Estate Agency Has Hit Capacity

Estate agency hasn’t just become busy. It’s exceeded capacity.

In this episode, Mark Burgess explains why manpower-based models can’t scale and why revenue per employee is the metric most owners ignore.

From CRM limitations to AI operating systems, this conversation reframes how independent agencies should be built.

This isn’t about replacing people.
 It’s about building properly.

If you lead an estate agency, this will sharpen how you think.

Listen now.

Link to AI Summit

Leading Estate Agents of the World – Founding Members Launch

We’ll soon be introducing the first founding members of the network.
If you'd like to be considered for the launch event, register here

https://estateagencyx.co.uk/leadingestateagentsoftheworld

This episode is sponsored by Iceberg Digital, the AI Operating System for Estate Agents. They replace outdated CRMs, disconnected marketing tools, and manual prospecting with one intelligent, AI-driven ecosystem, built to increase revenue per employee and future-proof your agency. https://iceberg-digital.co.uk/

Transcript

Setting The Stage After The Summit

Speaker 0:00

So on this episode of Sentix, I sit down with Mark and we cover the post-AI Summit event. Recently has been an hour and a half video launched about it, and we condense a little bit into about what it's about in this episode. So we cover Azair's Brain, a load of other AI stuff, how it's going to impact your business. So if you're interested to know more, have a listen and watch for this episode. Estate Agency, the UK's number one Estate Agency podcast discussing the future of a state entity, entrepreneurship and business. Host Mark Burgess and Rob Brady. So Mark, um, I wanted to get you back on outside normal normal um episodes to talk about now the AI summit's gone. There's an hour and a half video out there.

Speaker 3 0:47

It's on our website.

Speaker 0:48

Yeah, and obviously a lot of people watched it and said, oh my god, what's going on? But obviously, if you are a listener of the of the um podcast, I just almost want to maybe condense it now, the cat's out of the bag, into basically like why, what we're doing, the direction, Fraser Estates, and in that or paper thing, fucking hell, Mark State Open Estate Agency. Fraser Estates, and just like maybe to get someone to maybe think about if they are just running a traditional agency or moved into some sort of AI stuff, the problem coming down the line, that might might get them to think actually, I might want to watch that hour and a half video.

Speaker 2 1:25

Yeah.

Speaker 1:26

Okay.

Speaker 1 1:27

So summit's now gone.

Speaker 1:31

Um I remember having I had someone come out of that room and they said they came last they came last minute and they said, I'm so glad that I've come to this because my vision for the future is to have a business that I turn over half a million pounds a year as a self-employed estate agent, but not have to have the manpower and the admin behind all of it. And this feels like it's a thing that is is looking like could be the resolution towards solving it. Yeah. Obviously, that is a big parry goal to do that half a million pound tenant with one person. Um so right, where do we start with this one? Well, yeah, go on. Like, what was what was the general feedback you got from from what most people have said?

The Capacity Ceiling In Estate Agency

Revenue Per Employee Reality Check

Speaker 3 2:16

Similar to what you what that guy said to you, like, I'm changing all of my plans. Um my my my recruiting plans, my um the structural plans of my business. I've had a few agents reach out and ask if they could have conversations about what they are now planning to see if it aligns with like, you know, all the way I think it's gonna go. But I think like for people that didn't haven't watched that video or, you know, are thinking like, get to the point what you're talking about. Um I guess what I spoke about at the summit was that estate agency in its current form has reached capacity. Uh it's actually exceeded capacity. Um and everyone that has ever worked in a state agency, in a busier state agency, could can relate with that. Um, you know, there's too many things to be done in the day. It would be easy for somebody to always step in at the end and point out all the things that you'd missed. Whether that was in sales progression, or whether it was in not following up with all the leads, or whether it was not following up with all the viewings, or staying in touch with sellers. Like, there's always going to be some stuff whereby it's like, what is going on? Why are you not doing all of this? Because capacity's been exceeded. And uh now I broke down why that is in the summit um as things have evolved over the years, back from all the way back, you know, in like, you know, black and white days when I was an agent and you just you had an applicant box and people walked in and registered face to face with you or over the phone, and you either kept the applicant card or you tore it up and put it in the bin immediately. To keep your capacity possible. Like, you know, whether it was right or wrong to do it is a is another matter, but like that's what happened. You didn't have an over you didn't have slowly bigger and bigger applicant boxes. Yeah, I'm gonna need a second one and a third one. You had one applicant box and you were taught that there was a manageable amount to have in it. And so it was your job to cleanse it. Um and then uh, you know, as the CRMs come along and portals and all of these things that have allowed more leads, more people to be in your database, more people to receive property matches without having to put details in an envelope, all of these things, uh mobile phones have allowed constant communication, like it's just it's made it you work 24-7 basically, you're always available, and still you can't get all the work done. So the capacity's been ex exceeded of what's possible. Because Estate Agency is a manpower-based business. So there's only so many people you can afford to employ based on the numbers. And what's really interesting, actually, um if you don't mind me carrying on with that point, is after the summit, Connells released their uh financial data. So I was saying it's impossible to scale an estate agency up and have a high revenue per employee. So revenue per employee is your turnover divided by how many full-time staff you've got. If it's not high enough, you don't make any you don't make enough profit per person and you just run around doing lots of effort. It's like a good measure of how easy it is for your company to turn effort into profit. So then after the summit had gone come and gone, Connells released their financial data. Uh and they uh are up on everything. Turnover's up to 1.16 billion, and profit is up to about 73 million. It's like, whoa, like that is mad. Until you go and look at Connells employ 14,000 people. So when you divide 73 million profit by 14,000 people, for all the effort that each one of those people have to put in, and everyone listening to this is probably familiar with what sort of effort you have to put in to work full-time in a state agency, all the viewings, all the valuations. Remember that profit's including all of their mortgage money that they made, all of the everything, all of that effort, all the viewings they went on, all the valuations they did, all the missed appointments, all the late nights, every person in the company over the whole year made five grand. Right? And if so, if the biggest corporate scalable business cannot scale that model to make more profit, why are you opening another fucking branch? Right? And you left corporate because you got fed up a corporate and made a mini corporate without the budget of a corporate. You're not going to succeed at this. It's not going to work. And that's what a state agency's problem really is. We're we're part of the problem. You know, all these companies come along, you've got new technology, this will make your life easier, this will make your life easier. But it it had they haven't they haven't addressed the capacity problem. There's already, I'm already doing too much. So whilst your piece of technology sounds good, it requires me to do something more than what I'm already doing.

Speaker 7:44

And I don't have time to do what I'm already doing. Yeah, it's quite interesting actually, because when you think about like my role, even from you know, when we first started, just from the marketing side, like from a coaching perspective, I'm not coaching on how to use the tools. It's more of the mindset shift to what other things they should be thinking about doing in their business that they might have not ever thought about doing before because it just wasn't available to them in a state agency.

Speaker 3 8:12

That's right. And then they're pre-programmed to just carry on doing the same things. So at the summit I was talking about iceberg is not a CRM. Yes, life cycle replaces the CRM, but Iceberg Digital is an AI operating system for a state agent, not a CRM.

CRM Versus An AI Operating System

Speaker 1 8:30

And the difference in a nutshell is that a CRM tells you what happened, and an AI operating system tells you what to do next.

Speaker 3 8:45

So I think at the summit I used the analogy of your phone. Your phone doesn't work because you've got loads of apps on it. It works because there's an operating system underneath it that prioritizes the apps. So when you're listening to music and the phone rings, it knows to turn off the music because the phone, the phone call is more important at that point. When the phone call finishes, the music resumes. You don't play with the operating system, but it makes the whole thing work. So our AI operating system covers prospecting, CRM, marketing compliance, websites, all of this stuff. Because all of that stuff individually, yeah, it's all great, but it you've still got the capacity problem. So underneath it, you have an AI operating system that allows the human to be presented with the right things at the right time. This is a risk. This is a risk for you. You need to have a look at this. This thing's happening in sales progression. A phone call just come in in your uh other branch where the person was irate. Like, this might need to get put in front of the boss. Like, because we're tracking the call and we can see that's happening. We're tracking the sales progression, and we can see from the notes. We're we're tracking interaction on the website. This person you did evaluation for six months ago has just been on the website reading what to do to get your house uh ready for sale. So you might make some money from this thing. Whereas these four things over here, standard uh callbacks that you've just put in the diary, can probably wait. You know? So that's really if that if that if that if if you listen to that and think, huh, that's interesting, then it's worth watching the one and a half one and a half hour video on the website because it will blow your mind about how does that work. But I guess, you know, in a nutshell, that's what I was talking about and why people after the summit were saying what they said to you and why people have been saying to me, like, okay, this is changing my plans for how I'm gonna grow my estate agency, because like I say, you know, Connells Connells can't do it, and they're turning over 1.6 billion.

Speaker 10:51

So one of the things that uh came from the summit um was about the Azair brain. I sort of wanted to pick pick your brains on. Yeah. Pick your brain on the back of it.

Speaker 3 11:42

My brain or Azair's brain.

Speaker 11:43

Um and I was like, I obviously when I first saw, I thought, fucking hell, this is so cool. And obviously, people have since then the conversations that you've had, how do I how do I prep for this? How do I prep for the brain? Yeah. Right. So anyone listening out there thinks, what are we talking about? So uh Azaire's brain. Uh if you see any references, obviously by all means go and watch the video. But like in a nutshell, what have we now uh brought in or Yeah, how does it work? How does it work?

Prioritization Engine Across The Ecosystem

Speaker 3 12:14

Okay, so Azaire is our centralized uh operating AI inside uh the iceberg system. So it covers uh as I said before, it covers the prospecting, the websites, the CRM, the uh compliance, it it looks across everything. Um and because it does that, I obviously has the context of everything. It knows who's been on what viewings and what feedback they left and who's been on the website and who's done their AML checks and their ID checks, and it knows all of that stuff. Um and that's that's great. It does it does its own, it it can it we can do things because of that. However, like what most people think about when they think about AI is they think about something like ChatGPT. And lots of people are familiar with going to use it, and ChatGPT gives you like reasonably generic answers to things because all that the AI is really doing is take is understands the words that you've written, it's run a search on the internet for the answer, and it's given you the answer based on what it found on the internet. Um if you gave the AI a bit more context, spent a bit more time telling it what you was really trying to find out, it'd probably give you a slightly better answer. Uh some a lot of people have experienced that. Um so for those that haven't, just as an example, um I don't know, I use him as an example a lot, so let's carry on with it. My son Fraser, uh, he's uh he does concept art. If he goes to ChatGPT and says, uh, I've got a project based around football for concept art, what can I do? It will spit out some generic bullshit for him. If he says, um, I want you to uh act as though you are a uh creative director for Marvel that's worked there for the last 30 years, um, and you've come and seen concept artists, uh you've seen concept artists come and go, um, and I need you to specifically break down what would make a fantastic uh portfolio for you based around the idea of football. He'll get a better fucking answer. There's just no doubt about it, right? So what is Uzaire's brain? Jose's brain is something that you've been working on with agents manually for the past 10 years.

Speaker 2 14:40

Yeah.

Introducing Azair’s Brain

Speaker 3 14:40

Right? It's you should think about this in your company. So inside Uzaire, you can click on it and there's actually a picture of a brain, uh, uh, you know, a pulsating brain that's empty of information. And so when you use Azair, it will come up with its own uh opinions about stuff. If you say, I don't know, is my conversion rate good or analyze the phone calls that are coming into my office, it would it will do that based on what we've taught it. But you could go to a section of Azair's brain that is specifically one of its cortexes that is specifically being made for the information you want to teach it about how it should analyze the phone calls that come into your office. And you go in there and you simply write out the information around that specific subject. You don't get dragged off onto other subjects about, and also don't forget that our tone of voice is this. Now there's another section of the brain for tone of voice. And if you're not quite sure how to do it, you can click for a to coach you through that section. Just like you would have done manually to somebody. So you go, uh, right, okay, well, when phone calls come into our office, I would like you to analyse whether there you think that there are any missed any opportunities that have been missed. Also, we have a specific script that we like to try to loosely stick to in our company. Uh here it is. So can you write rate the phone calls against this script? And can you create three actionable bullet points for the person after the call? Bang, you've just taught Azair's part of the brain what you want when phone calls come into the office, and it'll be different to the estate agent next door. And the same thing for when you're creating a blog for me, and the same thing for when you're uh, I don't know, doing vendor vendor care feedback, or the same thing for when you're writing property descriptions. There are about 80 different uh cortexes in that brain that you may or may not know the answer to, and Osaire could coach you through them. What do you want to get found for in SEO? What do you want to get found for in large language models, right? You know, all of that sort of stuff. So that's how the brain of Ozer works, which I think was your first question. Uh I think I can't remember what the second question was. I think he was moving towards um, you know, how does how does how does someone then use that?

Speaker 17:08

Or well, I uh changing that. Your response to what you talked about, Chat GBT, is is a great example of that. You know, the uh can you do it for this? Most people would just go, no, can you do it better? Yeah, I don't like the response. Can you do it better? And then it goes rubbish. Yeah, then it goes, well, well, how do you want to do it better? And then so that's the that's the difference. Because I I was at um I only spent to someone the other day and we'll we'll I've you know I've got it's like custom GPT I'd made a while ago for just c some of our clients, but just business stuff, yeah.

Speaker 3 17:43

I remembered your question, but go on.

Speaker 17:45

And uh and and I spoke to an agent because they were struggling around some of the core value stuff, and I he said, I said, use this. And he said, No, no, I've got my Chat GBT, it knows me really well.

Speaker 2 17:55

Yeah.

Speaker 17:56

And then he he went to it and he was like, actually, this is really good. And that's the difference in the fact of like particular sections in the Azure brain, it's is particularly designed to pull that in. It doesn't just get lost in this whole yeah, uh, you know, like ChatGBT where it gets confused randomly.

Speaker 3 18:14

So for large language models, they seem great, but if you give them lots of if you give them lots of chaos data, they just amplify the chaos. You know, if you think about a good example would be like um someone might say, uh, I've got all of that information in my CRM. But what generally happens in an estate agent CRM traditionally is that everything gets left in the notes field. Everything. So you'd have to give the large language model or the uh AI for whatever you want to call it, access to the notes. And then you'd have to ask it out of all of the notes across the whole system, can you give me some idea about this to do with viewing feedback? It's going to fuck it up.

Speaker 18:59

Yeah, and especially like, you know, um really interesting what you've said on that is whenever I've spoken to clients uh and we've done maybe some particular audiences and the names of the audiences, one has uh uh not on market NOM, one has like another version, another has another version. So like even in the notes, the abbreviation in the notes, it's just gonna be like Exactly. The fuck does this work?

Training Cortexes With Your Rules

Speaker 3 19:22

Whereas like our system was built for this like nearly a decade ago. I won't bore people with the the intrinsics of it, but it's to do with the way the data's structured. We'd never built a CRM, we built a big data system. It just makes sense to people now because of AI. So your question that I've remembered was how do people prep for the brain? Uh so now that I've explained the brain, the prepping for the brain is actually no different to what I would have said to somebody before AI in terms of how do I make my business better, which is you have to find uh either mentors or books or some form of self-education around how all the elements of your business work. Um, you know, you got you run a course around it on a 12-month course for estate agency on Estate Agency X. There are other methods out there, but when an estate agent generally leaves corporate estate agency and opens their own estate agency, they run their business pretty much based on the numbers on a whiteboard. And that's quite good in many regards, but what they only realize maybe five or ten years after being in business, some people still haven't realized it, is that's just the sales department of a business. Like when you worked in a state agency, you just worked in you didn't work in HR, you didn't work in customer experience, you didn't work in, you know, finance, operations, you didn't work in any of those, you just worked in the sales department. And now you've made a company that just has a sales department. And they're the numbers you track, and that's it. That's why your company doesn't run without you, because all you have is a sales department and you're head of it. Right? So you have to go and figure out, oh, all right, okay, that makes sense. So how does a company work? And you can't figure it out for yourself, it's just a lot faster. Like I figured it out because I had mentors that taught me, and it was like, oh fuck, that's a fast way of doing it when someone just tells you. Same with the agents that you teach on the accelerator program. Like, you bring in an expert on how brand works, and they tell you it, not in a state agency, but how it works for the fucking Bank of New York. Here you go. This is how it works, and it clicks. Because, like, you know, people that have started their own business, generally that sort of stuff clicks for them. It's just no one told them. That's how brand works, and here's how you implement it. And that's how marketing works, and here's how you implement it, and this is how customer journeys work, and this is how you implement it, and this is how this works, and this is how this works. You figure all that stuff out, regardless of the Uzer brain, you need to figure all that stuff out for your company. And when you figured it all out for your company, then training in the Uzer brain becomes becomes fucking simple. What will happen for a state agent is they'll a lot of them will have to do it in reverse. They'll go to the Uzer brain and they'll go, I don't even fucking know where to start with this. What does this question even mean? And yeah, Ozaire will coach him through it, maybe, but like either. Way you gotta you gotta have that stuff. If you're you're asking how do you I prep for the Azure brain? You start figuring out what the fucking point you're doing.

Speaker 22:49

We only experienced it um the beginning of this month, you know, and the first workshop that we had. You know, everyone sat down there on your accelerator programme, yeah. And and you know, the the simple questions, you know, not simp they're simple in what's your core values, what's your one-year, three year, ten-year plan. Yeah. But the silence in the room of people trying to really understand that. Well, I think like in that room, like people have an immediate answer.

Avoiding AI Sprawl And Fatigue

Speaker 3 23:18

Yeah. Because, you know, you're you you're an entrepreneur, you figure shit out, and even if you didn't know before you came in the room, like you don't want to look silly. But a lot of people had it figured out. Yep, these are our core values, this is everything. But once it gets explained to you by an expert who has perhaps done something like the person that was explaining to them has built a business and sold it for multimillions of pounds, and then when they explain how that works, people are suddenly a bit more like, ah, okay, I need to rethink this. I mean, I just had some random shit written down. But if you're telling me it works like that, yeah, mine don't work like that. But that and that's the that's the quick learning bit you can get if you learn from somebody. Or or just read a load of books and I don't know, study it another way, but somehow we have to educate ourselves because when I went into first when I first opened a business, I had no knowledge of that. How would I have any knowledge of that? Like I just I'd worked somewhere and I felt I could do it better myself. So I opened a company and then I just tried to make some money. I mean, I did what exactly what I was talking about. I just had a sales department. Only 10 years, probably after having businesses, did I stumble into having mentors whereby it was like, fuck, why don't I know this shit that you're telling me? But they would have been the same, I guess, those people, like, you know.

Speaker 24:41

Well, you think about like even the one uh Adrian that we had on the first on the first workshop, and he talked about like the crash slept under his office desk, thought we had a business, slept under his office desk, and then picked up a book and was thinking, like, fucking hell, is this how it should be done? Yeah. And the turnaround for years later sell it for multi-millions of pounds.

Speaker 3 25:02

Absolutely. So so training the AI brain isn't as complicated as people think. It's no different to before AI. It's just the same as me coming along and really grilling you on how does your company work. And don't tell me generic table stake shit like we do professional photography and we'd like to give a personal service, and we have a we have a great blend of traditional values and technology. Like innovation of which you couldn't be talking any more shit to me if you tried. Like tell me something meaningful, yeah, and then we can grow it from that. And if you figure all that out, I promise you, AI or no AI, your business will be a million times better. Now, if we figured it out, we can lay our AI on top to give your AI a bit of personality. I'm not asking you to replace the humans in your team like with the critical human jobs. I'm saying, like, let's give the AI a bit of context here. This is what we believe as a company, and this is all the data we've got. So you could probably help me with a lot of mundane tasks. But the real high-value tasks, I've I've now freed up the humans' time to do.

Speaker 26:10

So um one of the things you talked about on that summit is about like maybe AI fatigue in the form of multiple systems. So, like someone's out there now thinking, well, I'm I'm involved in AI, pretty much got a good understanding of it. But I've got AI that does phone recordings that pulls it into my CRM. Well, I've got an AI thing that does like a chatbot that goes back out to people who do instant valuations, and I've got an AI out of office random thing that does some stuff and plates it. I've I can I've got my training my own brain to effectively it's okay. So, like, where do you see the the robot uh the blockage that might happen down the line on that on that front?

Speaker 3 26:55

Yeah, so companies outside of our industry that are already miles ahead on this are already have already experienced massive problems with this. Because what happens is you start off with generic AI, and then you don't like the fact it's generic. So you start doing a bit of training. You start like I want it to sound complicated, it's not hard to train an AI. You literally you upload a document saying what the rules are. Um so you start doing that. And the first document you upload is you've tried to sort of you've tried to do it as quickly as possible because you ain't got time to fuck around. And so you've sort of not really explained everything properly, and you've uploaded this document. Um and you get better results.

Speaker 27:37

Sounds sounds like some of our clients when we originally did Azair.

Centralized Brain Beats Point Solutions

Speaker 3 27:40

Right. Yeah. So and you start getting better results, and you're like, this is pretty good. And then you get some and then you start getting some shit results over something. And you're like, maybe I wonder if that's because of the document I uploaded. Maybe if I give it another document that that's also how I don't know, I'll give them I'll give it our official brand guidelines document. I'll upload that. And it, yeah, okay, that's working a bit better now. And slowly, slowly, maybe you upload some more documents. Um and then after a while, you've got maybe, I don't know, let's just say 10, 15 different documents that you've uploaded in there. Or in terms of what I was saying about the Uzair brain, you've trained 15 different cortexes, let's look at it that way. And then along comes somebody who goes, I've got an AI that will uh qualify your leads. So you're like, wow, that'd be that'd brilliant. Let's get that in as well. Um, okay, but what are you gonna do? You're gonna upload your 15 documents to it. And how do you know which of those 15 documents are causing you a bit of a problem with the old one? Like, do you need all 15? Or is it just five of them that you need? And so you sort of start afresh with the new one, and maybe you upload 10 of those that you think are good for this leads thing, and maybe a couple of other things that are specifically about leads. So now you've got two AIs, right? But they've both been trained differently. Um and now let's say time goes on and you continue doing that with like six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, fifty different other AI tools. Now, how often is it in your company that you have one of those meetings whereby we decide something needs to change? Right? Pretty regularly for most people. So some change does happen. We are no longer gonna charge any less than this much money. Fucking hell, how are you gonna train all the AIs? Are you gonna go around all 50 of them and upload a new document? And then where are you gonna find in the old documents that you've referenced this thing that you no longer do anymore?

Speaker 2 29:33

Yeah.

Speaker 3 29:34

It's just it, it's it's not even this could happen. It's happening, it's happening regularly to companies that are right at the forefront of trying out AI. And that's why you need a centralized brain that sits in a centralized ecosystem. And there isn't anybody doing it. Like we are actually at the forefront globally of this, which might sound crazy for a state agency because it's not normally at the forefront of things, but we are at the forefront of this globally. There is no company anywhere that I can find on the planet that runs a centralized ecosystem like we have been building for the last nine years that has a centralized AI brain system so that when you tell it something, it works across the entire ecosystem. You do make that change, you go to the one part of the cortex that's about your fees, you make the change in there, and it happens across the entire ecosystem. So it's maybe hard for some people to get their head around because it's so futuristic, if you like, but the concept's not that hard to imagine, like this is the way it's gonna go.

Building A Real Company, Not Just Sales

Speaker 30:45

Is there there is an element of that as well, with depending on the supplier that you choose in those forms of different tools, maybe it's the baseline of like the language that they've built out for that particular is that is that does that affect it as well?

Speaker 3 31:00

Yeah.

Speaker 31:00

And like the rules around how that is done, like the league qualification, how that lead qualification is done.

Speaker 3 31:06

Exactly. I I guess in simple terms, just something that someone could relate with would be think of an address format.

Speaker 31:12

Yeah.

Speaker 3 31:14

Uh what is the correct address format? Is it address one, address two, address three, town, county, country? Yes.

unknown 31:22

Right.

Speaker 3 31:23

I just sent a lot of passwords yesterday. Fuck me, uh, is it is it is it uh house number, a house name, this, this you know, what I'm trying to say is like we're all familiar with like you could get you get multiple different address types, right? Now, if you're building a software, you choose one of them. And then someone else builds a software and they choose a different one. Neither's right or wrong, but they start to become incompatible at that point. So AI is no different. I have to decide what is the purpose of this AI and how I'm going to train it in terms of how the world works and how this job should be done. And I decide that as a company, and then you can have some influence over it with your training. And then another company comes along, like you say, they've they've they've got some different rules for their base model. And and so, yeah, it just becomes more and more uh it's it's just it's just what will happen is those companies will go so deep with into a hole with AI that they will eventually go, fuck all this, this doesn't work, I'm getting rid of all of it. Meanwhile, the other agents that have an AI operating system that haven't got caught up on the shiny new tools and have gone for more revenue generating specifics will be accelerating at such a pace, the other people, they're just not going to be able to catch them up. Just like when the internet first came along.

Speaker 33:24

That uh revenue revenue generating per employee is such a I'm just thinking about like I was back in agency in some of those meetings you said, like those where we go in, the the conflict meetings, the friction meetings of what needs to change. It'd be a different conversation around the strategy going forward in how you, you know, invest in systems like an A operating system or how you do stuff. If that was one of the conversations that was happening at the forefront of it. Because then you'd be making your decisions, a lot of your decisions based around that. Because like you said there, like Connells, if you you know, if you're five grand per employee per year, even just you know, down that in down down to a month, it's like 400 pounds a month, which is fucking ridiculous. For all that effort. For the effort. All that effort. Um, and so I've I've we've I've experienced it even before we've just even the baseline stuff of what we've done, when people start to think strategically different about how they operate their business than how they operate just expanding beyond what they know is a state entity.

Speaker 3 34:32

It probably comes back to what I was saying there about whether you're running a sales department or a lettings department, let's call it. You're running a s a sales department or lettings department of a business, whether you're running a company. Because I find a lot of the conversations, like you've just said, there can be answered in that by with that analogy because people are like, um, I don't know, let's just say, uh. Yeah, but I I want to give, I want to follow up on my viewing feedback manually. You're not getting it, Mark. Like, that's what we want to do as a company. We want that human service. And I'm going, well, that's fine, you do that. What I'm saying is if you're trying to build a business, it's not viable.

Shifting Teams To Revenue Tasks

Speaker 35:15

Yeah. Because you like you sacrifice It was only like you're sacrificing the time, because it you only got me thinking about, like, you know, when I had the property manager with the department and we had to expend, expand before on the next portfolio, where's the where's the stress that happened in? If I had just thought about that from a simple calculation, how many people are in that department, the money we turn over, um, then it might be then thinking, like, if we bring that person on, I know then per property manager or per team, how much we're earning, how much money we're generating per thing. And and it might, it would have probably I would have probably thought about it strategically around investing in different maybe technology. Because if I thought about I don't invest in another employee that saves X amount of thousands a year, but then I've like half the money of that I can avoid putting technology that does several hours of that workflow, which then takes it away from all of the people, yeah, then then it's it's a it's a completely different scalable because you're not just you're not just employing for the person's role, you might be in embedding in technology into the business that influences the revenue employee per employee as a general as you scale.

Speaker 3 36:26

You're not it's not supposed to like a lot of people go, oh, you know, you just take away the human element and all that sort of stuff and redundancies and all. It's not supposed to reduce your headcount per se. It's supposed to move those people to revenue generating tasks away from non-revenue generating tasks. You know, I had an agent the other day that sent me this new blueprint for the way they want to work, and like I had to clarify that with them. Like, you know, we're not supposed to get down to there's just two people working here.

Speaker 2 36:54

Yeah.

Speaker 3 36:54

How many people have you got working now and what are they all doing?

Speaker 2 36:57

Yeah.

Speaker 3 36:58

Right. If they weren't doing that, and I could put them onto revenue generating tasks where they were actually generating more listings because they were being given the perfect person to have a human conversation with rather than they spend all day leaving voicemails for people.

Speaker 37:15

Well, even just thinking about from a valuation perspective, like you sometimes can get valuation fatigue. But if you've got an ecosystem working around all of that, um, sending the stuff before, working out the comparables, all the admin crap you have to do. And you just and you're walking into those meetings, they already know about your brand because of how the ecosystem is working, how your marketing message is working, how they're being pulled in, you haven't got to explain that. And the conversations that you're having become more interesting, more relevant, more just human-to-human contact rather than having to try and cram all of that stuff into that one hour, and then and then you're coming out of that, and then you have to do the follow-up process with all of it.

Culture, Fear, And Leading Through Change

Speaker 3 37:57

Well, I showed an agent uh like how we could free up loads of the team's time by uh automatically qualifying Paul Lead, for instance, and automatically chasing viewing feedback. Nothing revolutionary, pretty straightforward. Um and because they had they had said that a lot of time gets spent there. When you take into account all the missed phone calls, the telephone tennis, all of that sort of stuff, you know, probably talking 10, maybe even 15 minutes to qualify a lead on average, and then the same for the viewing feedback, right? So just that, based on how many leads they get and how many view-ins they do, was going to save all of this time. And as you then show them that like with that time, if I gave you this tool over here that told you exactly the right people to speak to in your database to get listings, can you see how that would work for you? Yeah, I can see how that would work, right. But what eventually came out of that conversation, in fact, like after a few days, was they said, um Yeah, just feel like, you know, chasing the viewing feedback and uh the qualifying the portal leads would be a bit uh impersonal.

Speaker 1 39:11

So you know, probably not gonna do that. And it's like you're just gonna go out of business.

Speaker 3 39:21

I what can you not see here? There's nothing personal about leaving voicemails for people that don't want to fucking speak to you. Like you're still going to speak to the people that uh have answered and are are qualified. The people that left viewing feedback, you're still gonna speak to the ones that you didn't get to speak to, you're basically saying, I want to carry on trying to speak to people that I never get through to.

Speaker 1 39:52

I've got a question that just come off the back of that.

Speaker 39:55

So during the accelerator program, and and you know, you've done you've probably had hundreds of conversations with agents, uh business owners out there. Do you find that like the problem that sometimes lies with that is in uh fear, in the fact of like, you know, you you you as the you as the leader going forward, you you know, we know you know your one year, three-year, and the ten-year plan going forward. We have rocks, we have everything planned around that. Then you know the strategic direction, you communicate that with everyone, everyone knows where they're going with everything like that. But so if you're making a decision, you're basically making the decision on the plan going forward. And you wouldn't go to everyone in the whole company every time you want to make a decision because everyone would like think about um the AI and AI and support that we've got, do that frontline thing. Imagine if you said to the team in support, we're gonna bring this in, it's gonna cut hard this. People often think, Oh, fucking wild, what have I got to do? So, do you find that maybe this the issue is where the business owners don't necessarily have maybe a plan going forward about why am I investing in this technology? Because where we're going, and then almost going back to maybe the teams. Isn't it? And it's almost like, do you know what? You know what that jobs you're gonna do? Yeah, we're gonna have a computer take over it, and they're all thinking.

Speaker 3 41:10

Yeah, I had I I had a conversation with an agent recently about this. He said he came to the summit, uh, he was blown away, he went back, he told his team, and they were all like I know who I know who. Yeah, I know exactly. They were all glum. They all looked at him as if to say, like, but we don't want AI to qualify at portal leads. Like, that's our job. We we want to like, you know, what will happen to our commission for getting mortgage leads, and what will happen to this and what will happen to that? And he was like, you know, like it really pissed me off. Um, because they just sort of brought it all down. What what you know, what can I say to them? And I was saying to him, like, you say you say to them This isn't a preconceived thing, by the way.

Speaker 1 41:53

This isn't like this is how you sell it to them, this is reality. You say to them um the role of a person having to leave 25 voicemails in order to get through to one person is gone.

Young Talent, New Skills, New Roles

Speaker 3 42:15

Whether it's gone in your company or not yet, like I can tell you categorically that role's gone. Right? So uh if you're banking on being employed for the foreseeable future doing that job, it doesn't matter if it's at my company or someone else's, uh your prospects are not great. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna present you with just the people that do want to talk to you about a mortgage, and you're gonna earn more commission because you're just gonna speak to those people and there's never gonna be a missed opportunity ever. And together we're gonna figure it all out, and we're gonna figure out the new roles, and you're gonna have a more secure job than what you had before. However, if you don't want to do that, because we've all got to figure it out together, right? This is a whole new world we're going into. If you do not want to do that, then that's all right too. Just go and work somewhere else. Because I want I've worked too hard on my company over the last whatever many years it is to watch it fall to pieces in front of my face. So rather than letting somebody else build the company that destroys my company, I'm going to convert my company into the one that continues to thrive. And this is how it's going to fucking work. So I don't give a fuck that, like, you know, you think your job is to leave voicemails to people. What I'm telling you is that this company isn't doing that anymore.

Speaker 43:46

Is it interesting? I know, but we're we're we're cut for time on this one. We could probably talk another hour and a half on this. Oh, we can do a part two or whatever. I interviewed I uh on the one of the podcasts we interviewed today was with Cindy, and she was saying about um apprentices that are. Cindy from Avocado, right?

unknown 44:01

Yeah.

Speaker 44:02

She was talking about apprentices that are coming through, and she said, We've got eight apprentices in the room, and we asked some skill set, and we had to narrow it down to two because that was the only thing. And she said, What blew me away was when you talk to them, they're like, I'm a TikTok creator, I do a built a bit of a couple of websites, I'm gonna do this videography for this wedding shoot. And these are she said, these are like 18-year-old kids, uh, 18 to 22 bracket. And she said, like, my skill set when I was in that age to where they are at now is a whole different level. And she I said, like, imagine if those kids who are 18 years old, yeah, imagine they had all that, they've built that on themselves, they've learned that themselves, and then you go into a traditional aestancy model that basically says, I know you I know you're really good at all of that, but you can do all that little fun stuff when you're at home. You can phone these people, just phone these 25 people. I'm not getting through 21. You're gonna control it. And then you're then you're then you start to wonder why maybe you're not recruiting the talent. Yeah. Because if you had like an AR operating system that was working all of that, imagine if you had uh five, six TikTok influencers built their own communities, selling the houses, like working under your brand, like but like it's it's gonna out smash anyone else out there.

Final Takeaways And Where To Watch

Speaker 3 45:16

Yeah, I know we've got to wrap it up, but it it's scary for people, but it's really not that scary. Bring it all the way back down. To let's figure out what the company looks like. Rob can help you do that. We can help you do that. We have programs for it. Just figure that out. Everything else starts to slot into place. The technology, it sounds scary. The AI sounds scary. All of that, the brain, all of that. It's not that scary. Let's just figure out what the company looks like. Not the sales department, not how do we get more listings? That's the job you used to do for a corporate. How do you run a company?

Speaker 45:52

Let's figure that out. And that's that one point I'll ask before we wrap up. The people that have gone through the programs, so accelerate programs, the conversations you've had, I've had with those people. They're like, right, how do I strategically look where compared to other people who are like, fucking hell, this brain's coming. I don't really know where to go with it. And yes, obviously, like that will come naturally to them as they it can be coached. But just from uh mode one and mode two thinking, people are just thinking in a whole different way based on you know that that first question, like, figure out how you operate your business. Yeah.

Speaker 3 46:28

Well, look, anyone that's listening that hasn't seen the AI Summit, find yourself a bit of time uh to watch it because we didn't really cover much about the functions and stuff, but it'll all make sense if you've heard this first and then watch that, like you know, in the show notes. You should be completely in yeah, in the show notes or literally it's just just go on the IASBerg website, you can't really miss it. Cool. Right, thanks for joining my cheers. Cool. Thanks for listening to this Estate Agency X podcast. Can you make sure that you're actually subscribed to this podcast channel if you liked the content? Uh, it helps us massively to get better guests, and it just helps us generally. So you might think you're subscribed, but just have a double check, whatever your um podcast platform of preference is, that you're actually subscribed, and then that way we can continue to grow the channel and get better and better guests for you.