Making The Transition: Exciting Times As We Transition To Something New
Participant #1:
Welcome everyone to the show. I am joined today with favorite person. I just can't stop laughing. Joined today by Rebecca, with Rebecca, by with Buy. How are we joined today? We're a little goofy today, so we wanted to speak direct to the audience today and not have a guest on because we have some news that's my breaking news, something really exciting, something we've talked about for a long time. We are going to be taking essentially all the elements of the homegrown company, Cassandra Properties, which we have been so proud to have been a part of and work in literally, like my entire professional career. Right. We're going 20. Oh, my gosh, stop it 25 years plus. Sorry. I just gave you the plus. You don't have to go any further. Well, apparently 25 years plus. And we have a bit of a different vision for real estate. Technology has disrupted things really in every way and every facet of life. If you think about just 1520 years ago, how we did literally everything right. The foods that we ate, the way we traveled, how we communicated. I mean, everything has just been turned on its head. And real estate has certainly gone through some transformation, but we believe a really unique set of opportunities that we want to go try our hand in. So as of the next couple of weeks, we're going to be rolling out a new brand. We're going with Friend Amo real estate
Participant #1:
awesome. And the idea is deal makers tend to have a certain skill set, and the better the deal maker. Typically, they're seasoned. They've been around for a period of time. They have kind of set in the way that they conduct business and for good reason, they've had tremendous success. And we want to do everything we can to keep deal makers in that space. But the business has different demands today. Absolutely. The business is now calling for us to be really digital marketers. And there's a very big difference if you're in this game, you know, there's a really big difference between a deal maker and a marketer. So part of what we've been so proud of over the last. Becca, you've been working with us for six or seven years now. I know literally the slowest six or seven years of my existence. And then Peter, you came on board when three years ago, and I was one of those deal makers, right? I was stuck in the way that I was trained, and I did what I knew and I knew what I did, and I did it well. But we started to see more and more opportunities to really start to expand, even the cool toolbox that we have available to us today, we started to see that there was real opportunities here, and it includes pretty heavy technology component, which we'll talk about a bit, but the human side of it as well. And we feel that investing in the people in human capital is the smartest investment we could possibly make right now. Some of you have heard the stories over the last year or year and a half since we've been playing around with this thing about the coaching and the unbelievable impact it's had on us. One of the things that we want to offer and we are offering now, and we'll offer it in a much more meaningful way as we move into this new iteration of what real estate we believe is going to look like is formalized coaching. So I was wondering if, Becca, you could spend a couple of minutes just talking about being a certified coach now, what that's meant to you and what it's meant to the team and what you think it brings for all of us collectively as we move ahead. Sure. So like James said, coaching has had such a profound impact on us just as team leaders and just with focus and vision. And there's a couple of different ways that coaching can help you one with strategy and systems and goals, which is always really great. But I think the more I don't know, the thing that at least had the most effect on me was mindset. And I don't think we necessarily think about that on a regular basis. How much of an effect that has on your day to day life and just changing your perspective and the way you think about things can make such a huge difference in your life, not only in your personal life but in your business. And I think people as a whole. If you talk coaching, you think, well, I mean, is it a form of therapy? It is. It absolutely is one of our first coaches. He said to me, which I thought was very interesting. He said, therapy works on your past and coaching works on your future. I really do believe that. That's very true. I think it also works on the present and what you're dealing with. But you have so many challenges that you come up against. And if you have somebody who can help to guide you to steer you in the right direction, it can make all the difference in the world. So for us as a company, we are going to focus on helping our agents by strategy and setting goals, but also just helping them to learn to change the way they think about different things because you change the way you think you can change your life. I've heard it a thousand times, and I never believed it. One thing that I started doing that I'm going to have my clients and the agents do is daily affirmations. We talked about this in one of our book clubs we started with which one was it? Millionaire Mindset? Yes. And I laughed when I first read about it because I just thought that's not going to change my life. Nothing's going to change. But I was going about it all wrong. Actually, it does change. It doesn't change your circumstance. It changes your perspective, which then changes your circumstance the way you think about things and the way you look at the world and view things. It's wild. It's really wild. So I'm excited. I'm excited to help people kind of get better at what they're doing and succeed and have success and be happy at what they're doing. So the affirmation thing for me, you know me the way you do. And for those of you who do know me at first, I had kind of the same reaction, like, Are you shitting me? Really? Like I thought of a Saturday Night Live skit. What was it? Was it Stewart Smally and gosh, Donna. People like me, right. But what I came to understand really quickly was people go through their lives and seldom take the time to stop and really look inward. And when they look inward, sometimes they really like what they see. Sometimes they really don't like what they see. Most of us don't, but very seldom is what we portray externally matching what's happening inside. We could talk about that for three weeks. The reasons why that happens, and we pretty quickly started to understand that we all needed present company included, perhaps present company more than most, if not all in the group. That just getting on this book club, which is another kind of one of the core pillars that we're going to build on in this new company, just getting on for that 45 minutes a week and reviewing the chapters and being just brutally honest about how we felt the team that we've built here, it's going to be almost the exact same team that's coming with us. So it's the same people. We're just doing things in a very different way. And in order to do that, we needed a clean slate. And we wanted to build it in a scalable way. And we found that when the inside started matching the outside, unbelievable, things started to happen. Absolutely right. We started to see amazing results. And as we truly felt better about who we were, it bled into our home life. It led into our work life in remarkable ways and kind of quickly. We're a tight knit group, and we trust each other in book club, and it's become, like almost a safe place for us to get together and really pull apart the respective chapters and talk about where we failed and what we took from that particular chapter, how we want to try and apply it in our personal lives and in our business lives and sharing that within the group. So in that same kind of approach, we recognize that we're good at what we do. We're really, really good at what we do. We're a group of sharp professionals that really work hard at their craft, and we have a lot of value that we can share. Right. So part of the new program is going to be in a very public way and completely free. Take part of the Institute that we've been working on for our agents internally and start sharing that with the community. We started with a really aggressive blog program, but the blogs were really driven by SEO candidly. Right. We were speaking to what people were asking in a global sense, not necessarily in the sense of our local market. So we want to take the blogs and make them far more local centric and convert that program into meetups. We'll probably do a bunch of them through Facebook and partner up with different folks throughout the island, other trusted companies and resources, and start offering these free seminars or webinars or whatever the rules are that day and start getting some of the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last 25 plus years. As Becca pointed out out there into the community when we started building the Institute and we were looking for what I call the Adam and Eve moment, right. Let me take a step back. We felt that it was really important to have a balanced agency, right? We want to have a very robust residential market and team, but we also want to have a really robust commercial marketing team. And on the commercial side, which is certainly where my strong suits lie, I kept trying to find where do I start teaching the Greenhorn, an agent that has no experience at all in commercial or any experience in real estate period. And Peter was a good beta for us. And I'm sorry, Peter, I always point this out, but as I was going through this, we spent hours and hours and hours trying to find that first moment where I can be. Okay. Well, this is the absolute ground zero for teaching commercial and every two sentences it was, well, what does that mean? What does this word mean? What does that term mean? I really have taken for granted how much knowledge I've accumulated over the years in this space. So we wanted to empower our people with the coaching. And again, we're going to do that in a very meaningful way in the new company. We want to certainly foster a bigger, broader, better book club, and we want to take the time to capture this knowledge, get it into an easily digestible format, get it out into the public for free, and then document it through the blogs and video logs. We don't have to be always selling, right? We don't want to do that anymore. Of course, when it's go time, it's go time. But we feel really good about giving back to an island that really has blessed me in so many ways over the years. So many people that I can thank that have really given me opportunities where I probably wasn't worth the risk at the time. Looking back. But so many folks had reached down and helped lift me up over the years and for all of those people, we're looking forward to continued relationship and business and service, but we're looking to do it in a much more meaningful way. And thank you quite candidly for the opportunities that I've been given over the years. Yeah. And I think that one of the things I've learned is supporting people can have such a big effect on your team. And if you support people, you strengthen your team. You have a strong team. You have a strong community. So as part of you saying that we're going to provide this information to the community, if we can help foster strength within the community, no matter what that may look like. I know we're blessed to do several community outreach stuff, especially around Christmas time. We do something special, but I think that having this opportunity to give back is really exciting for us. Yeah. We're going to basically highlight categorically the agents that excel in so many of the different disciplines lens to really be a professional and to deliver excellence for your clients and customers. It takes a heck of a long time to build that base of knowledge up. So offering agents access to an Institute that is really I believe it's second to none. I'm really proud of what we've put together so far. We started to find that over the years just I guess by happenstance, we started to cultivate agents that were really experts in the different disciplines. People think, Well, real estate is real estate. It's commercial or it's residential. It is not right. On the residential side alone, you have first time home buyers. You have foreclosure specialists. You have residential specialists. You have high end home specialist on the commercial side, you have a retail expert, you have a medical space expert. You have an industrial or warehouse expert. You have defaulted notes. You have short sales on that side of the table. It's just investment sales on the residential, multifamily, mixed use and on the commercial side, shopping centers. There's five or six disciplines in shopping centers alone. So we want to highlight the agents in their area of expertise and basically edify and share with the community the knowledge that they've accumulated over the years we've accumulated over the years and quite candidly, until we started slowing it down, we didn't even realize how much information we had at our fingertips. Yeah. Well, one thing to back up about for Peter, we pick on them every time, but I was lucky enough to come into real estate, and I didn't know it at the time, especially from where I'm from, because I'm not from New York, and I work directly with James. So I learned everything from him. He taught me everything that I know as far as real estate goes and other agents are coming in, especially if you're newly licensed and you're just kind of learning from those around you. Or maybe if you do some YouTube videos or whatever. But I didn't realize at all like what I had taken for granted, all the information that I had accumulated from you that normally when a new agent gets licensed or starts in the industry would have no idea. Yes, social media is another one of those kind of core pieces that we want to build out and convey to our agents. We all fall in the trap of just listed, just sold now in acceptance, right? Those silly posts that we make just because they're not really effective, they're not helping to drive any value to the customer base. They're really not generating any type of leads at all. I mean, we post just a post, and social media has given us an opportunity to connect, to connect with people locally and across the globe in a very, very meaningful way. And we intend to unlock some of the connections and tools that we're finding and do just that. We don't want to be on social media, to sell, we want to be there to connect and to be a resource again for the folks that have been so instrumental in helping us over the years. And that was an entire course, right. Hours and hours of content. But it was fun. And I think that we are so lucky. And I don't think I personally realize I'm sure you probably did. But until we started kind of breaking things into categories, how we really do have an expert in every field here and to have our agents put out their stuff on social media and to teach them kind of how important it is to let people know who they are because people want to work with people they like or they have similarities with. So it was a really fun course that we put together. It was I should probably watch it. She spent so much time on it. Guys, we want to build something that also gives us the ability to scale. Yes, we're putting together systems, and we've had the pleasure of working with some Dynamite experts, and we're working with even more Dynamite experts. Now, where again, to be a deal maker, there's the part of imparting the knowledge and process to that deal maker. But deal makers don't want to be caught in the weeds with all of the other things that go into driving traffic. I get to talk about Mission Control. I have to talk about Mission Control. You stole my Thunder. Sorry. I'm so sorry. It's all good. I get excited. I love systems and processes and spreadsheets and all those weird things, but I can't help it. So we put together what we call Mission Control, which is essentially kind of a landing page where agents can go and access everything they need. We always had this in the system. We had called Smart Sheets, but it wasn't laid out in a way that was really user friendly right now. It is absolutely Dynamite. And Peter is the one who just basically listened to all of my demands and put it together. And so he was over there shaking his head. He did a great job, but visually, it's pleasing, and it's so simple. You need a form. We've got them all categorized. You need a logo. It's simple to get. We've got direct links to our CRM, to YouTube videos, to all of our social media. It's a one stop shop, and no agent is going to have to go. Do you know where that template is or that form for this is they know where to go, and it's so easy to find. Yes. Again, keeping the deal maker in the deal. We wanted to centralize everything we could and a 32nd summary. It sounds like, oh, that's not a big deal. It's a big deal, like there's hundreds, if not thousands of forms that we've used. Everything's been templatized uploaded into DocuSign accounts we have for each individual agent, and all of that is going to tie into just an unbelievably slick CRM, which is kind of the next Biggie for us. We have the ability now through technology to plug in all sorts of neat tips and tricks to track your current pipeline, to help prospect and really cultivate your book and to generate all of your materials in a few clicks in one place where I mean, even like responding to all of your social media accounts, right? All of that will be centralized and you'll be able to access it from one dashboard. As you're looking at your pipeline, you're looking at the customer marketing reports that you're creating for your sellers and you're able to align everything in one place. So that led into the website, which we have literally. I feel like we haven't stopped tearing the website apart. Every time we get to a finish line, we're ripping it down and we're building it back up. We literally just launched a brand new state of the art website, and Peter and I have met six days a week, 60 minutes to 3 hours, 4 hours. Sorry. Six days a week, literally just going through and improving the customer experience and the presentation, the calls to action, the SEO, the metadata, the backlinks. It doesn't stop. But we felt that it was also critical for us to be able to utilize some of the new digital tools where you can track where people are coming from. You can track patterns and behaviors. You can identify people through geofencing and target people and start layering on top of each other different habits and patterns that we're finding drive much better leads. Right. So the end game for us was how do we drive better leads for the agents? And how do we provide a much easier customer interface and customer experience? So the new website, which should be live in a few days, which we're so excited for, is going to feature a search by category function, which sounds simple and it sounds like it should be on every website, but it's not on a single website that we've ever seen in the space. Part of the challenge is you try and run efficient ads, and you try and get eyes on the asset, right? That's the name of the game. We're running ads and driving people categorically to what was fed by our IDX feed. And the way it was fed is how it was presented on our and everybody's website. And you would go in and those maddening freaking boxes. I know, checking a box, checking another set of parameters, check this box and another set of and it was like, wow, my gosh. I couldn't stand working on my own website. So we also had the issue, as we were driving these leads in this traffic of if we run a really specific Google ad or a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad or wherever it was, it was driving people categorically to the IDX's presorted feed. And if I was targeting a $70 million commercial shopping center buyer, they got pushed to the same place as literally the 200 square foot drop off dry cleaner. It's ridiculous person that was searching, and neither of those groups have any interest in the other group's results. But you had to pour through this maddening amount of listings that were just completely irrelevant for what you're doing. Yeah. So we worked with a programmer. Some of you have heard them on previous shows. Joe is just a brilliant, brilliant guy, and we can't give the complete secret sauce outright. But what we've been able to do is significantly simplify searching for the consumer. So when they get to their site, if they want to see just warehouses for lease, that's what they're going to see. If they want to see just medical space, that's what they're going to see if they want to just see co Ops, that's what they're going to see. So for our sellers, this is far more productive, because now we can run way more efficient ads. We can drive far more traffic we're able to track as they come to the site and basically reverse engineer. What are the habits that these folks are doing? What are the publications that they're reading, podcasts that they're listening to? So we can reverse engineer and serve ads that way. And then on a go forward basis, build avatars and target those avatars, if you will, because we know that when they came specifically, they were looking for this type of. So that's one of many exciting new things that we've done with the website that we think is going to have a really profound impact for our sellers, our buyers or landlords or tenants. And it gives us the flexibility to scale, as I had said earlier, one of the other things that we're so excited for, and it just felt timely to tie the new company launch in with going into beta on a new app that we've developed. Cool. It's a game changer for real estate, not just in Staten Island. This is a game changer across the board. And what we found is over the years digesting and learning and pouring through so many different programs and softwares and apps. There's either real estate centric stuff that you could see was built by someone that was a deal maker, but was woefully lacking on the automation side. On the artificial intelligence side, it wasn't scalable, and it didn't give you the ability to really utilize the data, or you had unbelievably scalable products. You had products that did utilize artificial intelligence. It did do so many of the other things that the more remedial basic stuff didn't do. But it was mind numbing to actually use it as a deal maker. Right? When you're going through the flow of your day and look, we all have the same 24 hours. That's how you spend it. That matters. But there's only so much time that you can give to a program or an app that's clunky, right. That from an agent's perspective. Never mind the front facing stuff to the consumer. They became so difficult to use that they go by the wayside we've seen this with apps. We've seen this with CRM. We've seen this across the board. Really. So when we were able to partner up with our in house programmer now who is absolutely just brilliant and utter genius, and he's great to work with. Great to work with. He's a wonderful, wonderful guy, and he was open to really listening and really hearing what we were conveying and long story longer, we ended up with a piece of software that we believe we've probably scratched seven or 8% of its utility and function. We wanted to get to a minimum viable product that we can get out to a specific audience, and we're just about there, but it's so easy to use. It's a click of a button, and you have the ability to one of the things that has plagued us in the past with this type of stuff is repeat searches. Every time you go in, you didn't want to have to rebuild out those metrics and parameters. So you can customize this thing to yourself as an individual investor, yourself, as an agent or a broker to a company. Right? Appraisers? I mean, the utility on this thing is pretty wild and set up the metrics that work for you. So in the future, if you decide you want to find, I don't know, detached ranches in Great Hills at a 20% discount to current comp. And you wanted to use the last six months of comps or the last six years of cops to establish that value that also had at least 1000 sqft of buildable floor area left. You set your search, you click the button and the second it's listed, it populates for you. You don't have to wait for someone to find it and send it. You don't have to wait for the agent to locate it and flag it for you. You don't have to wait to try and stumble upon one of the 97 different sites that you can go to to search real estate, and you have the ability to make an offer, of course, on the spot. So if you access this through your local brokerage or you access it through whatever other affiliate you're working with, you'll have the ability to present the offer in real time on the spot. And that's 7% to 8% of the utility, right. It's a really exciting piece of tech that we believe is going to change how certain things are done in real estate forever. Certainly isn't going to be the end. All right. I'm sure that as we're rolling this out, someone else is rolling the next piece out. Yeah, but we've forged such an amazing relationship with the programmer that they're going to stay on full time with us now, and we'll be able to adapt for our agents and literally customize tech on the spot on the fly. That's another thing that we wanted to focus on, right. Was collaboration. Yes. In the past, I had felt, for whatever reason, this pressure that I had to produce at all, I always had to carry it forward and produce it all. And what that unintended consequences and collateral damage that resulted from that was a bit of a feeling of isolation with some of the folks here. They didn't feel a part of the process because I felt I had to do it and bring it to a certain point first. So we have creative meetings now every week where one or all team members can sit in and we just go through and collaborate on any topic that you want from top to bottom and left to right. The floor is open for us to try and problem solve and come up with better ways to do things in the real estate game. We're looking to completely transform our physical space and get to a place that fosters far more creativity. We think that's really important. Are you on with me on that trip to I don't want to say the retailer name. The retailer flew me out. No, Columbus. Okay. To Columbus. Yeah, we could say location, right. But they flew me out to a campus to look at a new floor plan. Essentially, they were trying to revision the brand as the retail apocalypse, as I like to call it, was underway, and some retailers were getting it, and they were adapting, and they were getting ahead of it. And some were just not. And this particular brand brought me out. The one thing that they did do exceptionally well was they created this atmosphere. It was palpable when you walked on campus that this was a place I wanted to work. There was drop off your dry cleaning. There was a fitness center. It was in March during March Madness. And I'll never forget there was a Keg and people were up writing out the names of the teams for March Madness. It certainly fostered a different feeling on campus. And I think that that goes a really long way in unlocking someone's potential and creativity. Well, absolutely. I mean, that's something that we have been talking about for who knows how long, but changing the culture and creating a culture that inspires creativity and working together and that kind of thing. So we've been working really hard on that. And I'm pretty excited about what we've got as far as that goes. Yeah. Just a couple of years ago, if you would have told me, I would have been on a podcast, never mind on a podcast in one of my favorite T shirts and a hat, I would have laughed you out of the room, right. It was a suit and tie, and that was it. That's how I rolled. And I've come to become far more comfortable with myself. And that's been an amazing journey and a very rewarding journey. And with that, being more comfortable and being more comfortable in the physical space, I hope, will help to foster more of that creativity from the team. There's a lot more kind of super secret things that we want to roll out in time. But today we just wanted to take a few minutes to come on. This show is going to continue. We're going to be undergoing unbelievable rebranding over the next several months. And we again want to say thank you to everybody for the amazing support over the years. And we're going to do everyone proud. We're going to take those best elements of that local brokerage, and we're going to tie it into a really tech forward, socially responsible company that is going to do some great things in the space moving forward. Yeah. I'm excited. Yeah. Me too. And, of course, mom has played such a pivotal role in preparing me for this day. Absolutely. The support that she's given over the years, the knowledge that she's imparted. I mean, I literally did learn from the absolute best in the commercial space, and this isn't an ending. This is a beginning. This is an opportunity for us to take, as we had said earlier, the best elements of that local brokerage and just take it to a new level. So, of course, just the love and respect and honor for mom over the years, for all the things she's done here, really is. What if there was any one thing that has brought me to this moment? It certainly has been my mom. Well, she provided the foundation without a doubt. Yeah. Without a doubt. And I have to say, none of this would be possible without both of you guys,
Participant #1:
the amazing support that you guys have brought over the years. So to both of you guys, thank you very much. From the bottom of my heart and to everybody out there, it's been an amazing run. And we're just getting started. So everyone out there. Stay safe.
Participant #1:
You.