Clay Lehman on scaling with systems, automation, and AI that prevents burnout - EP24

In this episode of The Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock, we sit down with Clay Lehman, founder of Lehman Strategic Partners, to talk about how entrepreneurs and real estate professionals can finally escape overwhelm and scale their businesses without burning out.  

Clay has spent more than 20 years in real estate, from property management to commercial buildings, and now helps owners build systems, strategies, and automation that deliver growth while freeing up time. His insights are practical, actionable, and rooted in lessons he learned the hard way.  

What you’ll learn in this episode:  
• How automation can improve customer service instead of hurting it  
• Why documenting your processes is the first step to freedom  
• The eliminate, automate, delegate framework every owner needs  
• How to create content that moves people from cold to client  
• The biggest threat to your business (hint: it’s not competition, it’s obscurity)  
• Which AI tools are worth your time right now, from Gemini to Perplexity Comet  
• How to build trust with your audience through content and calls to action  

Clay also shares the hardest lesson he learned as a business owner, how he thinks about delegation, and why awareness is the missing piece of the “know, like, trust” formula.  

Connect with Clay:  
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clay-lehman/  
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imclaylehman  
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/clay.lehman  

This episode is brought to you by We Capital and the Goethals Capital Fund, where we buy properties in cash, lock in deep discounts, remove mortgage risk in year one, and refinance later to scale — all without asking investors for more capital.  

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite platform for new episodes every Tuesday. Share this with a friend who needs systems, not more stress.  

🎙 About Steven Weinstock
Steven Weinstock is a real estate investor and founder of WeCapital and the Goethals Capital Fund. Since 2001, he has built a diverse portfolio of residential and multifamily assets while helping investors access passive income through strategic real estate opportunities. On this podcast, he shares real-world insights on investing, capital raising, and what it really takes to build and scale in today’s market.

📩 Want to invest or get in touch?
Visit: www.WeCapitalX.com

📱 Connect with Steven:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stevenweinstock1

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wecapitalx/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheWealthClockPodcast

Transcript

Steven Weinstock: 0:01

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Wealth Clock podcast with Steven Weinstock. I've been investing in real estate for over 20 years, from single family homes to multi-family properties, to launching my own real estate investment fund. This podcast is brought to you by my company, we Capital and the Goethals Capital Fund, where we buy properties in cash. We lock in deep discounts. We eliminate the mortgage risk in year one, and we refinance later to scale all without asking investors for more capital. This show is not about me, it's about operators, founders, closers, who are building real results in real time. Today I'm excited to have with me Clay Lehman, founder of Lehman Strategic Partners, who has built a reputation for helping real estate professionals and business owners create systems. Strategies and automation that scale their operations without burning out. Clay, welcome to the show. Hey, man, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. No problem. Okay, so I looked at your bio from a high level. Maybe just give a minute or two, tell us about yourself and then we'll get to it.

Clay Lehman: 1:14

Sure. So I've been in real estate for 20 years. Prior to that, I was in corporate accounting and corporate finance. I'm actually a licensed CPA, although you wouldn't want to ask me for any tax advice. I haven't practiced in 20 years. I've done a lot in real estate from retail brokerage REO, brokerage property management. Now I my latest venture is in title company, and then I know your group and you our real estate investors. I'm a fellow real estate investor. And I've mostly single family. I've had a couple of multifamily investments and a couple commercial buildings. But yeah I'm just, I'm stoked to be here. Excited to talk to you and your audience.

Steven Weinstock: 1:53

Where are you where are you based out of, where are you from?

Clay Lehman: 1:55

I'm in central Florida. I'm in Ocala, Florida. A little north of Orlando.

Steven Weinstock: 1:59

Been there your whole life or your transplant?

Clay Lehman: 2:02

So I grew up in Florida, Tallahassee to Jacksonville, to Orlando, and now I've been in Ocala for just about 20 years.

Steven Weinstock: 2:09

Okay, so

Clay Lehman: 2:10

you're

Steven Weinstock: 2:10

a

Clay Lehman: 2:10

real,

Steven Weinstock: 2:11

Florida native. Unlike I'm legit, unlike the rest of my neighbors here in the northeast who are making Florida the new home.

Clay Lehman: 2:18

Hey, it's great. Bring 'em on.

Steven Weinstock: 2:20

All right. Tell me about some of your automation, some of your business systems, and how they were key to scaling.

Clay Lehman: 2:28

Sure. So I, it start, my introduction to all this started with automation in my property management business and we were just finding that. We were having trouble scaling in the manner we wanted to, and I didn't like our inconsistent messaging. One of the things that was counterintuitive that I discovered about automation, a lot of times you hear the word automation and you associate it with. A reduction in customer service levels, but I found the exact opposite to be true because you can automate make, for example, we want to send an email out every time we lease a property, and that seems like it would be an easy thing to make sure happens every single time, but it didn't always happen. Or even, more important to the owners, like if if a renter was late on their, a tenant was late on their rent. An owner wants to know that and we want to communicate it, but property managers get busy. So automation was a huge lift for us in making sure that one, the messages went out. But two, the other benefit was I didn't have to worry about is Timmy saying the same thing as Bobby or what? We've made sure that the message that we wanted sent went out so that. Was the introduction to automation. And in the last couple years, AI has ramped things up to 11. And now that you can incorporate ai, you can personalize your automations that much more. Plus it helps designing the automations for people like me who, that's not my background. AI can help me. It can be basically my design partner. It's incredible what it can do. It can watch you creating, Google AI Studios has a screen share function where it can watch you work and then you can, with natural language ask it, how do I get it to do X? And it'll tell you. And it's, it is just ramped my ability to create and automate and anyone's not just mine, but through the roof.

Steven Weinstock: 4:17

Yeah, AI is really entered into everybody's sphere for real estate investors as well. Although I think most people when they think of ai, they're just thinking chat, GPT and how they could write emails that look a little better than their education allowed them to output on their own. What does your typical client look like? Are they entrepreneurs? Are they feeling overwhelmed? How do they get to you? Yeah. Why? Why are they calling you? Where are they holding in their business at the time?

Clay Lehman: 4:47

No, that's such a great question. It's typically people that have hit a ceiling, so the reason that I relate so well to that person is I was that person. Most of us when we get into business, whether that's real estate or another business, but really frequently in real estate. You follow the same trajectory where you get into the business and you mine your sphere of influence for business, and that gets you to a certain point and you do a good job and you get referrals, and that gets you to another point. But most people after three to five years realize that if they want to grow a scalable, valuable real estate business. They're gonna have to step outside of their sphere and start, really marketing. Most of the time when we get into real estate, we're not coming from a marketing background, nor do you learn much about marketing or strategy in your real estate classes. And that's where I step in, is to help them understand, how to build a strategy, which starts with, and this is true for anybody. Knowing who is your target audience, but not just knowing like their name or what they are, but what motivates them? What are their pain points? What are their aspirations? But truthfully the key is knowing their pain points, which then helps you design your marketing strategy to speak to those pain points. It's almost if you don't know who you're talking to, how do you know what to say? So that's where we start. And then we reverse engineer from where do we want people to get to and what's their journey from where they are to where we want them, and then we build our strategy to take them from place to place. That's the other thing people miss. Is that you can't just immediately start talking to a cold audience about, Hey, book a consultation with me. They don't know who you are. You have to build no and trust. You have to build trust with them. So we help 'em build strategies. A lot of it revolves around content, social media, drip campaigns, things of that nature to help them move people from where they are to where they want 'em and grow their businesses. And then on the flip side of that. One of the things I learned in my, I guess we're coming up on just past 16 years in business for myself, is that what keeps you chained to your desk is a lack of process and system. That's the number one thing that keeps you from, I used to have jokingly say that when I started my business, I built my own prison and what I learned the key to getting out of that prison. Was, documentation of processes, optimization of processes, and then applying a framework of eliminate, automate delegate, where you look at, and I'm sorry, I'm on a lecture here. I'm almost done. The eliminate, automate delegate is you look at what can you eliminate? What are things that you're doing that you no longer need to do? A great example is maybe you do something for a client even after the client's gone. I've seen that countless times, including in my own business. Automate is looking at opportunities for automation like we discussed earlier, and then if you can't eliminate or automate it, you need to seek to delegate it so that you can be focusing your time on the higher value things that an owner should be doing.

Steven Weinstock: 7:47

Okay. So first of all continue lecturing because my audience comes not for me. I found out they're not coming for me. They're coming for the people who I'm interviewing. And so definitely feel free to lecture. Just to noted, highlight you mentioned before the, no and trust. I know we spoke about this offline but I actually only heard about this concept a little while ago. I was talking to a guy named Yonah Weiss. Who was a big cost segregation guy at Madison specs. And just for our audience, he explained to me that it's like a triangle and, there's three parts. There's KNOW and trust. And in order for somebody to do business with you, they have to know and trust you. And he asked me at the time, what do you think the most important, of those three are, and I was, oh, trust or maybe and he said, no it's, no, they have to know you. Why? Because if they don't know you, they can't like you and they can't trust you. So the first step out there is to get them to know you and then after that they can like and trust you. Yeah. Can you walk us through a before and after example of a business you helped? What did their day-to-day look like before you stepped in? What changed for them after implementing some of your strategies?

Clay Lehman: 9:05

Sure. So first I want to piggyback on the know and trust briefly. One he nailed it about knowing, being the most important thing. One of the quotes that I read and I wish I could remember where I read. But was that the biggest threat to your business? Isn't your competition, the biggest threat to your business is your obscurity? And and I, when I first started my business I used the what I like to jokingly refer to as the Field of Dreams approach, where if I built it, they will come. And after about five or six years of basically no one coming, no one's showing up, I learned that, the knowing is the key. So in terms of the results that we've seen with our clients, the big thing is there's so much low hanging fruit, and this is something people can do for themselves. What I'm doing for them is nothing that they couldn't do for themselves. Now. I'm pretty good at it, but I want to encourage you, the very first thing to do is just Google yourself and think about the entry point that people have to you. As I mentioned, I work a lot with real estate professionals. The average real estate client spends two to three weeks researching online before they connect with an agent. So that means they're gonna be on sites like realtor.com, zillow.com, homes.com, and every real estate professional has the opportunity to create a profile on that site. And that's the first thing that people are gonna see about you. So that it follows, you want to optimize those profiles. So one of the very first things we do with people is. We do a deep dive audit of their marketing presence. And that goes from beginning to end, but we start with their profiles. And so I've worked with a couple of agents where they hadn't claimed their profile yet. So they, they didn't have a professional headshot. You want to have a banner you want to have a bio that's optimized for your ideal client. That's the other thing that we lose sight of is that we make our content about us. Because we want people to know that we're credible and that we're, that we're good at what we do, that we have experience. And that should be this much of your content, this much of your content. And the way you demonstrate your credibility is by sharing your knowledge. And so that's what we help people with is creating content maps. So what we've seen for our clients is that they get a big lift out of a lot of little things. The other thing that most. And it's not just real estate professionals. My own businesses that we're missing are calls to action. So think about your path from where your client is to where you want them as. Like a GPS, a map you want 'em to get from where they are to where you are. But to get 'em there, you have to give 'em little markers along the way. So what we'll do is we'll create content that someone connects with, but it doesn't tell them what the next step in the process is. And you want to match that with where they are. So for your cold audiences, so like for your social media that you're gonna post, you know that is gonna be seen by people that don't necessarily know you yet the call to action should be something that is 100% value to them and nothing promotional for you. So like a first time home buyers checklist to get started or how to rebuild your credit. Now that lead magnet, that would be a lead magnet, that lead magnet should then have the next step, which would be to connect with you further. So what we see with our clients is that before we get started with them, most of them are doing some degree of marketing, but it just lacks strategy. And where they end up is that they have a full marketing strategy that brings people from. Where they are to where they want 'em to be. And then the one thing that I would add to the know, like trust paradigm is awareness. That's something that I've added, I guess you would say. Because. It's not a one and done process of know and trust and in real estate, and I don't, that's my, my the paradigm I'm coming from. So you'll have to forgive me, but in real estate, the evidence that you're not maintaining the awareness stage is when you run into that friend who says, oh man, I just bought a house. I totally forgot you were in real estate. I need to, I wish I had reached out to you and I used to get mad'cause that's happened to me. I used to get mad at the friend in my head. Not out loud, but in my head I'd be like, man, how could he do that? But then I realized that the person to be mad at is me, because I didn't do a good enough job of maintaining that awareness. So what we're working on with them is we optimize the marketing strategy upfront. And then we move to a monthly engagement where we're creating content on their behalf. And with ai, we capture their written voice. We write a blog each, once a week, a blog, and then social media every day to support the blog, but also to trigger that awareness. And every single thing has a call to action. One other thing that is a really easy lift for people to keep in mind is that on your social media profiles, if you are wanting to grow your business, what you want to do is you want to create content that makes someone want to click on your name to see what you're about. But then, and this is something you should do, try and put on the glasses of your client, click on your name and what do they see? What they should see is a nice professional headshot as your profile picture, but then your banner should be a call to action. Like for example, mine. I'm trying to grow my Facebook group, so when people hit my name, they come to my profile and it's got my profile, my professional AI created, by the way, headshot. And then my my banner is an invite to join my Facebook group. What you wanna do is have that banner be something someone wants to click on, and then when they click on it, it's gonna bring up the caption that you put on it. That caption should be a little bit of a bio about you. Or really what's the value they'll get from doing what you want 'em to do, which is, and in my case, it says, Hey, I have this free AI driven, or ai, it's a free Facebook group for AI curious realtors. Not sure why I couldn't say that better. So when they click on it. On that picture, it brings up my bio or my caption that says, join the Unstuck Facebook group for tips, and it has a link. You always wanna make that next action as easy as possible for the user. So you want to include a link, or if you're at, one of the things we coach people on is. Having a strategy and some automations around gathering reviews, and when you want to gather reviews, you want to make that action very easy for the person you're requesting the review from. So very early in your email or text should be a direct link to the review site where they can take that action.

Steven Weinstock: 15:57

Interesting. Just to go back you mentioned a friend might say, oh, I just bought a house and I didn't think of you. I actually get that all the time, although I'm not a realtor and I don't help people buy houses, but I'll have a friend who will just reach out to me, a good friend who I'm friends with, for 25 years, and they'll ask me for help on buying a house or help on could I, do I have any houses for sale? And I'm thinking to myself, I'm a real estate investor. I buy multi-family outta state. I thought everybody knew this, especially my friends. And here he's asking me about a single family home in the neighborhood. It just, I guess my messaging even to my friends is not clear. Another thing I started this podcast for selfish reasons. Some of the selfish reasons are. Is I get to have 30 minute conversations with people. For free and for people who might not even really gimme the time of day otherwise. So I'm going to ask you somebody in my field. I'm a multifamily investor. One of the biggest hurdles we have these days is capital raising raising capital for deals LP investors. What would you tell someone like me and there's a lot of people in my audience who are, I guess like me. What could we do to help with raising capital? In 2019 it was a lot easier. Anybody who was buying was a genius because the market really just corrected any mistake but in a tougher market where. You really have to be good at what you're doing. And even if you're good at what you're doing just things sometimes just don't work out or distributions or planned or refinances get delayed. So you have a lot of mom and pop investors who are now on the sidelines and not necessarily investing. What would you tell someone in my shoes, how can we go about, trying to expand our network to get more investors into our deals?

Clay Lehman: 17:55

Steven, I'm glad you asked. That's actually a great use case for ai and I'm gonna give you a little bit of a multi-step process to follow that I think would be very effective. So I would start in chat or whatever your kind of favorite base model is, and I would ask it to create a deep research prompt to create a report. On and whatever your target, like you mentioned, mom and pop investors that are on the sidelines. So I would use that exact language That will give you a prompt that I would take to Gemini. Gemini Google's Gemini has a deep research function that, in my opinion is the best, gives you the best results. Chat has a deep research function that is also really good. I tend to use Geminis because as a workspace user I have more capacity or usage or whatever. So I would run that deep research report on that demographic, that person that I'm trying to reach, I would take that back into chat. The report, 'cause it's gonna be like 19, 20, 30 pages. I don't read them. I move them back into my chat and then I say to my chat or whatever tool I'm using. Help me des design a plan to reach these people, reach this demographic with, and tell it what your end goal is. I believe what you should do is also take that and find and ask either chat or whomever, or maybe even still in gemini, not important, but I would ask, where are these people hanging out? So Russell Brunson has a series of books. There, it's the experts trilogy or ex, or I'm sorry secrets Trilogy. It's Expert Secrets, traffic Secrets and.com Secrets. And one of the concepts he talks about is determining where your target audience congregates, going there, adding value, and basically bringing them to your target audience. So I would imagine that mom and pop investors might be on BiggerPockets. Or might be in certain Reddit forums, certain Facebook groups. So I would figure out which, what are those? Where are they? And then I would every single day create a post that has value to put into those groups. I do that every day. In fact, this morning I drink my coffee and I put content in all of the groups where my target audience is hanging out. So between. The deep research report and chat that will help me know what content to create. And then I would also ask ai, where are these people hanging out? And then I would combine those two things. I would then start creating content. For those groups or Yeah, for those groups to reach those people. And then I would also ask, and this will be a part of your deep research report, what calls to action will be the most effective in bringing them into my ecosystem? That's how I would go about really any. Project or any, where my goal is to reach people and to get them to take an action. I want to understand what's gonna motivate'em to take that action, where are they? And then how do I reach them and reach 'em up here and that's a process that I would go through.

Steven Weinstock: 21:27

Just to go off topic a second and not to get into politics, but if anybody's watching this interview you look exactly and I'm sure you've heard this before, so don't say it and let me say it, but you look like a guy who is Donald Trump's best friend. The guy who runs the UFC, Dana White. Have you heard that before? Ever? No. That's funny. I haven't heard that before. I don't know. That's a compliment. He's a Yeah, sure.

Clay Lehman: 21:49

He's

Steven Weinstock: 21:50

a tank. He's a tank. He's a billionaire. He is popular. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's just the Zoom video. And I only see your chest up physique, but I'm sure your buff and you could kick ass in the octagon. I'm a teddy

Clay Lehman: 22:01

bear in the octagon, but no I

Steven Weinstock: 22:02

hadn't heard that. That's hilarious. I appreciate it. Yeah. So if anybody's listening, you gotta head over to YouTube and tell me if I'm correct or if I'm just losing my mind over here. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially myself we are, I hate to use the word control freaks that we, we just love to do everything. Yeah. And we feel that we're the best at everything. And sometimes, and I find this happens to me on a regular basis, we get down to the weeds and I'm just doing things that are just penny ante. They're, so it's something that could really offload to somebody making,$5 an hour as a via, as a virtual assistant, or even hiring somebody locally for 20, 30 bucks an hour. And I find myself, doing these tasks and it's just hard to let go. And, delegating is such a real strategy. To know how to delegate. It's such a talent. I used to wonder why these, like CEOs of like multinational companies were making millions and billions and, they're not doing work. They're sitting in an office and, everybody else is doing all the, these guys know how to delegate. And in order to scale, you really have to know how to delegate. How do you deal with, somebody who's an entrepreneur? For the most part, he is an owner operator of, some real estate that he owns, and he's doing it for, 10 years. He's successful, he has money, his, he is living his best life. And how do you tell a guy like this who is doing well, that hey, you could do much better. You just have to let go and let the processes get automated or just hire out some of your, lower hanging fruit to somebody else. What do you tell people like this?

Clay Lehman: 23:44

No, you nailed it. The big thing is getting 'em a quick win upfront, but first of all, I. I make sure that aligns with their goals. Meaning if I'm working with someone, I'm not gonna force on them the idea of delegation. But if their goal is to scale their business, it's the one of the first places we're gonna start. And what I tell them is one, try and demonstrate to them that somebody's 80%, but leveraged meaning like. Yeah, you could do it better, but you're gonna do five widgets where if you can delegate to six people that are doing four widgets instead of five, you've got your four times six results, which 32 anyways you've got. 24, whatever, mu many more widgets than you have doing it yourself. So you demonstrate that to them and that's helpful. I always encourage people, whether I'm working with them or not, to read Dan Martel's book, buy Back Your Time. It is honestly my favorite book is, seven Habits, but that buy back your time is probably number one a because it's just such great practical advice around not just delegation, but. One of the things he talks about that you nailed is the you knowing your buyback rate. So he encourages you to take what you want to make in a year. Divide that by 2000. So let's say you wanna make $400,000 a year. You divide that by 2000. That's $200 an hour. Any work that you're doing that's significantly less than $200 an hour immediately delegate that. The next challenge to delegation becomes when you haven't documented. Most of us haven't documented our processes. You can't really delegate something if it's not documented. But again, this is where AI becomes a lifesaver. I've been a big believer in documenting my processes for a long time, not forever. When I first started my business, I thought, why do I need to document my processes? It's just me. Then when I hired my first employee, I thought it's just me and her. And then I hired my next one. But then by the fourth employee, we were having problems with people doing stuff right? And I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. But it was harder to do. It was 2000 and say 12, we didn't have the automation in AI that we have today. So here's the method that you'll use. And again, this comes from buyback Your time is something he calls the camcorder method. Which he says ages him, dates him, because when he started doing it, he literally was using a camcorder. But today, you can use a tool called Loom, which will do a screen record of your screen, and then a little window of you every process, do it. Even if it's just you and the business right now, do it on a Loom video. Talk through the process. I click here, then I click here, then I click there. Loom will create a video, but even better, it'll create a transcript. And then here's where AI comes in to take it to the next 15 levels. There's a tool called Google Notebook, lm. And you can think of it as a tool that allows you to train your own AI tool, your own LLM large language model. So what you can do is go, the thing, the power of Google Notebook, LM, is it's literally only your data. So you don't get any hallucinations, you don't get any sort of extra fluff. But it will help you flesh it out. So what I do is I take that transcript, I add it to a Google notebook, lm, and then I continue adding each process. And then what you have, it becomes ChatAble, meaning you can use natural language to, to speak to the process manual, to have it tell you what to do. So now when you hire someone, you can share that notebook with them, and while I still would advocate you training them, you, they can access that information. And so that takes their 80% as good as what you do and probably moves it up to 90% as good. The next thing that I've done with the same tool that has been tremendously valuable is whenever I train a new employee, now we do it on a Zoom or a Google Meet, even if we're in the same office. So that it will create that same transcript, and then I create a personalized notebook for that employee that has all of their training data. I can also add into it my process manuals. Everything we, the other nice thing about Google Notebook LM, is it's not just, you don't just have to use your data. So for example, in my title company, our production software is called Qualia, and they have tons of great data out there on how to use their system. I can add that to a notebook. You can have 300 or 500 different sources in your notebook and it is such a powerful tool and that's, that just scratches the surface of the things that Notebook can do for you. But in the area of delegation, our big concern is. I want 'em to do it exactly how I want 'em to do it. I wanted to do it that way every single time. This gets you so much closer. So the big thing to get people to understand the power of delegation is to illustrate for them one, the idea of delegation as leverage and employees as assets. That's the other mindset shift that we all have to go through. We're like, oh, I don't wanna hire anybody. They're an expense. If you're hiring the right people, if you hire 'em the right way, they're an asset that expands your reach. Once you get 'em through that, then if we can get 'em some quick wins, meaning, an build an automation that takes care of something that used to take 'em five or 10 minutes a day. My big thing, especially with my team, is we fall into a trap where we say, why do I need to automate that? It only takes me five minutes. But if it's a task that takes five minutes and you do it three times a day and you do it every single day, that's three times five, which I can do that. Math is 15, and then 15 times the rest of your life is a whole lot. So I try to tell 'em, don't focus on automating the thing that takes 10 hours. Yeah, let's get there. But let's start with the things that take five minutes. A lot of times those are a really easy lift to throw into an automation. So hopefully that answered your question. That's how I move people from the idea of, the challenges and objections to delegation to, most people will turn into not just. Accepting delegation, but advocating it to others. Because there's so much power in it,

Steven Weinstock: 29:53

There's there's so much AI out there. I've used a notebook lm they have this function where you could plug in, the sources, whether it's a YouTube link or PDF, or I guess you could word document or just type in whatever you want. Just to give an example, I plugged in. An offering memorandum on one of my investments where I was seeking out capital and it spit out this audio version. It was almost like a podcast of two people talking, discussing my PDF. And it was, it sounded great. And although I haven't really used notebook lm for anything useful yet, I really just played around with it. I think some of my biggest issues are figuring out how to use them. In a way that really helps my business. I'm familiar with, obviously chat, gpt I'm familiar with Gemini because, now it's on everybody's phone if you have an Android phone. Yeah. I obviously have a workspace account, which is like a professional Google account. People have their own domain name for their Gmail, so they get a workspace account and they throw in all these other features. There's so much out there. What automations or what tools could you tell our audience that are, essential in today's business environment? Again, there's so much out there. Yeah. And there's so many different ways to get to certain tools. Sure. Gimme a list of four or five that just, figure out how to use it. These will, be a lifesaver.

Clay Lehman: 31:20

Yeah. It's such a challenge. There's so much noise in ai in our world, and then there's so much noise around AI and there's so much that drives that, that fomo feeling oh, if I don't use the newest, coolest AI tool, I'm really missing out. What I would encourage people to do is focus on one tool at a time, and I would start with the most versatile tools. If you are a workspace user, I would say start with Gemini. Which is a different answer than I would've given six months ago. Used to be start with chat, which if you're already in chat and have some level of comfort, then just lean into that and kind of master or master not right, but optimize what you're getting out of chat before you start adding other things. But Gemini, they, it's really incredible how much it's improved. And one of the fun things is the new image generation tool within Gemini. The reason I advocate for Chat and Gemini as your starting point is they're the most versatile. You can, create content, you can use it as a thinking partner, you can do all kinds of stuff, and then you can also create your images in there. So it's a huge ver they're both huge, hugely versatile tools. I would start with those two. Going from there, the next thing I'd look at is the automations that live in the existing tech stack you already have. That's the o. The other temptation we have or really it's the same temptation, which is to grow our tech stack to take advantage of every little thing that's out there. The first thing you should do before you add anything else to your tech stack is fully optimize what you have. So for my real estate professional clients, it's usually their CRM. A lot of times our CRMs are a very powerful tools that we aren't using to their full potential. One of the things that's a real time sucker is, responding to emails. And you can set automations to reply to your kind of rote emails, the things that happen all of the time, and that will save you some time. The other thing is like scheduling. A lot of our CRMs will allow us to set up a calend link so we don't have to go back and forth with people. We can just say, Hey, schedule your time here. So the second thing I do after I played around with either chat or Gemini, is I would jump into whatever. My main tech, for us, like I said, is quality of my title company. Tons of automations in there. Take advantage of those things. And then the next thing I would say is I think probably Manus is my next favorite sort of thing to check out for people getting into ai. Manus is a agentic ai, meaning that you can give it instead of so with chat or with Gemini. You're giving it a prompt, it will respond. Then you give it another prompt, and then it'll respond until you finally get to that end goal that you were trying to reach. AG Agentic ai, you can give tasks. For example, you might say in Manus that, like for your example, you say, I wanna reach, I wanna raise capital from, and I feel like my target audience is mom and pops that are sitting on the sidelines. Help me design a marketing plan to reach them. What you get from Manus will blow your mind. Not to use a cliche, but it really, it's incredible what it will create. It'll even create, so I've had it do business plans for clients. My sons started a property services business, so I built them a marketing plan in Manus, and it went so far as to build out their website for 'em. That's incredible. The next thing that just came to mind, which is again, another newer tool, but. Unbelievably powerful is the Comet browser from Perplexity. Perplexity has replaced Google for me and for a lot of people in the AI space, and I think it's becoming more broadly adopted. Perplexity is like an AI search engine, so where Google gives you the best results to fit your query. Perplexity aggregates those results and then provides you with, here's the next steps, or here's what the your results say as a kind of combined entity. It gives you the sources. So if you want to for example, if it's a how to, you'll see the YouTube videos that it's referencing right there, but it'll also give you that information. Now they have a new browser called Comet. And what it can do. It's crazy. So the other day, like I was in my Facebook group and I wanted to know more about who all are members of my Facebook group. So I opened, I had that Facebook group open, and then I opened the the. Assistant within comet, and I said, Hey, what can you tell me about the members of my Facebook group? So then it takes over your screen turns like a little shade of blue. And then it starts scrolling through and gathering info and changing screens, pulling spreadsheets. It showed me that this was so cool. I had no I knew that I was having members join the group from all over the world. But I'm, my group members represent 65 different countries, which is so cool for a little country boy from Florida north Florida. That's what makes me country. Anyways it did that. The other thing that did that was super cool was I I have a blog and I write two blogs a week or two articles a week or whatever. But I don't really keep good track of what I've written. So I asked it. I said, can you make a table of all of my blogs with a link to the article that I can copy into a Google sheet? And so it was on 12 different pages and it went through every single page and it created that table. So that's all really good tactical stuff. But strategically it's super helpful too. So I had a call with, one of the things we seem to be getting calls about, me and my partner is helping people grow and monetize their Facebook groups. So I had a call with a guy that I wasn't familiar with, his Facebook group. So I went into the group and I asked comment to do a deep dive on, what are the topics of this group? What seems to drive engagement? What would be some strategies to grow this group. And it went through the group and it came back with incredible recommendations. There's just tons of things that Comet can do. And so I would definitely, and it's free now, perplexity has a pro account that's $20 a month. I'm a, I would 100% tell you it's worth every penny to have that pro account. But you can get in the comment browser for free. Same with Manus. Manus you can use for free. It runs off of credits. When you sign up, you get some credits. Every day they'll give you some credits, but they have a chat function that's 100% free, so you just have to change it over to chat and then you can chat with it. It doesn't do the age agentic thing I told you where you give it a task. But the chat is a very good chat. So I would check those tools out.

Steven Weinstock: 38:02

What's the hardest lesson you learned, in your own journey? You're in business a long time. What's the hardest lesson you learned?

Clay Lehman: 38:09

I don't know, man. There's been so many le tough lessons. I still the hardest, I remember the hardest day of being a business owner and that was in, and I don't remember the date. I just remember, and it's visceral, the feeling I get when I think back to this day. I've been run my first business was a REO asset management company. So we managed foreclosed foreclosures for hedge funds nationwide. And that business model isn't great. You manage the property for sometimes up to 10 months, 12 months, 14 months. You get paid at closing. But a little secret about employees, they wanna get paid every two weeks. So I had ridden waves up and down where I had borrowed money to pay. We sold houses, paid down the line of credit, just things went up and down. But in, I was in a season where my line of credit balance was climbing, and I remember the day I looked at it and it had gotten over $200,000, which for me was, could have, might as well have been a billion. And I didn't have the business to pay it off. I could look at what was coming and it was, I didn't see any path out of that. Hole and it was a scary moment and in retrospect, maybe should have closed the doors or I just, I learned that you have to pay really close attention and make moves early. I came out of that okay. Through. Something of a lot of luck, but also being ready for opportunity. I got a phone call a couple weeks after that where a friend of a friend had acquired a bunch of assets and we had the opportunity to manage'em, and, but I learned that lesson, that you need to be paying attention. The other thing I learned was that, you have to, if you have one client, you are not a business, you're a subsidiary. And to rely on just that single source of income. It just isn't, it isn't a viable business strategy. And so what I learned from that is one, diversification of client base, but two diversi diversification of revenue. You have to as a business owner, going back to our conversation around doing this sort of smaller tasks. You can't build a million dollar business doing $10 tasks. So you have to ruthlessly eliminate those tasks from your day so that you can be focused on growing the business and paying attention. The thing I love about real estate is if you're smart and you're flexible and you're paying attention, you can ride the different waves. You just have to know where to move. And I'm not always right. I've certainly I still remember when COVID hit, I thought, man. This probably means my foreclosure business is gonna just, come back to life. And I wasn't rooting for that, but I just assumed that when we shut the economy down, real estate would do this. I was 180%, 180 degrees wrong. It went the exact opposite direction, but I was paying attention. And so I wrote, I moved over and started doing more, leaning heavier into the property management side and grew a nice business. That's it. It is just, be flexible, pay attention, and know your numbers. What are you most excited about in the next 12 months when it comes to

Steven Weinstock: 41:24

tech

Clay Lehman: 41:25

and your business? Every single day it feels like some new thing, tool, application is being released. That changes things immensely. As someone who enjoys continuous improvement in learning, that's really exciting. So I'm excited to see where this tech continues to grow. I am excited in my business that I didn't. I don't know how this happened, but it feels a little bit like I'm with an, a group of people at the forefront of AI and real estate. Now, to be fair, what I'm doing, there's people, man, that are doing such amazing things in terms of automating and bringing AI into your business. That I don't touch, like Y OPO has some really cool AI tools for nurturing leads. That's not my thing, but my thing is helping entrepreneurs and real estate professionals build their strategies and the things that AI can help people do that I'm just so excited to be able to introduce that to people. I get such a rush out of showing somebody a tool that they can use in their business and just seeing their eyes go up like saucers and whoa, I didn't know I could do that. I love doing that. And I just, I know that I'm gonna have the opportunity to do that over and over again in the next 12 months. I'm excited about that. I also have to say, this is a new venture for me. My favorite time, this is my favorite time in a business, when you're figuring everything out, when every day there's a question that you go, huh, we've never run into that before. I actually get bored. When you get to that point where you're like, nah, we've done that a hundred times. So I'm excited about that part of my business continuing over the next year.

Steven Weinstock: 43:07

For someone listening right now, maybe they feel stuck, overwhelmed, they don't know how to scale. What's the first step

Clay Lehman: 43:16

you'd recommend? It's not sexy, but it's documenting your processes. When you get to a certain point in your business and you are overwhelmed with the storm around you the day to day, and you can't lift your head up to two. Strategize, you're never gonna come out of that. And the first step of coming out of that is documenting your processes. Because in doing that, even just in the exercise, I 100% guarantee you're gonna see something without any effort on your part other than the documentation where you go, wait, why am I doing this? And you'll be able to adjust it. But once you've documented it, feed it into AI and say, Hey, act as a best in class process documenter or process designer. What's missing from my process? How can I improve my process? What can I delegate? And just build on that. That's really the first thing that I would do is jump in and start documenting my processes and then turn around and work with AI to optimize those processes. It'll take a lot less time than you think, and you just have to think of it again. It took me a long time to recognize that yes, I'm busy. Yes, I have things quote unquote productive things I need to do. And documenting my processes or training an employee is, it takes me away from that productivity. That's an, it's an investment. It's just like taking that dollar that you could take and buy the candy bar, or I guess now maybe you need two, but you could buy the candy bar or you could put it in, put it into an investment. Like I saw a great reel the other day where it was like. If you spend $10 a day at McDonald's starting at this point in time, versus if you invested $10 a day in McDonald's at that same point in time, it's the same thing with investing in your business, by documenting your processes, yeah, it costs you some productivity time. But let's say you took 30 minutes a day or let's say you wanted to batch it and do two hours a week, and you spend that time documenting your processes, you're gonna buy yourself back 10 hours a week with those two hours easy.

Steven Weinstock: 45:20

Clay tell our audience where they could find you, learn more about you, how they could reach out. I'll put it in the show notes, but tell us. I appreciate it. Yeah. Tell us how they could call you, email you websites, social media, whatever you got.

Clay Lehman: 45:33

The easiest thing is probably connect with me on Facebook, clay Lehman, L-E-H-M-A-N. I'm, I put a lot of stuff out there. My email's easy to remember. It's Clay at I am clay lehman.com. Those are probably the easiest. I have a, my Facebook group is Unstuck ai. If you look for that, you'll find it. There's a ton of great content in there. And then finally on my website where you can find my blog. www.iamclaylayman.com. That's probably sufficient ways to get in touch with me.

Steven Weinstock: 46:05

Clay, I had a great time talking to you and honestly you really told me a lot you really said a lot here where after I, we finish here, I'm actually gonna take this raw video, before it gets edited, and I'm gonna send either the audio or the video to my partner. Because you really taught me a lot. I really want to test out some of these ai programs that are out there. And I really got tremendous value out of this last whatever it is, 30 minutes that we're talking. So I really want to thank you.

Clay Lehman: 46:35

Oh, I appreciate that.

Steven Weinstock: 46:36

Yeah, it taught me a lot. I hope our audience finds it as well. This episode might be released in a week or two, but I am literally, as soon as this is done, I am sending the files over to my partner. Just so you know, to get his take on it. I'm going to go through this over the next couple of days and really play around with some of these options. I really got tremendous value out of this, and I hope everybody else

Clay Lehman: 46:57

does, and I appreciate that so much. I'm so happy to hear that's, one of the reasons I love doing this is to hopefully bring value to your audience because, I want to connect with people. And on that note, as you get started, please reach out if you have questions or if you're like, Hey, I thought it could do this, but it did that, or whatever, right? I'm not a, I don't know everything far from it, I'm just a little further down the road than you are. But one of the great things about ai, it's so easy for you to catch up. So yeah, just let me know if you need any help with anything.

Steven Weinstock: 47:23

Clay, I really appreciate you coming on. For our listeners, if you found value in today's conversation, make sure to connect with Clay Layman and check out what he is building at Lehman Strategic Partners. This has been the Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstein podcast. Please share, subscribe until the next time. Keep building wealth, keep building systems and keep the clock moving forward in your favor. Clay, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, sir. I.