So talk to me a little bit about that.

So I would probably argue that most of the industry, most brokerages do a really good job with, like, training and onboarding, and they do a great job with continuing education and these, like, weekly Zoom sessions and all kinds of stuff, right? In-person training, like, I think generally speaking, the industry does a really good job with, like, training, generally speaking.

But, you know, for you to actually learn something, first, you, yes, you have to hear it in the classroom, but then learning adaptation has to occur.

And there's a fundamental flaw in our industry, which is the broker-to-agent ratio.

In almost every other industry, when a company hires somebody, yes, they do training, onboarding, and continuing education, but in most high-ticket sales type industries, whether that's, like, for example, leasing at a $300 million apartment complex or, you know, HVAC companies or dealerships or, or these other types of industries, they regularly inspect what they expect.

And so they have this ongoing feedback loop to their employees to grade them, and this is after training occurs, right? And they do this using mystery shoppers.

And so this has been going on for decades, right? Like, mystery shopping has been something going on for decades.

Yes.

How do you get into real estate and bring us to today?

Yeah.

So 20 years ago, got licensed out of college as an agent and come from a family as i was telling you of like engineers and technologists and um but i'm also a high driver personality and i was going on job interviews out of college and i just like you know just i don't know it was i i i have an entrepreneurial spirit and i was going on these interviews and people would be interviewing me and i i don't know i don't want this to come off like egotistical but like people would be interviewing me and i'm like you should be working for me like i should be working for you and you know i had i had this business i had a little lawn care and landscaping business to pay my way through college and like you know like it wasn't just a small little business we were doing a couple hundred thousand a year in revenue and i was you know going to school 15 hours a semester like i had a full-time gig but i also had employees and trucks and all that stuff and so anyways had an entrepreneurial spirit and i had a customer tell me to go into real estate and i got in really quickly and This was about the time Google AdWords launched their algorithm in 2006.

And so I very, you know, I quickly dove into working buyer and seller leads through Google AdWords.

And then I, you know, got became like, you know, fascinated with SEO and just the algorithm, generally speaking, and, you know, started selling a lot of homes.

and got to a point where there just weren't enough hours in the day for me to follow up with all the leads.

And so then I started hiring other people underneath me.

Yeah.

[laughs]

...

the Lebanese mafia trying to hunt my ass down for not paying the liquor bill, and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission trying to hunt my ass down.

And I was like, "Oh, shit." And uh, so I, I got to taste my, the first bite of a- of humble pie of my life at 24, 25 years old.

And um, the, you know, uh, the market was really bad back then.

Um, the Dow Jones was at, like, 5,000.

You know, this is the era of the movie, The Big Short.

It's just expensive, right?