh, this is a guy. 100%. Like, oh, dude. I just he's a he he's a maverick.
Oh, no. He's, like, he's gonna be sales. But, like, at that point, I hand him off to our sales manager. Mhmm. Our sales manager has, you know, a full process, you know, where he's gonna do role playing.
He's gonna grade him on 10 or 15 different things. He you know, we're gonna get other people. We're gonna you know? One thing I've been doing lately or, you know, just bringing other people in, like you're saying too, like, bring having more decision makers in, having them come to the office, seeing how they interact with people. But, you know, like, I honestly like, it's mostly the sales manager, and I think that's a good thing is, like, you know, I've I can find the people or or I can find the candidates Mhmm.
And then I pass them off and I have, you know, somebody I really trust who's process oriented, who's gonna, you know, make that decision. And, yeah, it's it's it's good. Like, it it's tough. Like, I'm a sales guy, Like, you know, let go of sales management and then to let go of hiring. But just, you know, having faith in the team that even if they make a mistake, they're gonna learn from it.
And, you know, I thought I used to be I thought I was a good manager. Mhmm. And then I started having this started working with really good managers. I was like, oh, man. I'm trash.
Like Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Having having trust in high level people who've been with the company a long time and trusting them.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And and a tool that's amazing for hiring as well that we've been using recently other than assessments is having a skill matrix
Sean: Mhmm.
Speaker: And filling all candidates under each other for them, and you get to rate each one against the other on each different skill. It just makes it
Steve: Which skills are you measuring for a skill metrics?
Speaker: It it depends on what hire you wanna you wanna do. Each hire will have different skills, but it goes all the way from soft skills to technical skills. Like, we've we've recently been looking to hire, for instance, a a in ResVie, a CTO, and we've wanted someone who've built a product from end to end, someone who understands certain languages, someone who's managed engineers successfully before, really good in conflict management because engineering and business team are always fighting consistently, and we want someone to limit that. So
Steve: Good luck with that that conflict management. Yeah. It's it's been tough. The we have conflicts, like, in the let's see. Our business, we started eighteen years ago.
Well, more than eighteen years ago. Trying to think of, like, all, like, the the conflicts we've had here, like, people get upset. They get angry.
Sean: Yep. Right?
Steve: And they might walk out of a meeting. There's not a lot of yelling. When I was at Intel, the conflicts. There are a lot of ego. A lot of, like, you're wrong.
You don't know what you're talking about. It's not like, help me understand. Wow. It's like, you're wrong. Here's why you're wrong.
And it's like Yeah.
Speaker: Wow. Yeah.
Steve: So that's how I used to argue. So fix that. Anything else you would attribute, like, to the to the big win?
Sean: Yeah. So about a year and a half ago so with marketing, me and Noah used to probably put five, ten hours a week into marketing, and never had a dedicated person. About a year and a half ago, one of our lead managers, who is another college friend or good friend of Zane's, we recognized through PI, like, he's a good lead he's a really good lead manager, but it's not his natural ability. He's very analytical. He's a perfectionist.
We moved him into the marketing department.
Steve: That makes sense.
Sean: Yeah. We hired another person into the marketing department
Steve: Mhmm.
Sean: And just started like, you know, right now we're doing, fractional CMO, with Brandon just, like, just super focused on on marketing right now. We're bringing, like, mail and PPC in house. So, just, yeah, putting so much emphasis on the last year and a half on we know we we've always been really strong with sales, but how can we get more qualified leads? Like, that's the thing I've just been really obnoxious with. Like, I don't have 30 qualified leads this week.
Why aren't we on, you know, 22 appointments? You know? Like, what's going on? Like Yeah. We're putting way heavier emphasis on that and investing time and resources there.
Steve: Yeah. I think having someone who's just dedicated for just marketing. You don't hear a lot of teams that have that. Even, I think, fractional CMOs is like a newer thing. Right?
We're seeing, for other organizations. Yeah. But, you know, you generally have an operations person. You have a sales manager, ops manager, sales manager, someone does bookkeeping. But marketing is kinda like we do it.
Yeah. Yeah. But it's not like a dedicated person. You guys have a lot of clients. Like, would you guys agree?
Speaker: A 100%.
Sean: Yeah. Yeah. So you
Steve: actually have a marketing person.
Sean: We have two of them.
Steve: Yeah. Two marketing. Yeah. So that's that's a very strong distinction. Yeah.
Sean: I think
Steve: that separate you guys from everybody else.
Sean: And a
Speaker: fractional CMO too.
Steve: Yeah. And a fractional CMO.
Sean: We're going a little overboard, but it's that important to us right now.
Steve: Well, maybe we could see the results, though.
Sean: Yeah. And, I mean, you know, we spend almost 6 figures a month on marketing. Like, to think that we were spending like, even a year and a half ago, maybe we were spending 60, and we're putting five or ten hours a week into that kind of spend, like, that blew that blew my mind.
Steve: Yeah. So being a better steward of your capital.
Sean: Yeah. And, like, one thing I didn't really expect this was our marketing person, you know, marketing and sales kinda clash, but in a healthy way. Like Mhmm. Our marketing person, she's listening to calls, and be like, why isn't this a call? Like, you know, if I'm hounding her for thirty, forty qualified leads a week, she's like, she's going to start listening to the calls and challenging things within the sales process.
So just getting, you know, a different perspective, like, you know, like, one of our big things is, you know, a qualified lead is either a price or motive good, good price or motivation. What does that really mean? Like, this person has motivation. Why isn't it a qualified lead? And having her do lead reviews every week with, with the sales manager Yeah.
Has been this thing that I didn't even know would come from it.
Steve: So that's a massive nugget. And if everyone is listening, that's a huge, huge nugget because, that's when I knew I had the right CMO in my organization. Right? And he wasn't a CMO yet. He was, like, a contractor.
I was, like, once this started happening, I was, like, yeah. Maybe you should be full time for just us. Was that he just was listening to sales calls. He's, like, we're not getting results, and he was compensated off of revenue.
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: Right? It's like, I'm not getting paid enough. Yeah. This is not working. I need to figure out what it is.
And so he just started listening to calls, like, give me the calls. Yeah. Give me give me the logins. Did he give him access to Fathom, create his own account, add my access. Alright.
Go listen to as many calls as you want. And but that's that's when I knew I had the the right guy.
Sean: Yeah. I think it's, yeah, it's building a culture where people challenge stuff. Mhmm. And even if it's not their department, like, you you know, like, I love having multiple people in our level tens, like, more and more people because I want them to understand the entire business. And even if it's not their niche or their specialty Mhmm.
They're gonna challenge it, and they're, you know, or they're gonna bring a different perspective to it.
Steve: Yeah. I think that was one of the biggest lessons I took from Studio A New Year. Right? And, you know, it does 15,000 Yeah. Thousand wholesale deals a year, whatever.
Right? Was that everyone in the leadership department is just, like, challenging everyone else. Right? Like, you can't hide. Yeah.
Right? Everyone's accountable to everyone else. There's no, like, there's no exceptions. No one's above being held accountable. And that's what I'm hearing.
Like, you're that's what you're doing now, which is awesome.
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. What is your mix of, like, deals, like your closings? Right? You know, there's a lot of deals, particularly in a competitive market. Yeah.
Sean: I
Steve: I look at Columbus. It's it's like the other Phoenix. Right? You got you got Michael Smith, Tommy Harr, Tiffany High. Austin's there too?
Sean: Oh, he's not. He's doing other stuff. Other stuff. Residentials.
Steve: Estan Esteban with EYE Homes.
Sean: Mhmm.
Steve: Yeah. You know him?
Sean: Yeah. Of course.
Steve: Like, so you got all these guys out there.
Sean: Yeah.
Steve: What are you guys doing right now as far as, like, a mix to stick to to do this many deals?
Sean: Different marketing channels. You know, we've expand so I used we used to just go in, like, our core county. Mhmm. We started doing like, maybe I always like to use, like, a radius from Downtown Columbus. It used to be about 20 miles.
Now it's like 40 miles, maybe 50 miles. So we're going a little bit further out while still not leaving. You know, it's still driving. We're still in person appointments. I think it's, it's just one okay.
So one thing I've really learned the last year, two, three years as we've gone from, like, 10 people to right now, we have, like, 32 people or so between project. We met we have a pretty big rental portfolio we manage in house and project management is all that. But throughout all of that Mhmm. It's a company that's like, I like, we're all late I'm a pretty laid back person. I don't like corporate kind of feel.
When you're, like, eight or 10 people, you can get away with that. When you get to like twenty, thirty people, it's like, we used, it just used to be a running joke, HR, like, you know, like, oh, Luke's HR for the day. Like, but like those things, you know, proper onboarding, you know, just running things like this, this isn't like a little, you know, like it's going from, like, a small business to, like, more of, like, a just more company, more structure. Mhmm. There are things I don't like about it, but just recognizing how necessary that is.
But investing in coaching, investing in masterminds, investing in relationships, being reputable, like, you know, having like, knowing that people wanna work with you or Yeah. You might not always get along with everybody all the time, but, like, even people who who you compete with and might not like you, they respect you. So I think Yeah. Building that reputation is huge.
Steve: What are your top three or five, like, lead sources right now for closings?
Sean: So cold calling, texting, mail, PPC. We're start like, we've really been working on our digital brand. Mhmm. We neglected that for a long time, but, pretty much it. I mean, we we haven't done TV, but that was we we did, like, three years ago, and it felt like we were just burning money.
Mhmm. I think next year. Once we get everything else, like, as we're getting everything in marketing tightened up, I think we'll probably do that next year, but it's PPC has been really, really tough for us personally. So I say cold calling, texting, and mail.
Steve: What's a digital brand?
Sean: Just, well, like our Facebook page, having you know, we've always been super we've always invested super hard in, like, our Google, our business, and our reviews. Mhmm. But using that more, being well, yeah. Also, like, Facebook ads and just trying other things, but, yeah. Putting more effort, like, it's always kind of been neglected, but being more intentional about how people in general see us as a company, especially as we get ready to spend probably, like, go into TV, making sure that we have a unified brand, you know, and message and feeling across, like, all of those channels.
Because a lot of times, they might not It it's it's you can't directly attribute it to PPC or SEO or mail. It's a combination of stuff. And the more you can have that, like, unified brand, that's gonna work better. So that's kinda what I mean with a digital digital marketing, digital brand.
Steve: What have we not talked about that everyone should be paying attention to?
Speaker: I think something we've talked about just hitting on it again is, like Sean said, as they grow just systems and process is in place and turning more from, you know, a a a a pretty laid back company to just a system and process that's followed every single time, is just very, very important to scaling both within CCS and even bigger at Res VA. Not we've we've even went, or further than that where not only we have a process and system for everything that's running, but we are always challenging these processes and systems. We've constructed an r and d team. That's their job. They just understand the entire business.
They're always looking at these processes. What could go wrong? How can we do it better? What are we tracking? What could we track more?
How can we improve it? And the more you do that, the easier it is to scale and get bigger without dropping your quality or, you know, getting more numbers.
Steve: Yeah. And I just wanna highlight, you know so we we've highlighted Sharper.
Speaker: Yeah. Yep.
Steve: So the things that we're doing together Yeah. Sharper business solutions. So we have mutual, consultants, collective genius
Sean: Yep.
Steve: Mastermind working together.
Sean: Amazing group of people. Amazing group. Yeah. That's getting in rooms where you're challenged, where, like, you know, like, you're the small fish in the big pond or you can see people who are doing things five, ten times bigger than you is just so incredibly motivating.
Steve: Yeah. Well, absolutely. And then and then boardroom also. Yeah. So, like, you're surrounding yourself constantly with the best minds nonstop.
Sean: Average of the people you hang out around the most. You know?
Steve: Absolutely. Absolutely. So moving on here, or actually before you move on, if someone wants to, like, find out more about Res VA, like, how do they find out more about Res VA?
Speaker: Yeah. They we they could go to resva.com. It has a lot of information. We have also, we have we have, link just for people coming from the podcast. We have special offering for them if they wanna know more about ResV a.
We we usually have setup fees. We all completely waive setup fees from anyone coming from, the disruptors podcast.
Sean: Which is normally, like, 500 to $1,000.
Speaker: Yep. 500 to $1,000 depending on the service person.
Sean: Also don't do any contracts or anything like that. So, people get in there, and it's not a, you know, it's not a good fit. There's no commitment and, yeah, waive the setup fees, put the their money where our mouth is.
Steve: That's huge. Not everyone does that. So that's big. So resva.com, resva.com. Mention disruptors and get your setup fee waived.
Sean: Yep. 100%.
Steve: So now looking at what you guys are doing now, how does your business look like today than it did before you went down this venture with, starting your VA partnership.
Sean: Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing is, I've made a lot of amazing like, you know, at the end of the day, like, I love hanging out with people, and, like, I love the opportunities that real estate have given me, like, the freedom. And I I love, like, keep getting to give those same opportunities, to other people. So, like, working with Zane and the other people, like, in Egypt, like, we have probably 16 people in our real estate company who are based in Egypt. 300 people on the Resvier.
I go to the 300. Yeah. I've Yeah. I mean, I'll I'll go there. Like, I've been three times this year.
Love going to the office, hanging out with everybody. Yeah. You know, like, travel's huge to me. I'm somebody who's just, like, really passionate about, world travel. Every year, we, the real estate investment company has been around, we've done an international trip.
So we've gone to Thailand. We've gone to Egypt. We've gone to Spain. We've gone to Costa Rica. So, you know, that's that's been one huge thing, like, is just, like, the relationships and Yeah.
Yeah.
Steve: How has your life changed going from being his lead manager to where you are today?
Speaker: It has changed a lot. One of one of the biggest things that's important for me is, being able to influence people and save opportunities for them. Sean has helped do that for me, and I'm able to do that for a lot of people right now. There is someone in our team that is on his way to start his own thing with with our help as well. A lot of people started we get that feedback a lot from training and from people in our companies.
Like, hey, guys. We we joined to become a cult caller, and we see an entire career. We're very proud of where we are. We've learned a lot of new skills, and being able to do that is just impeccable and makes me feel amazing and and and gives purpose to my life.
Steve: Yeah. That's awesome. How do you want to be remembered?
Speaker: How do I wanna be remembered? Mhmm. So that's a really good question. I I one of one of the things I wanna be remembered, similar to what I just mentioned, is honestly that I've been able to, give people opportunities, and I see myself doing that long term. Even with Res VA, long term is is is it it it opens up doors for a lot of different opportunities for different people and just being able to help people with that and let them show their path.
And I wish for people to remember that me for that, that I was easygoing and help them, seize an opportunity that changed their lives.
Steve: Yeah. How about yourself?
Sean: I'm gonna go more selfish. And, I wanna say somewhat like, I wanna be remembered as somebody who lived life to the full extent and, like, no regrets. So I'm very much, like, experiences over possessions, and, I wanna maintain that for the rest of my life, man.
Steve: Got it. What's your superpower?
Sean: Oh, I would say I leadership, but I still have so much so much I, like, I feel weird saying that because in the big scheme of things, like, I have so much to learn and so much room to improve. But yeah. And maybe that's why too because I'm passionate about getting better at it.
Steve: Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker: For me, I think it's talent acquisition being able to spot where a person would fit really good and just building systems that would be able to, you know, have a lot of people work under without being broken.
Steve: Yeah. Got it. And then, what failure have you learned your most valuable lesson from?
Speaker: What failure have I learned the most valuable lesson from? I think I think one of the lessons that I've learned in in in in in the first year is not letting go. I've had this idea that I need to do everything myself. I have to be my hands has to be in everything so it gets done correctly. Someone screws something up and it's done to my standards.
Okay. I'll just step in and fix it and make it correct. And that limited scaling a lot. And it was a hard it was hard for me to start letting go and delegating and empowering people and trusting them to do it. So, you know, someone screws something up instead of me stepping in and fixing it, explaining to them why it got screwed up, how it should be done next time, and not only that, identifying why it happened and putting a process in place so that it never happens for that person or any person they end up having under them eventually.
And once I've let go and started trusting and empowering people, it's been a game changer for me.
Steve: Yeah. That makes total sense. How about yourself?
Sean: Biggest failure?
Steve: Failure that you learned the biggest best lesson from.
Sean: When I was probably, like, in my twenties or, like, I'd, you know, made a good amount of money a few times and lost it all. And it was devastating at the time, but it really it, like, built up that, you know, risk tolerance. Like, okay. I can repeat that. Like, I've done it once.
Done it a second time. I can do it again, and I'm not gonna I'm gonna take way more chances. And I think that's just given me a lot of confidence in the business world.
Steve: Yeah. So going back to zero, guys.
Sean: At least. Yeah.
Steve: At least, that's helped you give that learn a lesson that you
Sean: can do it. 100%. Yeah.
Steve: I think that's huge. I don't I think that is something that a lot of people wish they had that knowledge. Right? Like, they're they think they can do it, but the fact that you've done it gives you that confidence that, yeah, like, we can do this again. Yeah.
Yeah. And then, last thoughts, you guys wanna leave all the listeners with? I'll start with you, Zane.
Sean: Yeah.
Speaker: So, one of the one of the things, I wanna tell a lot of people if they do wanna get into real estate investing or if they're real doing real estate investing and wanna scale, that, with with marketing channels, whether it's cold calling, texting that we're doing, or any other marketing channel, there is a lot of things beyond the vendor's control and ability, for it to succeed. It's a two way road, and they should be focusing on all different aspects starting from data, the vendor himself, and the marketing channel, and the sales process. They master these three. They've got a they got a winning campaign in on any kind of marketing channel. Yeah.
Steve: Yep. How about yourself?
Sean: I say, surround yourself around successful good people. Mhmm. I am the Jim Rowan. You're the average of the five people you hang out around the most. Like, I think that's huge.
You know, we were talking about, you know, there are different groups we're in. And, you know, be around people who inspire you, and it's gonna rub off on you.
Steve: Yeah. I mean, it's it's said many times, but it's still true.
Sean: Yeah. It's it's one of those things that it's so cliche, but it's cliche because it's true.
Steve: Exactly. Alright. So thank you very much.
Speaker: Absolutely. Thank you for having us.
Steve: Thank you.
Sean: Thanks, Steve. Thank you
Steve: guys for watching. We'll see you guys next
Sean: time. Out to Steve train. Jump on the Steve train. Disrupt us.
