Category: Uncategorized

Posted on in Uncategorized

How to Get Started with Your Personal Realtor Brand

Whether you are new in real estate or an established realtor, your personal brand is one of the best tools you can have. We’re going to walk you through the process from beginning to end to build out your personal realtor brand.

Brand vs Identity

While your brand is based around your identity, your brand can change over time. A brand is something we come up with, but who we are is who we are. You’ll want to spend some time thinking over your identity, what is important to you, and other aspects of your personality and preferences that you would want to incorporate into your brand.

Your Personal Realtor Brand Name

It’s important to differentiate between your identity and what your team wants you to be. Your brand is the front line of your business and what markets you, so you’ll want to think carefully about your brand name and slogan. Do some research in this stage to consider a variety of possibilities.

“As a new realtor, I was just trying to be the company’s brand. What I really like about Radius is that of course, we are Radius, but Radius is really open about you being your own brand. It’s hard to find your identity because your brand is what markets you. You want your prospects to know who you are.”

-Latashia Perry, The Real Estate Advocate

Logo

Typically logo creation starts with meeting with a Graphic Designer to discuss your vision, likes and dislikes, fonts, colors, and more. Then the Graphic Designer will come back to you with some mocked-up designs and the process will continue as many times as needed until you end up with a logo that you love. Ideally, your Graphic Designer will also give you the editable files and even show you how to make changes to your logo in the future. You’ll want to make sure your logo can help you stand out from the crowd.

Video

In addition to having a sharp logo, creating a video to highlight your strengths and specialties as a realtor can be a great tool. While it certainly takes some preparation and coordination to pull off, a video will show potential clients what working with you is like. You might have to overcome some nerves, but having a video to showcase will be worth it.

A great way to use that video is after you have an initial phone call with a lead, you can follow up. In your follow up message, you can do all of the following:

  • Thank them for taking your call
  • Let them know you look forward to their appointment
  • Provide some additional information about yourself and your real estate background
  • Share your video and let them know you would love for them to watch it

Your video could be client-based or a video to showcase your skills. You can also add your video to your website. Your video can share your perspective, identity, and brand. If you use a client-based approach, you can also provide third-party confirmation from your clients.

“It helped show you who I was and how I helped this person purchase a home and the process. It’s the reality of real estate. It’s not cookie-cutter. That’s the importance of branding as well. It’s something that you can take with you and use in a future moment.”

-Angelica Ojeda, The Sol Realtor

Merchandise

Merchandise is another important aspect of branding. You’ll want your branding to be consistent across your logo, video, for sale signs, business cards, tshirts, and any other merchandise you choose to use.

Sharing Your Brand (Social Media)

Once you have created your brand, you’ll want to create and update your social media accounts. You’ll want to have uniformity among colors, fonts, styles, and content everywhere your brand can be seen. This is your chance to show the world who you are and why they should work with you.

“Google yourself and see what comes up. You want to have everything uniform. Revamp your social media. Social media is king right now.”

-Latashia Perry, The Real Estate Advocate

How Radius Can Help

Here at Radius Agent Realty, we have your back with branding. If you aren’t sure where to start or want someone to walk you through the whole process from start to finish, we will do just that for you!

We’ll help you with logo designs, merchandise, videos, and more! We’ll help with all the marketing to help you put your best foot forward.

Conclusion

We are a flat fee full-service premium brokerage with a monthly subscription. If you are serious about this profession you can either start a team, join a team or be independent with Radius Agent Realty. We will support you and help you be even more successful than you are today.

We prioritize agents’ needs and profitability. We provide the tools, training, and support you need to be successful. Join our community to check us out for free. Start using some of our tools. When you want to, you can join our brokerage as well!

Posted on in Uncategorized

Working well from home

Aer Lingus and Ryanair are throwing some serious shade at each other on Twitter

It’s been a while since I wrote but I wanted to write about this WFH topic.  This question keeps coming up everywhere I go now.  Almost everyone in the tech world think that the office culture has seen its last days. I have heard this from engineers, product managers, leaders and founders. I have also noticed that this opinion changes significantly based on what role people play in their company and how. 

WFH seems to be best option for individuals who work alone or in smaller teams when the no of lines of communication is limited to complete a task. It’s the same with leadership roles. If you are managing a small team, it seems like WFH is definitely workable. If you are managing larger teams, it’s going to be a challenge unless you have a really good middle management team that can break your team into smaller teams. However you look at it, the one thing you definitely need is a good self motivated work ethic to be successful in this WFH set up.    

If you are pro-WFH, these are the best practices I’d recommend: 

  • Get a clear picture of what your team’s goals are and what your role looks like.  Come up with a roadmap together for a given time period.
  • Communicate any change in plan for the day, week, month even with your manager whenever you feel you need to do something else. 
  • Message your status at the end of every day even if your manager doesn’t ask you for it.  Include your learnings for the day too.  Keep in mind that sending this report also lets your manager be on the same page as you are.  Good reports trigger an asynchronous brain storming session.  It makes your manager think and give you better feedback.  Otherwise she/he is just hoping you’d do your job a certain way and might be disappointed if you don’t even for legit reasons.    
  • WFH culture limits your manager as much as it limits you in providing feedback.  So, you have to self-evaluate constantly by asking “how can I do my job better?” Or “How can I achieve my goals better and faster?” And include your thoughts in your daily report.  This can help you in two ways. 
    • a) Your work might become more impactful or
    • b) on the flip side,  you might stop yourself from going in the wrong direction. 
  • If you are part of a team, include all stakeholders in all your discussions and not just your reporting manager.  In teams, your work is always dependent on the other and vice versa.  Certain assumptions you made needs to be validated by your manager and team.  Just like how you want to stop going in the wrong direction and waste time, it’s equally your responsibility to stop your teammate from going in the wrong direction too.
  • People in your team look for immediate validations because that’s what they are used to when you work in an office.  Delay in responding can cause the whole team to move slow. So, stay on top of your slack or email or whatever channel you use.  When you are taking a break, let your team know you are taking a break.  
  • For managers, it’s even more important you are available most of the time. Your direct reports need you more than ever now.  
  • Also, as managers, you just need to hire well. This is true even otherwise but even more so in a WFH set up. Hire self motivated people and smart thinkers because they are taking your team forward with smart decisions on their own.  
  • Zoom etiquette: Always set an agenda before starting a zoom meeting.  Validate this agenda with your manager to see if these discussion points are in line with your company/team goals.  Don’t just set an agenda and schedule a meeting.  Always validate! If you don’t, you will just end up wasting everyone’s time discussing things that don’t really matter. Even worse, your team might waste time working on things that don’t matter, after the call.    
  • Zoom fatigue: If the above are done well on a daily basis, there won’t be a need for many zoom calls. The goal is to be on the same page as everyone.

If you do all of the above while working during the pandemic, I think you will become so good at working in a team or leading a team that when things go back to normal, you will be a rockstar in an office environment (if that ever becomes the case).  

Posted on in Uncategorized

3 startup models that can get funded

It’s usually during fund raising that I hit reality. That’s truly when I understand what the market is telling me. Until then, I live in this cocoon with my users and my team, thinking only about how to improve the product and make our users happy. My early assessment of the market today provides new startups with a few options

I. A start up involving currently trending technology (Crypto currency, Blockchain, may be at the tail end of VR hype, or some out of space crazy tech only Elon Musk will understand)

If you have spent the last couple of years in any of these industries, you are best positioned to start something and raise a shit ton of money for a half decent idea involving em. No one really knows what the future is for these topics so they are looking for ideas from you.

II. A start up that can generate revenue with an excellent ROI at a low CAC.

This seems obvious but it isn’t for most founders because it’s friggin’ hard to get this done. Given — It doesn’t matter what industry but if the ROIs are great, VCs will be interested. It could be the most boring industry ever but like I said, it doesn’t matter. It could also do very little with tech but there has to be some tech involved. Ex: Stitchfix. They probably have a lot of back end and intelligence but what you see in the front end is very little. But, majority of their workflow is still offline merchandising, etc.

Now, if you are thinking of choosing this path, you have to consider the following:

  • How can I reduce my costs mainly engineering and support costs? Remote teams…not engineers from the valley…Cross platform technology…simpler tech solution….etc
  • How do I reduce my CAC? Network effects…untapped market (highly unlikely…the only untapped market are the ones that don’t pay much and aliens…may be Elon got that too)…partnerships…competitive pricing (this is again dependent on reducing ur costs)
  • How to choose a paying industry? Keep shipping..Keep experimenting. This, again, seems easy from the outside. But, I think you need to work in an industry for at least 2 years to understand who will pay and for what will they pay? From the outside, it seems obvious that we would pay $10 for an uber ride but uber had to spend a few years in the industry experimenting with black cars, etc to figure out what consumers will pay.
  • What’s the TAM? Again, the best of us go wrong here. We define TAM very broadly but usually the actual TAM is a part of what you think TAM is. For this, again, you need to know what they pay for existing alternatives or how much they will save with your solution and multiply that with the number of potential users.
  • How do you truly feel about the industry? Are you passionate about this industry? If not, none of the above will work.

III. A startup with mad growth of users (every founder’s dream)

This is still true. If you are able to get to a million users very quickly and then to 10 million quickly again, even if you are clueless about revenue, there are ton of funds out there for you. This usually has to appeal to the fun side of your users even if it’s a productivity app. Ex: Slack. it’s fun to talk to all your colleagues about anything. So, everything including design needs to fun themed. And emojis. Yes, emojis. (Or if the target audience is a small segment of users (ex: Insurance brokers, real estate agents), adoption % & revenue per user are key! This kinda goes back to II)

Posted on in Leadership, Uncategorized

Leading, then and now

0c0807643f1efc4a4da22fcda12336f7

If they are already better, we need to worry about making them awesome.

 

Very often, in the last 5 years, I have gone to sleep worrying about what I am doing wrong leading my team.  How do I get the most out of my team?  First of all, I don’t think Leadership qualities can be picked up from a book.  And especially, not from a book that was written more than 10 years ago.  Everything is different now.  People are different, teams are different, businesses are different, attitudes are different.  Obviously, the way you lead a team has to be different.  I find it more useful to read books written by young leaders of recent large companies than read about leadership in IBM or Apple or GE.

So, what has changed?

  1. Information is easy.  Everyone knows a lot.  A simple search on a topic can get anyone access to wikipedia, blogs and articles which can teach much more than what you know.
  2. This access to information and overall exposure have given everyone a strong sense of confidence.  This confidence is very useful if channeled in the right direction.
  3. Independent thinking.  Everyone has a view and an opinion now, which is obvious because if you have ‘x’ and ‘y’, you should have an f(x,y).
  4. People don’t react positively to strictness.  If you behave like Denzel Washington from Remember the titans today, you wont have half your team by end of the week.
  5. Opportunities are plenty.  People are not looking for opportunities anymore.  They are looking for a wonderful experience being part of a great team.

A few things a good leader should be doing today:

  1. Empower the team by listening to them.  Give them a problem instead of explaining a solution.  It’s safe to assume that they know more than you in their line of work. They can come up with better solutions that you can.
  2. Don’t hide anything from your team.  More information they know about the business, the better they feel working for the company.  Even if it’s bad news.
  3. With each person in the team having a strong confident personality, it gets very difficult to get all of them to think alike and work towards one focal point.  Confidence is good.  In fact, your job as a leader is to make them more confident.  There will be arguments and disagreements and there is no point fighting it.  On the contrary, this needs to be encouraged and made into a positive thing.  Turn these arguments into discussions by leading every meeting with one goal – to finalize on the best possible solution to a given problem. When a solution concluded by the team is added to your roadmap, it helps increase the entire team’s confidence.
  4.  If discipline needs to be encouraged, you cannot do it by saying it.  You can only do it by setting an example for them top down and bottom up.  You need to behave like the team you need and have a few people in the team behave the same way.  The rest of the team will follow suit.
  5. Responsibility is the main incentive.   This might not have changed in a while but there is no better way to show appreciation than giving more responsibility.
  6. Encourage the team to appreciate each other.  Today, appreciation from the leader is the easiest part.  But, it has become equally important to get appreciated by your colleagues.  Setting this culture is important.

 

Knowing this now, I don’t go to sleep worrying about leading my team.  I worry about other things 🙂

Posted on in Uncategorized

Success is a process

Screen Shot 2016-05-02 at 3.46.08 AM
It’s been a while since I last wrote something here.  It’s definitely not because of a lack of exciting events since my last post.  On the contrary, there were lots happening.  In this post, I would like to type a few things about building a great team and product.  One of the big realizations in the last 3-4 months for me is the very definition of success.  How does one achieve great heights in any field they are in?  Is there a rule of thumb?  Is it the ability to come up with new ideas?  What is it that makes an idea click?
There are founders like Elon Musk, who may define creativity as creating a hyper loop or creating a habitable colony in Mars and there are founders like Zuckerberg who may define creativity as making a channel for teenagers to share and like photographs on their phones.  Then, there are founders who just replicate another business in their own way and become really successful at that.  Personally, I had a big problem of involving myself in something that is not the first of its kind and used to look down on founders who did that, even if they are immensely successful.  Books and experts always say it’s not the idea but the execution that matters most.  It’s a cliche that everyone knows.  But, what is the difference between a bad execution and a good one?
Before I try to answer these questions, I want you tell you something that happened 2 months ago.  In February, me and my co-founder (Vijay) met one of our investors, Mr. Gokul Rajaram who is currently Head of Products at Square and previously created products like Google Adsense and Facebook Ads.  We discussed some of the issues we were facing with respect to product development.  But, we approached the discussion wrong.  We started with a quick demo of the product and started asking him questions on ideas for future product features.  He, instead, started asking us questions on our team, structure and processes.  The discussion went on for an hour and our takeaways were more useful than product ideas that we initially wanted feedback on.  Some of the important ones are:
  1. Every quarter, the entire company should have 3 main priorities.  It’s a company’s vision for the next three months, for a lack of a better word.  Every feature built, every process undertaken, every team meetings should revolve around these 3 priorities.  Define this right at the beginning and row towards that.  It could be something like “Increase the number of photographs uploaded on the platform by 10x” or “Make sure every car manufactured have the exact same dimensions”.  All these priorities should start with a verb.
  2. If you have a small engineering team, always hire full stack or train every developer to be full stack.  If you hire an iOS front end engineer, train him/her to build web services.  There should not be anyone in the team who say “I have done my part and I don’t know why it’s not working”.  If it’s not working, you better find out why and for that you need to be a full stack engineer.
  3. Good engineers have the best ideas because they know what the code can do.  So, have quarterly internal hackathon events to get the best out of them.
  4. A start up engineering team cannot have hierarchy.  It has to be fluid.  Every product feature should have a lead and this can be anyone in the team.  The lead is responsible for two things
    • Implementation, manage resources involved and reports
    • Track performance of that feature over a period of time for further tweaks until it’s successful.
  5. Daily code review.  The head of engineering should do code reviews on every update.
  6. Finally, document everything.
When we got out of that meeting, Vijay and I were blown away.  We went in to buy a TV remote and we came out with the knowledge of building a home theater on our own.  This was brilliant.  Since then, I realize more n more that it’s not the idea that matters.  It’s not what you do or what you wanna do.  It’s not even just the passion or perseverance to do something.  Of course, all of those matter too but the key difference is the Process.  Gokul obviously went through his career building great products not knowing everything but he was probably always on the lookout for flaws in his processes and kept improving on that.  Now that he has that experience and learnt from his mistakes, he can build any product.  It could be Adsense, Facebook ads, a car, or a rocket, anything.  I am sure I can still improve on the 6 points mentioned above in building a great team/product/company with time and there are probably many more best practices out there which people have realized.  We just need to keep looking to improve processes towards perfection and that’s the underlying secret.
Today, I am on a mission to make everyone in our small team think the same way, believe in the process and become leaders in their own domain 🙂
Posted on in Uncategorized

Music, a time machine.

The_Eagles_-_Desperado
Today a founding member of the Eagles passed away.  I lined up a bunch of their best hits and it reminded of the good old times.  Somehow, life got very complicated immediately after.  Back then, there was joy in not knowing what’s coming up while listening to good classic soft rock.  An experience, when shared with friends who haven’t figured out their life either, made it a better memory than it was supposed to be.  My early 20s, at entirety, was filled with such memories.  Things changed, people changed, I changed.  I didn’t try to stop the change and welcomed it with blind enthusiasm.  Little did I know that those events will never happen again.   The Eagles, the Jefferson Airplanes, Queen, Tom petty, Sting, Fleetwood Mac, The Doors, Floyd, Dire straits, REO, The Who, CCR…the list goes on.  Put the record on, start your engines and you will never want the road to end and you will love the person sitting next to you for life.  Today, when I am 32 and listen to the same songs, I understand the lyrics even more.
As Boston put it
“I looked out this morning and the sun was gone
Turned on some music to start my day
I lost myself in a familiar song
I closed my eyes and I slipped away
 So many people have come and gone
Their faces fade as the years go by
Yet I still recall as I wander on
As clear as the sun in the summer sky”
It is more than a feeling, isn’t it.  All those days, these brilliant artists were warning us about a time we didn’t know was coming.  We live now, in a familiar time with new people close to us, lost yet found.  RIP Mr. Frey!
Learning to fly, but I aint got wings – TP      
Posted on in Uncategorized

San Francisco | NAR | ACDC | Agentdesks | Man united | Healthy living

The last couple of months have been good both personally and at work.  As a product, Agentdesks has progressed the maximum in the last 2 months. As a business, we understand our clients a bit more than before.  We understand what they are using our application for, we understand what they need and most importantly, we understand what excites them.  We revamped our Android product completely and we are en route to doing the same with our iOS application.  Our engineering team is kicking ass, everyone’s up to speed and we have great leadership.

IMG_3006

We attended a big real estate NAR conference in San Diego.  We had a small booth, giving away our application to real estate agents.  More than what we gave, we got a lot of positive feedback on what we are trying to do.  There were a lot of funny competitors walking by our booth to find out what we were onto.

IMG_2752AC DC had a concert here in SF.  Thunderstruck, I was.  Easily, the best concert I have ever attended.  All my childhood, whenever I listen to ACDC, I tell myself “I wish I attended their concert”.  It was perfect.  Then in a couple of weeks, Sir Alex Ferguson launched his book in SF.  I had the privilege to attend the book launch and get a signed copy.  Two of the greatest events of my life, happened in the same month.

IMG_2822

My second love, Manchester United is doing well theoretically.  Everyone’s complaining about their boring style of play but I believe in Louis Van Gaal.  If he can turn around Ajax, Bayern Munich, Barcelona and the Holland national team, I believe him when he says it’s a process.  Obviously, he is no Sir Alex who could get Aberdeen to beat Real Madrid.  But, if we beat Leicester, we are on top of the table.  That’s not too bad.  There are no superstars in United, which is great.  The entire team is doing an equally good job.  No leading goal scorers but goals seem to be coming from everywhere.  That’s how an outfit should work.

Going back to Agentdesks, some of the key learnings for me in the last couple of months are

  1. While building product, it’s better to make a long term play rather than a quick win.  Build for the future.
  2. Client who find you are more likely to give you valuable inputs to build the product further than the ones you reach out to.
  3. Until you see a big spike in usage, there is no point in going after Top of the funnel growth.

My goal in the next few months is to take care of personal health by doing the following regularly.

  • Biking or jogging or going to the gym everyday in the morning
  • Have a healthy breakfast
  • Sleep by 11 PM and for 6+ hours, at least.
  • Take a break from work on Saturday and do something that makes me meet new people.
Posted on in Uncategorized

How Uber is helping startup founders and they don’t even know about it

that $15 is worth it
that $15 is worth it

I just moved to San Francisco and obviously I am dependent on buses, trains and Uber for the last mile.  Almost every uber driver I have met so far has had a deep understanding of the technology scene in San Francisco.  One of them even told me that they have read about Agentdesks somewhere and was gracious enough to recommend features that we might implement.

Here are some amazing ways in which they help Founders

1)  Recruiting

One driver in the city (his name was Alex) said he meets at least 10 software engineers every day.  When they are going to office in the morning, out for lunch, getting to late night parties.  He just rambled on names of tech giants and how each of these engineers hated working there and are looking for new jobs.  So, I asked him recommend Agentdesks to the next iOS developer who comes in and gave my card.  He said, he will do it.  What if all the drivers were recruiting officers for startups.  Think about it!

2)  Client acquisition

Another driver in San Mateo, has a lot of real estate agent friends.  He took 10 of my business cards so that he can pass it on to his friends.  Perfect, right?  Context – I run Agentdesks.  Agentdesks is a sales application for real estate agents.

3)  Ideas

When you discuss with San Francisco drivers, it’s usually productive.  Some great ideas came out of a conversation I had with a driver this week.  He said, I should think about providing our agents with insurance plans and make that part of their lives easy.  That will create loyalty as well.  And many more ideas!

4)  Fund raising

You pick an uber driver in Menlo park.  Rest assured, he has dropped 2 other founders in the same day at different VCs.  You can expect questions like “what’s your cap?” / “what are your biggest costs?”  /  “who is your target audience” from your driver.  Great practice!  Also, they recommend more VCs that you can meet.

5)   Uber pool

When you are in the city, always Uber pool.  9/10 you will meet another software engineer.  He/She could be your next engineer.

So, do it.  Uber everywhere.  Don’t buy a car.

Posted on in Uncategorized

Rowing towards that “MVP” island

MVP3So, this is what I have realized in the last couple of months.  I don’t know if it’s true for everyone who have started SaaS products or is it just me.

1)  Customers want something else:  Whenever you think of starting a SaaS Product, your natural tendency is to come up with a list of features which you think is right for your customers and for the product.  Certain features excite you so much that it automatically becomes highest on your priority list.  If you wait to develop all these features to launch your product, you are probably wasting twice the amount of time because your customers probably think otherwise.  They want something else.

Lesson:  It’s best to pick one main feature and launch the product with that one main feature.  Give away a bunch of free trials.  Get feedback.  Sometimes, your customers will be nice about it and most of the times, not so much.  But, listen and note complaints.  If your goal is to come up with a Minimum Viable Product, it’s a long way to that island.

2)  Customers wont pay for your experiments:  When we launched, we launched with a pricing structure.  Looking back, this is the most crazy decision we have made.  Who is going to pay us when they know this product is not fully done.  Luckily, we realized this almost immediately and kept a free trial and extended it whenever necessary.

Lesson:  Don’t come up with pricing even before you know what your customers need.  Pricing is a gradual process.

3)  Design is key but not the way you think:  We learnt this lesson from our previous venture.  We spent lots on exceptional design.  We soon realized that customers, like yourself, get bored very soon.  The more they see in design, more things they can get bored of soon.  Customers will only see what they want to see, how much ever you try to push all your capabilities on them.

Lesson: we believe that design should be simple with less components in each page.  There should only 2-3 main call to action options for every user in every page.

4)  Bless them initial adopters:  There will be a few customers who take extra efforts in letting you know what they really think of the product.  These people are God sent.  Their feedback and suggestions are extremely important and it’s also equally important for you to give them special attention.

Lesson:  Look for these customers.  Make sure you keep them in a separate database.  Talk to them whenever you launch a new feature.  They are as important as your team.  MVP1

5)  Team, Team, Team:  Success of any product boils down to your team.  Initial success boils down to 4 departments: Developers, Support, Testers, BD.  These 4 need to work together and keep each other updated at all times.

Lesson: I realize that this is one of my most important roles in the organization.  Keep everyone updated on the proceedings.

If there are any successful SaaS product leaders reading this post, I would love your thoughts and if you have learnt anything more in your longer journey towards success.

Posted on in Uncategorized

The right amount of Pivot

cross-roads-in-life

If you run a company that has n’t made it big yet, I am sure you are wondering if you should change your business plan.  If yes, there must be a ton of questions you ask yourself when you wake up and pretty much for the rest of your day.  How much to change?  What happened to the vision with which you had started?  Is focusing on something else necessarily a good thing?  Does n’t changing business plans signify uncertainty and hence, doesn’t it spoil your branding/reputation?

I have been in this race to nowhere for quite a while now.  I realize now that there is no right or wrong to anything in a business plan.  You just keep travelling.  All you need to be sure of is the final destination.  When you are lost, you ask a bunch of people for feedback and some of them point you towards the direction you want to take and some don’t.  But, the important truth is the road is full of feedback.  If you don’t ask, you won’t ever find out.  In the last few months, I have been meeting a bunch of business experts, analysts and venture capitalists to explain about my business and every single meeting or a telephonic call has helped me figure out narrow down on my execution plan.  And I know it’s got to keep improving with time and turn out great.

Hence:  When it comes to pivoting business plans frequently, it’s expected and fine to make minor tweaks in the process as long as the final goal remains the same.  Just got to keep my ears and eyes open for feedback from investors, VCs, mentors, seniors, customers, industry experts, your team and friends.