How a Country Boy, a Title Queen, and a Broken Website Built a Real Estate Empire in 39 States

Glenn S. Phillips didn’t set out to lead one of America’s fastest-growing niche brokerages. But when a broken tech company with two fatal flaws and zero capital showed up on his doorstep, he and his wife Doris didn’t just fix it…

They reimagined real estate from the ground up.

In this jaw-dropping episode of the R.E.A.L. Real Estate Agent Life Podcast, Glenn joins Shane and Duane for a no-BS, front-row seat into what it really takes to build something timeless in a world obsessed with shortcuts.

From his small-town roots in Bear Creek, Alabama, to running a tech-enabled brokerage that thrives in 39 states, Glenn walks us through:

• Why “high tech with warm touch” is more powerful than AI
• How to build a pipeline of business that’s immune to disruption
• Why fewer agents with unfair advantages win in the long run
• The Circle of Love philosophy behind their business—and their lives
• And why every business ends in an exit—so plan accordingly

Whether you’re a rookie, a rainmaker, or a rain-soaked broker… this episode will make you stop, think, and rethink everything you know about growth, recruiting, and doing the real estate business differently.

“Make the main thing the main thing.” — Glenn S. Phillips

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Transcript

Duane Murphy (00:30)
3, 2, 1 and today is another episode of real estate agent life. So I'm Duane Murphy peace and that is Shane Kelly my co-partner in crime and Everything else he's like frozen today

Shane Kilby (00:39)
You

We're playing his frozen games But so so the Wayne can't spit it out. He's he's kind of fatigued He's been doing a lot of different jobs today including being late for this podcast episode our guest speaker here could verify that today our guest speaker Glenn Phillips from Birmingham is known for his background in technology but what we want to dive into is the his background as the CEO of Lake homes realty

Duane Murphy (00:48)
You

Well,

Shane Kilby (01:14)
As also how he leads one of the fastest growing real estate firms in the United States that specialized in Lake Beach and mountain properties across 39 different states He's a he is the guy that where tech meets real estate as a former software entrepreneur with a background in computer engineering Now blending tech and real estate at a high level He is also a nationally recognized leader featured in Wall Street Journal US News and World Report

Inc 5000 for company growth and innovation Power couple in real estate is also what he and his very beautiful wife Doris are known for as she serves as the company coo Together they built both a business and a mission-driven life because Doris as I Recently found out that it wasn't Glenn Doris. I think Doris and Glenn probably both power this charity

Doris is the founder of the Circle of Love Foundation that provides school supplies and holiday gifts to kids in need and in their way of giving back, it is at the core of their mission from head to toe. Mr. Glenn, how are you?

Glenn S. Phillips (02:27)
I'm good, Shane, Dwayne, glad to be here.

Shane Kilby (02:30)
We had the fortune opportunity to meet a few weeks ago at an event. And I think I even asked you, I was like, how did you end up at this event? And I guess I'm blessed that you didn't look at me and go, how'd you end up at this event? Because I guess that would have been just a fair assumption or question. But the question was basically because I'd

was eavesdropping on part of your conversation there and interested and intrigued. And so that was really my curiosity is, you know, being that KFR, John Ceplak, know, front center like, you know, accountability, ownership, growth and development, you know, thought process, you know, and the fact that it was one of those small spaces. And here we are in Covington, Louisiana. But it was a very great

Duane Murphy (03:23)
small group.

Shane Kilby (03:25)
a very good conversation, very great beginning to a great relationship. so Glenn, just, you know, we had a little bit of conversation beforehand, before we started recording and just kind of talking about your background and such and how you got to this point in real estate. So do you mind sharing with the listeners, you know, exactly who you are and where you came from in this business?

Glenn S. Phillips (03:47)
Yeah, I'll do the super, well, I would say super fast. I'll do a quick version. Then you can ask for details. So yeah, I grew up in Northwest Alabama in Bear Creek, Alabama, a town that still didn't have a traffic light. Went to college, got a computer engineering degree in Auburn, did some consulting work with some firms and started a software company that build unusual tech for companies, which meant I got to learn how businesses worked. And I was trying to figure out where to take that business. Meanwhile, I had met Doris. She was in title insurance and closing world and together,

I'd encouraged her to start her own company and she had it was called Real Source. And then we were approached by some investors who'd said, we have this lake thing we want you to look at. And it was going to be essentially a Zillow model for Lake Real Estate and lakehomes.com, great website, but it had never launched. It was in debt. It didn't have any money. All the employees had left except one. He was about to leave. And we were asked what we thought about it. And we said, it's got two things that'll kill a business, fatal flaw, like a

know, shark tanks look like we're not sharks, but what a killer business. You got two fatal flaws because they didn't understand real estate. We said you could fix it by being a brokerage. They came back, said, we don't know where you're at in your lives and your relationships, but would you consider running this? And we spent 15 months trying to figure out why we shouldn't. And with no capital, except just one investor put in a little bit because they didn't have made a pay us to start with, but we took a stake in the business and through brute force and funding ourselves, we, grew a

Duane Murphy (04:57)
Thank

Glenn S. Phillips (05:13)
buy it at a time, Alabama, then Georgia, then South Carolina, and now we're licensed brokerage in 39 states for Lake Real Estate and a number of states for beach and mountain. And the mountain is actually the newest one. We haven't even really done our press piece on it yet.

Shane Kilby (05:27)
That is, I heard brute force. I'm like, man, that just sounds like a daily language around, know, entrepreneurial life, right? Brute force, problem solved. So, so the, so now you've got the lake homes and the beach and the mountain. Is that it? Is that, is that as far as, I mean, I say, that as far as the vision get lake? I'm like, what else are, what else are there? I mean, are you guys?

Glenn S. Phillips (05:56)
could tell you but

then I'd have to kill you.

Shane Kilby (05:58)
⁓ man, I'm not- stop telling me stuff like that

Duane Murphy (05:58)
I mean, ⁓ they already have lake

homes. mean, if they all sudden, right, there's creek homes and river homes and channel homes. mean, come on, never ending.

Shane Kilby (06:07)
Well, I'm

just kind of thinking, I mean, just out West, and we were still mountain terrain, but just curious. was that their vision or was that your vision?

Glenn S. Phillips (06:18)
Their vision was just like, in fact, we came back during those 15 months. we're working with the investors who mostly came out of the investment banking world, which if you don't know that world, it's not cash. It's mergers, acquisition, putting capital to work for growth. The company was already part of an investment fund that was going to take digital companies and do something. And now we've gone from being a digital company, a SaaS, or digital media company that makes money through just the website.

Shane Kilby (06:20)
Okay.

Glenn S. Phillips (06:47)
to being a tech enabled services company. So the brokerage is a big piece of it, but it's a lot more hands on the ground, more people, more money, slower growth. But I think it's also a bit more stable because technology can change and shift really fast. Something make you obsolete. So we spent 15 months trying to figure out two things. One of them was, should we be in the business? What if some big brand wanted to just come dump a hundred million dollars and crush us? we like your idea. They didn't know how big the market was.

and didn't matter and they don't think that way. They also are in most brokerages in the Hemi agents, can I get business? So we really said we have an opportunity that was even more fascinating me than the niche space where we've taken local and stretched nationally. That's where we get a lot of buyers is from across the country. Nobody had done that before. But I was also interested, we're gonna make a brokerage that would function now and yet survive and thrive through the changes. For instance, the end of brokerage cooperation sharing in the MLS was something we planned for

over a dozen years ago when we first started our modeling. We've even planned for what if the federal government forced real estate agents to be W-2 employees, which is not imminently coming. We figured that out. And the idea was, could we take fewer agents and put a win behind them and be successful? And the other thing I felt was, could we create more balance? If we all go down to one brokerage or another, if it's got good training, good resources, good tools, and we take advantage of it, that's good for us.

But I wanted to take something where we could use tech. So buyers of like lake properties are all over the country and they may not even know where they're shopping. So we really give buyers something they didn't get before. Sellers want to be in front of those buyers. So we give sellers something they couldn't get before. Our agents want access to those buyers and sellers and have an unfair advantage when they're in the home saying, here's what I can do for you to get your home sold. That gives our agents an unfair advantage.

Our fourth team, so we have buyer, sellers, agents. Our fourth team is our staff here in Hoover where we do all our back office operations for the whole country. And our feeling is Doris and I believe if we take care of the buyers, the sellers, the agents and the back office and we're all rolling together, the business success works out for everybody. So it was just a different, part of people say, oh, it's Lake and it's cloud. And it's like, no, we are feet on the ground. That last mile is not gonna be threatened by AI.

Shane Kilby (08:56)
Win-win.

Glenn S. Phillips (09:09)
In fact, there's not enough data to understand for AI to even understand why one lake home and another lake home there identical aren't priced the same because the influence of the water, the location, AI's nowhere close to that as it might be for a cookie cutter subdivision.

Duane Murphy (09:15)
.

Shane Kilby (09:18)
Yeah.

Duane Murphy (09:19)
Ahem.

Yeah, they, the AI can't figure out that you can catch walleye on one lake and cutthroat on another. And it's a no wake lake versus, you know, you can, you can, you know, water ski on it, et cetera. There's when you, when you truly get into that segment, right. Of, deep diving onto certain lakes and why their values are as high as they are there definitely is a.

Glenn S. Phillips (09:30)
Yeah.

Duane Murphy (09:43)
There's a boots on the ground aspect that I would agree with you that just can't be replaced yet with and replicated with AI. Maybe it never, but who knows?

Glenn S. Phillips (09:54)
We call it high tech with warm touch. And

our agents, when they ask us to put more search features on there, I say, you don't think like an agent with MLS search. I said, what the consumer needs to do is get far enough into the journey that we hand them over to you. And they need you to take care of them because they, know, and they, it's one of the oddities of niche real estate is it's a discretionary purchase. So it's, our rule of thumb is first time we talk to somebody till we do a deal, we'll average about two years.

But if you advise them, if you nurture them, you are consultative and not pushy, you know, like, look, when it's ready, it's time. Same thing, your thing is selling. It's just not time. Okay, call me every year. We'll talk about it. But if you can nurture it, you will build a pipeline of business that's defendable. Many agents are on this. I need a deal that, I need a lead that closes this week or I can get under contract this week. And that actually doesn't work in our business. You just spook people.

Duane Murphy (10:40)
Mm-hmm.

would think that that brings up a good point. I'm just trying to think of over my 20 year career, those buyers that are buying that secondary property, that vacation home, that property on the lake or the water, it's not very often that all of a sudden they wake up and they say, I'm going to go buy a property on a lake. then they call you up and buy one in a couple of weeks.

You know, it's, one of those where I think, you know, everyone's got that dream of buying a place on a lake, got that dream of buying a place in the mountains, right. And, you know, and it sits there and festers and grows and right. And they start clicking on a couple of buttons, maybe searching a few places. And it's, you know, that nurture time, like you said, that from that acquisition to, you know, to sale, you know, I, think you said it's.

It's got to be all that.

Glenn S. Phillips (11:45)
Some are longer.

We do have people get the fever and they get what they want and they want it now. But for the most part, it's a discretionary buy sell. Nobody. So we actually, we get all our agents together for a national summit in Birmingham every year. And I like to get guests that are atypical for real estate. So Chris Hastings is an award winning chef here in Birmingham. He went on Iron Chef and beat Bobby Flay, that kind of guy. And I was talking to him in his restaurant, cause I'll talk to anybody.

Duane Murphy (11:49)
Mm-hmm.

Glenn S. Phillips (12:11)
He came in, he came speaking at our event and it was great. said, why do you have a chef there? I said, because people who can eat at his restaurant, that's not paying to sustain their body. And people buy a lake home is not because they need a roof over their head. I want him to come talk about how our mutual customer is treated by him and his staff. What is our mutual customer expecting in this restaurant? Because it's probably what they expect from their agent.

Shane Kilby (12:33)
Yeah, it's, you know, we've all had that Chick-fil-A experience, right? That you always feel appreciated. You always feel like the guest. never, you know, you pay for the extra sauces or whatever and they always greet you well. And everyone always knows how to operate everything. They always know the processes. And I was reading something recently that said that when they created that,

Franchise or the the the scaled version of Chick-fil-a from what it was mom and pop that they went and spent countless hours with Ritz Carlton Right to to see how to deliver that same experience Exactly, and when you go in there, it's like You're like, yes, you know, yeah sure y'all don't have to pay for this, right? It's you know, it's not 50 cents. not a dollar right and everyone everyone pitches in

Glenn S. Phillips (13:15)
Anybody can fix any problem.

Shane Kilby (13:28)
Like there's no one, there's no shortage and it's not overboard too. You can see when people try to, they wing it and then they're just constantly just hammering you to provide services too much. It's too much. They've got it dialed into a science. Let me ask you this. So, do you guys have brokerages? Is it franchise models that, know, or is it cloud-based?

Glenn S. Phillips (13:53)
So we're wholly owned. Where we have by law, have a physical brick and mortar, we do, but it's not for recruiting or training or education. It's typically our broker may just have an operational office. And we have some who want one and we'll set up a brokerage because they want to pay for this space to work. Okay, we can work with it. But there plenty of states with reciprocal or the rules in each state are wildly different. So for instance, Georgia requires a brick and mortar, but it doesn't have to be in Georgia.

Duane Murphy (14:20)
You

Glenn S. Phillips (14:22)
So I am sitting in Birmingham, Alabama, in Hoover, in the brick and mortar required for the state of Georgia. Other states require you to live in the state. So the broker of record has to live in the state in that boundary. it's created some challenges that we've grown, but once you do a few, you start to realize how to flow with it. Doris has a rule of three. She says,

Shane Kilby (14:28)
Nice.

Mm-hmm.

Glenn S. Phillips (14:48)
And she started this when she started Real Source, her title and closing company, when it was just her and $200 and a borrowed laptop and a little file card she hauled around and a cell phone. as she grew, she hired somebody. And then later she grew and she hired somebody. said, know, what worked for one didn't work for two. What worked for two didn't work for three. But you get to three and you can start to replicate it. And we found the same thing as we grew in other states, but as we knew different initiatives.

There's some flexibility in insurance once you get to three in multiple ways. And Doris being a smart woman, we talk about that a lot, even in our positions and in our markets. You have one agent and one in a market, even if it's not a big market. They get sick or something, you got a problem. You get two agents, okay, we got some flexibility. Three agents, okay, we're pretty good shape. If somebody leaves, there's probably, but we don't want 50 agents. That's a whole different thing as well. But it's a, you

Our point is the way we're built and the way, so we pay a lot of money to generate leads because we can do that with the power of our website. That's not typical for brokerages because they don't have that draw on scale. And they don't always need buyers from out of state. So it's very unusual. We will generate 30 to 40,000 leads for this year off our website alone. And that didn't count what our agents are doing on their own initiatives as well.

Shane Kilby (16:10)
And

these are high level keyword PPC. I'm sure. Yeah.

Duane Murphy (16:16)
wide net all over the US, right?

Glenn S. Phillips (16:18)
Yeah,

because the buyer is very likely. So there's a set of people who go, this is where my friends are, this is where I grew up, this is where my grandkids are. There's a reason they want that lake. But then there's a different group who are like, look, we're in Chicago. My kids have gotten grown, so I got grandkids in the Atlanta area and the Dallas area. So we want to retire near when I'm in, I don't even know what the lakes are called.

And so we could.

Duane Murphy (16:42)
Well, I think

that little piece right there is a little bit of a falsity, because I don't know anybody from the state of Illinois that doesn't come to the largest state park of Illinois, which is Wisconsin.

Glenn S. Phillips (16:51)
Yeah.

Duane Murphy (16:53)
Just, just saying like that. You go to that Southern border

Shane Kilby (16:54)
It's too cold. It's too cold there.

Duane Murphy (16:56)
and if you, you know, they charge us a toll to get into their state, but if we charge a toll to get into theirs, like we could be the third largest economy in the world if we charged all of them to come into Wisconsin and enjoy our 10,000 plus lakes, sorry Minnesota, we have more than you.

Glenn S. Phillips (17:11)
10,000 likes.

Shane Kilby (17:15)
So your focus is three agents, but it's got to be different if it's a bigger lake, right, or more unit.

Glenn S. Phillips (17:23)
Yeah, I'll tell

you what our real goal is. In some lakes we don't have three agents. My goal is, and this sounds fuzzy and I tell my agents this because I want them to know what we're doing. We're very transparent. I significant to dominant market share relative to the other agents of the market. Now, when I say that sounds real fuzzy, but if we get in a rural market where we can really move the needle for lake that's invisible, we really are very dominant in that sort of market. And they're not as many good agents.

There might be five agents that really do 95 % of the business there. And we can really move the needle. But if you get like Lake Lanier in Atlanta, nobody in that market has 5 % market share. So if we can grow, and we haven't gotten 5 % either, we get to 7 % market share, that's not dominant, but it's more significant than anybody else. So those are my goals. And however many agents it takes to do that is, and at some point, if we have somebody, if they've crushed it,

We've got some agents who are 50 % market share, 60 % market share. If they're crushing that, we're going to kind leave them alone and keep fueling them and be sure we've got their back. And if they often will get to a threshold, typically an agent that gets about, they've always worked by themselves. We find them getting stressed if they've never done more than four or five million a year. About six million, seven million tends to be where their work starts to flitter and not be as, they're not as nice and they're missing things. So we try to prepare them.

Do you need an assistant? you need a buyer's agent? What do you need? And that some of our agents don't need a team. You just need another agent you can refer back and forth because this, I think there's a bit of a myth of you become an agent, you get an assistant, you get a small team, you get a big team, you become a broker. That isn't something people are all good at. I've got some agents that I've started to teach them, here's all the ways this work and here's how all the money works. And they kind of go, yeah, I don't think I'm gonna do that. I don't wanna be responsible for all that.

Duane Murphy (19:15)
Yeah.

Glenn S. Phillips (19:16)
I said, just refer business back and forth, and you'll both accelerate each other and cover each other. And you'll both, every market where we had one agent we added to, the first one did better.

Duane Murphy (19:25)
And that's a great point of, of meeting your agents kind of where they are and then supporting them in the way that they need, right? Because they're not all the same. I, I can, I go back into my previous life in the restaurant industry and right. Some of my best cooks, right? My best chefs, my best cooks were some of my worst managers. Right. It's like, my gosh, like they, they're amazing at what they do. They can run the kitchen on their damn head, right? They can run circles around anybody.

Glenn S. Phillips (19:32)
Yes.

Duane Murphy (19:54)
And then you put them in charge of people and it was a damn train wreck. Right. And same way, right. With my, my best server, my best, whatever it's like just because they're the best at what they do. Right. And again, I've even had that in the, in the real estate industry. Right. I've had some amazing agents that were amazing agents. Like they, they loved on people, right. They, they sold homes like water and, but all of sudden you put them in charge of a small team.

or you give them some of that managerial responsibility and they were an absolute train wreck, right?

Glenn S. Phillips (20:27)
It's a different job.

Shane Kilby (20:32)
You can't drive

Glenn S. Phillips (20:32)
And

I think

Shane Kilby (20:33)
people like you drive yourself.

Duane Murphy (20:35)
Yeah.

Glenn S. Phillips (20:35)
Well,

it's an entrepreneurial dilemma. I've spent a lot of time before this working with entrepreneurs, both through my software company and we were angel investing in business. So we heard pitches and watched it. It's a classic entrepreneurial problem. And real estate agents, very entrepreneurial spirit. I got this, I can do this. And they have to be. But just because you're good at a thing doesn't mean you're good at the next thing. And too many people just think it's intuitive and it's not. You can become good at that thing.

but you still have to invest in training and skills and mentorship and teamwork and peer learning from others. Like what we're doing here. One thing's that coming into real estate from a tech world that I thought was really interesting about real estate is it's the only big industry I know where you do almost all your money and almost all the people you help come about by working with your direct competitors.

Duane Murphy (21:25)
Yeah.

Shane Kilby (21:25)
Yeah.

Glenn S. Phillips (21:27)
And so,

yeah, and that's what it, I don't, I mean.

Duane Murphy (21:29)
It's like one of the only industries like that, right? I mean, you don't see anybody

Shane Kilby (21:31)
Yeah.

Duane Murphy (21:34)
manufacturing anything and then calling up their main competitor and saying, hey, you want to work a deal together, you could buy some of my sprockets. It doesn't happen.

Glenn S. Phillips (21:44)
It's one of the reasons why Silicon Valley has been fascinated with trying to take over real estate. And I feel they've missed some things. And one of the things is they keep missing is you can't be the Amazon real estate because of the two party deal. And no one has enough market share to shove it down everybody else's throat. I'm a little fascinated with the movie Moneyball, where it talks about the Oakland A's bringing analytics to change how they built a team. I think our business is kind of Moneyball.

Duane Murphy (22:10)
Yes.

Glenn S. Phillips (22:12)
And I say that because in baseball, you need two teams and one team can't change the rules or this the game will play. In real estate, brokerages that try to get too weird actually freak out everybody else. it's not that I want to blackball them. I don't know what they're doing. And it makes them uncomfortable. It makes the consumer uncomfortable. So we were said we're going to be very different. from the brokerage standpoint, from the contract standpoint, how we work in the local market was going to be very traditional.

We're not gonna be the brokerage that come in that says, we've got a better answer and we're smarter. We come in going, we wanna do deals with everybody. And our agents are always in that market anyways. We're not importing somebody, they're already there.

Shane Kilby (22:48)
Mm-hmm.

So it's a, you know, I guess it's data driven when you put more emphasis into attracting recruiting agents to one specific market, right? So you're.

Glenn S. Phillips (23:05)
We, one of our agents, so we tell people we're recruiting, hey, call any of our agents. I used to give them a list and I realized they would call everybody not on the list. And I said, look, if they've been with us for, you know, less than 18 months, just say, did we do what we promised? And are we responsive? If they've been with us 18 months or more, ask them, have we made an impact, a real impact?

And I don't know who they're gonna call or what they say. don't tell the agents, know, don't want to turn our agents are not recruiters. They don't get a bump for that. I sometimes I'll say, well, here's an agent in the market like yours. I don't even give that agent a head up, but I had one of our agents. So well, I had some calls recently. I said, I appreciate you taking those. And she said, I'll tell you, you want to know what I tell them? I said, sure. She said, I tell them that if Lake Homes has called you, they may know more about your market than you do.

and they may know more about your business than you do and that they called you very deliberately and you need to do this. My mistake was I thought about it too long. I came, but I wasted time. You need to do this, you need to do this now. Because if you're serious about it. Now.

Shane Kilby (24:10)
BANG

Duane Murphy (24:10)
That's it.

I love that part. I do the same thing with potential recruits or someone who's checking us out or who's got interests. I'd be like, here's our roster. Call anybody you want. I don't care who you call. These few agents can relate to your situation or they came from a similar background or they came from a similar ⁓ scenario or whatever it might be.

Glenn S. Phillips (24:30)
I do, yep.

Duane Murphy (24:33)
they might be great for you to connect with, but I'm gonna invite you, you call whoever you want, right? I'm not, you know, much like what you had stated, I'm not afraid of what they're gonna say or not say. I have no idea what they will say, but please go ahead and call. And I think that open transparency, you know, just speaks volumes right off the bat when you do that. And I've always been pleasantly pleased.

Right? I'm not surprised maybe, but pleased with what I do hear that they say, you know, even when, even when they're not expecting it or, you know, you didn't do any prep work with them. It's like, no, just, just ask them, right? We ain't perfect.

Glenn S. Phillips (25:12)
You you're

probably, you're probably seeing what I'm seeing though is the there's this fallacy that real estate is shortcut to wealth. And it attracts a lot of people who are looking for a shortcut. And I've stopped, you know, is because the people part is so important. I am still involved in our recruiting efforts. You know, I'm a CEO, but the people part is getting those folks that are right, that get what we're doing, that are going to be our brand and are going to do the work because we spend I have no way to prove it. But I think I spend more money per agent.

than anybody in the business who's got some scale. But that's important piece of it. And because I know if I invest, it'll get a return. And if I accelerate their growth, that gets a return. But I've had to start figuring out recruiting. We see things as rock stars, and some of them have such sweetheart deals, they're kind like the whales at the casino. Nobody's making money on them, but they attract people. And they're not, I've had agents, you know, they're selling 20 million a year and they're paying their broker

Shane Kilby (26:03)
Right.

Duane Murphy (26:03)
Yes.

Glenn S. Phillips (26:07)
$12,000 for the year. She goes, I struck a check on the first day of the year. I don't pay him anything the rest of the year. I'm like, okay, that's a loss leader. I told you, you got to stay where you at. I'll lose money on you. Even good, we'll do deals together. Yeah. And she's good, good agent. And then we have a lower tier of people who want to move to the next level. And that's really who we're looking at. And then we have people who within that though, there's one band of people who they're kind of satisfied. I'm making good money, doing it the way I do it.

Shane Kilby (26:17)
Mm-hmm.

Glenn S. Phillips (26:37)
Change is discomforting and disruptive. And what I want to find out from people is, are they wanting to move from one level to another, seriously, or are they pretty happy? And I think there's probably a feeling of it's almost un-American to not claim you want to be more. When I've gotten the age of, if it doesn't work for me, I'm okay just going, where I'm at's good. There may be something else I'm wanting. So I'm really trying to get them to find out, if they're really happy where they're at, I don't want to bug them. We'll do deals opposite side of the table.

because it benefits me to work with good agents from other companies. What we have are the non-producers and the difficult agents that I tell agents that you, yeah.

Shane Kilby (27:16)
They're the same.

They're the same a lot of times. Non-producing and difficult. Double whammy.

Glenn S. Phillips (27:20)
Yeah. Yep.

And I say, look, my agents who say I want to take down the, they'll move up with these, I'm taking down the top agents. So you don't need to take down the top agent. Take the business from all the people who suck at this and you'll be a top agent. Yeah.

Shane Kilby (27:34)
easier a lot easier

like shooting fish in a barrel at that aspect let me ask you

Duane Murphy (27:39)
Yeah, it's a lot easier.

A lot. I was gonna say a lot easier to take business from that 80 % than it is from that 20%. Right. mean, it's 80 % suck.

Glenn S. Phillips (27:47)
And I would rather do business

with the good agents who know what they're doing.

Shane Kilby (27:52)
So, and I know how you're going to answer this, but I'm going to leave it for you to answer for the listeners. So you've got some strong agents, some great agents, they're putting up great production. Naturally, you know they're going to be a target, right? I want that agent's production. And we know it's about value proposition, but...

Is it that or is it something that, is it community? What allows you to retain those? Because if you're a team leader listening to this or you're starting a team or you're starting a brokerage or you've had a brokerage, we're completely brand agnostic and we're learning and growing from one another. So my interest is peak to know, to learn and develop of how to retain the assets in the business.

Because that's why I want to pour my energy and purpose and everything I've got into those people. I want their lives to be more positively impacted. don't really, I mean, yeah, I love the people that are problematic and don't produce, but I don't want to spend any more time with them. I've already spent enough. I want to save that, put it into those people. What is, how do you do that?

Glenn S. Phillips (29:04)
So this was a big question even when we started, because we spent 50 months going, I mean, candy, I'm a nerd, I'm a computer engineer, and Doris, while she's entitled and closing, you know, I kind of, if you'd asked me in 2010, why don't you start a real estate brokerage? I'd go, what kind of idiot does that? And turns out we're those idiots. So we really thought about this. I mean, even then, there were too many of them. Everybody knows a bunch of agents. Nobody seems to be different. So we spent a lot of time thinking about it.

And one of the things, and this, I'll tell you, our perspective and also it could help anybody who's got a team or they want to be successful, is we really became about the concept of unfair advantages. I don't mean illegal or unethical, I mean an unfair advantage. So like, we figured out we could use, and it took money to do this, and we had to grow to scale, and we had to convince people of our vision when we started, which means anybody could do it. But it's a matter of owning a space, whether it's a neighborhood.

Be the go-to person in that neighborhood. That alone is successful. Many agents are too busy. They're running from spot to spot trying to take everything, and the deal is make the main thing the main thing. In our case, it was about, you know, own the space, help our agents think about market share, which they still need help with. But we wanted to equip them with that. If you know more about that market, our agents go into a listing appointment. They have available an analytics report. So...

It's a bit of a trick question. And if you're one of our competitors at the lake, I'm going tell you what's happening. We tell our agents whether they're first or last. If you're interviewing other agents, ask them where the buyers come from. And they'll probably tell you two or three big cities. know, like up where you're at, Wheeler. They'll say, oh, they come from Florence or they come from Huntsville or Athens, or they may come down from Nashville or Birmingham. That's going to be the list. We can come in and go, in the last 30 days, here's 173 markets where somebody was sitting.

shopping this lake. If you list with me, you'll be on the web. If you don't list with me, you'll be on our website. But if you list with me, you'll be featured and shown more often. We're going to play the odds of more exposure for your properties possible than if you don't list with me. So that's one of the unfair advantage opportunities. We have others that we give them. But a lot of our agents say, you know, if I get in the door and it's not going well, I'll pull that one out. And it's like, If it's like, OK, they, you know.

Shane Kilby (31:23)
Thank

Glenn S. Phillips (31:26)
And we can tell, and we've got our agents. Yeah. So

Duane Murphy (31:27)
Don't lead with the spear out of the quiver.

Shane Kilby (31:30)
Yeah,

Glenn S. Phillips (31:31)
we,

Shane Kilby (31:31)
right.

Glenn S. Phillips (31:31)
and we know why they're good people. And it says like, look, these here's somebody in, in somebody here in upstate New York and Buffalo. It's not many visitors, but they're on this, they're shopping this lake an average of 20 minutes of visit. They're really looking hard. They may be a year or two or three out from buying. They also looking for a property and it might be your property. They're doing something.

Shane Kilby (31:57)
Yeah, yeah, they're not looking at the next celebrity story, right? They're spending some time doing some deep diving conversation. ⁓

Glenn S. Phillips (32:02)
Yeah, in fact.

In on our paper click, on our digital

paper click where we use keyword search, I go negative on all sorts of things because we've had people's celebrity search or crimes or arson or just bad words go in that list. If something bad happens at the lake, I don't want those people shopping yet.

Shane Kilby (32:23)
Yeah, what's, was a lake Martin had the boating accident a month ago, month ago.

Glenn S. Phillips (32:29)
So, ⁓

there, you know, these accidents are going to happen, bad things are going to happen and it can happen anywhere, but people were curious and now we search and so we actually have gotten really good at digital marketing with paperclip enough that when we look at how we compare, it shows who we're competing with in the auctions and the top three is in the markets that we're really spending time on and we will look at a local, state and national level and we have

hundreds of thousands of keywords. But when we look at our marketing insights, the top three in some combination is Realtor.com, Zillow.com, and us.

Shane Kilby (33:05)
That's fair enough. Yeah.

Duane Murphy (33:05)
powerful. Now come

Glenn S. Phillips (33:06)
All the other brands are below us.

Duane Murphy (33:08)
on, Holmes.com

is gonna argue that because I mean they said they're bigger than anyone. That's what their that's what their sales rep just told me.

Glenn S. Phillips (33:12)
I, they.

Yes, and if you clarify on their data, they've used statistics in a very interesting way and It's a and in here they've combined and and spoken with us nice folks I don't follow exactly where their path to success is going to be but they have enough money to figure it out one day I think but Yeah, and they've got three times the money is illo

Shane Kilby (33:22)
get awesome a little bit too.

Duane Murphy (33:34)
Well, unlimited plackets on that one.

Shane Kilby (33:34)
You're right.

Duane Murphy (33:40)
Yeah. So, my gosh, the, the successes that you've had with building what it is that you have and still building and there goes my hand thing. Talk with my hand. Sorry. Fuzzy. The, keep them, keep them tucked. Yeah. What would you say thus far has been your biggest success in business? What would you say if I had to pick one thing? What would it be?

Glenn S. Phillips (34:05)
that we, all of us together, took an idea that had not been executed in real estate, that most people don't even realize how we're different. In fact, you tell people you're too different, they get spooked, but we've executed a different model. The industry is filled with saying we're revolutionary or we're a hybrid. And in most cases in real estate, the traditional brick and mortar have added tech and that's great, but that's evolutionary.

The cloud companies have come in and really kind of replicated the traditional model with it's still a bunch of people. So it is, and they're plenty say we're a hybrid. I actually think we are the only real hybrid of scale in that we don't function either way without the two pieces and how we put those together. We look like a portal. There are people who think we're a portal that those agents are just people bought ads. And there are other people who think, you're, they see us locally and go, you know, they've got

Couple agents here, they're not significant, even if those agents are just chewing them up in the market.

Shane Kilby (35:05)
But what do you

think about shares, stock shares? I might have baited you into that one. It's a video you made.

Glenn S. Phillips (35:12)
I think I'm keeping mine.

We could ask,

our agents even ask, they go, can I get a piece of this? They go, not right now. It's privately held, closely held. When they brought us in, they had already, so for those of you are entrepreneurial minded, this is not exactly what we were told. But imagine an investment banker came to you and this is what essentially two months of conversation were compacted to this offer. Like somebody comes to and goes, Shane, Dwight, I got this business.

Shane Kilby (35:23)
Yep. Yep.

Glenn S. Phillips (35:44)
The technology's not finished, it has never executed. We've never generated revenue. All our employees but one have left. He leaves for Google in a month. We also have debt and we can't pay you. And our business model has two fatal flaws, either which would kill it and those both have to be corrected. Would you like to run this business for us?

Shane Kilby (36:05)
Depends on what has a win.

Duane Murphy (36:05)
You sidestep Shane's illegal

trading bait question very well.

Glenn S. Phillips (36:10)
So they did, of course, Doris jokes, she goes, they said, but we can give you a part of it. And Doris said, Doris is the smart one with us. Doris said, you mean you're gonna give us a piece of the debt?

Shane Kilby (36:21)
How generous, how generous. Now that took vision, that took vision. the stock question, that was just in relation to a video you posted, which I thought was awesome. Absolutely awesome, by the way, because I have that conversation every day of the week and I have friends in every brand. That's why everything, all of the true leaders in the business, like, you know, it's

Glenn S. Phillips (36:27)
Thanks

I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah.

Shane Kilby (36:47)
You have to dig to figure out what brand they even are, right? Because that's when you've been in the right room together. But we have that conversation all the time. when you post that video, like, I love that. That's great perspective.

Glenn S. Phillips (36:58)
So just

to clarify and remove the mystery, was out, since I said it and Shane doesn't have to say it, I was outspoken by indicating that there are brokerages out there that part of their incentive and we recruited them. go, well, I can't leave. I've got stock in this business. And my answer is, and I don't mean to be smart, but I'm like, you know, if you believe in this stock so much, come work with us, make more money and buy that stock. It's publicly traded.

Shane Kilby (37:14)
It wasn't bad, wasn't a negative comment at all.

Buh-lah.

Duane Murphy (37:23)
Ruth,

join us, make way more money, sell way more homes, have a way better quality of life, and by the way, go buy whatever stock you want. And buy a lot of it.

Glenn S. Phillips (37:24)
just because you have stock and mean, I own stock and lots of companies and I don't work.

And you know, I think the model,

the model is great because I believe most brokerages on scale, particularly the high volume, how many agents can we get? The agents don't realize what the brokerage is selling. The brokerage is selling hope. I won't be 100 % commission after I cap and I get stock. Well, 85 % of those agents or more won't do either of those things. But they'll do it because, yeah, but my other brokerage I pay to split over time.

Shane Kilby (37:37)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Glenn S. Phillips (38:02)
and it never got that way. They now believe when I cap, I'm gonna get it all. But most agents never cap. In fact, there's actually incentive for the brokerages to shove more agents into the market, which prevent... So I'm a country boy, I grew up in the woods. It was a milder neighbor. So when you live in the woods, a mile from a neighbor, you get dogs. As we say in the country, they just come up. And we just had this big pan we'd put out, metal pan, and we just put more food in the bowl. More dogs showed up, there were more, but...

Shane Kilby (38:25)
You

Glenn S. Phillips (38:32)
In the real estate world, that food bowl is the market. And yes, it's all you can eat. And yes, you can get incentive to bring more dogs to the bowl. But if everybody you tell every dog says it's all you can eat, and that's only how much food's there, all you can eat actually means everybody's starving. Except maybe the meanest bully of the group who eats well and everybody else. Yeah, it's all you need, but there's no more left in the bowl.

Shane Kilby (38:42)
so many dolls get raised.

Great analogy.

Duane Murphy (38:56)
I'm loving the country

boy logic, because this farm boy follows that.

Glenn S. Phillips (39:01)
Yeah. I'm also though, I've also learned that there's little value in the second kick of the mule.

Shane Kilby (39:01)
Great logic.

Glenn S. Phillips (39:06)
So there are plenty of things where I go, did that again.

Shane Kilby (39:09)
Yeah, it's like slamming your door. putting your hand on the hot surface. First time's a mistake. The second time was, well, you knew better. You knew better.

Glenn S. Phillips (39:17)
Yeah.

Duane Murphy (39:18)
So

in follow up to the success, that's huge, right? Monstrous. Let's flip that coin, right? There's always two sides to every coin. Some would argue there's three. But that second side of the coin, biggest failure in business.

Glenn S. Phillips (39:19)
Well, I... Yeah.

So I really had two. One was my software company, I'll be quick on that, where I was a good engineer, but there's a lesson in it. As a good engineer, we always delivered a great custom product, which is really hard to do. But I kept thinking, not that I was smart, but was smart enough to be a business person. And I did not run the business well. And in debt, it just wasn't a good environment. And it was my fault. I didn't know to go seek mentors and peers.

that forced me to do it. was the point of, I'm gonna go bankrupt and, know, I was a country music song. I'm divorced. I'm in debt. I can't sleep. My business, I don't know what to do with it. My dog had died. So yeah, the dog had died. it made me go seek, and they would, my first mentors told me things that were so bluntly obvious, I felt like, oh my goodness, that's,

Shane Kilby (40:11)
Hehe.

Duane Murphy (40:16)
I was just saying, don't throw your dog in there and then you did.

Glenn S. Phillips (40:32)
Absolutely. I didn't even need convincing, but I was also the point of I need to be successful or quit. I didn't need to be right anymore. So, so we recovered that business, paid off that debt, did well. But it was a lifestyle company. With this business during the COVID, course, everybody, the frenzy took off for everybody. And we were like everybody else. We're investing really heavy in working to try to build the things toward listings, heavy investments and got ahead of our skis.

So when everything stopped, June of 22, July 22, interest rate changed the world. I'd seen the markets change unevenly, but everybody slams to a halt. Like every brokerage in the country, we had to cut costs. We reduced staff mostly through attrition. But that was really a struggle. We've worked our way through it. We've tightened things up. But part of how we did that was we brought in a coach.

Duane Murphy (41:07)
you

Glenn S. Phillips (41:25)
We brought in a business coach who built a hundred million dollar companies more than once. he's integrated an integral part of our business. We've simplified, we've streamlined, we've built more better models of what we're doing financially. So our projections now are not surprises or just my feel for it. We still talk about the field because it's a dynamic thing, but we can adjust our levers so much better now than we did before. So in many ways we're becoming more professional, but either of those could have crushed me.

fact I survived it is I would like to say it's because we did all the right things, but now clean people do the right things. They still get crushed. There's also just, you know, I think about the business, the family business during COVID that had to close their restaurant and it kept being, we'll open in a month. We'll open it, let you open in a month. And they kept taking money out. If they just said, look, you're going to be closed for a year. They could have cashed out and been done instead. They were lured into putting their savings into something that was an unsurvivable. so that

Shane Kilby (42:19)
Mm-hmm.

Glenn S. Phillips (42:21)
Sometimes life is as one of our board members says, any business is hard, sometimes you can get it all right and still not work.

Duane Murphy (42:28)
Well, then it also comes down to your survival instinct and do you roll over and expose your underbelly and take that final blow or just give up, or do you scrap through it and figure out what you need to do to get on the other side? And it sounds like you had plenty of the latter on that as well.

Shane Kilby (42:28)
Yeah.

Glenn S. Phillips (42:53)
I'm going to be around people smarter than me so I can learn things. I've gotten where now. get mentors, get to talk to peers, know, been swapping messages and things and reading each other's stuff through now a group of folks like y'all. But it's also a matter of who will do the work over time. I may not do the most work today. My wife was really astounded. And I'm not a workaholic. I can check out if I need to. But getting through this was, I've committed.

Shane Kilby (43:09)
Hmm.

Glenn S. Phillips (43:20)
to making this work and I'll do what it takes to get there. actually this Memorial Day weekend, we had our strategy meeting with some of our senior team and our coach and Doris said, you're not gonna believe this. Memorial Day weekend for three straight days, didn't go to the office.

Duane Murphy (43:35)
Well wait, you just said you had a strategy meeting with your leadership team and all the powers on Memorial weekend.

Shane Kilby (43:35)
Three.

Glenn S. Phillips (43:41)
It was Tuesday. Monday's our normal day. You're right. Monday's our normal day. It was Tuesday. We pushed it out of the day.

Duane Murphy (43:43)
Well, okay.

Alright, I like, wait, you just said you could get away from work, but you just made everybody get together on Memorial weekend to talk strategy.

Glenn S. Phillips (43:50)
You almost busted me there. Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm not the, I'm not the, everybody look, I do get up early. In fact, my wife has a phone app. I don't sleep a whole lot. And she says, if I roll over and not there, I look at my phone app and sometimes it's 4 a.m. and he's already at the office. And, but it's not that it's, I have a grinded out strategy. I know everybody's work. I have people on my team that they're going to give a lot for eight or nine hours and that's it. I have.

I have somebody that I've worked for for almost 30 years. She's good for about five hours a day. it's going to be even when she worked with our software company and even on when we sent her out on things, they said, well, can she be here more hours? And I said, we'll bill you for it. And she knows this is what she's good for. Do you want we'll put her in the office. She'll sit there and bill you. But she's good for five. And they went they appreciate the transparency. OK, because everybody else in the consulting business wants to jack up hours. And we were the reverse. even told them

We did a software project and there were three other big consulting firms in there. We were the little guy from, and we were the only ones going, we gotta get this project done. they're well, don't, everybody else is saying they just keep going. go, my team will get bored. If they get bored, they leave.

Shane Kilby (45:01)
You

It's funny though, you know, it takes time in life to, or it has for me anyway, to figure out that being successful doesn't mean being right. I believe that's the secret code. Once you realize that right really has nothing to do with it, I think you get there faster, you know.

Glenn S. Phillips (45:22)
Shane, that

was one of the things when we were asked if we want to do this was we inherited the existing board. Very smart guys who built massive companies or helped people build massive companies, which was another unlike. Even if we don't do this business, we spent 15 months getting to basically have a private shark tank to figure out this business together. What we learned for them alone was going to be valuable for the time. All of them were OK being wrong. You just had to show that and they weren't defensive of themselves personally.

Like, here's my position and why. If you brought data, they would, and they go, look, show me I'm wrong. I love it. And they generally would. that's part of, we wanted to be around people where nobody was, nobody was concerned with being right. Just be successful. And we were attracted to that. That's who that has proven to be. And I'll tell you an example early on, we had limited number of agents that everyone was important. We had an agent that was really doing some things they shouldn't be doing. And

The agent, their board didn't even help recruit them because we were that baby of a stage with no track record. And we would start a board meeting with how was recruiting going because it was key to revenue. And they asked about, they said, what about this one? And I said, had an integrity issue, this isn't going to work. And they didn't say what happened. They didn't say what did you do about it? They went, okay, and went on. That was the whole discussion. And, you know, hope they're better but.

Doris and I were talking about it when we began with it and I went out and mowed the grass where I get my great thinking, one of my two spots for that, and came in and said, you know, this isn't a training issue, this is an integrity issue. And we need that revenue, but we also can't change who we're gonna be. If we die, we'll die sticking to our guns about who we are.

Shane Kilby (47:04)
Yep, and if you continue that path, then your integrity's a lie. Even if nobody knows about it until they know about it.

Glenn S. Phillips (47:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, nobody would have known about that one. And it doesn't mean that that's a bad person, that sometimes they just are wired or they have a... I never know what's going on with somebody about the choices they make that can be driven by things that we don't know, they're going on in their lives. I like to think positive about them, just sometimes they're not a fit for us, or we're not a fit for them, if anything. I used to early on be too slow to encourage people to move along, and I was concerned what I'd do to them around. What I found was,

Duane Murphy (47:31)
Mm-hmm.

Glenn S. Phillips (47:42)
everybody knows who's causing a problem or not pulling their way and they actually wonder when leadership is going to stick to a standard that they've been talking about or not.

Duane Murphy (47:52)
Yeah. And unfortunately, a of times in those situations, you don't find out until after because then they're coming to you and saying, I was wondering when you're going to do something or I was wondering when you're going to be the leader. Right. And it's like, well, why didn't you come to me before? Why didn't you say, well, no, it wasn't my place to say, I just wanted to wait and see if you're, know, if you saw what we saw and you're going to do what you needed to do. And, know, and they'll come back and they'll say, thank you for doing what you needed to do. But.

Glenn S. Phillips (48:00)
Yeah, well.

I didn't have.

Shane Kilby (48:16)
Yeah, that's

Duane Murphy (48:20)
You know, they're watching and testing too, right? They're watching in.

Shane Kilby (48:20)
That's a double-edged sword because

a lot of times you or I felt that we were hesitant because of fear, not fear, but just concern about how it would be portrayed, right? So I mean, we beat ourselves up on that, yeah, we know the decision we need to make. We should make it the minute we have that gut feeling, but we don't want to make the wrong decision.

Glenn S. Phillips (48:48)
One thing

I had to realize is that the people who were not with us staff and agent wise, some of them have come back, interestingly. But we've also had some where the very reason they're not with us is why they, I know, I've seen it online, I've seen other places, they've had non-complimented things to say. that that, you you hear about these football coaches and these politicians and, but particularly some of the football coaches, if you want me in charge,

There are people not going to like you, people think you're doing it wrong, people who are no longer with you that will be very, very negative about you. And if you're concerned about that, I've really started trying to think like these coaches that I hear in press conference when somebody leaves and the press will ask them about it and they say an answer I love. I'm going to talk about the people who are with us.

Duane Murphy (49:34)
Oh, that sounds like, well, hey, I was thinking about the great coach, uh, Mr. Nick Saban, right? He's like, if you want to be light, go sell ice cream. You ain't going to be a coach, right? Um, you know, and same way, you're not going to be a coach or a leader and you'll always be light.

Glenn S. Phillips (49:47)
And you know what? It not being a fit could be our fault.

know, it being a fit could be, we're not fit for them. You know, one thing I do know is that the longer we stay together, it's not a fit, not only is affecting us, but they can't go find their thing. And some of them won't make a move on their own. I don't say that to make myself feel better, but at the same time, know, yeah.

Shane Kilby (49:54)
yeah.

Yes.

Now, we hold them back. We hold them back.

You're exactly right. Let me ask you this.

Glenn S. Phillips (50:12)
I've been laid

off twice and it was the best thing that happened both times. I was pretty excited.

Shane Kilby (50:16)
Oh yeah,

well, I'm a high D, so I've been done that path a couple of times. I think Dwayne said a lot more than me at one time, but we stopped counting. But anyway, we're still here and then trying to drum out success, whatever that looks like. Glenn, let me ask you this. So we've all got that influential person. Who is that for you?

Is it a specific athlete, entertainer, influencer, motivational speaker, like preacher, teacher? Who is that person that's made such a great impact and influence on you?

Glenn S. Phillips (50:52)
Yeah, so one of things I rarely have favorites or singles because I really think so multi-dimensional but quickly I've got three people if I look like if I hadn't had those three people in my life, who knows what would happen. And one I'm just not not just because she's my wife or my business partner but meeting Doris Phillips when we met in our point in life, we appreciate ourselves so much that the opportunity we get to do it together. We're friends. We don't argue. We don't fight.

because we're going to do what we respect. don't always agree. We agree, it's okay we don't agree, but that didn't mean we're going to raise our voice or be ill-behaved to each other. And we need, one in one can be three or five or seven. So we count on that. We appreciate each day. We kind of feel that our anniversary and Valentine's for many people are the days to make up for it. In fact, we were so busy in Lake Homes one year, we forgot our anniversary, both of us. We have our anniversary.

Shane Kilby (51:48)
Well at least you bugged it.

Duane Murphy (51:48)
It works

better when both of you forget though.

Shane Kilby (51:52)
Yeah.

Glenn S. Phillips (51:52)
No,

we're fine with it. In fact, we both forgot it's coming up next week. And she said, what's that on my calendar? She said, you know, our anniversary is next week. And I was like, hadn't thought about it. So we were fine. then during that time, I'm coming out of not running my software company well and starting to finally embrace mentors. There was a fellow named Roger Daviston who also did a lot of work about cognitive thinking and distortions and how we see people.

I was taking a sales class and they swapped trainers midstream and I didn't like this guy at all. I was about to not come back and I thought I'd give him one more try. Roger changed how I think about business and sales and we're still friends. He's come to our events, spoken, very influential about how I thought about business even though he's a sales guy. And then he's on our board but if Zane Torrance hadn't come to Doris and I and said, he knew us independently. didn't know, knew why he knew we were married. We each had him.

met him through different things. And he asking us to look at this Lakehomes.com thing, this Lake thing he kept calling it. He not only asked us to look at it, but listen that we had an angle on it and ask us if he's the one who asked us, did we want to come run this business? He's still on our board to this day. He's still a big trusted advisor. So helpful, but just that he saw we've never built a growth company before. So we were gamble.

And he gave us that opportunity and it's been helpful along the way. Those three though, any of those three not my world, who knows what kind of train wreck I'd be in.

Shane Kilby (53:16)
Thanks for sharing. Thanks for sharing. always, yeah, a lot of times it's many different individuals. Like you said, it's impossible to put in one and you're almost afraid to disclose two or three because you're afraid like, man, there's a long list of different milestones, different mile markers in my life.

Glenn S. Phillips (53:33)
I can make

a long list of all the things that that person brought this, that person brought this. And some of them are people I admire and listen to, know, like Cieplak. You I'm not going to ever be him, but he brings a lot of good reminders about focus and look, this isn't hard, which is the philosophy I believe. This is about doing the main thing, the main thing, the main thing. was written up on my dry erase board I look at every day, but you know, those things that are...

Shane Kilby (53:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Glenn S. Phillips (54:00)
Even people who just come in are your, even if not accountability, just that top of mind reminder.

Duane Murphy (54:06)
Yeah, there's so many different pieces of influence, like you said, that come in and some of them, know, Shane always shares, what is it, the part of your story for like a lifetime, a season?

Shane Kilby (54:16)
Oh, a season, reason, and a Yeah.

Duane Murphy (54:19)
season

reads in our lifetime, right? And so many different pieces that way. I had a little question off of one of your influences that you had mentioned and I believe it was Zane in bringing you into the, you know, into the, where you are today, right? And the influence on the company and everything. So how did that connection come about? So do you just like Google you and all of a it's like, oh, okay, this guy's done some web stuff before. So I don't know, he seems to be smart.

so where, where'd the, the door open, right? Where you, where they gave you 15 months to evaluate. I've never heard of such a thing like that before, but right. But where did that door, where did that, that door, that relationship, where did that, where did that start?

Glenn S. Phillips (55:05)
So I'm gonna say here's a lesson for anybody in business about the power of networking and showing up. Showing up being visible. In fact, that's how I Doris. I met her at Chamber of Commerce luncheon. And I don't go sit with my friends, I don't do that anymore, but when I did, I was like, I don't go sit with my friends, I go meet people. This is business networking.

Duane Murphy (55:18)
Great.

Glenn S. Phillips (55:26)
So Power Network, but Zane, he at the time did a lot of local speaking. Now he speaks with Vistage and all these big groups all across the country, very in demand. He speaks at our event every year or has so far. I realize that may not always last, but I showed up. If Zane was speaking, I showed up and he was very involved in Birmingham's entrepreneurial community 25 years ago. And it's a small enough community that he would show up and you could talk to him and.

He knew what we did. We'd done some things that were of higher visibility. One of our software projects got a lot of national attention 20 years ago that is still a product that helps. We built a system that helps paramedics do real-time routing of trauma, stroke, and cardiac patients across the state of Alabama and throughout about 80 hospitals, as well as being an early detector of biological and chemical events that could be of a disaster nature. that's a nerdy thing, but it got a lot of attention, particularly that biochem thing around 9-11.

And it also, in the first year with 10 hospitals, cut the mortality rate of severe trauma in central Alabama by 12.5%. So, you know, that's the most important project I ever do, and it's still around. But I showed up enough that I just talked to Zane being naturally shy like I am. And so he knew what we did just from years of showing up. Doris had participated, the Birmingham Venture Club was much more active at

Shane Kilby (56:33)
Wow.

Glenn S. Phillips (56:50)
time and they had an entrepreneur accelerator program to take businesses that could be growth, not just an insurance company and hire three people. Who could go on a national scale? And you had to apply, you had to be selected, you had to commit time, and it was several Fridays in the fall, and then networking events, and then a year of mentorship. And Zane Doris was one of the 12 people that were selected that year in 2006, and Zane was one of her mentors. he knew, so Doris's title company does some unusual things. So

they can do extra checks and research and curative work at no extra charge. So instead of getting a binder back that's got all these requirements, they'll do the work for you. They'll even get the last four of social, they'll even run that for lanes. So they take word off, load off the real estate agent or the closing secretary. they can do closings too. And the way she can do that with the staff she has is she knew this nerd who knew how to build software.

Shane Kilby (57:46)
you

Glenn S. Phillips (57:46)
So I built this software so she could do something. And in fact, that real source is growing in several states now as well. so he knew Doris from a year of being a mentor for her business with real estate title and closing and me for being a nerd. So was sort of real estate married to nerd, which is still to this day, so the hybrid of what this business is.

Duane Murphy (58:06)
Yeah, no, thank you. I figured it had to be network relationships somewhere. I was just very curious on how that.

Glenn S. Phillips (58:11)
Yeah. And

Zane's involved in very big deals. He has the premier conference that's very hard to get into here in Birmingham. But things like, know, like a Birmingham success story is that the delivery company shipped, which is bought by Target for, you know, over half a billion dollars. That was one of Zane's deals.

Shane Kilby (58:26)
See you later.

Nice. Nice.

Glenn S. Phillips (58:32)
So that's the circle he runs in. We're not

shipped yet, but we're working.

Shane Kilby (58:38)
Yeah, yeah, mean, sky's the limit. Big vision lead to big things. You gotta have big dreams and have big visions. So looking back at the younger version of Glenn or someone coming down that pipeline or even considering headed down that career path or even to venture into something as deep as what you and Doris have jumped off in and been greatly successful.

What's something that you would like to have known 20 years earlier than you did or that you feel like would be beneficial to that individual coming down that same path?

Glenn S. Phillips (59:16)
So I learned part of my life where I started thinking about how the brain works. And we get these labels where we're often in junior high and we live to the label. The job, the beauty queen, the smart kid. I was a smart kid in high school, not because I was really smart, but I had educated parents. Most of my classmates parents may not finish high school. My dad, my uncles had all gone to college. They were educators. So I had that advantage.

and that we worked, we worked hard. If you work in school, you can get good grades. But that was the label I lived to was I had to keep being smart. Well, here's a problem that's a secret. And when your label is smart is you do things so you won't fail and you don't go ask questions because you don't want to look stupid. You need to figure it out so you'll look smart. I would go back and tell myself, quit being smart.

That's not, that's a label. It's not who you are. It may be that you've had comfort, but, but I, in college, I got good grades. I got a good degree, but I didn't go embrace the faculty. made, it made it so much easier if I'd done that and growing my business until I reached the point of failure, I had brute forced my way into growing a business when I had no idea how to be a business person at all. I'm still learning, but even though I've been around people, that embracing what I can learn from others of show up.

Stupid.

Shane Kilby (1:00:30)
Hmm

Glenn S. Phillips (1:00:32)
and be coachable. I was coachable. I just didn't embrace coaches. When I played sports, I may have been small, but I was slow. It's a real bad combination. Which meant I was real coachable in that because I wasn't good at it. ⁓ But I liked playing. I really liked playing. so that being coachable, but also getting coaches. If you're coachable and you won't go get a coach, that doesn't help you either.

Shane Kilby (1:00:46)
UGH

True.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:00:56)
And I don't know anybody that's successful that doesn't have accountability coaches in some shape, form, or fashion and doesn't seek it out. And peers, peers that you can go, I don't know what's going on, Bear your belly about this isn't working.

Shane Kilby (1:01:12)
You know, it's simple though, but you have to have hit your head on the ceiling enough and not have achieved the level of success and greatness that you desire till you realize like, okay, what is it that I want to achieve a higher level of success at? Not business, like specifically, what do I need to do to get to that next level? That's the great place to start.

You need to go right there and get someone that's in a much different room the way you're in. We talk about this all the time. And get in it. And if you're not intimidated, you're not in the right room. You should be terrified to speak. And it's just like, then what, know, and that kind of grows you out of balance. And it's like, okay, so I need to go focus on this. So I need a coach.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:01:41)
Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

Shane Kilby (1:02:10)
And that's a whole nother conversation there because all coaches aren't the same.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:02:14)
Well, I'll tell

you a quick funny. So, so this board is four guys, super smart, super successful, you know, one of them right now is CFO of a multi-billion dollar company based in Birmingham, international company, you know, and they're super available if I need help. And I made a point that I was going, we'd invested in a company, Angel Investment, that the CAO wasn't coachable. He tried hard, he meant well, but he wasn't coachable. So I wasn't going to be that guy.

And so I was going to do whatever they said. So these four guys will have a board meeting. They all gave me a list of things to do. about three years into the business. Yeah, because each time, okay, this is tech, this is admin, this is money, this is... Because they had areas of expertise and they were great list. So we're about three years in and we're at a board meeting and I go, look, I got a problem. Look, you know, I'm sort of CEO in training for a company of the size we're becoming already.

Duane Murphy (1:02:47)
for different lists of things to do.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:03:10)
That's part of why I came so I could learn from all of you, but we have a meeting and y'all each tell me the things I need to work on and I have no dispute with that. Plus I have the stuff that's just daily operational. I don't think I'm getting any of this stuff done well. Maybe a few things done well, but I feel like I'm missing so much of this stuff. I don't know if I'm not capable or I'm not doing it right. I just, don't know what to do about it. And nobody said anything for an uncomfortable few seconds. And one guy leans over and looks at me goes,

You do know you can tell us no.

And I said, well, actually I had no idea I could do that. And so the solution was I was given a one page report, which is a great idea. If you're growing a business, even if you make it to yourself or a mentor, a one pager of what are our goals, what are our key performance metrics, what are we working on? They said, flip it over, 15 lines, you know, we only need lot of read, 15 bullet points of the things and at the top are the things you are working on that are important.

At the bottom of things, the important that you're not working on and rank them in the order of attention. These get all your attention, these get some, this is not getting any. So we can at least see your mindset of where your focus is and if the order is wrong, we'll tell you to change. So I started doing that, which was a wonderful exercise of prioritization as well. And they never told me to change my list. But I now was relieved to realize I'm not ignoring you. Here's what's more important.

Shane Kilby (1:04:33)
You just haven't, you haven't made it, you haven't made it to that top of the list. Give me time.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:04:33)
But yeah, I'd

Duane Murphy (1:04:33)
I like that.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:04:37)
And there were times where

Doris and showed up and changed the priority as well hard. We did a thing, we're working a lot of things and this was probably in 2015 or 16. We said, look, kind of like with KFR, we said, look, we're gonna quit working on these things and we're tripling our recruiting goal. We're gonna triple our, we have a goal of transaction volume over a six month period, annual transaction volume recruited in a six month period.

we're going to triple that goal. And if we didn't hit it, we were close when we shifted our focus. even then the board meeting said, well, Glenn had told him to work on this, but he shifted recruiting, which was the right thing to do because it goes to revenue and moves the ball forward on everything else. If we generate more revenue, we can hire somebody to do the thing.

Shane Kilby (1:05:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You make some of the admin and support problems magnify, but then you got you, you can, you can wing that. You can fight that battle till you get that problem solved. It's a little, you know, lopsided when you've got all that admin and support and you know, and everybody's sitting around just waiting on the checks to cash.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:05:45)
Well,

one of the things we think is an opportunity with our centralization of all our back office here in Birmingham is that it gives us a sense of economy of scale. So instead of a franchise that's got replicated things, not all of them do, some operate out of one office, but it means one, our staff is cross-trained. So it's not like, Sally's out today. You've got to wait till Tuesday. It means our.

commission handling, our money handling, our escrow handling is always got multiple people who do it. If there's a brokerage question, there's more than one person who can answer it. We have state law guidelines for every state. Every contract gets reviewed based on its checklist for its state laws and they're cross-trained. So it's been a delight. The agents who've joined us said, you know, I thought I needed the physical office to go in, but now that I think about it, my broker wasn't always there. And now they were on the phone.

But even then they could be tied up in a closing or something. Said, now with multiple people who can answer a question that really know what they're doing. That's been been a, they said, you told me it was true, but you were right. I've got better support than I did. And we think that can help us as we scale make the business increasingly efficient.

a flywheel effect.

Duane Murphy (1:06:52)
Hmm.

Shane Kilby (1:06:54)
Yep. All right. So.

We're going to have to have another episode because I wanted to get into the book. I wanted to get into the book.

Duane Murphy (1:07:01)
I was going say, the

scale in multiple states and just the growth of the organization, just everything that you're doing is pretty inspiring. That's pretty amazing. Sometimes I sit here and I get stuck in my own way. Sometimes just trying to figure out how to go across the the state that I'm in, by the way, much less to try to figure out how to go across 39 of them.

and not be backed by a behemoth franchise or corporate... ...flig of some sort and here you are living proof that it can be done.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:07:40)
Hey, Duane, I want to tell you secret. We were very concerned to begin with about telling them what we're doing for fear that the BMFs would see it and come after us. They don't care. And I'd be at conferences and they would say, well, how many agents you have? I'd tell them, they'd go, and what's your either gross commission or transaction by them? I'd tell, and I could see that just, oh, nothing. What they didn't ask, I would go to, I've gotten the opportunity to speak at Inman and NAR and I'd hear other people on stage and they'd tell how many agents they had.

and their transaction volume and everybody, particularly the indie brokers like what we're all doing and they applaud and I go, yeah, but if you just tell me if I take away your rock stars, rest of your agents are starving.

Shane Kilby (1:08:21)
He

Glenn S. Phillips (1:08:21)
I said, the number I care about is transaction volume per agent. And so I think last year, our average for our producing agents was a little north of 8 million in transaction volume an agent. About 20 sides an agent.

Shane Kilby (1:08:25)
Yeah, productivity, productivity.

That's definitely not an industry standard.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:08:41)
And,

Duane Murphy (1:08:41)
No.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:08:43)
you know, if you don't sell too many and I lose money on you. But that's the, we're going to row together. you know, one of our agents noted on some post I've been doing and she chimed in about what we're doing because, you know, we don't always provide the lead quantity people want, but our agents tell us these are the best leads they've ever gotten enough that they've quit other sources. And they say, if we'll work them over time, if I'm just saying it came in and they didn't buy this week,

I said, well, you threw it away. In fact, we want to be better at working them correctly over time, of being of service over time. But it's just very interesting to see. She said, brokerages will come in and give you the training and the tools, but then you've got to figure out where to get the leads or they'll sell them to you. Said, I've never been a brokerage that gave you the tools, showed you what to do with them, and then handed them to you. And I said, and I need you to work them.

Shane Kilby (1:09:35)
Yeah, that's why he's been

working before. Nah, I just need you to close them.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:09:39)
You are the last step. You are a converter of all our expenditures, effort and time, blood, sweat and tears to revenue for us all and to serve the person. Help them. If you help them, that improves the odds that they'll let you help them again.

Shane Kilby (1:09:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. One of the biggest challenges in the industry, you know, no matter how many leads, know, it's, it's leads are easy. ⁓ conversions to art, you know, and anyone can learn it, but then it just works.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:10:02)
Mm-hmm.

Duane Murphy (1:10:07)
Yeah. So

yeah, the amazing, I've got 30 other questions in my head, but I'm gonna have to shelf them in the effort of saving time. Glenn, we reach coast to coast and all over. I think that our footprint is, our fingerprint, right? Footprint is growing every single day. So there's gonna be without a doubt, some people that have some questions, wanna just reach out to you, touch base with you, follow you.

Shane Kilby (1:10:15)
Hahaha.

Duane Murphy (1:10:32)
What's the best way for someone to to find Glenn?

Glenn S. Phillips (1:10:38)
Yeah, so if you Google Glenn Phillips, you'll get the former singer of whatever, wet sprocket, Toe the Wet Sprocket, yeah. And I'm not a singer. There's a reason I play a sousaphone, a tuba. And I really do. But if you look for Glenn S. Phillips in Lake Homes, you'll find me on, I'm more active right now on Facebook, very active there, but some on LinkedIn and you can.

Shane Kilby (1:10:46)
What? Yeah, something.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:11:02)
go to lakehomes.com and under leadership at the bottom, I'm there and you know, just G Phillips at lakehomes.com. Reach out to me. I'm, you know, my agents do and it's pretty accessible. I try to be. And if you reach out to me, I don't respond. You can try again. I'm not offendable.

Shane Kilby (1:11:21)
Yeah, or give me an opportunity to get right back with you. Absolutely. Well, and that information will be in the show notes as well. We'll keep that stuff in the show notes for everybody. You know, if you guys have listened to any of this and taken away any type of value, hopefully it's been beneficial to you, your business, your future endeavors. Glenn, you've been a absolute, mean, I literally could sit here like an audible.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:11:26)
Yeah, so we're.

Shane Kilby (1:11:46)
like audible book and just listen to that and listen to you speak because I'm just, I always will see myself as being a student, a self-driven learner, a coachable, teachable individual, and then try to transfer that same mindset onto those in my organization as well. In the future, we'll have to do this again and whatever we got to do to get Ms. Doris on here, if we got to make a donation or whatever, like,

I want to, those are the, not that you're not, because you've been absolutely phenomenal, but I can tell.

Duane Murphy (1:12:13)
I you gotta get her

an anniversary gift. I mean...

Glenn S. Phillips (1:12:16)
I'll tell you a story

she probably will wish I didn't say is that I suggested to, know, Inman can be a bit, likes to think of themselves as edgy at their conference, but apparently I crossed the line and she was like, you did what? I submitted a speaking topic for us to go do together, which she didn't want to do, of how to grow a national real estate company when management sleeps together.

Shane Kilby (1:12:20)
Thanks for the best.

that's awesome.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:12:39)
But if you read it, it look, it's Mr. Mrs. Glandorf-Philipson. did say it's really, about how we co-lead a business, how we can make one-in-one be more than three. Yeah.

Shane Kilby (1:12:46)
You got that hook, that chip-like hook. You got that hook

in there, Ashley.

Duane Murphy (1:12:50)
Yeah.

It's all about the headline.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:12:52)
So,

Shane Kilby (1:12:53)
Yeah.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:12:54)
but it's also about how do you grow? How do you partner with people? I see too many people, even with real estate teams, we're partnering 50-50. You will fail. You will fail. That's not how this is done. Even we had to decide, look, you've had your business, I've had my business. We talk business, we don't agree. But what are we gonna do if we're leading one together? And so we set down ground rules before we agreed to do this because we could not have this business.

Shane Kilby (1:13:02)
Yeah.

Glenn S. Phillips (1:13:19)
damage our relationship.

And so, but it was premeditated how we were going to do it. It wasn't get into it and just go, well, I just thought you would do X. No, this is, if you're gonna have a business partner, you gotta know what it is. You need to also know what the rip cords are if somebody wants out. It's not like pre-nup, this is a business. Business is always exit. Even if you grow to be 200 years old and both pass away on the same day, you always exit. And so what does that look like?

What are the goals? What are we trying to accomplish? Are we on the same page? We don't work the same. We don't see the world the same. We count on that. Because if we saw it the same way, we'd be redundant.

Duane Murphy (1:13:55)
We're gonna have to charge our subscribers and our listeners extra for that last little piece of golden nugget. Just saying. Like that right there was that was a business class 201 possibly 301 That was I love it. Love it. All right, Shane take us out of here

Shane Kilby (1:14:03)
Yeah.

Lots of lots of gold, lots of nuggets. ⁓

Yeah, so if you guys took value away from it, please do us a huge favor. As Dwayne would say, smash that subscribe button, like and share this episode. And we always appreciate a good five-star review because it helps us as Dwayne would call it the Google rhythm. The algorithm helps get us up to charts and helps get it into listeners ears just like you and I.

Duane Murphy (1:14:21)
MASS

Google Rhythm.

Shane Kilby (1:14:37)
With that, we will see you next time on the other side. Let's send them out, Dwayne. Take care, guys. Peace.

Duane Murphy (1:14:41)
Peace!