Stephanie Betters: Last year, we lost 43,000,000 potential revenue. We had it in our system, and it sold to somebody else. We got punched in the teeth 2022. Yeah. That sucked.
And 2023 was like, 2024 was okay. Like, 2025 got better at the end. Right? And that now this year is actually January this year has been really good. Looking at that, it made everybody on our team think, will it ever get hot again?
Can we grow a big business? Is the opportunity out there? No one's buying. No one you know, it's too hard. The market's too hard.
And then you look at a number like that. Is that over?
Steve Trang: Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's episode Disruptors Where Millionaires Are Made. Today, we have Stephanie Betters with Left Main REI and Stephanie Flewim from Charlotte talk about how she's grown multiple businesses to 8 figures a year, which is wildly impressive because it was a few years ago where you came on to talk about multiple 7 figures a year. So, so I can't wait to get into that. Guys, I'm on a mission to create, millionaires. Information on the show alone is enough to help become a millionaire in the next five to seven years.
If you'll take consistent action, you'll become one. And before we jump in, if you're here to learn how real entrepreneurs are building real empires, make sure you hit that subscribe button because every week we're dropping lessons that create your first or your next million. Right now, you have a hundred thousand two fifty, probably even more sitting in your CRM. Resurrect all your old and dead leads with the objection proof AI calling agent. Text cash to the phone number 33777 to unlock the money that's just hanging out in your CRM.
You ready? Alright. So, I asked you to come out, because I was thinking about, there was a conversation that we had back at Collective Genius. Before we get into all that, you were speaking on stage about what people are missing in regards to AI and their CRM. So you wanna go ahead and jump into, like, what what was the problem that people were not aware of in regards to their CRM?
Stephanie: Basically, homeowners becoming more motivated over time Mhmm. And then getting getting in front of them and doing essentially, the bottom line is doing good follow-up. Right?
Steve: Right.
Stephanie: So one of the biggest competitive advantages that I have, like, running on sale investment company for ten plus years now and other people just like you and, our clients who've been in business many, many years is they generate leads every week. Right? And then the 30 to 50% of them are qualified right now, and the rest are not. Right? So every every week, every month, every year, you have this growing database of homeowners who you've paid for, you know, very expensive marketing to generate them, and it becomes harder and harder to actually follow-up with them.
Yeah. Right? So you have this great competitive advantage that you've been in market forever and you have all this data, but hard to sift through it. So, you know, the theory was these people's problems are not going to instantly be solved. They're probably gonna get worse over time, but it's really hard to know when.
So, you know, prior to releasing what I'll I'll talk about is, you know, you just put them in a follow-up sequence. Mhmm. Cadences. Right? You're getting texts.
You're getting emails. You're calling. And and what happens is the follow-up sucks. No one likes to do it. So it gets deprioritized.
You're going through a task list. It's like the worst thing that you have to do all day is your follow-up. So you call somebody, they don't pick up. You click a box that you tried, and you move on. Right?
But meanwhile, they may have additional motivation that makes them way more relevant than even potentially a brand new lead. So the whole thought process was, how can we make our CRM alive? Like, how can it serve me up better follow-up?
Steve: And you're talking about a problem. I mean, we all have a follow-up problem. Yeah. And you solved it in a novel which a novel way, which I think is very lucrative. But, like, we all have spent the money in the marketing.
Yeah. Like, I was talking to Eric Brewer, you know, like, they're using our system, and he was like, I got 60,000 leads Yeah. In my CRM who knew who I was, raised their hand, and said, I want a cash offer
Stephanie: Yep.
Steve: That are just sitting there Mhmm. Dormant. Right? And so the other part too is, I was talking to another member at Collective Genius this morning, and he was like, let's talk about our favorite problem. Follow-up.
Stephanie: Follow-up. Yeah.
Steve: Because it's not rocket science
Stephanie: Right.
Steve: To be aware that the money's in the follow-up.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: But you have, again, a a novel way of approaching it. What is a different way of looking at it or different way of solving
Stephanie: the problem? Essentially, we auto enrich your entire database. So we we turn on monitoring for all of the leads and opportunities inside your CRM, and we watch for certain signals like, foreclosure, which can be pre foreclosure, active foreclosure, auction date, things like that. Pre probate, probate, evictions. If you're a landlord, vacancy, absentee, homeowners, mortgage rate changes like refis.
My goodness. So many like just to name a few. So essentially, if any of those things happen, your database is now hot ranked. So if you have multiple things now, you can now they're on your hot list, right? So a homeowner who may have played it really cool on the phone six months ago is now in pre foreclosure and and it'll be on your hot list.
So you'll know why, like, why they're on your hot list. This is an this lead is now in pre foreclosure, so you're not gonna call them one time. Mhmm. You're gonna call them a ton of times. You're basically gonna call them like, oh, you would a brand new lead until you get ahold of them again.
So it kind of prevents you from doing unnecessary follow-up. Right. Because things that have already sold also will be cleaned out, but it also gives you intentional follow-up. I'm not just blowing through a list and it sucks. I'm like, I'm calling you because I know I can help you have something new that happened.
Right? Like, I'm calling you because something new is here. Not just calling circle. I'm circling back. I'm just checking in.
How's it going with the house? Right now you're they have some intention behind it, which I think is helpful psychology too for the person who has to actually do the task. You know?
Steve: Yeah. And, you know, you were on stage at Collective Genius with Casey Ryan
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: Talking about all this.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: And for me, the thing that was most fascinating, the point that you made, where you have a massive competitive advantage Mhmm. Is that let's say, someone fills out a form on my website. They go on our system, and like you said, they're playing it cool. Right? And we're having a conversation.
Whatever reason, we couldn't lock it up.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: And then a couple weeks go by, and now they've got a foreclosure notice.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: But the difference is we have a relationship with them.
Stephanie: Exactly.
Steve: Wanna talk about that?
Stephanie: Yeah. I mean so now they recognize my voice or my team's voice. Right? They've heard about us before. We are friendly on the phone, and they're way more likely to deal with me than somebody who's cold calling them or getting a letter in the mail.
Right? Yeah. Just out of the blue. Because I have a relationship with them, I can leverage it. Well, whatever happened with your sister?
Is she okay? She had the hospital. Right? Like, everything I know about you, it's proprietary to me in my database. Now I'm just I'm bringing both of those two things together.
New intent signals plus all my my IP that I have about that homeowner.
Steve: Yeah. So when you guys talk about, like, your data enrichment basically turns your CRM to, like, a living
Stephanie: Exactly.
Steve: Organism. You wanna expand upon that?
Stephanie: Yeah. Because now as people sell their house, they fall out of the system. Right? I can't help you anymore. Great.
So they they're automatically updated as sold, and I get to see too who bought it and for how much, by the way. Like, how far off were we? We can do a little post mortem too with the sales team if we need to. But the all the people that we can't help anymore fall out, so I don't have to waste time or waste marketing dollars dollars following up with those people. And the people who have events that are relevant to me, like if they're actively listed on the MLS, it's a deprioritized lead for me.
If they have an expired listing, it's a newly prioritized list for me. Right. And like just like absentees and people who change their their address, etcetera. But it's new. So just to kind of go down that vein for a second about absentee owners or vacant homeowners, you can buy that list online.
Like you can go there's multiple data providers. You can buy a vacant list. But when you buy it like that, you don't know when it was vacant. You just know that it it was vacant. Right?
But if you have it directly connected to your CRM like this, as soon as it becomes vacant, you know, and that's super relevant. And so maybe there's an absentee homeowner first. Right? Like, maybe they change their address and their tax record and they bought another house, and they're in the process of moving. Right?
You're gonna know. And that's way more relevant immediately than it is potentially six months later when they've they don't know they no longer have pain.
Steve: Right.
Stephanie: The first time they move, they have pain immediately. And this first the immediate time it's vacant or the immediate time that they file for eviction on a on a tenant, they're feeling pain. Mhmm. If they file for eviction and you wait thirty, sixty days later to contact them, they probably have gone through some some part of the pain and, like, are now moving on a little bit. Mhmm.
But if you catch them right when they file, they're pretty pissed. Right? So, like
Steve: They're definitely very pissed when they file that eviction notice.
Stephanie: Right? Like, you're hot. So so if you follow-up with that person, you know, urgently and prioritize that, your chance of of, winning is way, way, way higher.
Steve: Yeah. What have you seen how have you seen this benefit you at Better Path Homes?
Stephanie: Kinda nerdy, so bear with me. Alright. Okay. So I I I looked at it two ways. One is brand new prospects that are being generated.
I didn't have in my system. And then the other one is enriching the prospects that I or the leads and opportunities that I had in my system already. So from a like a cold standpoint, we used to buy a ton of list. I bought list from every provider in the world. Right?
And when we buy a cold list, like an absentee, a vacant, a high high equity, all the long ownership, I've done all the different combinations, hundreds of thousands of records over the last ten plus years. About point 5% of those records will convert to a deal. About point five.
Steve: All of that is he bought?
Stephanie: Well, no. No. No. Actually, it's actually lower. I'm sorry.
I actually just misquoted it. It's point zero five. Was there a percent
Steve: of all the data you bought?
Stephanie: All the data I bought will turn into a deal. So That felt really good at first. I'm gonna have a whole list. We're mailing this big list. I'm giving this to, like, we are cold calling back in the day.
Like, I gotta keep my people busy. I gotta give them names, but only point o 5% of them actually converted into a deal. It was just a big numbers game.
Steve: Lot of effort.
Stephanie: A lot of effort. And it's a and we were always told this is a numbers game. You gotta do it. You just gotta blow out these numbers or whatever. When we did the intention list that were brand new live, like, so if there's an eviction or a foreclosure today, I didn't have it in my system to enrich.
Great. It comes in as a new prospect, and we mailed them right away. Right? And that's our primary outreach. We don't do cold calling anymore.
So new thing happened. We mail them right away. They essentially get a mail piece in the mail, like, three to five days later, depending on the day of the week and whatever. Looking at that, we've been running it for a little over a year now, point 5% of those converted. Mhmm.
So 10 times better Yeah. Conversion. And so, like, that downstream revenue is ridiculous. I I I I first of all, I do I'm 10 times better, and I'm spending way, way less money. Mhmm.
And there's a lot of different damage.
Steve: This is the difference between what list?
Stephanie: Between, like, pulling a big list of, like, just I don't know. Going on a web list. I'm trying not to be directly disparaging because I don't mean any disparagement from it. But, like, just convert like, going on a website and buying a list from a data provider.
Steve: Like a data provider with, like it's just, like, give me everybody
Stephanie: or Yeah. Like, just give me a list of vacants. Give me a list of preforeclosures.
Steve: Got it.
Stephanie: Versus live daily slash hourly data.
Steve: Okay. So fresh data.
Stephanie: Fresh. Right. Directly in. And the problem is it's hard to do that often.
Steve: Mhmm.
Stephanie: So, like, if you're
Steve: cost money.
Stephanie: It costs money, but it's also just, like, laborists. Like, you're gonna go on what are you gonna do it monthly, weekly? It's a lot of time. Yeah. Right?
So people don't necessarily do it daily or it's not even available to most providers daily. So the fresh data converts 10 times better, which is huge downstream, revenue and a ton and some months better than others. I had some months it was 1.2% Mhmm. Conversion from from prospect to deal
Steve: Yeah.
Stephanie: Comparatively. It's just ridiculous. And the response rate to mail is better. All the things. And then if you look at your enriching database, what I found when I first turned this on, that 5% of my database a month is sold.
Just sells to somebody else. 5% a month. First of all, that sucks. That's also a large percentage each month that I'm just not processing in time. Right?
So I am not gonna waste my time calling people that I can't buy house from Mhmm. Or rent to my team's time. That's a lot of wasted time for people who don't pick up the phone or respond or sending mail or whatever. So we clean all that up, and it's about 5% a month, and getting better over time for sure, as we are better now. So that gets all cleaned up.
And then the of the people that are being enriched, we're setting about 10 to 15 new appointments a week from follow-up just from enrichment, which if we're closing about 18% of those.
Steve: Mhmm. Wow.
Stephanie: I'm not spending any more money on marketing.
Steve: Are they already in your CRM? Yep. And all we have is just a recent weather, some sort some sort of event
Stephanie: Yep.
Steve: That caused either foreclosure or, vacant or anything. Yeah. And it just tells your team, hey. Something happened with this prospect. Call them right now.
Yep. It's like really it's a really simple idea.
Stephanie: It's just it's really simple. It's just kind of and, you know, I don't know. Sometimes I think innovation can be over overengineered. Mhmm. Innovation sometimes is just about removing friction.
Yeah. We have a lot of what we need. How do we just get better? How do we just get 1% better? Yeah.
And just being just that little bit better results in a huge downstream impact.
Steve: What have been, like, some of, like, biggest wins you've seen? Lines that you
Stephanie: have. Oh my gosh. Similar really to to what I found when we were beta testing it and still using it. Just people being able to lower marketing spend, lower waste. I've seen a lot of people cut cold calling because it's kind of a gamut, you know, like the numbers you have to feed to a team in order to get a result.
Right? Yeah. And it's kind of I would have noticed is it's kind of like that thought process you go through when you have contractors. I just gotta buy a house because I gotta keep my contractors busy.
Steve: You gotta feed them.
Stephanie: You You gotta feed the contractors, but then you do, like, a bad deal. Mhmm. Like, what am I doing? Like, I'm doing a bad deal to, like, keep contractors going, but then I'm losing money. Like, that's just not right.
Steve: Losing money, sleep, putting out fires.
Stephanie: That's not good economics. No. And this is kind of the same kind of gamut with cold calling, especially as as, things got more competitive and margins got compressed. People like, I gotta do more and more. I gotta build I just need more lists to call.
I need more cold callers. I need more and more and more. So I've seen a lot of people reduce, reduce that or stop cold calling because now they have better data and they don't need to. You know, you don't need to throw a ton of spaghetti at the wall. You can be, you know, you can be a little bit more a little bit more focused.
So, I think ROI in general has has increased all of our customers across the board, on what they're able to do with what they already have. And then the stuff that they don't have, they can spend a little or just a little bit of money per month on or per week on on mailing and get a better response rate.
Steve: I wanna touch on a few different things you said. Yeah. They say it like it's kinda it's casual. It's like no big deal. But I wanna dig into these.
The first one, postmortem. Not everyone does these. Right? Okay.
Stephanie: So It kinda hurt your feelings.
Steve: Oh, it's painful.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Right? So it's sold. Mhmm. What happened? Walk me through a postmortem because you you got the deal signals and you're finding out, like, hey.
This is no good. Yep. We lost a sale. What happened? What's involved in a postmortem?
Stephanie: So every week that updates and it essentially shows you what opportunities. And that's the ones we review with our sales team is what opportunities did we have that sold to somebody else. And varies on the week how many there is, but there's generally five. So Mhmm. Sucks.
Right? So every week we have a on our sales meeting, we pull it up and we look at it and and they're all organized by sales rep. So we'll have, you know, three three to five sales reps that had that had a loss in that week. And then we'll look at it and say, okay, 123 Main Street. We made an offer for 110000 Dollars It's over $150,000 to X and X LLC.
Right. What did we miss? How did they get it right? Like, who is that person? And do we know them?
And, like, okay. Well, now they're on our buyers list because they apparently paid more than we did. Like, let's just reverse engineer that for next time. Right? It's good to know them.
They're my new friend. And then what did they do that was better than us? And we can review, like, what were how was our follow-up? Do we stay on top of our pipeline? When when we were in negotiation with them, like, did we call them every day?
Did how did we handle that opportunity? And sometimes, you know, we drop the ball there. Sometimes we drop the ball on the underwriting, like, we could have offered more. Sometimes we we drop the ball on, rapport building and, like, truant truly finding the pain. Sometimes people play it way too cool, and we're like, oh, we didn't think they were that motivated.
So we gave them, like, a price range. Mhmm. Oh, maybe, like, 1, you know, $1.20. And then, you know, we weren't real sure or, you know, we had a hard time getting in person, so we've all parked them. There's all kinds of stuff that we can learn from that.
And I think what's been really helpful for the sales team is it's no longer subjective. Or they're like, well, we don't know what happened. I don't know. She's not picking up the phone anymore. And I was like, no, they'd sold like we had it and this is what we can learn.
So it's more I think it's more impactful because it's not theory.
Steve: You know
Stephanie: what I mean? So that's been that's been really cool to see. It's super humbling. I think I think last year we lost $33,000,000 in potential revenue. Dollars 33,000,000.
Steve: Better Path.
Stephanie: Better Path Homes.
Steve: 33,000,000 natural revenue?
Stephanie: Potential revenue. We had it in our system, and it sold to somebody else. It was 33. Something ridiculous. And then
Steve: That's a that's I mean, that's a stomach punch number.
Stephanie: I mean, I think part of it is the stomach punch. Right? Like, oh my god. And the other part, it's encouraging. It's like, this can be a gigantic business without doing much different.
Steve: Yeah. Like, we
Stephanie: just need to be a little bit better and, like, let's chip away at that number.
Steve: Mhmm.
Stephanie: Right? And then we can have we can we can triple our business. Right? Yeah. Just by being a little bit better.
So in one aspect, it hurts and it sucks. Obviously, we want all of it. But on the other side, it's really motivating and at the opportunity in front of us because especially the last couple years, I don't know about you, but we got punched in the teeth. 2022. Yeah.
That sucked. And 2023 was like, 2024 was okay. Like, 2025 got better at the end. Right. And that now this year is actually January.
This year has been really good. But, you know, looking at that, it made everybody on our team think that over. Like, maybe it's not over, but maybe it will ever get hot again. Can we grow a big business? Is the opportunity out there?
No one's buying. No one you know, it's too hard. The market's too hard. And And then you look at a number like that and it's real, right? Yeah.
No, it's not. People are buying. People are finding a way. And then we're not that far off. We can just be better at this or that.
So anyway, long monologue. But I I maybe it's just my optimism, but I find it to be encouraging that the that the opportunity is in front of us. We just have to be better about grasping it.
Steve: Yeah. And the postmortems, like, we call them we call them postmortems. People call them as I said, you know, it's very morbid. Another way to call is after action reviews.
Stephanie: There you go. Alright. This is the medical side of me. Postmortem. Yeah.
Steve: That is very medical. Yeah. The other ones we call them is autopsies.
Stephanie: Autopsy. Blameless autopsies.
Steve: Yeah. Those are Blameless autopsies.
Stephanie: Blameless don't get some trouble. We gotta learn.
Steve: Other number you said is 55% of your CRM
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Sells every month.
Stephanie: Yep.
Steve: So you got really good hygiene that you know you can keep tabs on top of, like, removing the waste because with the information you have, you're able to remove 5%. Mhmm. Implication here is that if you don't pay attention to this, the CRM is like a wasteland, not wasteland. It's filled with a bunch of busy work that's just wasting everyone's time. Right.
Stephanie: Because you can't help them. They sold. Yeah. In fact, sometimes I'm worried, like, should it be bigger? Should that number be larger?
You know how I've never measured it before, though, until now. You know, what is a healthy number of people to sell? Because you'd expect these motivated people that I'm paying for leads. You'd expect them to sell. Right.
During the year. Right. So it's made me take a hard look at that too. And so we're trending it. I'm very curious to see what this is going to be over time.
Like, was that a really bad number and it's getting better? Or, like, should more people sell, like, to me or somebody else? Mhmm. I'm getting better leads. You know what I mean?
Yeah. So it that's an interesting number, but that's that's the benchmark. So I'm curious to see what happens.
Steve: Yeah. It's a surprising number. It feels high, but I think if you have really good data
Stephanie: And good leads.
Steve: And good leads.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. It should be, they're selling to somebody.
Stephanie: Yeah. Exactly. But to your point, if you don't know that, I mean, before that, I would know unless you told me or told my team. Right? Like, like, take me off for less.
I sold my house. That's the only way I'd really know. So, and those people just generally don't pick up and they just ghost you. So your serum gets bloated and just impossible to manage. And,
Steve: the other thing too I'll just go real quick back to post mortem. So Eli Fisher, when he was with Adantic
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: He did this audit, if you remember.
Stephanie: Hey. Everyone give the pukers. What did they call it?
Steve: Well, there there was that also. I know, but he's like, hey. Give us access to CRM. I will tell you how many leads you lost due to lack of follow-up.
Stephanie: Nice.
Steve: And so we did. And I saw that we lost 46 sales in one year because they sold to someone else. And that was very it's like, when I got that, I did not feel very good.
Stephanie: Oh.
Steve: And basically, I was like, yeah. We're gonna keep we're just gonna keep calling them forever because the lack of follow-up is purely what what what caused this. So now you can do this in real time. We don't have to do this, like, once whenever Eli Fisher feels good.
Stephanie: Right.
Steve: It's just Once
Stephanie: you get a nerd near you Yeah. Like a look.
Steve: Yeah. So just nonstop with with a tool. A question I have is where did this idea come from?
Stephanie: Mean, really? Yeah. It's just ongoing problem in my business and just wanted to make it better. I was inspired by, ZoomInfo. Have you heard of ZoomInfo?
Steve: I'm aware of them. I don't really follow it.
Stephanie: It's kind of like a b to b software, essentially, where you can look up, contact contacts for companies like Slack or whatever. Like, you can look up a big brand and try to find decision makers at these big brands. They have an integration with g two. Mhmm. G two is a software review company.
So you can go in there and look for reviews and try to find a software to solve your problem. I don't know if it's taxes, if it's whatever under whatever. There's a million different softwares out there. Right? So if you go to that website and search for for reviews, it actually there's some sort of buyer intent signal that goes from that to ZoomInfo.
Mhmm. So if you're on ZoomInfo and you sell sales tax software, for example, and you look at Stephanie Betters, I've looked at sales tax software in the last year. It'll show that I had buyer intent because I went on that site and I looked for something. Right? I was like, that's really cool.
That's relevant. And I wanna know when somebody searches for something like that. And so I think that was kind of the catalyst of it. It's not directly relevant to homeowners. Right?
They go online and say, how do I sell my house fast? We know about that. We know about Google Ads and all those things. But what if we can get them with an event prior to that? Yeah.
That's the gold. Right? So
Steve: And so because, like, where we started off with Left Main was because you're trying to figure out Salesforce. You're you had a problem with Better Path Homes. You weren't out to make a software company.
Stephanie: No. Like, I
Steve: have a problem. I need better I need a better CRM. And he just went made.
Stephanie: That's the part where I got really mad.
Steve: What part do you get really mad?
Stephanie: I got really mad because it wasn't easy. Right? There wasn't a there wasn't a solution for me. And, I when I went to sales I went to Salesforce because they're the number one CRM in the world.
Steve: I was like, hey. Gorilla, can't ignore them.
Stephanie: I'm tired of stuff going down. I'm tired of stuff being buggy and like Who were
Steve: you using at the time?
Stephanie: I was using Podio and another one that's out of business now. Mobile or something like that. I don't know. I was using lots of different things on this on the real estate investor side and then other things like, Asana or, we tried Monday too and, CallRail and all these different disconnected things. And we were doing a lot of business, and I was a COO at the time.
This is literally madness. I can't make a decision. And, like, it's all unstable. Stuff was breaking. And that's why I was like, what's the number one one?
I'm just gonna go buy it instead of these, like, small homegrown things. Right? And, anyway, they quoted me a lot of money.
Steve: Like Salesforce.
Stephanie: Salesforce. Their developers wanted a million a million bucks literally, to build it over the course of a year. Labargasted. I was not prepared for that money for that amount. Literally.
Steve: Build out cost. Yeah. The so our I need to talk to my team. Like, you gotta start selling customers at a million dollar custom build out.
Stephanie: Like, Deloitte? Okay. Like, Deloitte has a good deal. Whoever whoever started Deloitte because they write some scopes of work, my friend. Yeah.
No no I mean, no hard feelings. I just wasn't the avatar for that. Like, the small business, like, what am I I wanna spend a million dollars. Mhmm. Early someone is.
But Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: It's a filtering system.
Stephanie: I guess. Yes. But I was so furious because I just didn't have a solution. I was so desperate for a solution.
Steve: You're angry about that lack solution. Were you also angry about the million dollars or just, like, whatever?
Stephanie: All of it. Yeah. I was super upset because I couldn't believe it would be that much to solve my problem. I was like, it literally can't be that difficult. Why is this so difficult?
Turns out it is difficult. But if you're mad enough, you, you know, like, oh, you can overcome it. So Yeah. I I taught myself how to code, built it on built a left main on Salesforce and what is now left main. But it was really just at first a solution for Better Path Homes.
Mhmm. And then, funny enough, plot twist, Salesforce came back and asked a partner.
Steve: Oh, that's nice. And we're gonna talk a little bit about that journey. Okay. So then was it the same thing with deal signals?
Stephanie: It basically. Yeah. I mean, like, I'm sitting here feeling pain, too, in this business, right? Like, I own this business. I wanted to do well.
Like, what the hell? Why is things not working? Why are things harder now? You know, how do we get better? And, you know, buying all these lists and now as I've been saying it for four years prior, I'm like, why are we sending?
What year is it? We're sending spreadsheets to each other. We're sending CSV files, like via email that are, like, are a mess and like where they live all over. Like, what are we doing? But we're using computers.
Why are we sending data on spreadsheets? Why can't this all talk to each other? Yeah. You know, I don't we don't do that. Yeah.
So, eventually, I was like, I I wanted other people to do it, but no one no one was interested in solving that problem. So I said, okay. Fine. Well, then I'll do it.
Steve: I think this kinda goes back to our, your mantra before, which is, I eat problems for breakfast.
Stephanie: Dang right.
Steve: Yeah. But you kinda, like, wavered on that a little bit. You're like, I don't wanna be the person who's problems for breakfast anymore.
Stephanie: Well, the funny thing is, okay, you wanna, like, dive into my self help journey that I've gone on?
Steve: Yes. Let's do it.
Stephanie: I am okay. So my background in medicine, right? I have been trained. I have trained myself to find problems like that was my job to look at you and know, first of all, if you're telling me the truth, you're hurting. What's wrong with you?
I want to A patient.
Steve: Your job is to find out from a patient.
Stephanie: A patient.
Steve: Are they telling the truth about their symptoms?
Stephanie: Right. Because sometimes people play cool. Right? There's not like you don't always get the truth from a from a patient or they they they downplay.
Steve: Seems weird to me.
Stephanie: Have you ever had ever gone to see the doctor and you had your wife ask you, well, did you ask him about that? Like, no.
Steve: Well, I wouldn't ask him because I'm a guy.
Stephanie: But see? So it's the same thing.
Steve: But I wouldn't lie to a doctor. Right?
Stephanie: You may okay. You may not flat out lie, and but some people some people do.
Steve: Well, I bring that up because, like, my favorite show one of the very few shows I actually finished was, like, Doctor House. Right?
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: And, like, his whole deal is, like, everybody lies. It's like, why would they lie?
Stephanie: Because they're embarrassed. There's a million reasons.
Steve: Maybe just because I'm shameless.
Stephanie: Maybe. You see? Maybe it saves your life one day.
Steve: Yeah. So alright. So, patients lie.
Stephanie: It's not even just that. Like, it's just I'm I'm looking for a problem all the time.
Steve: Mhmm.
Stephanie: Right? So I've kind of program myself to find problems. And eve and actually, when I feel anxious, I like my first gut, like, unhealed part of me. It's like, I'm just gonna check shit. I just gotta go check things.
It's definitely okay. Why do I feel this way? And I don't know. And so I look for problems, right? And of course, you find problems.
Steve: You can always find problems. You
Stephanie: can always find problems. But then, like, I have this feedback loop because I'm good at solving them. Okay. I'm like, okay, well, good. I'm gonna now I know I feel productive.
I'm gonna solve stuff. And so then I went through a period where I felt super overwhelmed by that because I was like an arson, basically. Like, I'd check things and find problems and then solve them. And, like, then I felt completely chaotic. And, I felt overwhelmed by how many problems there were.
And that's kind of when I started like, the only way I got myself out of that from being overwhelmed and not feeling completely crushed, like, no, I'm just gonna problems are not a big deal. I wake up, I eat problems for breakfast. I don't care that there's a problem. I'm gonna figure out a way to solve it. It's not gonna take me down.
I'm gonna be fine. So that got me through many years. Right? Being like, I'm not overwhelmed by problems anymore. They're gonna be there.
I'm gonna find them. They're gonna surprise me, and we're gonna we're gonna battle them. But now, on my little journey, I have I've come to deal with not looking. Like, not when I feel anxious not to not go, like, create chaos by trying to find problems. Now there's been a lot more empowerment on my team and trusting my team to to to do what they need to do.
And I've been able to to recruit and hire and attain incredible talent that I trust. And so I'm no longer, like, digging, like, if that makes sense. But I'm not afraid of problems. I'll solve them.
Steve: Were you ever an arsonist at one point? No. Within your organization?
Stephanie: In my probably. Because, I mean, I look I look for if I feel anxiety, like, that's how I try to solve it. I the my first instinct when they're when I feel anxious is that there must be something wrong. Mhmm. It's not it's sometimes it's just there's nothing wrong.
And I have a moment to breathe. I'm like, what's this?
Steve: Yeah.
Stephanie: I'm sure there's plenty of moms who will relate to that. We're like, the house is quiet. Well, I'm like, right. Right.
Steve: Most business owners are arsonists.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Right. Like, they'll create problems subconsciously. Yeah. That's just that's something to fix. I was just wondering if you ever described yourself this way.
Stephanie: I probably was. I'm sure I was. You know? But that I think that energy helps you start a company. Mhmm.
But then it becomes very difficult to grow that company if you stay in that zone.
Steve: Yeah. Because, like, I I can speak for myself. I don't think I was ever one to, like, create problems, like, identify and, like, create problems of, like, existing situations. Yeah. My problem was always, like, things are really good right now.
Let's start something new. That's where I was kind of an arsonist, to the overall is the ecosystem. The other thing too as we're we're as we're going through your your, you know, growth journey
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Is we went through this whole exercise of positive intelligence.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: And, I thought that was cool because, like, that, see, was it? Bobby on Jimmy Reelan's team. So Bobby Coe shared that with me, and I shared that with you.
Stephanie: Yep. And we
Steve: just had everyone at CG do it.
Stephanie: Exactly.
Steve: Yeah. Do you remember, like, your results?
Stephanie: Shoot. No. I I can't I have it on my phone, though. What what were they again? What were the categories?
Steve: So I can Tell
Stephanie: me I'll remember. I
Steve: can speak for myself. Right? Hyperachiever.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Hyper rational. Yeah. What was it? Restless. Mhmm.
Confrontation. I see. That's four of them. What else was there?
Stephanie: It was, like, victim.
Steve: Yeah. Victim victim mentality.
Stephanie: Yeah. I was tied for two. I I wanna say I wanna say hyperachiever and then one more. Maybe perfectionism.
Steve: Yeah. Perfectionism.
Stephanie: There's a perfectionism. Yeah.
Steve: It was, it wasn't controlling, but it starts with, like, a stickler. It was stickler was the other one.
Stephanie: Oh, that's not the second one I did. Yeah. Hyperachiever is definitely the was the top one, but there was a close tie with the second one.
Steve: Well, I think everyone that took it as CG was hyperachiever.
Stephanie: Probably.
Steve: You have to
Stephanie: be Yeah.
Steve: To be in that room. Yeah. There's something wrong with you where you have to achieve. But I bring this back just to see, like, did you did you find any, like, correlation between, like, I gotta go solve problems to positive intelligence and it's part of this whole journey.
Stephanie: Yeah. For sure. I I think it's funny because your strengths can also be your weaknesses. Right? And Yeah.
My gosh. Entrepreneurship. If you got to look at yourself and know thyself, right? I've never had to be more self aware in my life. So I don't know.
Maybe you can go get a therapist. Maybe you can go start a business. But like, either way, you're going to figure out how to try to be healthy, right? Because it uncovers everything. It uses everything, which is cool.
Like all of your previous experience, like people think, like all medicine, how does that relate to real estate or SAS? Totally does, right? Definitely. I've brought a lot of lessons over, but it also has uncovered a lot of like, you know, things like things I'm fearful of. Right?
And, or things that I'm wired I have wired myself to do, like hyperachieving and being and putting out a certain level of excellence. Right? And, like, that can be a really great thing because then I can build things and put out things to help people and solve problems, and that's great. And everyone wants someone around them that's gonna solve their problems. Right?
You want me to hang out with you and wanna solve all your problems. I can't help myself. I'm like, okay. Give it to me. I'll do it.
But then if I keep doing that, I, like, bury I got completely drown myself. And then I'm now I'm in, like, an unhealthy state where I don't you know? So I've had to learn to accept progress and accept the journey so that I don't crush myself by trying to solve all the problems around me. Yeah. That makes sense?
Steve: I think the greatest demonstration of that was you were still a doctor.
Stephanie: Nurse practitioner.
Steve: Nurse practitioner doing heart surgery.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Are you still doing heart surgery while running a wholesaling company, getting the left main up and going?
Stephanie: Pretty that was pretty silly. That was a lot. And I I realized things that, like, I can physically do things longer than I can mentally do things, if that makes sense. Like, I I can sacrifice myself and my mental health and my balance and my all the things. So if I if I can visit, I used to tell myself, well, if it's physically possible, then I can do it.
Mhmm. Right.
Steve: Sound like Elon Musk over here.
Stephanie: Right. Well, I'm like, well, there's a cost to that. And I paid that cost. Like, it's kind of glorious to say now, like, look at all the stuff I did at the same time. And I was consulting with Sharper at that time, too.
Like, I was doing so much and better path. Like, it was just I was doing so, so much. And then I paid a personal cost. Like, I, like, broke my brain.
Steve: What was it? I mean, what was the personal cost?
Stephanie: I just wasn't sleeping. I wasn't eating right. I was like, I wasn't exercising. I felt like I couldn't be present with my family because my brain was always on and running and, like, stressed. Right?
Like, I I think I went especially considering the medical side, I probably went twenty years without sleeping more than three or four hours a night.
Steve: Really? Yeah.
Stephanie: I didn't sleep. And there would be weekends, especially was that when I was on call, I didn't sleep at all. Mhmm. And so I felt so unhealthy, and I had a hard time just being in, like, in my own skin, like, just sitting and hanging out without worrying I'm missing something or I gotta check that or you know what I mean?
Steve: I just can't imagine that being physically possible. That sleeping four hours a night
Stephanie: Oh, it is.
Steve: For twenty years.
Stephanie: That is. It doesn't feel good.
Steve: Well, I imagine it doesn't feel good. It's just I came in and fathom it.
Stephanie: When I left so I I started, you know, obviously, weaning back on a lot of things. But what I kept for the longest time was Better Path, left Maine and, you know, work at the hospital. When I left the hospital, it took me probably two years to figure out how to sleep.
Steve: Really?
Stephanie: Literally. Like, I I now sleep eight hours a night. I feel like that's one of the best health things I've ever done. Just sleep. How silly is that?
But I now sleep and I feel million times different, but it took literally two years to heal that.
Steve: Yeah. There's a couple other things I wanna hit on before we go back to the Yeah. Multiple eight bigger businesses. So I I believe it was the same event where you in case we're speaking on stage, or maybe it was event after that. But, like, we're we're in Dallas.
It was March.
Stephanie: Remember this.
Steve: And someone's talking on stage. I can't remember who it was. I wasn't really into whatever he was saying. And you're like, hey. Get over here.
I was like, okay. And you said to me, hey. You should, was it not not, was it, supplement your sales training with some AI stuff. You should go ahead and, you know, add some role play, add some coaching behind it, and we have a big value add for your customers. And I was doing my best to be, like, laser focused.
Stephanie: I was
Steve: like, that's a great idea. I appreciate it. Thank you. That's flattering.
Stephanie: I was like, no. Really. Do it.
Steve: And then as and Ian was sitting there too. I was like, hey, Ian. Get over here. So and you I was like, alright. You tell Ian.
See what he says. Right? And I believe you said the same thing. And he's bought in, but, like, let's take a lot to get you in the buy in. Right?
He's a visionary. Hey. We should do this. Alright. Let's do it.
He's like, we've described if, was it billions or billionaire? Whatever. Like, I'd be Axelrod, and he's my,
Stephanie: I haven't seen that show, but I need to.
Steve: Yeah. So but he's the guy that's, like, we enabler.
Stephanie: It's like Yeah.
Steve: I have a bad idea. Like, he's he's he's fully
Stephanie: time. Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. What are we doing this? Right?
Stephanie: And but
Steve: that was, like, the the the first seed, and then, you know, I go it's like, okay. Thank you. I'm flattered, but, you know, like, it's a distraction right now. And then, like, the next day, I'm sitting next to Brad Chandler. He's like, hey, Steve.
I got his problems. Like, okay. What's the problems? Like, you know, I when do I know my my reps are ready, to go on appointments? Like, I'm spending $400 a lead.
I need to know when they're ready Yep. For a new hire. It's like, can you create something where we can, like, just score them? Like, whole idea. I don't know.
Maybe. Yeah. And then on the third day of CG, Casey Ryan, like, hey. Could you add this call scoring and give it away to all your clients? Like, it's three people.
It seemed like it was a distraction at the time. Yeah. But I kinda feel like we have to do it. Yep. And so,
Stephanie: So glad you did.
Steve: I'm so glad we did. Right? But it doesn't happen without you, like, starting it.
Stephanie: Right.
Steve: And so, like, I'm client number one for my company. Right?
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Because we have to use it internally. But you're client number two.
Stephanie: Yep.
Steve: Like, right out of the gate, we were, doing this for for Left Main. And so I just wanna you know?
Stephanie: And Better Path. Both sales teams.
Steve: And Better Path. Yeah. Yeah. And so I just wanna say, like, it was without you and your support, your inspiration, it would just kinda sat there. Like, it and potentially have someone else kinda come in and swoop it, and and take that seize that opportunity.
Stephanie: I appreciate that, but you did it, my friend.
Steve: We did. We did. And it was a lot of work, but we did. And now, officially, as of January and also on the board of advisers.
Stephanie: Hey. Yeah. So
Steve: because I'm going on this journey now. Right? And I've got, you know, a lot of really, really smart friends, a lot of successful people in real estate, a lot of people that have done some pretty incredible things. But it's pretty cool to go on an adventure with someone that you like. So,
Stephanie: like, you
Steve: already you've already been on this path to partner with Salesforce. And for me, there's no better acquire than Salesforce. So, like, you've been really instrumental, for being on my board. But another thing too was I had a health scare, which I can give you an update. I don't wanna do it on the podcast.
But I had a health scare where I was seeing, like, three of everything. Kinda scary. I'm posting by at the hospital. Right? Like, and it's funny.
This is this is also terrible. Right? Like, I got some health issues, seeing three of everything. And I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty confident is if I tell my wife this, she says you need to go to doctor. I was like, I would be like, it's okay.
I'll be fine.
Stephanie: See that?
Steve: Yeah. I kinda feel like that was I would do that. Right?
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: But I go to Croc, and I say, like
Stephanie: So you ask Grock.
Steve: I I'm suffering triple vision. Here's what's happening, and it says go to the ER right now. Yeah. I still go to ER, and I, I'm posting pictures in hospital, this and that. And you're texting me, and I am doing two things simultaneously.
Every blood result, every, CAT scan and MRI, I'm uploading on the Grock. I'm texting it to you.
Stephanie: Were they right? Were they the same?
Steve: In the end, you guys came to the same conclusion. Yeah. Turns out you're both wrong.
Stephanie: What? You had complex migraines, didn't you?
Steve: No. We we we rolled that out.
Stephanie: Okay.
Steve: But you guys came to the same conclusion. So you're as good as AI as a doctor. You're you you and my AI doctor are, like, right here.
Stephanie: Alright. Alright. Let's see what happened after that all that then.
Steve: But it's pretty cool, right, to have someone in your corner. So, like, not only are you helping on the AI side and the business side, but it's, like, to have someone that you can send, like, here's my blood work. Here's what's here's what the MRI says. Here's the CAT scan says. Like, oh, this is probably this.
That's pretty cool. Just wanna kinda highlight there, like, you guys don't have a doctor friend.
Stephanie: No co pay.
Steve: Just No co pay. Yeah. Just text them the results.
Stephanie: I will say, though, this is the the deal. If if you text me something silly, I save it in a folder. Yeah. K. So, like, I've had, like, weird things that people have sent me, like, weird rash.
Like, someone sends it and I I save it forever.
Steve: So I run for office.
Stephanie: If you run when you run for office, I'm gonna be like, look at this picture of you in the, like, off like, in the hospital bed. No. Yeah. You didn't send me any pictures, but sometimes I get unsolicited rash pictures.
Steve: Oh, really?
Stephanie: I'm like, that's a little. Send me a warning. K? But, no, that I'm gonna save it forever.
Steve: So I haven't done that. It's it's PDF. I send you PDFs.
Stephanie: That's fine.
Steve: Yeah. But the other thing too, so, like, we're going through this whole like, I don't know how much AI you're using in your thing and and and deal signals.
Stephanie: A lot. Left Main.
Steve: It's
Stephanie: all machine learning. It's all
Steve: it is. So walk walk me through because I wanna talk about something we're doing cooler
Stephanie: later on
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Stephanie: Yeah. So, essentially, what we do is oh, well, I don't know how technical you wanna get, but we
Steve: More technical.
Stephanie: Yeah. Okay. Good. So most of our product is built on the Salesforce platform. Right?
It's like the user interface, but all of the data and machine learning and algorithms are all built in the on the back end on Snowflake. Snowflake is like essentially a data lake. It's it's big enough that you can have a really big complex database, SQL database that you can feed back into Salesforce and basically make a nice user interface. But you can crunch everything outside very, very quickly. Direct, like, single line authentication between somebody's left main organization to our Snowflake database.
So, essentially, what happens is we transform your CRM into its own LLM. So when we make predictions as who's the most likely to sell, we have all the public data. Right? And the most of the time, that's more relevant than what you have in your CRM. Right?
But we we enrich your CRM with all that public data that's hot ranked and scored and learned and and the machine learning side as to who what what those things mean. Mhmm. So, for example, maybe there's a case where there's a active MLS listing or an expired listing, and 17 other things in the back end that make it most likely to sell versus somebody with one thing, probate, being the most likely to sell. Right? So long story short, there's a lot of ways to crunch all that data, and the the easiest way to do that is in this big data lake and then feeding it into your CRM so you get really unique insights based on your data, your notes, the the what you know about the property and the homeowner, plus all the public data.
And your insights and your hot list, if you will, can be completely different than somebody else who's in your market because you have different proprietary information about homeowners than somebody else potentially does. So it's kind of like a single line, LLM, and it's only getting better. Now that we're a year out, we have run tens of millions of data points through that algorithm, which it takes a ton. I'm sure you've experienced that same thing. It takes a while to learn, and you need to give it lots and lots of data points.
But now that we've run it through all that, it's getting better and better and and being even more accurate of how we can score and predict things. So much so that you're like, why?
Steve: And you
Stephanie: don't know. Yeah. Like, it like, does this, like, vector math thing that even I don't understand. And thank God we have data engineers that are way smarter than me. I'm like, well, why is that the prediction?
And they're like, actually, it's unclear as to why, but we know it because of, like, all these spider webs to all these different, like, three-dimensional connections it made.
Steve: Right.
Stephanie: Like, oh, so essentially, everything that we're doing from our product development moving forward is all integrating AI.
Steve: Yeah.
Stephanie: I strongly believe five years from now, we're not going to have a keyboard anymore.
Steve: Yeah.
Stephanie: Everything's gonna be voice and talking to tech like a coworker. And so I'm building towards that right now. So what that means is everything has to be enriched. Everything has to be logged the proper way so that, you can actually spit out an intelligent response when you ask your CRM, who should I call today in natural language.
Steve: Yeah.
Stephanie: Instead of, like, scrolling and clicking and like, all that's gonna be gone. Right?
Steve: I mean, I kinda vision a world, and I think it's kinda scary. I think, actually, even for Salesforce
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: Is like, you just sit down. It's like, who should I call right now? Right. Or not who should I call right now? Like, call someone.
Call the most likely person to sell.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: And then you just talk to that person.
Stephanie: Right. With your meta glasses.
Steve: Yeah.
Stephanie: I think we're always going to need databases.
Steve: Mhmm.
Stephanie: So it's been interesting to see how these gigantic companies are looking at this problem, and they're way smarter and have more resources than us.
Steve: Lot more money.
Stephanie: And a lot more money. Infinite money. And, truly, if you can figure this out, there's there's no end. It's not an object. And the way they're looking at it is basically database infrastructure.
Yeah. And so I think think the world is gonna change significant way in how we interact with tech, but we'll always need databases. There has to be something that I own, and I store my stuff. Yeah. Right?
And I think how we interact with that is going to, you know, be way different, but I'm still gonna need storage house for my things. You know?
Steve: So So, I got my sales team and love them, but they've got some challenges. Right? And one thing is they lose sales opportunities where people feel like, I'm not sure I'm ready to do this yet.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: And every time I hear that, I was like, if you're not using AI in 2026, just plan on not being here in 2027.
Stephanie: Right.
Steve: What are your thoughts on my maybe it's a very stark, very
Stephanie: No. I think you're dead on.
Steve: Yeah. You
Stephanie: know, the reason why first of all, it's going to be integrated into everything that we do, like, regardless on what you believe it will be. But one of the reasons why I think it'll put you out of business if you don't integrate it is because it'll just be too expensive to do business the normal way. Yeah. Like, call it inflation, call it macroeconomics, microeconomics, call it just the real estate market in general, what it takes to generate a deal and generate a lead. It's really hard to afford to to function when you need a gigantic team to do it.
Mhmm. I just just take cold calling, for example, and having 20 cold callers. Like, you gotta pay for that. You gotta pay for the data for them to process. That's super inefficient.
You gotta go through all those motions. You gotta, like, hold the line until it's profitable. Right? Mhmm. If you can make just that one piece of your business more efficient, you you don't have to spend as much to to get the same result.
Right? In fact, you get you spend less to get a better result. So that's the that's the business landscape right now is that it's just really expensive to have headcount and to have, like, bloat, be it office space, be it be it employees, be it tech that's difficult to integrate with and and, like, not connected to other things that you're using. So if you're not using AI, you're just inefficient. And and I think we'll go bottoms up.
Steve: We had a case more beyond the show, I don't know, eight, nine months ago. And the way he put it was like, oh, you don't wanna invest in a tractor? Great. Good luck if you didn't get to me while I'm in my tractor and you're over there with a shovel and hoe.
Stephanie: Right. It's kind of the equivalent. Yeah. Right? Like, how many people would it take to plow that field versus just having a tractor?
Steve: Yeah. You know? And so, anyway, I I I maybe just have my team just watch this part right here.
Stephanie: But it's I mean, it's it's true. It like, it just takes too much to run a business. And the beautiful thing about real estate is you can do gigantic numbers. I think Casey Ryan was just here. He probably talked about how much he does with a super small team.
Yeah. He is shockingly efficient.
Steve: 6,000,000 profit, 12 team members. Actually, I have people text messages like, is that real? It's like, yeah.
Stephanie: It's he is dialed in, and he is leveraging tech in such a cool way. And, you know, and I, like, I just love sitting down and out with him. But that's that's a cool thing about real estate is you can do these gigantic numbers with small headcount, and we're gonna see it more and more. I think we'll we're pretty close. I read an article sometime mid to end of last year that they'll be the for the one person company that has a unicorn event, billion dollar evaluation with one employee Yeah.
Human employee. Right? So, I mean, anyway, real estate investing, I think, is is interesting and and innovative in the sense that you can do those kinds of numbers without 200 team members.
Steve: Yeah. I kinda have this, outlook. I don't know. I'm a bit I'm a bit kind of a doomer on the AI side.
Stephanie: I thought you were gonna say boomer. I was like, you're not that old.
Steve: I don't know. That's when my kids call me. Where I kinda see, like, we're gonna have maybe, like, 10 or 15 or 20 wholesalers in the whole country. Right? Because, like, if you're not adapting fast enough, you're gonna get absorbed or eliminated.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: Kinda where I see this going. So, hopefully, it doesn't get to that.
Stephanie: I don't know if it's gonna be that severe, but it's gonna be pretty severe.
Steve: Yeah. So alright. So you're using that to turn everyone's, feel kinda like a large or or or a a language model
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: Using their CRM. Are you is fuel signals then effectively AI, machine learning? Or Mhmm.
Stephanie: Yep. And then, essentially, what that what's happening this year is it's just getting better and better at predicting Mhmm. By by, of course, all the public data that's available, but then all of your CRM data and, like, all the little things like user activity or the numb like, what people respond to in a text message or or a phone call, what they say, and what you've logged in your notes and things like that. Like, it's learning all those things, and we're finally at the point where it can truly spit out a prediction that is completely generated on its own with those two datasets, and it's unique only to your business. Yeah.
So it's like you specific, not even, like, market exclusive. Like, who cares about market exclusivity? Let's care about, like, CRM exclusivity. Like, what do you have that's your most valuable gold in your whole business is your data. So let's make it even better.
Steve: You know? So I don't know how much we can talk about this yet. We got an event coming up. Oh. What can we talk about?
What can we say?
Stephanie: It's gonna be in October. I feel like we've settled to the month. Yeah.
Steve: Is it October? I thought it was September. I don't know. What are those two months?
Stephanie: We had the September or October.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Stephanie: We're still finalizing the dates clearly, but we have a potential location Mhmm. And potential dates, and a concept.
Steve: Yeah. And I think what's cool is this idea of putting this event together is that a lot of events is like, hey. Listen to this guy talk on stage. Yeah. More.
But that's not your vision. Mm-mm. What's your vision for the event?
Stephanie: I want immersive tech. So I think that things are moving really, really rapidly, and it's overwhelming. Right? Like, I don't even know what's out and what's coming. And
Steve: in fact It's changing so fast.
Stephanie: It's so fast. And the only real way I grasp it and I feel like I'm pretty technical. Mhmm. But I I will grasp it way better if I can just play with the tech. Right?
And it's really difficult to get your hands on it or to be able to do that or, like, even figure out someone's tech by them by yourself. So the vision is, what if we just have an event that is immersive tech? So all the coolest, all the all the newest and the greatest technology for real estate investing specifically is there. They're all everyone has all these products that they're launching. Let's just have it so users can come and just plug in their computer or use their demo computer that's there and actually use it and be productive.
Yeah. Like, I want it to be hands on technical stuff. I don't wanna hear theory from the stage. Mhmm. I think we're I don't know.
I think those days are are starting to wane. You know what I mean? I think now it becomes who are the actual tactical operators that can do anything with you, and let me learn from them. But then also, let me just do it. Show me the value.
You know? Like, let me just plug into the tech and use it. So that's that's the that's the vision is is let's just get in there and and plug tech into our companies.
Steve: Yeah. Really excited about it. Yeah. I think it's because it's so different, but they're so it's so valuable for anyone that's actually in the space who would walk away with, like, the the tools in place, If not fully set up, at least start it
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: So that you can start using it. One of the things you know, I I I'm going through this whole journey. Right? For onboarding, when I was just selling coaching, right, it's like, I just take your credit card right over here. Right?
And then, hey. Just show up on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Yeah. And as long as I showed up, I've onboarded you. It's done.
Right? And I showed up almost always because, like, very, very fortunately, I don't get sick. Right? So, like, I've never missed a call a coaching call
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Due to illness. Yeah. I've missed it because I'm at CG, I'm at boardroom, and then Ian covers for me, like but I've never missed an event. Yeah. Coaching call to the illness.
But onboarding software is a completely different animal.
Stephanie: Yeah. It is.
Steve: Right.
Stephanie: Ask me how I know.
Steve: Well, I've learned a lot of lessons at your expense. I picked up some lessons, but I'm still experiencing some of those other lessons that you went through as well.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: But, onboarding, I was I was going through a book. We just finished it. I'm I'm actually making my whole company read, and the book is never lose a customer again. Have you read that one? Mm-mm.
Fantastic book. Yeah. So we started with, software as a science, so we made everyone learn
Stephanie: it. Yeah.
Steve: We didn't make everyone read it. We made everyone learn the principles right now teaching it to them. Never lose a customer again. It's like everyone in the custom everyone in the company needs to read this because everyone needs to understand this this philosophy Mhmm. Of of, you know, keeping the the customer excited no matter where they are in the cycle.
But there's one chapter, book that opens, which says there's no onboarding product that is harder software. Right? And the reason why in the book, it says, the business owner decides to stroke a check, swipe their credit card. Right? Mhmm.
Once they swipe their credit card alright. You set it up.
Stephanie: Right.
Steve: Who had no say in the decision Yep. Isn't bought into the process, may not actually be technical, and they have to go set it all up. Yep. And it's just this big cluster. Yep.
So what I'm excited about with this particular event is that you'll be able to walk away equipped versus the nightmare paying for software, never use well, some crazy statistic was like I think that was, like, 90% of software is never used after purchase. It's crazy.
Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. I've never heard that before.
Steve: It was some it was just some of statistic. I was like, that cannot.
Stephanie: Just pay for, like, a gym membership. You're like, I don't know. I'm donating it to a good cause.
Steve: I mean, I know, like, what was it? 80% of books are never read. True. Right. I could buy a book, you read chapter one maybe, and then that's it.
Like, 80% of books are never read.
Stephanie: I don't know how to do that.
Steve: I don't know how to do that. I don't know. But yeah. So with, with software, that's that's what I'm excited about with this event.
Stephanie: I think it's such a win win because, obviously, from the customer standpoint, you get to choose all the stuff. You know that it works before you make any commitment. Maybe even you have a couple different stakeholders like you as the owner, and then your team is there. You know, you bring the person you're gonna delegate this thing to. You get a little you get a little buy in.
Right? And you get to validate it. Then the other end, imagine what a value that that is for the the tech company. Mhmm. Get live feedback.
People pay big money for user groups.
Steve: Oh, yeah.
Stephanie: Yeah. Crazy amount of money. They're like, here's a phone. What do you think you should click on? Right?
Like, that's crazy. So imagine getting that feedback live too. It's just I think it's such a win win for everybody, and hopefully, it accelerates the whole industry.
Steve: Yeah. Oh, I I I absolutely know it will. Yeah. And then, our deal signals and left me a package deal, or is it separate? How does that work?
Stephanie: Oh, that's a good question. So we have to just have different additions. So it depends on where you're at in your business. If you want all the data and all the enrichment, obviously, has a cost to it. So we have different additions.
We have an addition that is just the core CRM automations, all the best practices for running a business, essentially. And then we have a deal signals package that has all that enrichment and the property sales AI, etcetera, which is the property up updates when things sell. And then the we have a package that's like a premier package where you can customize and configure things above and beyond what we what we do. So about 50% of our, customers, since we released it, will opt into kind of our middle package, which we call launch, which is all the CRM and and business operations of that, plus all the data and AI. Mhmm.
And about 25% probably go to either other way.
Steve: But no one's bought deal signals. That doesn't happen.
Stephanie: No. You have to have left me to to get it. Yeah. I was just curious. In the future, maybe not.
So in the future, maybe not. We we have a really cool road map. We have one other product that's going to, you know, bring on and elevate deal signals even more Mhmm. On the buyer side
Steve: Yeah.
Stephanie: Which is super exciting. That's coming out, by the summertime this year. And then once we finish our roadmap, potentially an off off platform solution.
Steve: Gotcha. So you mentioned that Salesforce asked to partner with you. Mhmm. What does that mean?
Stephanie: Kinda weird. Right? Yeah. Kinda nontraditional. Honestly, I I don't know why it happened this way.
I I, you know, call it call it fate, call it a god moment, call it just plain old kindness for no reason. Mhmm. But, so after that that call I had multiple calls with Salesforce and these fancy development people, and I don't even remember what the company was that they're with, but something fancy. After that whole call where they quoted me this million dollar road map, I literally freaked out on this call. Like, I was flabbergasted.
I thought it was gonna be expensive. It was, like, honestly, 30, 30 $2,030,000 dollars, whatever, which I was like, even that was a lot. Like, we could not afford that. Right? Anyway, was like, we're gonna find a way to afford it.
Anyway, so so flabbergasted and, like, taken aback and surprised. Like, I just, like, flipped out on this call. Like, what are you talking about? What what do you mean? And I was just going on and on.
I'm like, like
Steve: I hope this recording is somewhere.
Stephanie: I I'm sure there is. Like, I was I would say I used to say, oh, I never can run for public office, but we've we've we've
Steve: seen we've
Stephanie: seen worse.
Steve: Were you mean? Right?
Stephanie: I was not mean. I was just I was just astounded. And I was like, how hard can this be? What are you guys talking about? And I was like, I'll just do it myself.
And then they thought that was really funny. So then I was like, they laughed. They thought that was cute. Like, oh my god.
Steve: You could hear the lassier.
Stephanie: Oh, yeah. They they literally laughed in my face. Because I was at the end, I was like, I'll just do it myself. They're like, okay, little girl. Yeah.
Literally. So I was like then I was even more and I hung up the Zoom call, and I was like, I'm just gonna build it.
Steve: Mhmm.
Stephanie: I'm gonna freaking figure it out. Right? And so then, you know, it took me three months and a hundred hours to to figure out how to code on it and to to launch it. And then the AE, the Salesforce AE who had introduced all these fancy development people, followed up with me and basically said, hey. Did you give up?
I just wanna check-in on you. Do you want those connections? And I was like, actually, no. I'm done. Thank you.
I built it. And she said, well, can I see it? Like, alright. I'll show it to you. That way you, like, stop and you leave me alone, basically.
Because now I was, like, kind of upset. But I had a bad taste in my mouth with the whole thing. I'm like, I so I do my own thing, like, whatever. But, I jumped on a call with her and I showed her, and she said, this is this is something, you know. You know that.
Right? And I was like, something for what? I said, alright. Can I come to Charlotte and come meet you? I was like, sure.
Bring coffee.
Steve: Yeah.
Stephanie: So she did. So she came, I don't know, a month or so later. And, we went you know, she was like, let's talk about this thing. And she's like, every single real estate professional that I talk to has the same reaction you do. They come here and they're excited to have a solution, and they feel hopeful.
And then they're like, just flabbergasted too about the cost of what it's going to be and how complicated it is or whatever. Have you ever thought about selling this? Do you think that you could? I truly have no idea what that means. Like, I've never thought about selling software in my life.
Like, what is that? What she's like, I I really want you to talk to the Salesforce partner team. So I was like, I'll talk to whoever you want me to talk to. Like, I have nothing to lose. Right?
So she introduced me to you know, now I now I know, but this is like a high up person on the partner team that is a decision maker to negotiate a contract Mhmm. Which you usually don't get to. Like, you usually just put an application in the website on the AppExchange and, like, you know, go through this. You know, you you get a you get someone who doesn't really know know too much about any type
Steve: of process. It took a while.
Stephanie: Yeah. It takes a long time, and it's like there's no technical person. You know, It is. It's fine. But, so anyway, I got introduced to this person.
They're like, yeah. You know, I think there's an opportunity here. Do you wanna do it? And I was like, well, I will do it if I can sell it for an affordable price that I can sell the entire thing that I have right now built, and I get to control the sales process. Like, you guys, no offense, didn't know what you were talking about, and they, like, just upset me.
You know? And so they said, okay. See if you pass security review. Yeah. I I passed security review, first try.
And, it launched January 2020. Yeah. And my god. But then, you know, then COVID hit hit, and I was like, oh, maybe nothing's gonna come of this, you know? But I started talking about it with my friends and my my friends, like, yeah.
I wanna can I try it? I wanna buy it. And they bought it, and then they told their friends. And we kinda had this very grassroots thing, and here we are six years later. Today is actually the six year anniversary.
Steve: Wow. Congratulations.
Stephanie: Thank you.
Steve: And then
Stephanie: Not wild?
Steve: It is very wild. What is your, because, you know, you're trying to get into this venture capital world. Like, what is this vision for all that?
Stephanie: I got a real big vision.
Steve: Okay.
Stephanie: And, I'm really excited about it. I think that, I think the whole industry is about to get completely disrupted by by tech. Mhmm. And the the grand scheme of changing regulation and things like that, like, I I think there's a huge opportunity to be a tech platform that can compliantly do all the things that need to get done in in real estate investing. Probably, I'll say on a public podcast.
I'll tell you more over a glass of wine. But, there's a I have a big plan over the next ten years, and a lot of it is leveraging, data and AI and, transaction management, and title work and and how title is performed, essentially, through this archaic process right now. But I've got a I've got a big plan. I did raise venture capital, 2024. And at very end of 2024, I raised, with with an angel round with an angel investment company in Charlotte.
Shout out to Charlotte Angel Fund. They're awesome. And then after that, I did a series seed round, with another group out of North Carolina, and that has helped so much. I raised money specifically so I could build all these AI products. Mhmm.
And
Steve: a great call.
Stephanie: Doubled doubled a couple years in a row. So do it again this year.
Steve: Yeah. That's a great great call.
Stephanie: Yeah. Oh. I learned a lot.
Steve: We're gonna actually talk a little bit about, you know, how we went from multiple 7 figure businesses to multiple 8 figure businesses. Yeah. Before we do that, you're also starting a new podcast.
Stephanie: I am. I'm really excited about that. I'm trying to be like Steve Trang. No one could be like Steve Trang.
Steve: I don't know if you wanna be like that. I'm not sure that's something that you wanna try to be.
Stephanie: I'm excited about this.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Obligations. Gotta get space.
Stephanie: You gotta have these lights. They're glorious.
Steve: Gotta have employees on the other side of this wall. But what's the podcast about?
Stephanie: So I'm actually gonna do it with my husband, Zach. So it's the two of us, and it's called Who's in Charge?
Steve: Sounds like a very dangerous Right? Title.
Stephanie: Like, we could fight about it? Yeah. No. We don't fight about it. But, it's a leadership podcast.
Mhmm. So I think it's you know, we're we flipped our first house in 2007 and founded, Better Homes of the Carolinas, which was in 2012, I believe, something like that. I actually forget. It's been so many years. And then the you know, emerge and became Better Path Homes, and then we launched several other companies since then.
And as it stands right now, he's the CEO of Better Path Homes, and I'm the CEO of Left Main. And those are each of our kind of, like, full time gigs. Right? So I think it's really interesting. Both of us had our very our very own unique CEO journey and entrepreneurial journey, but we're married and have had to figure out a way to run the household with two entrepreneurs.
Right? And and he's way more entrepreneurial at heart than I was. And maybe I maybe I've got the crazy juice now. I don't know. But, so I think it's been an interesting leadership journey for both of us, and we've met a ton of really cool people along the way.
Mhmm. So the whole premise of the podcast is the leadership journey, and who is in charge of the company. Like, what does it take that that person that sold their their their business for $6,000,000,000? Who is that? Like, how do they do that?
Right? From from a SaaS perspective and also from incredible real estate operators because, obviously, that's a huge part of our story. So the the idea is just, like, bringing those lessons to light and, talking about it. I'm excited. It's launching in March.
Steve: Okay. Yeah. Lot of using virtual or in person? Virtual. Let's say because, like, Charlotte's a great hub.
Stephanie: I know. I know. Well, maybe we'll do some studio in the future, but we just wanna, like, I just wanna get it launched.
Steve: Yeah. Because, like, I will say, like, the thing that worked really well for me is, like, Phoenix. Everyone wants
Stephanie: to be. Yeah.
Steve: Right. Like, I want to
Stephanie: take a five hour flight to come hang out with you. Yeah, I do.
Steve: Yeah. It's simple here. And like, I mean, like, I know Charlotte is the main hub only because getting stuck in Florida, like, how do I get out of Florida? It's like, like, I go to Charlotte, Right? Because, like Come
Stephanie: hang out.
Steve: It's always Alabama or Georgia or Texas. It's got some crazy storm.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: There you go northeast a bit and then west.
Stephanie: Charlotte is a crazy airport. I never have to connect there, which is like the blessing. But, yeah, every every flight goes to Charlotte pretty much.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. So, I wanna talk about some of the things that you've done because, like, you've doubled two years in a row. Yeah. It's pretty substantial.
Right? Like, normally, when we're younger and, you know, you say, like, I wanna double. Right? Because actually you're hungry, you're ambitious, you wanna double. And then life kinda, like, punches you right back in the face.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: Right? So then as we get older and we consult and we coach and then tour. And so I was like, hey. I wanna grow double every year. I was like, well, how about we settle for thirty percent first?
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Like, let's come up with a plan for double.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: But let's be happy with 30%.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: You legitimately doubled two years in a row. Mhmm. How did you do that?
Stephanie: Well, I think improving your product line and bringing more products to market helps. Right? Like, I've what I've learned I'll I'll back up for a moment. What I've learned from Better's Homes Better Path Homes, excuse me, and and Left Main is that there are revenue ceilings.
Steve: Mhmm.
Stephanie: And, like, as you break through these different revenue ceilings, you get a little, like, escape velocity. Like, you can boop. You can pop right up. Like, so there's a I've I feel there's a there's a revenue ceiling at 1,000,000, and then the next one is at 3,000,000 in a real estate investment business. But once you break through the million dollars, like, you can pop up to three relatively quickly, then you can get stuck there until you break through that ceiling.
Right? And there's different things that you can unlock along the way that help you do that, and some and some of those are harder than others. For example, the first the first thing you really gotta break through is building a funnel. Like, what is your funnel? What is your conversion rate?
What are like, who what are all the cogs in your in your lineup? Right? So, along the way, I learned that there's a significant revenue ceiling that you can break through if you have better business units. And so what that translates to for SaaS is being better at solving the customer's problem, and the customer has many problems. Right?
Yeah. And so first, you gotta solve the first problem really, really well. Right? Like, hyperfocus, and I did for four years knowing I had this big plan. Like, no.
I've gotta nail this part first before we can even get to the other stuff. And I'm like, Chris Richter will tell you, like, him and I had this conversation, like, three and a half years ago. I'm like, I gotta do it. And I'm like, oh, no. Anyway, anyway, so I, I solved one problem and then essentially developed another business unit to solve additional customer problems that all were, like, together with like, that built up upon the first problem.
Mhmm. I think you talked to me a little bit about this the last time I was on the podcast. You're like, how do you evaluate opportunity? Like, how do you pick? Right?
Right. And so for me, it was does this compound on what I'm doing already? Like, is it still in the same line? And so with CRM, like, the left main story, like, we needed an industry specific CRM first. That was a really difficult problem to solve.
Having that be a good product and onboarding people properly and retaining people and helping people grow their companies and add user licenses and all this stuff. Right? And then helping them navigate years, of being on platform. And then the next the next problem that everyone wanted to solve with this was a follow-up game. Right?
And there's a lot of different ways that you can solve that problem. You went a totally different way of solving that problem, which is is is still is valuable. But the way I solved it was on the data side because I had the CRM. So that compounded against it. So essentially, it created another business unit inside of Lafane, like additional products and things that we solve that are super complimentary to what we're already doing.
So that is one way to double, right, of these different business units. And then another way to double is having resources to actually invest in accelerated growth. One of the things that is really challenging about doubling in a real estate investment business is it burns cash. And most people don't have a ton to burn. So you you're constantly fighting, like, against profitability and revenue.
Right? Like, you cannot sacrifice profitability because then you go out of business. Mhmm. But if you have a big and and articulated plan and you go raise venture capital, you can burn for a little bit while you're building and launching. Right?
So raising venture capital gave me a lot of resources to be able to actually do it well and quickly instead of over the course of years when it almost becomes irrelevant. Right? Like, now two years from now, if I had launched it bootstrapped, it probably would have been irrelevant. I had to do it again. Like, I'd just do something different.
You can almost never get the opportunity underneath you. And the third thing was leadership, like hiring really incredible people with way more experience than me. Like, at Left Main, I truly have a c suite. Mhmm. Like, I truly do.
Not an inflated title, like, for a COO. Right? Like, no. My COO is a COO. My CTO is a CTO with twenty five years experience.
Right? Like, unbelievable that they wanna come work with me. Right? So the leadership team is is the caliber that I can give a vision, and they can articulate it into their department and actually have it do like, they can do it. I don't have to be the one to, like, push the rock over the hill all the time and, like, basically, just have people waiting for tasks for me, which I was that's how it was for a long time because you're bootstrapping.
You can't afford the the the crazy person. Right? And I didn't have I didn't I never gave equity away. I gave equity away now to those leaders. They're, like, invested in the company with me.
And, a lot of wonderful things can happen when you have smart people on your team. So So
Steve: I wanna talk about first so business, additional units, that makes total sense. Yeah. Right? It's it's a way to add revenue.
Stephanie: Yeah. And to translate that to real estate investors, for those of those listening that are not SAS entrepreneurs, that's like having a business unit around JV ing. So you may be wholesaling and direct to seller. Right? And you may get really good at dispositions, and then you can have a business unit that helps you that that you just JV with other wholesalers.
And that is a business unit, and it has a different team that does that. Right? And, like, that's complimentary to what you're doing. Just as a, like, a super quick example.
Steve: Right. So products make sense. Capital. Did you decide to go get capital? Did you get stuck and someone's like, you need to go raise capital?
How did that journey begin?
Stephanie: I I just well, a little bit of both. I decided I needed capital, and I didn't know how to get it. Like, I know nothing about knew I knew nothing about venture capital then. So the first thing I did was find advisers. I networking is really a crazy thing.
It's so much fun. But I
Steve: fun. It's stressful for me.
Stephanie: Like people.
Steve: I don't.
Stephanie: You're good with people. Anyway, I just I I definitely felt like I hit a ceiling of, like, what I knew. You know what I mean? And I was like, I need I need different mentors, but I don't know these types of people. Mhmm.
So I started going to different types of events. I started going to more Salesforce events. I started, looking on LinkedIn for people who have done m and a activity before, like, on the SaaS side or who know who sold a company to Salesforce before. I mean, like, find these people. Right?
And surprisingly, there's one degree of separation. Like, it's crazy how many people are within your network or close to your network. So I started just networking and and talking and just, hey. Let's just connect as entrepreneurs, like and, make make friends. And I did.
And and and one one friend I made, her name is Blakely. She's incredible. She built a company called Task Ray and sold it. It was just a it's a Salesforce type company, sold it for incredible exit. Anyway, she's like, yeah.
I was telling her about this. I'm like, I feel like I'm kind of hitting a ceiling. You know? I was grateful to connect with you. And like, do you have any advisers?
No. I should get those. She's like, yeah. I'm like, duh. Right?
Like, it's like going to a mastermind. Like, what am I thinking? So she became an adviser, and she kinda introduced me to that person. They introduced me to that person. Blah blah blah.
I had a and I had an adviser board. And essentially, it's just a group of people you can ask questions to that will tolerate your stupidity.
Steve: Mhmm.
Stephanie: You know, like, you'd be naive and ask me whatever you want. Yeah. And so I did, and I was like, I need capital, but I don't know how to get it. And, turns out having really great advisers makes you more fundable. Right?
Steve: Well, it's funny. So you're that first one. So you're gonna meet my Blakely. Yay. You're gonna make all these connections for me.
But I was actually talking to someone this past week and talked to too many people now where I kinda forget, which is ironic because I don't like talking to people. But, they're like, someone was asking me for money, and they don't have an advisory board. So I just blew them off. Like, oh, wow. Like
Stephanie: It's serious.
Steve: That's a real thing.
Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: I had no idea how a real thing was until he just kinda, like, just casually, oh, they don't have an advisory board.
Stephanie: Yep.
Steve: Oh, okay. So I'm glad we're doing this.
Stephanie: Yeah. This is the cool thing about venture capital is they're very high risk. Mhmm. And, one of them told me one third there's a there's a rule of thirds. One third of the companies that we operate that we invest in go out of business.
Like, we don't get any of our money back. One third of them break even. Like, they have a decent exit. We maybe get our money back, like, most of the money back. And then a third of them actually do better and produce a return on our money.
So two thirds of the time, like, nothing like, nothing good happens, basically. Right? Like, you've wasted time on one. You got your money. That's fine.
The other third, like, you've lost it. It's like those odds are pretty low, but they're so excited about it. So they they are they expect you to have to have trouble. Right? They expect you to be a dumbass for a little while, which is kinda nice because, like, then you can be honest.
Right? But, like, no. Let's listen. There's some things I just don't know, and they know that. And so they look for you to have a good advisory network.
Like, what's your where's your padding around you? And if you have good padding around you, it really elevates your chance of being able to be funded because they're like, okay. If you have enough good people around you, you'll be fine. You'll figure it out. You know?
Yeah. That's neat.
Steve: And then the third thing was, your executive team. And, like, before you talk we're talking about yours. Like, one of the most exciting things is to go through this journey. Right? Because, like, when I was doing coaching, it was, like, you know, we have a team.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: But I can never offer really, like, potential exit.
Stephanie: Right.
Steve: It's without a potential exit. You have to find people. You have to, like, lead and manage.
Stephanie: Mhmm. Exactly.
Steve: Now that we can recruit based off a potential exit
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: Getting talent that I would not have expected. And so, like, I had a call last week one on one with our fulfillment, director fulfillment. And, you know, he's like, hey. I just made a decision. I'm just gonna start building this out myself because I can't wait for anyone else.
Like, you're just gonna build it out. Yeah. Like, I know how to code. I went to college. I I I have a computer science degree.
Cloud code. I could just do it all myself. It's like, great. Like, we don't have to wait for anyone else. We don't
Stephanie: have to
Steve: go talk to anyone else. It's like, I'm just gonna build out this dashboard exactly as I want it. Mhmm. You don't get that when you don't have a potential exit.
Stephanie: Right.
Steve: The people you can attract based off the upside Mhmm. You don't have to, like, manage them, hold them, like it's not that we don't hold them account. We still have to hold them accountable, but, like, I literally have people, a lot of people in my company now, who actively think about how to improve this company on the weekends.
Stephanie: Funny thing happens when they own a piece of it. Yeah. Right?
Steve: Yeah. It's it's it's wild. So, anyway, so I go back to you. On the leadership side, how you attract leaders in your organization?
Stephanie: I mean, first is vision, and it's the same way with venture capital. Like, you really have to articulate your plan. Mhmm. The vision has to be big enough. There has to be a big enough addressable market that you can produce something valuable inside of it.
Right? So that's what everyone will ask you first. But, like, what are real estate investors? Like, how big is that opportunity to help them? Like, who cares?
Right? Most people don't know how big of an opportunity this is. Right? Or, like, how many of their how many real estate investors there are? How much of the real estate transactions they're doing in The US?
Right? So it's a little bit about setting the context of why this is important, like, why you should listen. Right? This is the this is the situation. And then this is how our approach is in solving these problems.
And you have to be able to articulate that that vision to somebody so that they understand it. It's not just fly and that, like or, like, spitballing stuff. Like, you actually have to have a plan. Right? And and people will pick up on on your plan being, like, sus or not.
Right? Yeah. Not Not to talk like my 16 year old. But, like, you actually do have to have a plan, and a thoughtful plan and forecast. Mhmm.
Like, what what do what do these numbers look like five, ten years from now? You have to think about that. And then you you articulate that to a smart person. Right? And they're like, okay.
I can see how this could potentially work. And then they're looking at you too. Like, what have you done? Why you? Why should I trust you?
Have you ever been successful before? Like, what is your what what are your like, this culture, all culture stuff, all do I wanna follow you stuff, or what is your track record? And then how do you like, how do I plug in to this? You can I help? Like, essentially, like, if you were trying to hire a CTO, they wanna know, like, can I actually provide value to this?
Like, how do you how do you plan on plugging me into this, and what kind of team do you need me to build? Most executives will ask you that. Like, what do you need me to build here? You know?
Steve: And Very different question. Process.
Stephanie: Yes. And I'm like, this is exactly what I want you to do. Mhmm. I'm like, okay. No.
I can do that. I've done that before. Like, I'm I want you because of this you're at this interview because you've had this exact same experience in this in this role, and I wanna know how you can translate that here. That's why you're here. And I'm like, no.
I can do that. Yeah. You know, I'm interested.
Steve: Do you require a headhunter for that?
Stephanie: Use a headhunter for my CRO, my revenue officer. Mhmm. Everyone else I found through networking.
Steve: Like going to events, letting friends know that you're hiring.
Stephanie: Mhmm. Yep. Friends of friends going to events, advisors, knowing somebody maybe that they can introduce me to.
Steve: Yeah. So okay. So adding more products, raising capital to go fund it. How much? Are you sure how much you raise?
Stephanie: 6,000,000.
Steve: 6,000,000.
Stephanie: All of that.
Steve: Alright. So raising 6,000,000. But now you can go develop the products Mhmm. That you need.
Stephanie: And hire the people that you hire. Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. And I think that's trying to think, like, how would you work that in a in a wholesaling business? Or
Stephanie: I mean, I think there's there's people who are trying to do that for, just being able to purchase and hold an asset. Mhmm. Like, it just it eats up so much cash to be able to buy land if you're gonna build, to to whole tail or wholesale. Right? Like, it it's not wholesale.
Whole tail or flip. You gotta hold the asset for a certain period of time and, like, it eats up your cash. Rentals do the same thing. Like, it's a great model to to buy a lot of rentals. You're not gonna make a lot of money for five, eight years when, by the way, you sell them, not just by holding them and and getting rent.
Right? So there there's a period of time that needs to that you need to be able to tolerate relatively low or small incremental profit increases. Mhmm. But it takes capital to be able to accumulate the things you need to do in order to get to that next place. Right?
So on the on the real estate side, that's raising private money so that you can flip more houses instead of taking a traditional loan out. Right? Yeah. It's potentially having raising a bunch of money and buying more rentals with with more of that capital. Right?
So, it's it's being able to raise money so that you can have operational expenses or make an investment in r and d. I don't recommend that. I recommend you spending money on assets and not operations. But but look what you can do when you have private money.
Steve: Yeah. I guess that's true because, like, there's a he he, I mean, he's just started multiple real estate funds because he got into real estate to buy assets.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: And it's painful by assets while you're building up a wholesaling company.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: But you just raise money buy assets, and those assets pay him a fee. Actually, we had John Burley here, and he's a a guy who's not very well known nationwide, at least in our circle.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: Based on very well where all he did was just raise money and just buy assets, and he would just own everything $50.50 with everybody. Just go raise a bunch of money, buy everything $50.50, pay yourself a 10 k assignment fee on every property you buy. You do pretty good.
Stephanie: You do pretty good.
Steve: You can scale pretty fast in capital before versus trying to grind it out to buy assets.
Stephanie: I think having having some money so having some margin, that's probably the better way to say it. Having margin is really, really helpful Mhmm. Because you can go a little bit faster. You can also make some clearer decisions because you're not you're not you don't have a gun to your head every month. Mhmm.
Steve: It's
Stephanie: really hard to do that. And and I'll say this too. Like, you don't have to raise a bunch of money to be successful in real estate. Like, you don't have to. But if you wanna break through these different revenue ceilings, you certainly need to have resources.
And resources can come in many different things. It can be in joint ventures. It can be in money. It can be in team members. It can be a a lot of different things.
Right? So it doesn't just have to be to be money, but having having a business plan that is fundable like that certainly helps you execute quicker.
Steve: Yeah. And then on the other side, going back to real estate, because we're trying to figure out, like, price capital leaders.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: But you could do the same thing with products, adding other ways of driving revenue inside your company.
Stephanie: Mhmm.
Steve: Capital, just raising private capital. Yep. And then leaders, like, the other thing you can do too is, you know, we see some teams where they give revenue share or potential to flip with the company. Yes. Right?
Like, hey. On this deal, like, you got some extra money, you can be you can be the lender.
Stephanie: Yep. On this
Steve: deal, and you can make some extra money while working. So you get to benefit
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: From the company winning.
Stephanie: I think alignment is super important. You know? There's like you said, there's lots of different ways you can set that up. But the true leaders want to create Mhmm. And own their part of the the thing that they're creating around.
And it doesn't have to be ownership in the company, but maybe it is winning on a deal that they can or or contributing to a deal or contributing to a success in some way. Like, everyone wants that ability. They wanna grow themselves. They wanna learn. They wanna be part of something bigger than themselves.
Like, this is all normal human nature stuff. Yeah.
Steve: And I
Stephanie: think you can recruit really phenomenal people when you give them an opportunity to align like that with a company.
Steve: Yeah. And I think some of the best people we can hire are entrepreneurs.
Stephanie: Yeah. Exactly.
Steve: People that wanna build Yeah. But don't want all the headache in building.
Stephanie: There's listen. There's a lot of really good ideas out there that are that just are done poorly. So what if you can what if they like your idea and help it actually get done well? Yeah. They don't have to have a new idea.
Like, no one who cares about a new idea? Let's just do the that good idea super, super well.
Steve: You know what
Stephanie: I mean? Like, you can make a you can make a lot of money that way.
Steve: Yeah. So, I asked you a lot of questions. Was there anything that we haven't touched on that you think is important for the, the people that are listening?
Stephanie: Open ended.
Steve: Yeah. It's very open ended. A lot of questions. We talked about everything. We've we've fully digested all of us.
Your whole life story.
Stephanie: You had a lot of it. That's for sure. I don't know. I'm excited about what we're gonna do together. Mhmm.
I I think that the most successful people are the ones that are collaborating. Mhmm. And so I'm excited about what that looks like from the product standpoint and and seeing how how we can continue to do that better. And then just real estate tech in general, I feel like, you know, you've got a voice, and we can have a voice together in helping make that really wonderful for our customers. Right?
And and and us who are investing in real estate ourselves. Right?
Steve: That's funny talking about collaborating because, like, so we have a mutual client who was unhappy with how things were progressing in the development because they bought Left Main and they bought objection proof AI. Right? They were frustrated. And With integration. Yeah.
With integration. Right? And he did, I say a smart thing. He sent an email. He was unhappy, but he cc'd you.
He cc'd me.
Stephanie: Problem solvers one and two.
Steve: And so what do I do? I take a screenshot, send send it to you. Like, what do you know about this? And you reply back. I don't know.
What do you know about this? But in that conversation, you and I agreed. You know what? Let's get our team both of our teams on the phone. Yeah.
Have them figure it out and create a solution that makes the client happy. That's collaboration.
Stephanie: That's it. That's it.
Steve: Right? There wasn't like, oh, well, Left Main sucks. Right? They're like, oh, well, that's Steve's problem. That's Steve's company's problem.
Yeah. We both quickly got on the phone and solved the problem Yep. Together. Yep. That's pretty awesome.
Stephanie: That's pretty and that's how it should be all the time. Right? Like, hey. We care about the same person. Mhmm.
Let's just make it better for him.
Steve: Mutual mutual customer. Right. And then the other things too is, I mean, I don't know if we talked about it the last time, but, like, we're investors together in your apartment complex. Yeah.
Stephanie: That's right. We own some stuff together too. We own
Steve: some real estate together, which I forget periodically. Oh, yeah. I own apartments.
Stephanie: You just get that email from me. Like, everything's going great.
Steve: Yeah. That's all I need. I just need to know everything's going fine. Yeah. But then the third thing, because we have, again, a lot of overlap in clients Mhmm.
Is that, it appears just reading emails, it appears that we've now built out something where on the deal signals. Right? Follow-up. Deal signals.
Stephanie: That's Charlotte. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve: So deal signals happens, and then our follow-up bot reaches out.
Stephanie: Imagine that.
Steve: So it looks like the double, double whammy
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: On follow-up. So, yeah, signal from, from left main. And then our AI bot is to work.
Stephanie: Right.
Steve: It's like it's magic.
Stephanie: Right. It's it's really cool. You know? And and what I like about that is I can say hyperfocus on what we're really good at from a product standpoint, and you can say hyperfocus on what you're really good at, and they're complimentary. Yeah.
We just gotta work together and know what each other are building. And that's why I think it'd be really cool to to do this event. Like, we can help. Like, I really care about this, like, our customers. Mhmm.
Right? Like, that was me. That is me. Like, I I wanna help the I wanna help real estate investors do more transactions, and I can't solve every problem. You can't solve any problem.
But, like, the collaboration and the synergy we all have together with the with the end goal in mind of helping investors, like Yeah. There's so much impact we can have. It's so cool.
Steve: And that's with, Jordan Fleming Yeah. Smartphone who's on here not too long ago. You introduced us.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: The right after is like, alright. I'm doing the AI thing. What What should I do? It's like, let me connect you to Jordan. Yeah.
Really, really helpful. But, like, that part where, that customer journey Yeah. Because that person, that was you when you were, like, talking to Salesforce.
Stephanie: I know. Right?
Steve: Like, I've got this problem, and, like, no one will take me seriously.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: I'm frustrated. Yeah. Now we can help that person out.
Stephanie: Right. And maybe that's why I take it personal, and we're like and feel so passionate about it because that sucks to feel that way.
Steve: Yeah. I know you and Jason Lewis are two people I know that lose sleep Oh, yeah. When customers aren't happy.
Stephanie: Yes. Yeah. Yes. I mean and, honestly, I don't know how to be any other way. You know?
I don't I don't know how to but some some days, I wish I could just be like, alright. So it's fine. It's fine. Right? Like, someone someone on my team can respond, but, like, no.
I I, you know, I think I think it takes being this passionate to survive six years long. You know? Like Yeah. I love solving this particular problem. It's a difficult problem to solve.
Customers and people on their entrepreneurial journey are at all different stages and have all different types of reaction to technology and how to learn it and how to use it and leverage it. Everyone has different reactions, but it's this is my problem to solve, and I'm excited about solving this one thing.
Steve: Yeah. So I think just to kinda wrap it up, it's the, it's the customer doing everything they can to make sure the customer wins.
Stephanie: Yep.
Steve: And us as vendors, product, providers, solution providers, what we can together Yeah. Make sure the person that's most important wins.
Stephanie: Exactly. If you're not collaborating, you're losing.
Steve: Yeah. You know, it's it's sound kinda weird. Right? It's refreshing to still hear this. So, you know, I started this podcast in 2018.
Right? When I started this podcast in '18, you know, there's Sean Terry obviously here.
Stephanie: Yeah. And
Steve: that guy tells it. He gives it all away.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: Right? He's been an instrumental leader, I think, in some ways, kinda like the godfather of wholesaling
Stephanie: For sure.
Steve: In Phoenix. And when I started this podcast, I was teaching abundance and, you know, like, let's share everything. Yeah. Because that was my journey when I started real estate or not started real estate. Sucked all real estate.
When I haven't started having success in real estate, was learning from people that had a lot of success. Yeah. Right? And the people that were willing to open their doors led me into their company, just introduced me to people on their teams. Like, here's what we do.
Here's how we our process. This is on the realtor side. It's not the wholesaling side. Yeah. On the realtor side, like, the people that are most successful or most available sharing was working for them.
Yeah. When I started the podcast, it just brought this energy. Right? And we have people come out on the show, talk about abundance, talk about sharing and this and that. But there's a part of me, still kind of a jaded individual, there's a part of me that says, yes.
He used to say abundance
Stephanie: Yeah.
Steve: When everyone's doing Yeah. If everyone's doing good, you know, preach abundance. And in the back of my mind, they really spoke this vocally, was like, we'll see what happens when the tide chains Yeah. And see if you actually speak abundance, if you actually speak collaboration. Yeah.
You still do.
Stephanie: Still here.
Steve: Yeah. So I appreciate that. But it's the reason why you have all the successes.
Stephanie: Oh, thank you. But, you know, I, I have been blessed by just radical kindness. Look, really, med in my my medical career and the real estate investment career and the SAS thing, like, shocking kindness for no like, with for people who really can't get anything from it, like that AE who just was like, hey. You should do something like this. She didn't get paid for that.
Like, literally nothing came from that. I have countless stories like that in my investment career when, like, just scared and don't know how to move forward and, like, having mentors just be like, no. You it's okay. You can do this. Mhmm.
Like, having my mind blown. So I feel indebted to do the same exact thing. And it's funny because I hear people, like or see people post on Facebook and things like, I I hate when people ask to pick my brain. Blah blah blah. I will give freely everything that I know if I have time to do it.
I will absolutely I don't care. I'll go to CG, and I'll tell you everything I know about everything because I know that that that that karma comes back around, and I have been already rewarded beyond what I believe I've ever deserved. Right? So, like and been the beneficiary of that kindness, like and how good that feels. I just wanna keep doing that for as many people as I possibly can.
Yeah. You know? Like, we'll we'll all win. Like, we're all still standing, or we'll still win. You know?
Steve: So I want to connect with you, find out more how is the best way what's the best way for them to do that?
Stephanie: And probably Instagram or Facebook. Mhmm. At steph betters is my handle. Mhmm.
Steve: You can
Stephanie: find me there. You can email me, stephanie@leftmainrei.com. And those are the two best ways.
Steve: Perfect. Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been absolutely great. Having me.
Yeah. Of course. Thank you guys for watching. See you guys next. Steve train.
Jump on the Steve train. Disrupt us.
