Clay Lehman 0:00

the biggest threat to your business isn't your competition, it's your obscurity.

Ed Mathews 0:07

If you're within three feet of me, we're probably talking about real estate, much to my family chagrin. But here's the thing, most people see 7% rates in freeze. I see opportunity. They're waiting for the perfect deal and well, I've analyzed thousands of them and perfect just doesn't exist. So I talk to operators across every asset class, flippers, multifamily, syndicators, note investors, and whatever else is working. No sales pitches allowed, just real lessons from people actually doing it. I'm Ed Mathews, and this is Real Estate Underground. Greetings and salutations real estate underground. It is Ed Mathews with the Real Estate Underground. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm grateful that you're making us a part of your day. With me today is Clay Lehman of Lehman Strategic Partners. He is based in one of my favorite parts of the world, Ocala, Florida. And so Clay, welcome to the show and it's really good to see you.

Clay Lehman 1:08

Yeah, man, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited.

Ed Mathews 1:10

Absolutely. Absolutely. So for those folks who haven't discovered you yet why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do for a living?

Clay Lehman 1:18

Sure. As you mentioned, my name's Clay Lehman and my most recent venture is Lehman Strategic Partners. I started my career in accounting. I actually went to work at Arthur Anderson forever and ever ago and then meandered my way into real estate about 20 years ago. When I went to work for Pulte Homes, I was the controller for the Ocala division. That's what brought me here. And I went from there to a couple other interesting stops and started my own real estate business in 2009. What a amazing time to be in real estate. And then I, so I started my own business and then I wanted to share that I also am a real estate investor. I'm mostly in single family. I had a quad for a while. I have a couple of commercial buildings. So I certainly relate to you and your listeners on that side, although I'm interested to, to discuss or hear more from you on the multifamily. But yeah, that, that's it. And so now I'm layman's Strategic partners. I work with real estate agents to help 'em develop and implement marketing strategies. One of the things you don't learn when you're getting your license is how to grow your business. And, over the course of the last 20 years, I've learned a thing or two, some by doing some right things and most of it by doing some wrong things. But all of it I try to bring to bear for. For my clients. And then there's the component of ai, the kind of latest thing. But for me, I dove deep into it about 18 months ago, and I just, I think the, honestly, I think the reason it appeals to me so much is I love finding shortcuts, and I don't like cutting corners, but I like finding shortcuts. And so to me there's just such a component of acceleration. Of your creativity, acceleration of learning, acceleration of, it is just an enhancement of everything that's, that you bring to the table. And so I just, I've enjoyed it and I've, I really enjoy teaching others how to implement it into their businesses.

Ed Mathews 3:09

Yeah. It's interesting the, whether you are an investor, a broker agent, whatever. I have this mentor, his name's Charlie Doman, and so he does, he's one of the people that taught me how to do multifamily syndication, right? Years ago, and. One of the first things he ever said to me was, and I vividly remember it 'cause it hit me between the eyes, like of course it is is that, when you're in real estate, you are in the marketing business, right? Yeah. And, most people think customer service, arithmetic, whatever, right? And all those are true. But the fact is that nothing happens unless people know you exist.

Clay Lehman 3:44

Can I tell you so that actually, that dovetails into one of the things that I read that have, that has stuck with me forever, which is the biggest threat to your business isn't your competition, it's your obscurity. That just nailed me right between the eyes because as I shared, I come from accounting. We do not hold a high opinion of business development, marketing, or sales. And so when I started my business, I thought it was the field of dreams. If I build it, they will come. Yeah. If I do a great job, people will show up. And about six years into doing this. Yeah. I finally realized that's not how you build a scalable business. And so I've spent the last maybe. Eight or 10 years, my whole being is really committed to business development. I've come to really love it, which is just ironic because I really was skeptical of it when I started my business. So yeah that's huge is, you've got to be known. But I would also argue that not only is real estate sales, I think our marketing, sales, persuasion, everything in life, no matter what you do, whether you're persuading a customer, that's the more direct, thing we think of when we think of marketing and sales and persuasion. But you have a boss or you have a client, or you have a coworker, or you have a spouse, or you have kids. It's so important that your message be crafted in the right manner to reach your audience. That's marketing, but it's also communication. So anyways I've come to feel that everything has a degree of marketing and sales as a component.

Ed Mathews 5:14

Yeah. The fact is that especially with the internet and now with ai. Marketing, creating that awareness as you were alluding to, it smooths out your business, right? I mean it, yes,

Clay Lehman 5:24

absolutely.

Ed Mathews 5:25

It takes the ebbs and flows out of your business because if you're consistent with your marketing, you're consistent with creating awareness, which Yes. Drives your pipeline, which hopefully, if you're, even if you're not a competent salesperson, let's see, an average salesperson's gonna close, I don't know, 25, 30. 35% of the opportunities that come across their desk. Even if you're close closing 10% y if you recognize that sales is your weakness, that's fine. You can either hire somebody or you market more to create more opportunities. It's one of those

Clay Lehman 5:54

Exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah. And

Ed Mathews 5:57

I,

Clay Lehman 5:58

those people, I'm sorry. Oh, please.

Ed Mathews 6:01

The other thing that you mentioned was AI and technology and, Sure. As a fellow geek, right? I'm a nerd. I might, yeah. If you talk to my kids, they may even say I'm a full blown dork which is fine. 'Cause they're not wrong, but the's, right? I don't view technology as a cheat code necessarily. I don't think you're cheating. I think what it does creates, it's a force multiplier, right?

Clay Lehman 6:21

Yep.

Ed Mathews 6:22

It allows you to do. A lot with a little bit of resources. No, go ahead.

Clay Lehman 6:27

That's exactly right. No, I was just gonna piggyback on that because some of the pushback I get from people is relates to. Like some of the stuff I share my content in social media is it revolves around highlighting yourself as the expert. And I've had some feedback, comments from people that say, this is what I don't like about ai. The, person who knows nothing can pretend to be the expert. And I would argue that that's not a hundred percent accurate. I think you could put out there. I definitely feel like AI levels the playing field in terms of access to information, but that only gets you so far if you don't have the experience and wisdom and, the hard work or the at work ethic. There, there's so much that goes into. Being a strong operator and being the expert, and, if someone is propping themselves up with whatever it is, whether that's just looking up a white paper on the internet or having AI help them create a persona that makes them appear as the expert, that only gets you so far. The real power of AI is, and enhancing like what you already have. And if there's nothing, if there's no substance, then AI's only gonna carry you so far. What's interesting to me is, I'm a part of an AI group that the average, and it's one of the bigger ones on the on, on the internet, on Facebook, the average age of the people in the group is like mid fifties. And the guy that runs it, who's also, a mid fifties guy, he says he thinks that the big reason is just what I, like what I said. He probably said it to me, and that's where I'm getting it from, but basically that it's an enhancement of what's there and that's why it's, why people that have, some career, some experience some wisdom. AI just takes that and helps you articulate it as well as. Grow the scope to which you can share it.

Ed Mathews 8:16

Yeah. Yeah. If you're not a writer, AI can help you. Exactly. Does it give you in-depth? Can you write an in-depth article about a particular subject? Eh, probably not. It's gonna bump along with that. Yeah. What it can do is help you strategically. Like for instance, I'll give you a use case that I use chat GPT for. So I pay attention to, the usual guys, right? Alex Hor and Gary V. And I'm a, a huge follower of Keith Cunningham, who's a business guy, right? A handful of others. And what I've done is I've created an advisory board in AI and basically said, Hey. Here is their life's work, which is readily available on YouTube and the books here is their life's work. Now, on a periodic basis, I'm gonna sit down and ask, I'm gonna present to you what I'm doing and I want you to give me your unvarnished feedback and tell me what I need to do to adjust. 'cause I can't know everything.

Clay Lehman 9:09

Yeah, same. I have a number of, I have a content advisory board. I have a productivity advisory board. We just became best friends, bro.

Ed Mathews 9:47

Yeah. Did we? Yep. All right. Did

Clay Lehman 9:50

we just become best? Yep. Yep.

Ed Mathews 9:52

The other thing, I think the other reason why I think your colleague on the Facebook group is spot on is 'cause as a 55-year-old. So I'm smack d in the middle of that demographic. Is that we all, we were there when the internet was invented, right?

Clay Lehman 10:08

Yeah.

Ed Mathews 10:08

And, we navigated that revolution in the various jobs that we had. I was a sales guy back then. No, I was a program manager back then and then a sales guy. You were obviously were an accountant and, the ground shook, but not like it is right now. This is, I actually think this is a bigger deal, but

Clay Lehman 10:26

I, I agree. Yeah, no I've made that comparison that this, reminds me of 96, 97, 98 when we were just like you had an email address, but it was a novelty. The thing that I always think about is the old websites that businesses have, which were basically like their sales brochure, but on a screen, they didn't know what to do with it. Nobody was monetizing it. And the difference with AI, I think is just gonna be the speed of adoption. And I'm not making, that's no big prediction. It's already happening, it's being adopted at a much faster rate. I had a really interesting conversation with a gentleman the other day. When we're talking about the the potential for AI to disrupt the workforce and I've for the last year or so, as I think through it, I think about what we transition from agricultural to industrial. We transition from industrial to information. This is just another transition, but his point, which I think is a good one, is that the speed of at which AI is being adapted or adopted is happening so much more rapidly that when you think of those other transitions, they happened over time. So the workforce could adjust and, his sort of. I, I almost don't wanna say the word pessimistic 'cause maybe he's closer, but his sort of more pessimistic is that the speed at which this is being adopted is going to make it more disruptive because the workforce has less time to transition. So yeah, that's getting a little, like my brain is starting to hurt, just saying that stuff. So this is getting a little too smart for me.

Ed Mathews 11:57

Yeah. But it's we're all learning here, brother.

Clay Lehman 11:59

Yeah, absolutely.

Ed Mathews 12:00

Here's the thing. Like it was 18 months ago that my nephew at a holiday, at a Christmas party for our family was like, Hey man, you gotta check out this chat GPT stuff.

Clay Lehman 12:10

Yeah.

Ed Mathews 12:11

And I'm like yeah. That's just, the latest shiny object, right? And within, I don't know, 30 days of that I was like neck deep in it and yeah. The fact is that back in the day they used to talk about Moore's Law, so I'll get a little gee. Yep. Moore's law was that computing power would double every 18 months. And I'm seeing the same thing you are in AI and that the capabilities are expanding. At a at such a rate that I don't think people understand, I don't understand, and I pay attention to it every day. Understand how fast this is evolving. We're talking weeks and maybe months of capability that are quantum leaps. Like you look at chat, GPT-3 five to four to five is right. Is not, they're not, Hey, this is a little bit, it's not

Clay Lehman 13:05

linear,

Ed Mathews 13:06

it's exponential. Yeah. It's exactly right. It's it's not linear.

Clay Lehman 13:09

It's incredible. I, it's daily really. You gotta pay attention to what's going on. 'cause things shift so quickly. Like when I first started getting into ai, which my experience was similar to yours, it wasn't a a relative. But I was at a conference and I still distinctly remember there were two presenters one presented. And in the course of the presentation demonstrated having a conversation with his chat, GPT Voice agent. And again, at the time I had no I didn't, I had never even opened chat, GPT, so I have heard, had heard about it, but when I saw him talking to it, I thought he was like a magician. And then another guy did a presentation that hit me right where in the sweet spot. 'cause it was hu it was very humorous. And it was, they did a presentation of what it would be like if they were to open a title company for Snoop Dogg. And he did this amazing video showing all the different things that they used cha Bt to do and within, and it probably took 30 minutes. Not the video, but they just demonstrate how quickly they could come up with the name, the mission, vision, core values, the tagline, the logos, the, and like they had all the, and they created like 365 days of social media content. And just, it blew my mind and it still took me a little while to, to catch on or to really dig into it. But the way that it shifted and I think about, if you had asked me maybe three months ago, which tool am I in all the time? Chi Chachi, pt, all the time, 24 7, always there. But now I was reflecting on this the other day I spend so much more time in like Gemini and in Claude and, because every, and I would've, Gemini was. Was trash when I first got started in this, and things just changed. I did something that as a fellow nerd or geek or dork, you'll appreciate yesterday. We talk about which tool do you use for what task.

Ed Mathews 14:59

Yeah.

Clay Lehman 14:59

And I created a writing challenge and I created a in chat. I had a custom GPT and clawed a project in Gemini, a gym with the exact same. Custom instructions and knowledge files, and I had manis design the challenge and then judge it blindly. So it gave me a writing prompt that I fed to. Chat to Gemini and to Claude. Then I saved the results as blog A, blog B, blog C, so that Manis wouldn't be biased.

Ed Mathews 15:30

Right.

Clay Lehman 15:30

And loaded it back up. And I'm just curious, I don't know if you just wanna play this game, but WWI don't, would you want to rank those and what you would expect the results to have been?

Ed Mathews 15:40

My guess. A month ago, it would've been different than it is today. Okay. So today I would say Claude. I'm not a, I'm not a a Google user. I don't use their ai, so I don't know anything about that, but I would say, so I'll put them third just 'cause I don't know

Clay Lehman 15:57

sure.

Ed Mathews 15:58

The I would say Claude Chat, GPT and Google.

Clay Lehman 16:02

Yeah. And so you are, you're very close. Claude was number one, which, that was my expectation. What I was surprised by was how well Jim and I performed. So the way it scored on like a 50 point scoring system with how closely did it match my voice? 'cause I gave it a voice, like a style snippet. Yep. How closely did it, you know what, whatever, 50 points and ch I'm sorry. Claude was 46 out of 50 but Jim and I was 40 out of 50 and chat was maybe 36, whatever. Super non-scientific. This is just a redneck in Ocala, Florida messing around. But it was a lot of fun 'cause I fully expected it to be clawed chat and then Gemini as a distant third. What's interesting about that is and I, if I'm going too far down the nerdy ai rabbit hole, pull me back. But one of the limitations, so you'll relate to this, so you automate through N eight N. One of the limitations with some of the automations and some of the AI tools is that you can't you can't call use an API call to use a Claude project. Now you can use an API quad to, an API call to use Claude. But you can't call into a project. And the same for Jim and I, Jim, or at least that's my understanding.

Ed Mathews 17:16

Sure.

Clay Lehman 17:17

But you can into a chat, not GPT, but into a chat assistant, which you can build to be similar to A GPT. So what that means for me is as I'm building automations for myself or for my clients. I lean more towards using chat because of the opportunity to use an API call into an assistant. Now, with that said, these results, I obviously, I love writing with Claude now. I just feel like it's far superior output, but with. With these results, I'm gonna have to take a look at Gemini and what opportunities I have to use that in automations. And it goes, honestly, that just goes directly back to your point that you've gotta constantly be paying attention, which is something that I love about it. Yeah I'm. One of my drivers is continuous improvement. And so I think AI definitely tickles that, little part of my brain. The other thing it does, and sorry, I'm lecturing, but I'll just finish this thought. The other thing it does is one of my shortcomings or weaknesses is my lack of preparation. I'll wait till the very last minute to do things and I've done it, ive. Made it okay in life, but definitely have caused myself and the people around me some heartburn just by waiting till the last minute. Man, ai like supports that so well, like I had a I had the opportunity to present to this really large Facebook group and my presentation was at one and at 1256 I finished my gamma presentation. And I was sweating bullets. But, I, and I say I nailed it. I made it on time. I don't know how well the, you'd have to ask someone else how good the presentation was. But anyways, I find that I, every day I'm asking myself is ai. Helping me or hurting me in this regard because I just don't sweat that much. I'm like, eh, I can produce a thing in two seconds with my ai.

Ed Mathews 19:00

Yeah. Why

Clay Lehman 19:00

sweat it?

Ed Mathews 19:01

I think it's like a muscle, right? If you use it to good point, then your writing skills will atrophy. If you use it to strategize your strategic thinking will atrophy. And I think the secret is it's a tool, not a crutch.

Clay Lehman 19:17

Yes.

Ed Mathews 19:17

And it's becoming a better and better tool. Right?

Clay Lehman 19:21

Sure.

Ed Mathews 19:22

So one of the things that, that I'll do is like you get writer's block, right? Yeah. And so I have what I call a, basically a brand voice, which describes I, it give, I gave it probably similar to what you did. I gave it pretty much everything I've ever written over the last, 20, 30 years. And it's stuff that I had right. And right. Just to give it an idea of, okay, here's how Ed writes, here's the phrases he tends to use. All that stuff.

Clay Lehman 19:48

Yep. That's awesome.

Ed Mathews 19:49

And it's really cool. And so yeah, when I say, Hey, write me an outline for this article. It thinks the way I think. Pretty much. Probably 80%. Yeah. And 80% is great. 'cause that's all I need to bust through any sort of writer's block that I have. And then it's exactly, off we go to the keyboard. But

Clay Lehman 20:07

what I would say to the idea of it being like a muscle and then, leading to atrophy is I think if you seed those things over to ai, meaning you give it up completely and just say, you write this, you strategize this. But for me, I find it to be more of maybe you'd think of it as the spotter at the gym, if we're gonna keep on the muscle analogy. Yeah. It's there to lift me up. So for my blog writing I love writing these blogs, but two years ago I wasn't writing at all because I just don't have the attention span or the discipline to sit down and write and. Proofread and like all the things that you really need to do to produce a nice piece of writing. Yeah. And with ai, what I can do is take what's in my head, which I have some decent ideas, express them. But what I do, and I have the same thing. I've got a clawed project that, that captures my voice. I don't just go in there though and say, Hey, write me a, an article about, real estate strategy or, working with first time home buyers, or whatever the topic is. I'll go in and I'll say, this is what I wanna write about. Here are my thoughts on it. Here's my experience with it. Here's what I would say. If I were speaking to someone about it and that takes me a few minutes, but it's a heck of a lot shorter than the three hours. It would probably take me to write a blog

Ed Mathews 21:27

at least,

Clay Lehman 21:27

and then I read over what it creates and I push back. One of the things that. I, it drives me crazy is when it puts in there, I was just talking to or like an agent the other day about X, Y, or Z, and I'm like, no fake case studies, no fake examples, no fake conversations. But I always wanna be on the lookout for that. And then also any statistics I try, I run it through perplexity if it throws any statistic statistics in there to kind of fact check those things, but yeah. Yeah, no.

Ed Mathews 21:53

You've gotta do that. 'Cause it, it does

Clay Lehman 21:55

absolutely

Ed Mathews 21:55

resonate. And I'm fine with it writing the fake case studies. 'cause then that's just a placeholder for me to go in. I rip that out and go, okay,

Clay Lehman 22:02

yeah,

Ed Mathews 22:03

here's a good place to put a real one.

Clay Lehman 22:04

Yeah, definitely. That's a good practice.

Ed Mathews 22:06

Yeah. In terms of how your clients are using ai, right? Insur, or I'm sorry, real estate brokers. Not exactly the most tech savvy group of people I've ever met. Some are, but most of them are, they're hustlers, right? They, you're, they're world class salespeople. They're world-class customer service people. They're world-class business people in terms of being able to figure out, yeah, absolutely. Is this the right deal for my client? Yeah. But tech is really not their thing usually.

Clay Lehman 22:35

Sure.

Ed Mathews 22:36

So how are, how are you working with these clients? What do you do to make their lives a little easier?

Clay Lehman 22:42

Yeah, it's interesting 'cause that's, you're, you nailed it. They're tech curious and obviously not everybody's the same, but the vast majority, that's not their strong suit. They wanna be out there. Talking with people, shaking hands, kissing babies, making deals,

Ed Mathews 22:55

right?

Clay Lehman 22:56

So what I try and demonstrate to them and then implement for them are all the ways that they can take the things that keep them from being out there doing those things. Take those away, the strip away, the admin strip away. The content creation's a big one. They all feel like I need to be on. Social media, but it's such a pain in the butt. Things of that nature. I like to demonstrate for 'em and then implement for them ways that AI can help them with that. So I'll help 'em build. Simple tools. I'm not building like crazy automations or anything like that. I'm more just building simple GPTs or even just prompts to help them with their day-to-day tasks. So from, I think everybody's entry point on the real estate side into using chat GPT is to create their listing descriptions. Yeah, that was the very first thing that I used it for. I always used to joke that my listing descriptions were house pretty, you buy. And it really helped flesh that out. And that's a starting point, but, I like to demonstrate to them all the different ways that it can, help 'em with administrative tasks like transaction coordination and, you can have it help you with your follow ups. Helping with hiring or streamlining your processes. That's a big one for me. I, huge, I preach a framework that I was taught, which is eliminate, automate, delegate. And it starts with, documenting your processes and then running those processes through that framework and people, documenting your process is a huge pain in the butt. But man, AI makes it so easy. You fire up loom, you record yourself doing whatever task it is that you need to document. You take the transcript, you put it into ai, and I have a a custom GPT that specifically helps them build SOPs, standard operating procedures, that then we run through the eliminate, automate, delegate. And the other thing I tell 'em, this is true for any business owner, and this is what I learned the hard way, the thing that keeps us trapped in our business is the lack of process. You cannot delegate. You cannot. Free yourself from your keyboard if you don't have process. But not only that, I think, a lack of systems and process leads to inconsistent customer delivery. Just all kinds of headaches. And so a bunch of stress. And I say that as someone who was, I was loathed to document my processes. I hated it. It was boring and who would want, but now I live by it. It's one of the first places we start. So that's I, for me, my big thing when I start working with somebody is I wanna get 'em some quick wins. Because some of the things that we do take a little bit of time and I don't, another thing that we, realtors, and I'm putting myself in this boat or famous for, is not having the best sticktoitiveness on deal on things. We stick to deals, but, initiatives are a little bit more fluid. And so I like to get 'em some quick wins by just implementing something in their business that helps 'em, like one of the cool tools that's super helpful is Google Notebook, lm. That is such an amazing tool for process documentation or. Just so many different things or I encourage 'em to open a notebook for each deal that they're doing. You can start let's say you have a listing appointment, okay, we'll pull the property appraiser's data, any past DeMoss the Zillow the Zillow information on this, on the thing, realtor, everything you can find. Throw it into a notebook. Lm, I even encourage 'em to go out and see if you can find the owner's LinkedIn or Facebook and put that into the notebook because then it can help inform how best will this person hear what I have to say. And so things like that I mentioned Gamma earlier. Obviously one of the things that agents will do is presentations, listing presentations or buyer presentations. Dude, gamma is the coolest app. And like earlier today, okay, I have a client I'm working with and he uses Follow-Up Boss for his CRM.

Ed Mathews 26:30

Yep.

Clay Lehman 26:30

And so I used AI to design three drip campaigns for his three different ideal client profiles. And so I sent that to him and he asked now what do I do with these? To be fair, I was gonna have a call with them to go through it, but. I said in follow up boss, that's gonna be a smart action to set up a drip campaign, but I will just, he's technologically challenged. So I went to Gamma and I used the one line, they have a, have you ever worked with Gamma?

Ed Mathews 26:55

I have, yeah.

Clay Lehman 26:57

Yeah. So they have the creative presentation from a one line prompt.

Ed Mathews 27:01

Right.

Clay Lehman 27:01

And I literally wrote. Write or create a presentation for a very technologically challenged realtor on how to create smart actions and follow up boss and I hit enter and I started working on something else. That's what I love, Ben. I have three screens here and I love when I look up and I have Manus working on a project over here, and I have DMO creating a presentation over there. I feel like a superhero or like a with

Ed Mathews 27:27

wands

Clay Lehman 27:27

and,

Ed Mathews 27:28

Yeah,

Clay Lehman 27:28

exactly. So anyways I, I lost my, oh, but with Gamma, so I created that. Then I had it converted into a website, and then I just sent him a link to the website and now that's there for him or anyone else that I will work with in the future. That's the other thing that gets me so charged up is that everything that I'm building. Is then incrementally like that means that I have it for the next time I encounter. That's. I just, it just fires me up. I get so excited on what I'm building.

Ed Mathews 27:59

Yeah it's amazing what a very small focus team can accomplish in a very short period of time.

Clay Lehman 28:06

Well said.

Ed Mathews 28:07

Using these capabilities, it's a, literally, my company here we're, nine, 10 people. But we look and act we're multiple of that because there are, we're we're heavy users of technology, right?

Clay Lehman 28:21

Yeah. It's leverage.

Ed Mathews 28:23

Yeah. The administra all that crap that like, a guy like me hates to do, you're an accountant.

Clay Lehman 28:28

Yeah.

Ed Mathews 28:28

I married an accountant, for two reasons. One is she's awesome and I love her. But the second one is she's an accountant and I'm not. And

Clay Lehman 28:35

there's also the accountant. Yeah, no, I hear you.

Ed Mathews 28:37

And that's it, right? Is that, yeah. She's the type A personality in our relationship. I am not that person.

Clay Lehman 28:43

To be honest with you, neither am I. Both my, so my dad he was CPA as well, but he was, he same way. He very outgoing. Very gregarious. Not the, push your glasses up, sit behind the desk right. But but it was a good skill set to, to have established, but you wouldn't want me doing your books or your taxes, that's all I said.

Ed Mathews 29:01

Yeah.

Clay Lehman 29:01

And

Ed Mathews 29:01

I'm not doing, she doesn't do my books either, but you know it, but the fact is that the I'm not doing them either,

Clay Lehman 29:07

right? That's right. Exactly.

Ed Mathews 29:09

I have a very nice young lady in the Philippines who's a, who's awesome at it, and she does 'em.

Clay Lehman 29:13

Yeah. Wonderful.

Ed Mathews 29:15

And then we review 'em once a week and at the end of the month. But the, in terms of, we've been shooting the breeze for a while here I want to understand how are like your forward thinking, like really aggressive clients. What are they thinking about in terms of how this market is changing? Like how the technologically, how this world is changing?

Clay Lehman 29:39

Yeah, a lot of. I wouldn't say the forward thinkers fall in this category, but a lot of people are nervous about what it might mean for their careers. The more forward thinkers, I think see it as what you talk the force multiplier where before, and especially, and this is where I was trying to say, I don't build these type of tools, but there are tools like Y lo o So one of my clients uses Y lo o and it's a tool that attaches, it actually attaches the follow up boss. And it may attach to others, but he uses it with a follow up boss. But what he, what excites him about it is it'll go out there and warm up your cold leads. Engage them in written communication. So it'll email 'em, it'll text 'em. Yeah. It goes so far as, one of the things Steve was showing me the other day is it'll make spelling errors on purpose and then do the little star and correct the spelling error to give that more human feel. And then at the point in time that the buyers or whatever, the client is okay, I'm ready to meet with somebody. It sets the appointment, he gets a notice, and then he's there. And he's done zero except pay for, this amazing technology. So I think the more forward thinkers see it that way they buy into the idea that AI's not gonna eliminate my job, but an agent using AI might eliminate my job. I think they see it as a way to do more, in terms of if ever there was a limitation for an agent based on whatever administrative back. And stuff had to be done. You can forget that this can, you can do, you can have one person directing the orchestra like I was talking about. I don't think, I don't I'm not ready to hand certain things over to ai, but I certainly will hand over the initial execution from my review, and that's where I think they are, is just looking at it as that force multiplier that they can use to leverage both, outbound sales, content creation, and then administrative work, and then just grow.

Ed Mathews 31:28

Yeah, a really interesting use case, actually, it may apply to some of your clients as well. We just built it for in-house because I'm a multifamily guy, but we also flip houses, right? And so we do a lot of marketing and someone will hit our website, fill out a form, and I used to have a virtual assistant who would call, but if he or she is not. If they're on something else, or if they're, off hours then that person doesn't hear from me or us for 12 hours. It could be Right. And an

Clay Lehman 31:57

eternity.

Ed Mathews 31:58

An eternity. It might as well be forever.

Clay Lehman 32:00

Exactly. Yeah.

Ed Mathews 32:01

Understood. And the so what we did was we built a tool 24 hours a day. So if you call the number that's on all of our marketing, or you call me on my cell phone? I have, it's actually what I was working on when I hopped on this call. You get an AI voice. Agent who has the ability to ask you questions. It will in the background score the lead. Is this a motivated seller or not? That's

Clay Lehman 32:26

crazy. Yeah.

Ed Mathews 32:27

If and will make a decision, literally make a decision as to whether or not this person is somebody that I should go meet human being to human being like right now, and it will text me. Set up an appointment for the parameters that I've given 'em, which is you gotta gimme an hour to get there. And if it's after a certain hour, you can't call 'em. And if it's after a certain hour, I'm not going to see 'em until tomorrow. But you know what

Clay Lehman 32:52

a huge advantage that gives you over people that aren't using that tool.

Ed Mathews 32:55

So someone fills out a form on our website and in 45 seconds they're on the phone with someone looking to understand what their situation is, how we can help, and and then setting an appointment on my calendar, lay down.

Clay Lehman 33:07

We, we don't, I'm just curious, what tool do you use for the voice agent?

Ed Mathews 33:11

11 Labs.

Clay Lehman 33:11

Is it your voice?

Ed Mathews 33:13

No, because I know you, I know a lot of labs will train. It's funny. So there are two, there are actually three assistants. One is a callback assistant. So that's the thing I was just working on. I just finished it. As a matter of fact it's testing on the screen to your to your left right now. So that is Katie, that's my daughter, that's my oldest daughter. It is not her voice, but I'm gonna see if I can talk her into letting me use her voice. So cool. And so you call my cell phone and you get a, an voicemail that says, or an outgoing message that says, Hey, this is Ed. I'm sorry I can't pick up. I'm with another client or whatever. And my assistant is gonna call you back right now. 45 seconds later, Katie's on the phone with that person. Hello. How can I be of service? Basically triages the call and figures out why they're calling me. And then through a decision tree can say, okay yep, happy to set up an appointment with Ed. Or we're probably not the right firm for you, but give Clay a call because he's, a realtor and that's what he does for a living. Or I'm not really not sure how to handle this, so let me have Ed call you back and then I get a text. Call this guy right now and I pick up the phone and call.

Clay Lehman 34:18

That's incredible. How is the, is there like any kind of a delay in between. Wow. That is amazing.

Ed Mathews 34:24

We disclose that it's ai 'cause I think ethically you need to, but

Clay Lehman 34:27

yeah that's good.

Ed Mathews 34:28

But honestly, I showed this to my wife and I'm like, do you know this voice? She goes, no. Who is that? I said, it's an effing computer.

Clay Lehman 34:36

That is so cool. Did you see did you see the AirPods announcement yesterday with the live language translation?

Ed Mathews 34:43

No. Really?

Clay Lehman 34:45

Dude, it's so cool. And now I think that it was a real demo, but it was a video. But basically the idea is you're wearing your AirPods, it translate, it said there's a slight delay between the person talking to you and then the translation. Then you speak. In your native language and then hold up your phone and it translates what you're saying into their language so that they can read it. And like in my title company and here in central Florida, we have a large Spanish speaking population. Yeah. And unfortunately I don't have any Spanish speakers in the office. And I, when I looked at that, I was like, I, not that I need a big excuse to buy a new tech toy, but I was like, man, we need that for the office.

Ed Mathews 35:22

So that's the other thing that's in thing that we built into so it's Katie and Maggie, my two daughters. So Katie is the outbound agent. Maggie is the inbound agent, and or no, Katie is the receptionist and Maggie's the outbound agent, and both of them have the ability to speak Spanish on the fly. They can detect if the person, is a English as a second language and will ask. Would it be better to speak in different language? Would you prefer, what would you prefer? And then it has the ability to speak in Spanish, Portuguese polish, and Italian, which are the four.

Clay Lehman 35:54

Yeah, I was gonna say probably almost any language.

Ed Mathews 35:57

Yeah, the list is. Is

Clay Lehman 35:59

so if I call and I say, Hey, I speak cling on, maybe it'll,

Ed Mathews 36:02

I

Clay Lehman 36:02

think

Ed Mathews 36:02

that one might be a

Clay Lehman 36:03

stretch,

Ed Mathews 36:04

but

Clay Lehman 36:04

not getting there. All right.

Ed Mathews 36:06

I mean it, you can pick Africons

Clay Lehman 36:07

That is so I gotta, I have to mess with that. I haven't messed a lot with voice agents. I know. I use go high level and they have some voice agent capabilities in there. Yeah, that's, I can't wait. I just, I have to keep focused or i'll Yeah. I'm sure you can relate,

Ed Mathews 36:21

yeah. For me it's not really a shiny object 'cause it's a problem. I'm solving a problem, right?

Clay Lehman 36:25

Oh no, it's an investment. No,

Ed Mathews 36:26

a hundred percent. No, I get it. There's certainly shiny object stuff. I messed with a whole bunch of stuff to learn how to do this. But the fact is that there are, there's a business problem where. Hey, I filled out a, somebody filled out a form and, stats are, Harvard did a study, 391% more likely to close a meeting, which is the first conversation if you call them, within the first five minutes and every minute after that, it's, it's tens of percentage points falling off until you get to 10 minutes where it's zippity due to a chance of getting them to, because they've already

Clay Lehman 36:59

been absolutely a hundred percent the same for real estate. So it'll be in the an arrow in the quiver for me at some point.

Ed Mathews 37:05

Yeah. If I can help, I'm happy to share.

Clay Lehman 37:06

Yeah, I'll reach out.

Ed Mathews 37:08

All right. And the next layer, this is outbound, outbound calling.

Clay Lehman 37:11

Absolutely.

Ed Mathews 37:12

Which I think is, that's Maggie in my world.

Clay Lehman 37:15

Yeah.

Ed Mathews 37:15

And she's not where I need her to be yet, but we'll get her there.

Clay Lehman 37:19

Come on, Maggie.

Ed Mathews 37:20

Yeah, come

Clay Lehman 37:21

on.

Ed Mathews 37:21

She's better at being a high school senior and playing softball, so we'll let her do that.

Clay Lehman 37:24

I love, I do love the kind of the way you're honoring your daughters. I wonder how they feel about it, but

Ed Mathews 37:28

I'm sure so they don't know. Actually, I haven't told her.

Clay Lehman 37:31

No, I

Ed Mathews 37:31

think it's I love it. Wife, Patricia is my wife Patricia is my in-house, in-office assistant,

Clay Lehman 37:36

oh, that's great.

Ed Mathews 37:36

She doesn't know either. She might now, but she doesn't know either. It's funny. So let's let's I. Let's move forward. I'm gonna skip over the lightning round. Sure. 'cause frankly, I think this has been way more valuable, so thank you for Oh,

Clay Lehman 37:48

good.

Ed Mathews 37:49

All of your wisdom. But if people wanna learn more about you or about layman strategic partners what's the best way to get in touch?

Clay Lehman 37:59

So I'm most active on Facebook. So you know, it's just clay Layman on Facebook, or I have a Facebook group for ai curious real estate professionals. Okay, that's been a lot of fun. I ran a report recently and saw that I have. Members in the group from 65 countries, which Wow. For, yeah, for like a joke, but for redneck from Ocala, that's pretty cool. Really cool. But, so it's unstuck AI for real estate. We will get you there. And then the other thing is my website, so it's just www dot i'm clay lehman.com. Okay. I am pretty. Like I write two blogs a week. Spoiler alert, I write them with Claude. I share wisdom around, or implementation ideas for ai or just general business wisdom or real estate. But a note since I, we picked up on the stepbrothers did we just become best friends, right? Yeah. So when I registered my URL as I'm Clay Lehman, I wanted it to have a question mark at the end, like an anchorman when he said. I'm Ronda Burgundy.

Ed Mathews 38:56

Yeah,

Clay Lehman 38:57

exactly. But they wouldn't allow the question mark. So it's just, I'm clay layman.com.

Ed Mathews 39:02

Okay, fair enough. So Clay, when you're not when you're not talking real estate or ai, what else do you like to do?

Clay Lehman 39:09

We, I have four kids, although three are getting onto the grown side. I have three older boys. My, my oldest will be 22. Next week, which I can't bring myself to refer to them as young men yet, even though they are they're really great. And I have twin 19-year-old boys. They just started their own business. And they are just killing it. So their work ethic impress me. I'm not trying to go off on a tangent, but it is one of the things I love to do. I love developing businesses. So they started a they call it Layman Property Services. And I'm helping 'em with all their marketing and business development. And we talk all the time about tactics. Like this morning my son was going to a neighborhood and he is oh man, I just had this one pressure washing job. I said next time you should go on to next door and say, Hey two days from now I'm gonna be in, Lemonwood. Anybody that wants pressure washing, I have five slots left or whatever. I just love, I trading ideas. Now I have a 12-year-old daughter. We like to build Legos and this may ruin all of my credibility with the, with your audience, but I enjoy professional wrestling, so we'll, we are going to Orlando in a couple weeks to smack down. She's my little wrestling buddy. That's fun. And. I like to boat and fish and do all the kind of central Florida things. I've retired from golf because I was terrible. I never practiced. I don't know what I expected. And then my wife and I, 27 years crazy. We've been married and we enjoy traveling. I don't know, but honestly I'm not trying to, whatever, like this isn't a flex with ai. So somebody asked me the other day. Does it save you? Do? Do you work less? That's what they asked me. Do they, do you work less? And I said, the honest truth is no. I work way more, and the reason is it saves me time. But I love creating with ai, and so I got up this morning at five. I walked my dog, I got home, brewed my coffee, opened my computer, and started working. When I get home tonight, I'm gonna sit down and we're gonna watch some tv, but I'll probably have my phone or my computer, and I'll be doing some deep research on Gemini, or I'll be building a GPT or I'll be working on something for a client. I haven't done this since I first started my career. But it's just, I'm just, I'm enjoying it so much. So I'm not saying, oh, all I do is work and all I do is this or that, but I just, it's so much fun. I can't put it down. Yeah, I have a problem, ed.

Ed Mathews 41:25

Yeah, I'm addicted too. I'm right there with you, man. It's

Clay Lehman 41:27

yeah.

Ed Mathews 41:28

It's I'm the same way, right? I, it's not that I'm working less, it's that I'm accomplishing more, way more,

Clay Lehman 41:34

way more,

Ed Mathews 41:35

right? Yeah, that's

Clay Lehman 41:36

exactly a hundred percent. That's, it's just, it's hard to put down. I'll get a, I'm, this is a little bit probably hyperbole or whatever, but I'll get a little anxious man, what can I be doing right now if I weren't, so it's definitely, double-edged sword,

Ed Mathews 41:49

yeah. Excellent. Hey, clay thank you so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Clay Lehman 41:54

Yeah, me too.

Ed Mathews 41:55

Thank you. And and I'm looking forward, since we are best friends now, we're gonna have to keep in touch,

Clay Lehman 41:59

so hang out.

Ed Mathews 42:00

All right. I would love that. Yeah, absolutely. Clay layman, thank you so much.

Clay Lehman 42:05

Appreciate it. Thank you.