 So I had a very great fund, Securing Extension Commission inquiry, and that was, I mean, it was the darkest times of my life. And it was thanks to that wrong mindset. The wrong mindset that high paid executive is going to build a company in perpetuity. I mean, make it great again, right? And that was my biggest mistake. This is Startup to Store Fund. Today's guest is Roy Deckle, co-founder of Set Schedule. For decades, realtors would have to go through the motions, sorting through leads, calling those leads to verify their authenticity, and then doing their homework about the property in order to make the sale. Roy realized that machine learning and AI could drastically expedite this process, and thus Set Schedule was born. Today is one of the fastest growing real estate companies in the U.S., but all that success did not come easily. So listen in as we cover everything from why Set Schedule is not for sale, the importance of questioning authority figures, and Roy's advice to rent, not buy in today's real estate market. Now, back to the episode. Welcome to the podcast. We're here with Roy from Set Schedule. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. Tell everybody the quick, what is Set Schedule? Oh, there's no quick version. It's going to take an hour. Good, good, good. So Set Schedule, actually you can trace it back to the origin of the name. That's kind of like what we are. We're a company that obsesses over time management, utilizing technology, but we're specifically addressing it in the space of real estate. Yeah. So now if I have to kind of like zoom in, basically what it is, is we built several platforms with a core product, which we call the referral radar. And the cool thing about the product is kind of like an agnostic marketplace of real estate leads, and the marketplace aggregates all of these leads from all of the well-known sources that you are. Like Redfin, Zillow. Zillow.com.com, Realtor.com, Facebook, I mean all of them. And the marketplace basically aggregates them, machine learns them, and serves that to the end user, which is the licensed pro. Okay. Resident agent, broker teams. And traditionally they pay, right? So if I'm a Realtor, I'd pay some money to get those leads from like a Zillow or Redfin, or how does that, what's the traditional way? So we completely revamp the traditional way, right? The traditional way is you go to a publisher, aka Zillow, right, and you sign a six-month agreement, and you basically buy a certain zip code. You commit to a certain zip code. Okay. And based on your commitment, you get a certain amount of leads generated, and you take them, work them, hopefully transact as a real estate agent. We kind of like flipped to turn the table on this concept, right? Okay. And what we created is basically we created predictability around the consumption of leads. So in simple terms, if you're a pro, then now you can go download the app for free, create a desktop user, right, for free, and you're able to look in real time in your specific area and see what you have available in terms of inventory. And the reason you can do that is because we're actually taking the risk through our partnership with Zillow and Homes.com, and Realtor.com, and we cultivate those leads. We receive them kind of like Amazon, right? So they're the merchants, I mean, they're the publishers. We aggregate that through technology. We bring it to our marketplace and we serve it to our end user. And you vet them somehow, you score them somehow. We score everything. So yes, we vet and nurture and track, score the consumers, for a lack of a better term, we work with the consumers, we engage with the consumers throughout technology and nurturing systems. If we have positive engagements, these leads become verified leads. So they're the set schedule or the set verified leads, and they go into the marketplace with a different UI. Different price point, okay. Yeah, different UI, different price point, different engagement, and the agents which are scored also in certain, you know, obviously ratios based on their engagement with the system go and consume these leads. So they know it's fully transparent platform. If this is a non verified, you know, Facebook lead, or this is a verified Zillow lead, they're completely different. And from a pricing perspective, obviously it depends on your engagement with the system and the type of user that you have, whether you're a stunt, I mean, a starter user or a premium user, your engagement and your cost basis is different. How did you first start the company? What was the idea? How did it come to you? Were you a realtor at one time? You're in real estate? So that's a funny question. I was never a realtor. I have all the respect in the world for obviously, you know, the pros that work very hard every day. But my journey actually started as a real estate investment manager. We traded, I traded, I managed hundreds of properties. At some point, post-recession, I would buy some around four, five, six properties per month. We would probably bid on 20, 30 per month. And we realized, and we did in California and we did in Texas, and we realized that through that process, we have so much access to real estate and realtors and we consistently buy and hold. We did buy and hold residential rental portfolio. And we realized that we can possibly take some of that inventory. And instead of buying ourselves, we can possibly market it to a third party investor. From there, we kind of developed the idea of, hey, maybe we can build an ignition-wide agency or brokerage and start selling and buying real estate, not just buying, holding and obviously building a portfolio. And that's where it started. What was the pain point for you? Was it you were just going through so many realtors, it was hard to find a good one? Like, what's the problem? What was the problem that you encountered? Too many realtors, no inventory, no quick way of connecting them to? So the problem was three tiers. Yes, the first one, which is most obvious, is when you need to trade 20, 30 houses a month and you have very aggressive goals of buying real estate properties, you realize that you're subjected to the availabilities of the agents, the level of their interest in building their book of business. So that was number one issue. Obviously, you realize that you pay a certain commission, you pay a certain fee and you want to be able to return. No one's happy to do that, by the way. Well, yes, it has been an issue for the longest time. But I gotta say right now that I believe that the commissions are just, I believe that good professionals in the space should get paid commission. For sure. And you know, so this is not the friction point is not paying commission, the friction point is the ability to scale with some some individual agents, because not all agents are the same. And a lot of them got got into business for the wrong reasons. Yeah. So when you need to scale a large pool of investment, you say to yourself, okay, maybe I can put a couple of agents on payroll and start buying these. So that's where the thought process started when we really had some agents on payroll. And we developed the idea of, okay, well, let's buy and sell also for others, because we have the agents on payroll, right? That was kind of the mindset. Right. That was step one. And I was the first friction point. And then when we went to the second phase, which, quite frankly, that's what the industry deals with with every day, we realized that we have problem of of actually now inventory to feed the payroll agents, right? We realized that we need to to market, we need to aggressively find leads, home shoppers, I mean, you know, people looking to buy or sell or get to a cited market, you have to solve both. Right. Yeah. So we realized that we're spending a lot of time figuring out where we want to how we want to address the inventory issue. And this is constant fluctuation with that problem, right with with inventory. So we basically said, okay, let's let's let's partner, let's go the traditional way, let's go to Zillow and sign a contract pay five times the amount when an average jail would pay for as an agent, right? We sign a great contract and, you know, for six months, we generate tremendous amount of leads. But we realized that there's that was the the last straw that broke the camel's back, if you will, and created the birth of set schedule, we realized that now we have a lot of leads, we have the paid salary agents, we have the concept of going nationally. But we're dealing with so many uncertainties, when when is the lead going to come in? Is it going to be a good lead? Can I somehow vet the lead before I take the lead? Right. Can I, you know, can I even close it? Is it right for me? Because this lead of a condo, let's say, you know, $500,000 condo in Laguna is not what I'm specializing in, I'm better servicing a single family home. So we had a lot of friction point around that area. And I actually, during that time, worked with one of my best friends that became my partner, where I sit down with Udi, that's my partner and Udi kind of like looked at the concept and said, why are you trying to figure it out for a couple of salary agent when you can actually build, build a thing to scale and was technology was tech his background? Okay, got it. Yeah. So he's looking at it. Yeah, yeah. He's looking at from from from the tech, you know, perspective, right? And he said, let's let's scale it through some technology. And that was kind of the birth idea of set schedule, you know, respect your schedule and have it done through an agnostic marketplace where we will aggregate the leads, bring them over and serve them to you, you just pick it up. And as you pick up more, the marketplace will study your behavior and will create prediction so that that's the birth of the whole company. So was was Udi your first your first hire first full time person on board? Is my first and only partner? Yes. So he and I partnered around 2014. And really roll it out in 2015, mid 15. The funny thing is that we we took our time with R&B, it took us two and a half years to roll out front facing consumer or or I should say realtor facing. Yeah, the realtor facing mobile app and desktop app and around April of 2018, that came out. And who since there, we're 20,000 agents nationwide strong and we're growing 1000 plus per month. Well, do you consider yourself an agency in some way or you just partner with the agencies? How do you view your business? It's a very good question. I love that question actually because, you know, when we talk to the publishers, right, the partners, the zeal of the world, you know, they're they're looking at many different ways to verify and deliver a lead and bring it to the pro. Yep. So from the perspective of lead generation, we're not new. But right, right, you're smarter, right? Smarter, more tech based and more scalable, right, than anything else. And the beauty of it is that our focus in the the large aspect of the revenue for us is actually revenue share. So we're 2080. We take 20% commission share from all of our users when they close a transaction, whether it's a rental or whether it's an investor that buys 10 properties. Yeah, from from, you know, from the from the user or the realtor that you have a SAS business model, and you have a commission based model. Yes, an agency. So to answer your question, we are basically a technology company, but our approach to revenue is very much brokerage referral. Got it. Relationship. Did you pick 8020 because of the SEC and their breakdown of how they treat? So basically SAS revenue is you have to report it. But 20% of that can be like customer integration fees, or in this case, like commissions. It's that smart. Did you know that? No, I did not know that. Yeah, thanks for letting me know. Yeah. So it sounds like a perfect split of the two, which is pretty cool. No, to answer your question, the reason we did it is because we wanted to be the best and wanted to be the most economical. Right. I mean, a lot of agents get it. I mean, there's 2 million licensed agents and you know, the United States. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, it's funny, because I mean, we get agents from Canada and from the UK that are asking to join a platform. But right now we're a US based platform. A lot of the agents, the 2080 kind of thing, you know, a lot of them don't have the budget and really struggle to compete with with a killer agent that has 15, 15 sub agents in their team. So we really obsess over or really make a point to be as economical as possible. Most agent can pay when they close a transaction, but they don't necessarily can or want to pay upfront. And we want to create the upfront aspect very, very user friendly and economical. Yeah. And that's the reason we went also with the 2080. The few competitors that we have in the space are much higher in commission share. There are a couple of other referral companies that are in a 25, 30, 35% rate. And we said, you know, even on the back end, we want to be the most competitive and that's why we dropped it to 20%. Did you ever have to raise money or because you were effectively paying the commission, right? You're getting commissions based on the salaried employees that you have. Did you not have to raise any capital? We had to raise capital because development is not cheap. Totally. Yeah. Is your team local or are they are they based? So we're we're all over the place. I mean, the business, the home base is or the corporate office is in Irvine. We have about we have about 50 staff members in Irvine. But we have also about 60 staff members offshore and in Sitterlite offices. So we're about 110 strong give or take full time employees. We have tremendous amount of obviously contractors and partners. But most of the development is done in Irvine. Sales inside sales done Irvine. So yeah, I mean, we really very early on realized that we need to focus on the right development. That's why we took our time and actually brought the developers in house. What do you view today as the hard part of your business? Just in terms of is the hard part getting more houses getting more realtors, maybe training the realtors? I don't know if you guys are doing that a little bit to just have a better experience with the home sellers? What's the the pain point? I think the pain point was and still is getting as many realtors as possible satisfied. Okay. The challenge is that we unlike some other competitors in the space, we don't really discriminate. We don't only work with the top 10% or the top 1% really open the door and we make it very economical to everybody join and utilize the platform in 90% of the SAS products inside the set schedule app are free. You can use a CRM free can use the research center free can have an open house visitor manager and free you can have a lot of the data for free. The only thing you really pay for or have a commitment to from a commission standpoint is the leads that you're taking from the marketplace. And we're actually going to announce some exciting things with additional free software that we're all out this summer. So the problem though is because of that we get tremendous amount of agents that should seek some coaching and more training. And yes, we're we're addressing it by creating more webinars and more remote training. We are actually planning to budget for local training pretty, you know, in the near future, not pretty soon, but in the near future. So training our partners is our biggest challenge. Yeah. And obviously internally, you know, it's all about development. So the biggest challenge is to to to be able to spit out a product roadmap in a reasonable timeframe from a development standpoint, that would be the second resistance from the agents to get more training. It sounded like there was a bit of a pushback on their end. I don't think that there's tremendous amount of resistance to training. But I think that continuation of training, and being persistent and staying on top of your personal development and your hardship and challenges. That's where the problem is. I mean, it's we can get our partners to to get on a call or webinar and train. But this is not a one, you know, one day show, right? This is this is on average. I mean, if you want to do something as a realtor, as a service provider, really, you have to plan six months, 12 months out. And unfortunately, a lot of people in this space and many others, but industries quit very quickly. That's what I was thinking to be your challenge. So in some way, you're democratizing the advantage, right? Right? If everyone's getting good leads, it's, it's amazing. And then if you're building CRM tools and ways for them to stay on track, then you've democratized that completely. But at the same time, if you're elite, like let's pretend you're top 2% realtor, and you've democratized that that also helps them a significant amount because now they're relying on what they're already right at closing the conversation, the empathy, whatever it might be in the selling process. I'm very upset because you actually stole my line. I use the term democratize, delete consumption and business development every day. Yeah. And I love the fact that you picked up on it because that's what we do. I mean, instead of creating this one, one, one way street, contractual relationship, where sit and wait for your leads to be generated by a website you just sign up with or whatnot. We created really a full democracy around consumption around totally. So it has its advantages and disadvantages. I mean, as many, many people in the space would know, like I said, that at the end of the day, you can do so much to feed you know, individuals. So again, that that has been the biggest friction point, but we're definitely solving it. I mean, the products we're bringing out the market are solving it. For sure. I was just thinking like if you're a rock star salesperson, you want to become a realtor, and you're trying to deconstruct the risks. I think the obvious ones, right? So for people listening, the obvious ones could be I don't have a network. I just moved into let's say LA, I'm new to LA, I don't know anybody here. And I think there's a there's a myth in real estate where if you're successful, it's because you have a network here or your parents were here, or you grew up here. And so you know, when like Auntie Donna and all her cousins on the street that you grew up with are selling their house, and they think of you, because they've known you since you were a kid, there's like this perception of that here in LA. Well, I mean, I think there's a bigger perception and actually lends itself to the two million licensed individuals, right? Is that it's not that difficult, that it's actually not that difficult that you get your license, you can make a killing because if you sell one home in Los Angeles or one home in Newport Beach, oh gosh, you're making $40,000 commission, right? I mean, sell a million dollar home, that's $25,000 easily gross commission, right? Right. But it's a broken perception. It's it's no different than any other business. And that's why I believe I don't have the accurate statistics. But I think that what is a 30% churn meaning quitting the industry after a year and four months. And most I mean, tremendous amount of agents don't don't renew their license after two years. So and it's it's it's sad. I mean, I kind of like that. Mission statement is to fix that. But without people who don't really want to I mean, are those people do you have any idea the statistics if those people are even making a sale in those year and four months or two years, or are they just getting frustrated that they've only made X amount of sales and they were in their head. They maybe were thinking more. So I'm going to use a line. It was provided me by Vice President of Sales for a brokerage. It actually we started with when we tested the product and we came up with this membership model that's scheduled before we even had the user interface app. And that vice president of sales which is was in charge of training every Monday morning 30 40 50 agents and the brokerage would come and hear him talk about sales cycles and sales process. And I sat down with him and I said, What do you think about this concept? This is how I'm going to structure it. And he said, You guys are too expensive. And I'm talking about $1,000 995 talking about, you know, and he says, You have to realize that most of the agents in our office would average $20,000 commission for the year. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a huge that was my that was my that was my reaction. And I said, Okay, well, I have two problems with that. Respectfully, first off, I have I have a problem with your perception of your of your agents. You should obsess over making them better. Yeah. And number two, I have a problem with the number. So if that's the number that means we need to find ways to solve that problem. And I feel like we're trying and I hate to use the term trying because that's the intention to fail. But we're trying to win that. We're trying to solve that and inevitably, because of that, we get slapped in the face sometimes with with whether it's reviews or bad publicity, which you know, obviously comes with the territory. Yeah. Yeah. So do you think about partnering with brokerages then? So it's like, basically, they should be buying all the leads for the agents. Does that already are we doing that the BW model? Yeah. Yeah. So we actually rolled out the brokerage and teams ecosystem in the end of last year. Well, actually, it's six months ago. And we've done well. I mean, now we have multiple users engagement process. Now the ecosystem, the marketplace and all of the products that that we roll out go for go out for single users and multi users. So we definitely see the multi users as a much better, more stable environment where the agents are more stable or they're stronger because because they have the help of of an ISA and an inside assistant that the nurture the deals and we're very happy with the teams. I want to go high level for a second. Just I can't stop thinking about this. So when I think about companies like Compass, who I'm sure you're familiar with and be themselves the tech company, and they're doing a lot of that, right? They're trying to democratize, but they're also having their little brokerages, let's say in LA, but they get all the tools. Do you view yourself as a monster acquisition target for anybody who wants to come into this space? Because you're already solving so much of that, right? Yes. But you're also ahead, I would say in some categories. Yes. And so how do you view where your company is going? How do you view, you know, it's 2020, I always like to say we're starting a new decade. How do you smile so big right now? I don't think you share that. That's confidential information right there. No, it's funny. Compass actually a client. We have tremendous amount of our clients in Compass. I respect them. I appreciate them. But but we're very different. I mean, we are a tech company. Compass is more of a brokerage company. Totally. Yes, they have tech, but they're brokerage company. We're agnostic. We don't license any agents underneath us. We don't have employee agents. Yeah, we have developers, right? employees. But with tens of thousands of agents, you know, and thousands coming in regularly, where we're going with this is actually because we have the flexibility of the technology and because we have the flexibility of a unique engagement where we're not the employing broker. We're the technology product that provides the end user with so many solutions. We actually see ourselves actually quadripling our agent count within the next couple of years. And not just that, we're actually going to roll out a complete new product at the end of the summer. And that's all I can say today. Yeah, that is going to hug all of the sister and brother professionals to the real state agent. So any pro that benefits or contributes to our real state transaction would be able to benefit and use the product in the platform. They're going to roll out at the end of the summer on a much greater scale than nobody has provided before. But the North Star right, at least is actually correct from an acquisition. I assume you that's your goal, maybe, right? What exit? Yeah, of course. No, I'm the Warren Buffett business. I want to have an entry plan, not an exit plan. You want to acquire, I believe make all to acquire. Yes. Yeah, if that's was the question. Yes. Yes. I want this company to be you know, big and nice for my kids. That's that's that's the mindset for us. Got it. I mean, let's face it. We do not have a single institutional VC in the company. I don't believe that VC money is always right. I think actually it's wrong in many instances. Why do you think it's wrong? Not that I disagree. I'm just curious to hear your take. Well, because you have to first of to answer that question, you have to reverse engineer the answer. You have to ask who is a VC? Well, a VC is basically a money manager that gets one percent asset management or two percent asset management and 20 percent kicker if a sell takes place. So they're making money based on the amount of capital they have or deploy. Yep. And they also make money the faster or when they liquid it. Yes. Right. And I think that most VCs don't really care about the founders that invest in. Yes, they're going to say they care. And yes, they're going to say that they'll be around for 15 years with the founders. But in truth, they're probably looking at five years time horizon. You know, in five years, I need to show my pension fund or my institutional investor that there is return on investment and or else why am I paying you? Meaning pension fund to VC, why am I paying you the two percent asset management every year? Right. So there is lack of alignment in interest. I think that the idea of OK, let's plug in a lot of high paid executives and pump the business and make it great. Well, you can probably do that but it's not going to be a company that your grandkids are going to know about. Totally true. That's I mean, and I can use a lot of companies examples, but you know exactly you can think about five different examples of as to why is it true. So so there's no alignment and I've been around the block. I made those mistakes before. I know that I paid executives are not the right thing for the company. Oh, sure. I mean, I brought in high paid executive to crush my businesses before. So I know I know that you have to make sure that the founders stick around and give their love of the business. And that's what really builds the, you know, the long term businesses. You don't hear about JP Morgan Bank founders being the VCs that invested in JP Morgan. You hear JP Morgan was part of the company for many years until he died. I love that. That's like a centennial type of mindset, not so much a decade type of mindset. Yep. In terms of let's give some advice to some people. You said you paid some high high end executives or some high paid execs. What was it that went wrong with them was that they were just out of touch. They had been, you know, I have my own stories. I'll share them. Right. I'll just share them now. And then I'd love to hear that. Yeah. So from my perspective, it was always like, when I was, I would say just coming up in the game, I think I was an engineer by background civil engineering. And then my first job in the tech world was in sales. And so I was like, oh, they're bringing in some expert, right? And this guy, this person was just like some unicorn or so they, you know, that's how they would sing his praises and he came and I was just asking him all these questions like, I was like, Hey, your unicorn blah, blah, blah, I heard this. What's your strategy? How do you do it? And then they would tell me their process or strategy. And I was always just so disappointed. I was like, that's it. Like that's not even, that's not even today's America. Like it's almost like they were telling me about the fax machine and how cool it was. And I'm like, we've reached an arrow where like, why are we using email? Right? We should be using text. We should like, I didn't the whole process was just stagnant to me. And I said, Oh, you just didn't evolve. That's how I looked at it. I was like, Oh, I see, you were great at one time. And then the game changed and you you didn't. And that's that's been my experience. Is it you're similar? Oh, that worse. And I like sharing it. So I had a very great fun Securing Extension Commission inquiry. And that was I mean, it was the darkest times of my life. And it was thanks to that wrong mindset. The wrong mindset that high paid executive is going to build a company in perpetuity. I mean, make it great again, right? And that was my biggest mistake. That's funny. My biggest mistake in 2008 started a company called Diverse Financial, with then a friend of mine and, you know, pretty quickly, he quit the business. But the important thing was that a year into the business, we made millions, millions in net profits, right? It was crazy. And that's great. Okay. Yeah, it's great. But then what's next, right? Right? And it was here in LA. And the first thing that came to mind was how do we build this to scale? We're in financial services when the life insurance space, how do we build this thing to scale? And the first thing that came to mind was let's hire executives that are going to run the company with great background. They're going to run sales, they're going to run operations, they know how to build business, let's hire, you know, them so they can bring 100 sales executive financial advisors, you know, what have you. And, and we brought, we brought these sales executives and the executive vice president that became president of the business. And along and short of it, 2010, 11, 12, turned out to be the worst years of our lives. I mean, these people just bled the company dry. And the problem is, as a kid, as a youngster, if you will, right, I was 27 years old, 26, 7, 8. Yeah, so go, you know, getting to my 30s, you realize that these 60 plus year old executives, they're not in it for the company, right? They're in it for the profit sharing, the bonus, the salary, right? They're not, they're not in it for the founders love that you were into it. And you talk about a company that had millions of dollars in cash, yeah, that vaporized, right? And every time where we had to have this uncomfortable conversation, let's change the course, let's, you know, roll out a different product and whatnot, the answer was no, no, and you have to keep paying, right? To keep paying me. And, and it came to a hold, obviously, basically stop operations and we required obviously to, to get an equity, did you? Yeah, yeah. Okay. But even when it was the easy part, right? Yeah, but the annual bonuses and the salaries, that that was the that was the tough part, right? And, and there were a couple of mistakes that I mean, I've learned a lot from the experience, right? Number one is if the product doesn't work, just cut ties. I mean, just just kick the bucket and move on. Totally true. It's, it's, you know, that's problem one. Here's a problem when you do with executives like that. They don't know what to do with the other product. They don't have the idea of coming with another product. I mean, if I hired a higher up executive now in set schedule, right? I mean, I wouldn't be able to articulate a half of what we have in our product roadmap. So so that's a big issue. The second big issue is that nobody has the founder's love and nobody has the, you know, the ability to do what you really can do. I mean, I like to use the example of Disney, for example, there's tremendous amount of difference between Roy Disney being at the top and all the other executives at the top. Bob Iger, okay. Yeah. Well, now yes, soon to be the replacement, I don't remember his name. Yeah, that's true. But but the truth of the matter is when you go to the parks, I mean, it's still, I mean, maybe I'm too nostalgic, but there's a big difference between the Disney family managing the Disney parks and other executives, they're talented. And it's a public straight company, but you still see the difference in the way that a cast is being managed in those parks and all of obviously the, you know, the management of the organization. So, so the thing is, it's really important to understand that as long as you're able and capable to run your business, you should stick around on outsourced or hire your job to someone else. Right. Just hire the experts around you. Yeah. So then would you recommend bringing people up through the system? Because then they have that institutional love for what you're doing is supposed to bring people on from the outside. That's a big thing that I've heard about with companies like, say Microsoft, I think they the CEO's name Satya Nadella he is a guy who came up through the company. And so when they were hiring a new CEO, they looked around but they decided that the best CEO for them was someone who knew the intimate workings of the company itself rather than go pluck someone who used to be at Chase or PepsiCo or whatever it might be. Is that your philosophy? Absolutely. And you give a perfect example. The soda water and she's at Steve Jobs, right? Yeah. I mean, that's that's that's, you know, John Scully is probably a very talented guy, right? But the truth in the matter is that what happened with Steve Jobs was the worst thing that ever happened to Apple. And the same thing. I mean, the same kind of like philosophy that you're mentioning as an example with Microsoft. In our company, we really promote from within. We make the point kind of like my naval days, right? Military special ops days. You have to promote. You're a military man. We'll talk about in a second. Okay. Drop it. Drop it on us. I thought you knew all of that. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. So like, like military military is a phenomenal machine. I mean, you have your specialty, go through core special training and then you can be plug in so many different units based on your core competency and your your your certifications, right? And it's a huge organization, the military, right? So we do kind of like the same thing. I mean, we have this great bootcamp training with Hell Week training for sales and we really nurture and cultivate business development and the six sigmas and go, you know, build your marketing machine and your closing process and nurture your your your clients and then they go to the business consultants, the partners consultant, right? Which is, which is a different department, but everyone in the partner consultant had to be a graduate from the sales team. So if they didn't do pre-sale, they're not going to do post-sale in our company. Yeah. If they do pre-sale and post-sale, they can very well be promoted or moved to media and content and marketing. And so so we really cultivate from within. That's so smart. Let's talk about your military experience. Yeah. Let's go there. The Israeli military, right? What was that like? How did that at a high level, how did that define, I guess, some key, some key things in your life, in terms of mindset, maybe in terms of sounds like practice? Well, it defines everything in my life. Okay. It's, it's, it's who I am. Wow. It's kind of like what Steve Jobs said. He didn't graduate Stanford, I think, right? But he took everything from Stanford and implemented it in his day to day life. So I'm the same way. I was actually a SEAL and the Israeli SEAL that trains with American SEAL. So I went through BUDS training. And then I left and became an intelligent officer. So I went to specialty, counterintelligence specialty, an officer, I was a lieutenant and the entire journey of BUDS training to officers Academy in Israel. It's a little bit the other way around you have to be a soldier becoming before you become an officer. So I was I was a soldier with special operations. And I've done the hardest that there is presumably. I mean, I'm sure there are other good courses but but every single thing I did in BUDS training defines who I am and what I do now. I mean, I've seen 80% quit ratio. I've seen people that were crying or broken because, you know, they've done something that was well publicized before. In other words, they went in knowing what what they're going to have to go through and still the mindset change and the dynamic change. And, you know, and I've seen I've seen amazing the amazing experience of brotherhood when you actually grew with with with people that, you know, it just it's so hard to even kind of like reflect and look back into the stuff that we've done as as brothers in the military. And we implement all this as far as our mindset goes in our companies. Do you think it's all mindset? Do you think that's the one thing that you walked away from was that people who came in prepared even though they had seen it all but had the ability to reach into part of their mind that was like you're going to make this happen and just relentless or what part of the mindset would you say made people graduate and others not. It's pretty simple. It's funny because you hear you hear it a lot in a lot of shield interviews and special ops interviews and, you know, different segments of the business. It's this gap between between giving up and and being able to block that thought process, right? And when you go through hell week and in Israel, it's two to hell weeks, right, where you sleep for three and a half hours the entire week. And you probably walk five minutes of the week because the rest is running, swimming, diving, what have you. The only thing you need to do is to say I want to quit, right? But if you're able to block and say I will be OK on Friday, even though I don't know what day it is today because I don't sleep. So it's to me, it's just like Monday through. Yeah, very long Monday. It's a seven days Monday. Sure. But you just say, I don't care. I mean, unless my body gives up on me, I'll be here. Right. Yeah. And that's a physical mental mindset, which if you use it in business, you'll win. I mean, because at the end of the day, we all do the same. We all, you know, we all hunt, we all try to survive. And it's just a question of how much are you willing to push and not quit? That's the only thing that you need to add to the mix. I call that being in the room. And so I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they're in this room where it's almost like the imposter syndrome where they're like, am I really doing this? And they spend time not moving at all. Right. And the obvious. So once you're in the room, there's two doors. One is like you quit, go back to getting a job, you quit your company. The other part of the room is like progress is like accepting that you're in the room, accepting you can't do anything about it and understanding that it's like you said, right? You're either going to quit or you're not. But a lot of people, I think entrepreneurs spend time in that room. And what you learn is that nothing gets accomplished in that room. You're just draining time, energy in your head. 100 percent. And not to be too philosophical, but if you can also date it back or kind of like ask yourself why, because I'm big on why in the company, we always ask why, right? Like why? OK, yeah, let's I love this. Why would people go and give up? Why would people do what we do 99.9 percent of the day right in business? And why do we need coaches and why and why and why? I mean, and I think it starts from birth. And I think that it's kind of like a cycle where it starts with the parents. Now I'm a dad and I just again, maybe 20th time, say obsess over, but I obsess over the the concept of raising the kids in a way that enables them to make a decision on their own. Like, for example, they know at this point and they're eight, 10 and a year and a half old, right? They know, well, the year and a half doesn't know yet. But the eight and 10 year old, they know that their parents are not perfect. They challenge us all the time. I love and I love that. Yeah. I mean, I don't I don't I don't tell them respect your dad. Don't even think about it. Don't even think about, you know, asking why, why am I why do you need to do chores? Why do you need to take the trash out? Is it ask why? And I'll explain to you the logic behind it, right? So so I'm big on that. And I think parenting is the beginning. You know, it's interesting. So I've always heard about the and I can't remember the official term for it, but it's in different cultures. They learn either to respect authority or question authority. And the United States kind of falls like above the median in that terms. But Israel is one of the highest countries in the world in terms of questioning authority. So it's interesting that you are nurturing that in your kids as well. That that like always no matter who it is, just question it as opposed to just this is how it is respected. It's so true though, you know, I'm laughing because there is this famous saying that in Israel, you have seven million managers and seven million officers. I mean, you don't you don't. Yeah, that's that's that's a popular line. I have a friend who he raises. He's a coder tech guy also. He raises his kids and he talks. I mean, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen really. He'll tell them he's like, it's it's your first time being an eight year old, right? The kids like, yeah, he's like, it's my first time being a dad to an eight year old. So like, help me. And what's amazing about that is they view they still know he's his dad. I think America has this weird complex where like, if you do that, they're going to forget you're the mom and dad. And it's just not I don't know where that came from. But what's beautiful about it is they they're in it with him. It's like all of a sudden they're in the same problem together. And it's just beautiful because they know it. And it takes the pressure off of parenting, I think, and trying to be right all the time or whatever. Right. And it's really cool. I agree. And again, I don't want to be too philosophical, but you say you can do that here. Yeah, I'll do it. Welcome. So we're in the room. We're in the room now. We said it very well, you know, it's to us, it's in America, it's a beautiful country. And I'm an immigrant. And I, you know, I've seen different countries and different lifestyles. America is a great country. The problem is that we're forgetting the foundations of it a little bit. So it's kind of like a big corporation that is ran by executives. I forgot what founders love is all about. So I think, again, great country, but I think that giving participation awards in games is unnecessary, right? I mean, rewarding for doing that or kind of like what you said, you know, in the book, I mean, the book says I'm dad, then that's the process. And again, if you go back to our foundations or the country's foundation, you'll see a lot of a lot of capitalists that always challenge authority left the British, you know, came here and build great companies in great country. And I think that we need to we lost it a little bit because the economy is good overall, because this is a phenomenal country that has pretty much all the shit square widths were put together. You know, if you're comparing comparing country to any other country, so amazing. Yeah. So once we cherish that and understand that, hey, I mean, we shouldn't have the next generation take it for granted, we'll be fine. Yeah. And that's the part of where we need to have our kids understand that at some point, they're going to be the one running this country without us around. And if we put him in an incubator of love, love, love, love, love, it's great, but they have to have a certain balance. I just find that funny because it's so true. I find it so weird. I was born in Peru and in Peru at the time when I was born, there's like two options. You were just poor, you were wealthy, but there wasn't anybody trying to help you. Right? It's like if you were wealthy, your odds of creating more wealth or higher. But if you were poor, it was just like there was no government, give assistance, no, no, no sort of like baseline. And so you'd see, I'd see kids my age when I was a kid like out there selling crackers or whatever. And that was like so eye opening as a kid because to me it was like, whoa, like we're not different. I was four at the time and I was looking at them like they're me, like I played soccer with them probably and just like connecting the two equals. But yet society has set us on like different paths. But the reliance is on you. It was amazing. And then coming to America, it's like, oh, here's my chance to start over. Right? It's like, oh, here we go. Because it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's always something that's lived with me to this day and continues to and it's just it's cool because it's also like you're charting your own path for your friends in your case for your family, right? It's like they need an example. And so you are it every single day for them. And I think that's like super powerful. That's an amazing thing for me. When I remember it, Peru, the synagogues I went to did Yom Kippur there the synagogues and the temples all and all that nice houses have like this, this, you know, the fence guards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm thinking to myself why the gap is so huge. And I mean, and ultimately, obviously, again, that's the beauty of the balance in this country. But I think that, I mean, we don't need to be so harsh on ours. I think that we're overdoing it a little bit when it comes to kind of bridging the gap. I think that that ultimately, there's a great balance between, you know, poor and rich. And I know that there's probably, you know, a lot that we can do for homeless and stuff like that. But I mean, I think that ultimately as a country, we have a very well balanced economy that that powers all sides of the market. Let's go back to the company. When you think about creating culture at your company, is it like an employee ownership program or how do you how do you create a founder's mindset within your company for all of your employees? Do you spend a lot of time trying to do that? What incentives do you do? The training? That's absolutely. Well, it's an awesome question, right? It's hard. I mean, that's the hard, that's the hard truth. Right. Everyone's trying to do it. Right. I don't think anyone, you know, everyone's really successful at it. Absolutely. And I think that I'm so proud of our team. We're calling this the Schedulions, right? We want not only Ink Fastest Growing Company in California for real estate tech, we're number one. Number 21 in California is a company and number 196 nationally. And that is going to sound super cheesy, right? But it would have not been possible without the Schedulions. So I think we're doing it pretty, pretty successfully. And it's obviously starting thanks to the human resources process. And it's not because of the human resources, but it's because of the process, which is military style of basically selection. It may sound a little bit bad, but obviously to get into the unit, you have to pass assessments, cognitive ability. Sure. All of that is tested not just via, you know, verb, I mean, verbage or conversation or interviews, but it's really cognitive ability. So that's the first stop, the selection process. OK. Once selected, we really bleed the culture. It's our number one goal because you said it's difficult and it's absolutely difficult and it's even more difficult when you don't have the budget of Salesforce.com and you're in that kind of Irvine or LA and you have to compete against a company can just burn cash because they have it, right? So we through training really bleed culture, culture of not giving up, culture of kind of like military mindset. Our director of sales is an ex-marine. So we very much kind of like military guys structure, the structure you put in place. Yeah, the structure and the path to growth, the promotions, but it's the pinnacle of it is that we respect so much any person that actually hits a certain timeframe with the company. So once the loyalty is there on top of the capabilities, we do offer ESOP. So employees stock options and we want every single person that reaches that point to really see the company as their own company. So they have shares in the company and obviously it has its vesting period and the idea is that at the end of it, as we grow bigger and look with it, they have a certain amount of participation in it. Do you explain a tremendous, like do you spend a lot of time explaining to employees what equity is and what it means to them and how it like quite literally could transform their life in the future? Absolutely. We even take a calculator and we break it down and we show this is the evaluation now, this is the evaluation next year. This is what it means to you. Yeah, that's so important. So many companies don't do that and it's like they sign these equity. You have to sign documents obviously and they're like, I don't even know what this is. You know, looks good. Don't know what valuation means. So many companies do that. They have it wrong. Yeah. So with us, the beauty of it and that makes me smile every time it happens. Our team actually comes to us and says, when can I get the equities? Oh, nice. These up. Show me the cap table. Pretty much, pretty right. And we're happy to do that. That's so good. One of the things on another podcast, super smart thing that we learned on the hiring process is they always wanted to make sure it aligned with their big goal. And so many people are just afraid to ask that question. It's almost like dating. People are so interested in being liked that they forget like maybe this person isn't good for me long term. Right. And in the office, a lot of people forget like, if you don't want to do sales and I'm hiring you for a sales job because you want to be a chef someday. Right. Maybe this isn't the right move, right? Right. No. And we actually take the approach of so we narrow it. Right. I mean, I used to say to people, are you ready to are you ready to sign up for a three year tour? So it's kind of like, again, military term. But okay, we know that maybe you don't know. You probably don't know where you want to be five years or 10 years from now. 20 years, right? Life is very dynamic. But can you sign up for a three year tour? Can you visualize yourself? Imagine that you're going to be here for three years. That's where you're going to be able to get to equity and more stuff and management. And that's kind of like how you're investing in them and you want to see that they'll stick around long enough to return, have a return on that right. One of the things that I want to circle back around and kind of bring it all together. One of the things that I've always heard about the seals is that they pride themselves on being experts, on becoming experts. Are you familiar with that saying it all? Absolutely. Yeah. Is that something that you can teach people in your company? Like if there's a problem or a new area that you want to tackle, is that is that a skill set that you find that you're able to instill in your employees as well? That kind of like mentality where I may not know something about this right now. By the end of the week, I'm going to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the room on it. That's an awesome question. And it's an awesome question because the answer is going to be very contrarian answer. The answer is no, you can't. And I don't say no, you can't often. But I think if you remember it, I said the first step is selection. Not everybody is selected to go to seal training. And I think the reason is because you cannot teach thinking. The moment you try to figure out how to make someone think, you're going to lose. There's a very, I guess it's a blunt sentence that says you can't fix stupid. And it's true. You really can't fix stupid. I mean, you can't tell someone, hey, think that's how you think. But if you come with the foundation of strong cognitive ability and in short, you're smart, you have the potential, right? Then yes, you can teach them tools and techniques, but you can't teach them to think. Let's talk about some of the hardships you've gone through. So quick, any quick one, two stories you can share with people around any tough times of your company's founding? So as an entrepreneur, yes, I had plenty and I'm happy to share them because I think that that anyone that says, well, I don't really recall, you know, it's kind of a question. What's your biggest weakness? Well, one biggest weakness is that I am a perfectionist. No, that's not a weakness. I care too much. Right. Think about a different answer. So like I said, I, my biggest, my darkest times in life revolved around the DF era, right? The 2008 company that that basically led me to the limit was the decision making process on my end. It led me to administrative actions and civil investigations. And it was just a nightmare. And it was, like I said, I mean, we said earlier, it was a derivative of having a mega successful company, right? At 27, you have a couple of millions of dollars that that's actually your share, right? In that income and you and you want to build a better business, a bigger business and you want to grow from there. So you hire and you start to hire more individuals and you expend and you hire a president that runs the company. And, you know, obviously, you know, soon enough you realize that that it's really hard to reverse those decisions. I mean, you cannot go back and and run the company once you have the overhead, once you have this this this executive that know how to cement a contract and have their golden parachute deals and they have better attorneys than yours or at least they've worked with attorneys for 30 years longer than you have. So, you know, as a young entrepreneur, you you going to possibly be interested in finding that glorified investor or the glorified executive that's going to run your company. Or those are the key points actually that was for me were the biggest failure in my life. Was the thought process for you hire the experts? Like, did somebody tell you that? Did some or what was the advice? Like, was it clear to you that you couldn't grow the company anymore or you were just in such an unknown area that you needed to bring in people that seemingly knew how to do it? So I was very passionate at a time to I don't want to compare myself to Steve Jobs, but I guess that's the best comparison. I was very passionate about coming with new products. I was very passionate about the idea of evolving the menu of offerings that we have and rolling out a new investment approach. For example, in that in our space was investment products and different funds, ideas and real estate funds, which did very well. So you knew where your focus wanted to be? Yeah, yeah. And I kind of like delegated running the company for like the term. So it's kind of like the Apple story right when you realize that I'm screwed. I mean, I'm too behind. I didn't pay attention to the details. Now I see that these guys are running the business to the ground and I have to figure out how am I going to answer questions, right? How am I going to solve that? I'm the 27 year old guy, but I am the co-founder. The left alone is the founding member of the company. I am the CEO and title. So go explain why you're holding this title at 27, 28, 29 when the 60 year old is crushing your business. So again, I mean, I don't sound like a victim because at the end of the day, I'm at fault for all of this and it was my responsibility, but it's a teachable moment and for sure the important component. There's one thing you can take, not three, right? The important component is to know that when you start a business, know your product and don't ever give up on your business. I actually kind of like gave up on the idea of managing it. Yeah. And that was my biggest mistake. But even having made that mistake, I think and the reason really we started these podcasts and thank you for being honest is because here you are today with another company successful and that's important, right? It's important to say and really share that story. Here we are. Awful lesson. I can only imagine what that was like for two years of your life. I mean, God awful. You have no idea how many Google researchers I have to this day that are Google researching me and judging me without knowing half of the story. Yeah. So the results of your reputation, you know how they say you can you can destroy your reputation in one minute. Sure, yeah. The results of that that has been years in the works, right? And I and I five day in and day out to a tell the story and be overcome those hurdles. I feel like I'm swimming against the wave and seal training again because you got someone Google researching you and he said, oh, administrative action with the SEC from years and years and years ago. And I mean, you don't need to need to explain to them. You know, you just don't talk them again. Right. So so the idea is passionately as I can put it in words, right? Is is you have to own the responsibility as an entrepreneur. You're going to take the credits if you're successful, but you're also going to take the blame if you're not, even if you hired the wrong person. It's not that person's problem. It's yours because you hire that person. So you need to be OK with that. And that's again, another influencer said it very well, you need to be OK with the criticism. You need to be OK also with obviously taking the credit. So on my end, my history for these bad decisions actually been trailing me for quite some time. And you know, it's it's get diminished by the day because we're doing so much good work, but that's something that people need to be ready. Yeah, you know to deal with. It's like you put it in your back pocket every day, extra fuel. Yep. Yeah, I kind of love it. What else is on deck? What can you share a little bit about the future for set schedule? I don't know how much I can share. But I really want to share. I really, really want to share because I really want to. So at the end of the summer, I like to say this way, we've perfected the art of consumption, we democratize consumption for leads and Sierra management on a very much complimentary or minimal cost basis. We've perfected that. We have tens of thousands of agents and that's great. And at the end of the summer, we're going to perfect the art of collaboration, collaboration between a mortgage broker and a title officer and a real estate agent and a real estate brokerage and an interior designer. And we're going to do it through a very inexpensive not completely free work. Yeah, now what kind of seed is this? You are dangling something. Yeah, I can smell it. It smells good. I want to taste it. Yeah, I will have to come back then in July. And I was like, yeah, I'll have to do a re-release with an update. All I can say. Let's put it this way. I'm willing to guarantee we're going to quadruple the amount of users in a period of three months. And I and I'm willing to tell you that they'll be. I'm willing to bet that there'll be a line of companies are going to want to acquire us now that we're interested. Sure. It's definitely the case. Or vice versa. At a high level, when you look at all the data, what do you see for the economy? I imagine you look at you see the data, right? You see a tremendous amount of volume. What is it looking like? What's the state? I just attended a talk. There's a PhD economist and says everything is super healthy. He put it in a really nice way. He said it's never been a better time to be a single mom in the United States. I would say this way, though, for real estate, that's a rent don't buy. Even it's kind of like contrary to advice. You said rent or buy? Rent don't buy. Yeah. Right. Because my I say that to everybody and everyone else at me all the time. And I'm like, you guys don't get it. Yeah. Give me your maybe you can help me pitch this better. Go ahead. Tell me why rent don't rent don't buy people because your return on investment by renting now over the course of the next five years would pay a whole lot better than buying. OK, so it's a pretty easy chart, right? You look at the chart and if you assume or if you believe that everything is great, like, like, you know, that professor said what not or the economist, right? So if it's all great, you have at some point, you have to start walking down. Right? I mean, it's it's it's a mountain, right? When you start going down and walking down, right, the high end property, especially in California, New York, Florida, what have you are going to be the first one to get hit. And we see it in Manhattan. We see that properties are staying staying a little bit longer in the market, which is the first indication that there's a little bit of a slowdown. So it's a bounce between sellers, market and buyers market. But if you give it enough time, I believe there'll be a 10 20 30 percent dip in a price point. And if if you're patient enough and you can be cash-rich, then you'll be able to make a much wiser investment while you were renting and didn't pay property taxes and insurance and all the other counterintuitive. People have been taught their entire lives. The you know, it's the American dream, home ownership, the American dream, work your way towards buying a house. And it is counterintuitive. And I've been hearing this from Diego a lot. Years, years. Yeah. And it's it's almost like I've been hearing your perspective from more people more and more over the past few years. But it's just now starting to fade into the popular train of thought, like, oh, maybe maybe this isn't the right time to buy. Maybe home ownership isn't all it's cracked up to be because we are at such a high. I mean, that's that's not easy to turn on capital is what he started his statement with. Right. Right. Right. Which is really important. It's not easy to convince people going against years and even decades of being told the other way. All right, let's face it. OK, so sell your house. Sell your house. Sell your house and rent. Uncle Roy says sell your house. Sell your house and rent. Rent. Yeah. Start a business. Yeah. Put your money in places that you can see it grow. 100 percent and stay cash rich if you can. That's no no doubt about it. I mean, look, you're talking about mistakes. I bought my first house at twenty three and a half, almost twenty four, right? And I in 2004, give or take, right? And that house was sold for a nice short sale during the recession. I mean, I was upside down to three hundred thousand dollars. And I think at this point, it's still not worth what I had mortgaged against that property. So 10 years. I, yeah. Well, 16 years later, right? But I short sold it. I sold the house and short sale and 2010, 11 and 12. I managed a real estate fund while the other side of the business was run by by other individuals, right? And I had the best time of my life. I mean, the real estate fund was 30, 40 percent, you know, cash on cash return. And and that was right after the recession. I mean, we quadrupled, you know, asset value with a period of 12 months. And so now I have to ask you a question because of what I do. I'm hoping this answer aligns with mine. So now we're editing it out. I know. Thank you. We're canceling the podcast forever. Since. So what we do is we take all of our capital. And like I said, we buy these distressed assets. We fix them. We bring in a 10, 12 year triple net tenant, usually a brewery. And then we'll either look to flip that building with the obviously with the lease in two to three years or we will. So we're doing an opportunities on a deal. And so that one's obviously a 10 year old. Smart, right? Put your capital in that. Smart, right? Yeah. You ask for confirmation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me confirmation, guys. Genius. Is that what you said? You know what? I mean, I'll be a friend here. I think that it's a great. I mean, I think I love the investment. I mean, the commercial properties, the triple net leases, you're talking the long term play. This is not residential. Totally. It's not emotional if the business is good and breweries are good because people would keep drinking beer even during a recession. Yeah. Right. Actually, they'll probably drink more beer during a session. So your tenants are going to be strong during recession. Yeah. And I think that it's a good business because again, you have 10 year engagement here pretty months for session proof because everybody will drink. And and maybe you'll go for a dip in the multiplier during recession, but you're going to have to weather it. You're going to be fine. Yeah. Yeah. Smart. Yes. Yes. You're good. I got vulnerable there. I was like, man, I don't know what this is going to go. Nick's also an investor. So it could have been bad for him. He would have been like, oh, what did I do? All right. So if you're a realtor, check out setschedule.com. Set the and then at setschedule is the Instagram. So setschedule.com. Your schedule is set. If it's too long, you can go to set.xyz. And as far as the app, it's at schedule. Yeah. That's where you go. Mobile app, iOS, Apple, Google. One of the fastest growing companies in America. Thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you guys. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. It was fun. We here at Startup the Storefront would love to hear feedback from you. Reach out and let us know what you think, either through rating us on the podcast app or by sliding into our DMs. You can find us both on Facebook and Instagram at Startup the Storefront. The team is comprised of Diego Torres Palma, Nick Conrad, Natalia Capolini, Megan Conrad, and Haley Nelson. Our theme song is composed by DoubleTouch. If you want to learn more about the products and businesses featured on today's episode, check out the links in the show notes. And if you enjoyed the episode, consider subscribing, because we've got a lot more great guests coming up that you won't want to miss. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.