Speaker 1 (00:00): After earning two degrees in architecture and starting your career with a design firm, you get into real estate operations, your first task, turn a real estate team into an independent brokerage overnight if possible. Your second task expand and renovate the office to prepare for growth. Meanwhile, you need to pull systems and processes out of people's heads, get them down on paper, merge them together, document it, redesign, onboarding, and teach it to agents. Mateo Zingales, director of operations at Teams, Zingales Realty shares the details in this story, how they created the role from scratch, why he put observation before innovation, how we set up the tech stack for scale, and which three questions to ask to get constructive criticism from your business partners. Get all that and much more right now with Mateo Zingales on real estate team os no Speaker 2 (00:51): Matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team Os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte. Speaker 1 (01:06): Mateo, thank you so much for investing so much of your time and attention in all of these episodes on the show and welcome to your episode here on Real Estate Team os. Speaker 3 (01:16): Yeah, thank you Ethan for having me. I'm super, super excited. I'm a huge fan of the podcast, so I can't even believe today has come, so I'm ready to rock and roll. Speaker 1 (01:25): So just for folks watching and listening, Mateo's been a subscriber. He reached out, we had a conversation. I was like, that's a really interesting story. Let's bring it to the show. I'm on the other side of all those emails. Speaker 3 (01:36): Yeah, that's insane. I thought it was spam, but I got another follow-up email and I was like, oh my god, it's Ethan. This is awesome. Speaker 1 (01:44): Yeah, that's it. I mean it's a pretty small community that we're building overall. I mean there are thousands and thousands of emails subscribers, but this world of people trying to grow 5, 10, 20, 50, 200 agent teams really isn't that big overall. And so the goal is just to bring folks together and share stories and lessons. What's a must have characteristic of a high performing team? Speaker 3 (02:07): So I actually have three that I feel like are really important. So the three that come to mind are clarity, alignment, and accountability. At a minimum it needs to be those three things people need to know, have clarity on what their role is so they're not stepping on toes alignment. Everybody needs to be working together towards that goal at the end of the road. And accountability, this goes back to roles. Make sure your roles are clear so that you can hold others accountable so you guys can be successful as a team. Speaker 1 (02:42): I really like that combination. I think they work really, really well together and I like the way that you defined it. I mean clarity of the role and accountability to the outcomes of the role. I think if we could just do that piece better, we would have better businesses. But talk a little bit to the alignment piece. Speaker 3 (03:00): So it's kind of twofold, right? So one could be alignment towards your core mission, your core values, stuff like that. And then I think at the end of the day it also is towards I just making sure that your roles are aligning with the other people in your organization. You need to work efficiently and effectively together in order to get to that end goal at the end of the day. So I think it really is kind of twofold. It can't be just one or the other. Speaker 1 (03:32): Cool. We are recording and releasing this conversation in Q Q4 of 2025. So I assume that you and the team are looking at 2026 and I'm sure there's some alignment things there. What does that process look like for you and the other folks that are trying to create alignment and progress with the organization? Speaker 3 (03:50): Yeah, absolutely. So great question. I think, so right now we actually just wrapped up our budget, so we kind of work backwards from there. And I'm not obviously going to get nitty gritty about it, but just at a high level, we obviously have budget targets that we're looking to hit. And from those budget targets we then kind of go back to the agents. We business plan and set goals at the end of the year so that we know, okay, are the agents aligning with our goals? If not, how can we get them to align with our goals and are we aligning with them? Are they getting what they need out of us? We're very agent centric, so it's not always the company's needs are paramount, it's both people. So it goes back to making sure that we're planning our business plans together and making sure our goals are attainable and making sure that obviously both parties goals are aligning with each other's. Speaker 1 (04:47): Cool. You are the director of operations for teams als, but you started an architecture career after getting a master's degree in architecture. How did you go from focusing on a, I mean, I guess you could draw some parallels and I'm sure you will in your response, but how did that path go for you? You were on a career path and then all of a sudden you're in this real estate team and building an operations organization, not from scratch, but from scratch. And we'll get into some details on that over time too, but how did this go for you? Speaker 3 (05:21): Yeah, absolutely. So if you asked me a couple of years ago if I had any interest in joining the family company, it would be a flat out, no offense to Joe or Sanna, my dad and my aunt who built the company. I went to college. I was studying architecture, of course, got my bachelor's, got my master's, loved. It was like, I still love it to this day, but I think at heart I'm an entrepreneur and what I was not being fulfilled with at work, I think I feel as though, and this is not to talk poorly, it's really just kind of how it ended up happening was I wasn't being able to provide input or my vision wasn't really coming to life or that collaborative nature wasn't a hundred percent there. So I was kind of dying for that. And in the meantime I started working on the backend for my aunt and my dad fell in love with what I was doing and I was at a high level doing operational things in the background. Speaker 3 (06:34): I pitched to them coming on full time. It was like a fever dream for me and it just ended up working out about a year after I joined my architecture firm full time. I was there for about a year and a half and then I got the opportunity to work with my dad and my aunt and I took it. I was like, I am not looking back on this saying, damn, I wish I did. I took it. So it's been incredible ever since. And there are a lot of parallels that I drag into on a daily basis, designing systems, designing buildings, you can marry the two together. So that's really how I got to where I am today. Speaker 1 (07:20): Draw that little analogy that you just offered there out a little bit more. Speaker 3 (07:24): Yeah, absolutely. So for where I started in design school and architecture school, the second your structure goes in, could be foundation, could be walls, could be your structural columns, anything, your building system is already working, right? It has to keep everything else up. The analogy that you can draw between the two is for a business you have to have processes, systems, procedures in place. If you don't have those in place or they're not clearly outlined so that people can follow them, you're going to have things collapsing on top of you. Your processes aren't clearly defined. There's a lot of inefficiency in your organization so that people are getting confused on what to do and it's not the same experience to the client that everybody's giving. It's direct correlation. So I think what I ended up doing for the company is I came in, all of these processes were in people's heads and the human brain is great, but we are not always able to create the same duplicated experience just by memory. Speaker 3 (08:34): We will do things where like, oh, that's cool, and then we'll lose other things that we were doing along the way. So my first thing that I had to do was I came in and I started building SOPs and it seems like it's really a mundane task, but at the end of the day you need those to be efficient and you need to again, provide the same experience back to the client so that you're getting referrals, you're getting those good Google reviews. It matters at the end of the day. So I think that analogy is the correlation that I'm trying to make and it's pretty effective. Speaker 1 (09:17): Cool. Well, we are going to get into maybe a couple examples of those SOPs and the ways that you drew them out of people's heads. But before we go forward, I would love just for folks watching and listening to have you characterize Teams and GOs however you'd like. Speaker 3 (09:32): Yeah, absolutely. So we're an independent family owned brokerage. We're based in Methuen, Massachusetts. We serve Greater Boston, the Merrimack Valley in Southern New Hampshire. We're about 15 people strong in our organization right now, so that includes all of the support in the backend marketing me, Joe Rosanna, and then we're about 11 agents right now. We're boutique by design, but we have growth in mind. So we just went through a huge office renovation and move and we just doubled our footprint. So that's kind of the trajectory that we're working on right now. Cool. As far as culture goes, we're super family oriented, agent centric, like I said, and then we're deeply rooted in relationship building. At the end of the day, it's not always about the commission check that you're making. It really is about relationships that you're building and the networking that you're doing, and that's pretty much Team Z. To wrap it up Speaker 1 (10:36): When I hear Boutique by design, but with growth in mind, looking to probably to add some agents over the year ahead, family oriented, agent centric, my guess is that you have pretty good tenure within the agent population. Folks have probably joined and been there for some time. Is that true? Speaker 3 (10:56): Yeah, yeah, it is. We do focus on bringing on newer agents and pouring resources into them and kind of creating them into a really effective agent. But at the same time, we do have agents on board that have tenure with us. A couple of our agents have been with us pre my time, so we're talking like pre COVID 20 18, 20 15, 16 area. They have kind of seen the catapult of growth that we've gone through within the past couple of years, Speaker 1 (11:28): And the brokerage itself is really from COVID era, right? Speaker 3 (11:32): So we operated as a team under a bunch of corporate outfits. We're talking Century 21 re max, those guys. It was 2021 that we opened our own independent brokerage. That was actually my first task as at that point I Speaker 1 (11:51): Was a manager, here's a task for you. Speaker 3 (11:53): Yeah, let's open an independent brokerage. It was terrifying. Speaker 1 (11:58): Yeah, just tell that story a little bit. How did you walk into that and how did that go? Speaker 3 (12:02): Yeah, I mean, when people say things don't happen overnight, but this one happened overnight, it was terrifying, so I'm not going to lie. What happened was we kind of got together, we have operations meetings every Tuesdays every week, and part of our goal for the coming year was to grow. The problem was we couldn't grow depending on the existing contract we had with our then broker. We tried to negotiate the contract. Unfortunately we couldn't come to terms and we literally said, we love our time with you guys. We appreciate everything you've done for us, but we're looking to grow, right? We had the whole recipe to just up and walk out. That's basically what we did. We said we don't want to leave, but unfortunately our growth is paramount for our road forward. Couldn't come to an agreement and literally gave notice the next day and they were super kind enough to kind of transition us, which was huge. We cannot thank them enough. That's literally what happened. Speaker 1 (13:21): It could have been teams and galas within another brokerage, so maybe that name continues, but what else has to happen here? Speaker 3 (13:28): So it's a lot of state regulation that's super boring and insurance stuff at the end of the day, Speaker 1 (13:37): Mateo's got it. Puto on it. Speaker 3 (13:39): Yeah, it sounds like something incredibly interesting when I talk about it, but at the end of the day, it's a lot of going for licenses, filing with states, making sure your businesses are up to par with the secretary of state licensing boards, insurance, making sure your e and l is in place and your workman's comp, all the whole nine. So that's the mundane boring part. The really exciting part was the marketing that went behind it and getting ready to announce you're an independent brokerage, you're your own thing now. And then my favorite part was I was planning for an office renovation that just happened this earlier this year, and little did I know we were going to jump into another office renovation and entire office moved. So it was awesome. I was terrified going through it because I was like this little peon in the world of real estate and just doing things in general. But my aunt and my dad gave me the opportunity and I literally took it. I was like, I'm making sure I do this really well and there's no excuse. You knew what you were signing up for. Make sure you learn everything you need to learn. So that was me Speaker 1 (14:58): And you just figured it out. Speaker 3 (14:59): Oh yeah. And I can't just say, I can't sit here and say it was all me it, there were a bunch of players in it. My dad was huge, my aunt was huge. There was another individual, my mentor, Linda Cody, that was super incredible in just putting us on the right path and getting everything done to regulation and stuff like that. So there were definitely players that played a huge role in opening our brokerage that I cannot thank enough. Speaker 1 (15:37): What I'd love for you to do for folks is take us to the conversation. I think I understand why it made sense to you to want to make a full-time role after providing some help to your dad and your aunt. When you had that conversation, what did you think you were pitching them and what did they think they needed? Where I'm at is a team leader who has some people doing some operational stuff, but they're not really like, let's make a roll out of this. Tell a little bit of how the role was formed between your own vision, what they maybe thought they needed or wanted. How did that come together and how did you get going and why a full-time ops leader, not just an EA or a VA or another kind of operational type of role. Speaker 3 (16:28): At the time, we previously had an in-house transaction coordinator, which eventually that freed up. We outsourced that and my position really became available. I have to be honest with you, when I first started, I did not know what to expect and thank God for the real estate team os this is no plug for you guys other than I genuinely mean it. You guys were there. For me to be able to just have a resource and hearing people out in the industry and what they're doing, and I kind of are indeed it, that was one thing. They didn't know what the heck they needed. To be honest. I had a rough idea of, okay, there's no structure here. There's no infrastructure. This goes back to a building analogy in architecture. You need to create that solid foundation so that we can start to peel from it and grow. Speaker 3 (17:29): That was the first thing I did. It's hard to say a VA wouldn't be able to do that. I think they would be able to do that. The one thing that I think they would not be able to do is have a vision for growth and map it out. I'm super passionate about the organization. Of course it's my family, but it's something I'm genuinely passionate about and my ideas are always kind of working. So that was another thing that I brought is vision and just predictability of things in forecasting. So I think at the time they didn't think that I was going to bring that to the organization. I really think that it was kind of a pseudo admin role that they were expecting, and then I just took ownership of the role. I just said, well, I could do this differently and this is what could happen from it and we can grow because of it. KPIs are tied to the SOPs and if you're hitting your KPIs, you're able to scale and grow to an extent. But that's really, I'm not sure that they knew exactly what the role was. I kind of had to come in, jump in, bring clarity to the role. That's what it's been ever since. Speaker 1 (18:49): What I've heard you say so far is this thing is all happening, but there's no solid foundation. There's no structure. Everything that's happening is just because of habit and knowledge and circumstance, and we're just doing it the way we've done it, even though no one really knows the way we've done it unless someone tells them. So you're like, we need to add some structure here. How did you prioritize and sequence some of that stuff and just going to the SOPs you've mentioned a couple of times, go into a little bit of detail on a few of them and how you, because I know there are people listening right now that are like, yeah, my business isn't exactly on the rails. I would like to grow, or worst case, I've tried to grow, but it was unsuccessful because we realized that we were built on sand. We didn't have that foundation that we needed. Talk about building that foundation on the operation side, kind of from scratch. How did you survey the situation? How did you prioritize which processes to commit to and how did it go putting those together? Speaker 3 (19:56): So I'm going to start with a tip and then I'm going to roll the tip into kind of how I took everything forward. So my tip would be you really need to start with observation, not innovation. So you need to observe what's currently going on. You need to find out where are all the loopholes or where are all of the inefficiencies. So for example, when I came on my aunt's listing, SOP that was living in her brain was totally different than my dad's listing, SOP, that was living in his brain. What I had to do in, for example, a listing, SOP was one of the first things that I started working on was, okay, how do we systematize this so that I can take both of your processes, merge them together, and then be able to present this back to our agents so that they can use this? Speaker 3 (20:54): Right? That was one of them. A buyer presentation is the same exact thing. The buyer presentation my aunt was giving was totally different than my dad's. We need to marry them, document it, and be able to present it to our agents so that they can use it. Because a lot of the issues that come up are agents find value in the support you're providing. They don't want to build these processes. They want kind of a turnkey white glove service that's already built for them. Those were two of the first things that I had to work on. Another one that I can throw out there was an onboarding SOP. How do I grow this and provide the same experience back to the agents that I gave the first person I onboarded? So those three are huge. I have a lot of backend operational SOPs for budgeting and just me and my marketing coordinator are building out marketing SOPs. Just going to reemphasize my tip. Start with observation, not innovation. Once you iron everything out, I think that's when you can start to innovate different techniques or processes that you can bring into your organization. Speaker 1 (22:09): Anytime I took on a new role, and I've seen this among other leaders that I've worked with doing the same thing, it's essentially a listening tour out of the gate. You also need questions to drive it or some prompts to drive. You need to know a little bit about what you're looking for, but it's just like, let's just go talk to people, find out what's going on here, Speaker 3 (22:30): And it seems like you're unproductive when you're on this listening tour. Speaker 1 (22:36): Here's that way to be for sure. Yeah, Speaker 3 (22:38): I can promise you the listening tour is probably the most important part, especially if you have a team or a brokerage or I like to call teams, ALS a team Orage because that's really how we operate. You need to be willing to listen to your agents. If you don't, it's going to be the leaders roadmap to their end goal. It needs to be a team effort. We all need to be in it together so that we're all successful in every goal that we put out there. All of our agents' goals become our goals. Just listen. Be willing to listen and be able to provide constructive criticism. That's another thing that architecture school was huge on. That's your only way that you're going to grow and get better. If you're not being constructively critical, there's no room for improvement or there's no path for improvement. Speaker 1 (23:41): And I think once it becomes, if it's not culturally normal to be constructively critical of the people and the work around you, then it's going to be really uncomfortable out of the gate. But once it becomes normal, it's one of the healthiest and most important things you've got. Speaker 3 (24:02): Absolutely. For example, I just had a 90 day check-in with one of my agents yesterday. From my point of view, it kind of seemed like they were expecting me to rain on their parade the entire 30 minute meeting. A lot of it was me trying to pry information out of them and be constructively critical with me. What's going well that the company is doing what could be better and what are we lacking? I want to know all three of those things so I know what we're doing really well, but what can we also add to the organization that makes your life easier? The whole point of support. It needs to be an open dialogue of being constructively critical and welcome it. Speaker 1 (24:49): Yeah. Is that kind of a 90 day check-in just a standard thing? You just kind of cycle through the agent roster on a recurring basis? Speaker 3 (24:57): Yeah, so when I onboard an agent, we always default to a 90 day, but after they kind of go through their initial onboarding cycle, I check in with all of our agents on a quarterly basis. I don't want them to think that we're not listening to them or that we don't care about what they're doing or what's going on in their lives, anything like that. So that quarterly cycle is kind of where I'm able to get a pulse check. Okay, how are you doing not only in real estate, but just in life, right? Aside from that, what's going well? What can we provide to you that would make your life easier? Stuff like that. That's been proven to be huge for our office. I mean, people always are talking about the 90 day and the quarterly check-ins because it's a really awesome outlet for them to provide feedback to us and just get together and make sure everything's going well. Speaker 1 (25:56): Good. So it sounds like you kind of got to make up the role. You got to make up a little bit of the scope. You did have some things kind of just handed to you take this brokerage independent or take this team, turn this team into an independent team ridge, expand the office. You hired a marketing person. What else have you taken on, for example, tech stack? I assume that there was something in place, Speaker 3 (26:25): But Speaker 1 (26:26): Did you inherit and advance that? Speaker 3 (26:28): So when I came on board, we had a couple of pieces of tech that we just used to, no surprise, we did not have a CRM at the time. I look back and I'm like, did you guys do business? Speaker 1 (26:46): What other tech did you have? Speaker 3 (26:48): Yeah, without being overly judgmental, because now it's been four years roughly of having follow-up boss. Follow-up boss has been huge to us. That's an integral part of our tech stack. I love it. I learn something new about it every single day. Loop, obviously for contracts monday.com for just project management and transaction management, Google Workspace, getting automations ready with Zapier and make, that's really our key tech stack. Oh, Y lo O as well, Y lo o can't forget about them. That's our key tech stack. So when we onboard all of our agents, they get training on all of that tech stack so they know how Team Z uses their tech stack. How can I make sure that this is super efficient so that I can get my job done without having to spend dozens of hours doing really simple things that can be automated. Speaker 1 (27:50): So you own that piece of the operation Speaker 3 (27:53): As well. Speaker 1 (27:54): Yeah, Speaker 3 (27:54): So just building the process and how all of the different pieces of tech kind of communicate with each other is kind of where I jumped in. If there wasn't a clear communication between the two, it really becomes tedious and actually adds time to your workflow. Architecting that and building that process was also my task. Speaker 1 (28:24): Cool. What kind of feedback have you received, and let's just go back again to that first, say 6, 12, 18 months. As you're figuring out what you think needs to be done, you're obviously doing some combination of just doing it and then maybe asking like, Hey, I'm thinking about this. Does that sound right? What I'm imagining here is that there's a process of figuring out the boundaries of what falls to this role that we've never had before and we literally just made up and what still belongs somewhere else. What kind of feedback did you get in the give and take of shaping up the role from scratch? Speaker 3 (29:03): Yeah, so fantastic question. I could talk about this for an entire day, but I'm going to try and summarize this as best as I possibly could. I have to give a lot of credit to the Tom Ferry program and our Tom Ferry coach, coach, Sean. What really happened when I first stepped in was we had to define our roles because again, it goes back to over overlap and a aligning and alignment and stuff like that. There was no accountability. So we were doing, the three of us on the backend were doing the same job except I wasn't selling. So as far as admin and growing the business goes, we were all doing the same things. It did not work. That was not working. So we had to sit down, have really difficult conversations and be like, okay, what's your role? What do you love to do? Speaker 3 (30:01): What do you hate doing? Across the board for all three of us, we just did this again this past week. So it's not one and done. It's not something that you just do once and then you kind of keep going forward. You do it. You have to have a cycle of going back and checking the pulse of your business. Where have our needs shifted? That was number one. Number two, it became you have to align your role with the questions and requests that you're fielding. I was fielding at the beginning, I was fielding requests that were really admin driven that I was like, I don't mean this in any negative way, but this is not in my pay grade and we can automate this. Automation will fix this in two seconds. So a lot of the transactional tracking, date tracking, deposit tracking, all of that stuff, we were outsourcing that to a third party transaction coordinator, but also in our backend, we need to make sure that we're also aware of what's going on. Speaker 3 (31:17): We automated it with monday.com. That was one thing, and then we also automated it with Loop, making sure contracts were on time, getting signatures was on time, making sure all the documents we needed was in our file and all of that fun stuff. So to answer your question, where we're at today is, I mean, if somebody came up to me and was like, can you send out an addendum for X, Y, and Z? Or can you send out an extension for X, Y, and Z? No, reach out to the transaction coordinator. They can send that out for you already on the loop. We need to make sure everybody's staying in their lane. Speaker 1 (32:01): And the caution there is if you said yes and you just went to the transaction coordinator, you're training the agent that you're the person to go to for the thing that you're not the person to go to. Speaker 3 (32:10): Exactly. And what happens is a linear roadmap that kind of looks like this starts to look like this, and all of these curves are inefficiencies where you're wasting time. So it's like just go back to the linear roadmap. Speaker 1 (32:28): Yeah, really good caution. What are you looking at for the year ahead for yourself relative to the organization? Where's Team Z going over the next six to 12 months, and what does that mean for you in your role? What are you most excited about building or adding or focusing on or removing or simplifying? Speaker 3 (32:49): Yeah, so I think, oh my God, this is another great question that I could talk about for days on end. So where we've come, right, we're already growing. So I was alluding to, we had just finished an office renovation at our old office, but then we jumped into a new one Speaker 1 (33:11): Because you needed the space. Speaker 3 (33:13): We needed the space, we needed the collaborative space, but we also needed the space for the agents to kind of come in, touch down, be able to do their job and not have a bunch of commotion going on in the background. So just creating that safe space, so to say for the agents was huge. But we are growing. I'm not going to shy away from saying that I think I need to hire nine really solid agents, which really I need to double that because sometimes agents don't always work out. They're not the right fit for the company. We're not the right fit for them. So I'm looking to onboard about 18 agents and just grow our family. I think that's exactly what every new agent is for our office, and it all goes back to our office culture of being family oriented. We're a super collaborative office, so just making sure that we're sticking to those mission and core values is huge for us. Speaker 1 (34:23): I heard earlier or maybe a couple of times in the conversation that onboarding is something that you took responsibility for. How about that recruiting function? Who is going to go find those folks and build the relationships? Is that you too? Speaker 3 (34:38): I'm actually looking to take on that role a little bit and spearhead it a little bit more. Right now, my dad does that for the most part, and then hand it off to me to onboard them. I think just the nature of what my role actually is, I need to get out there and network a little bit more, and I used to hate networking, but all of a sudden it's an interest of mine. It is actually really cool. The people that you just run into and meet, it's really exciting. At the end of the day, I don't think it's something to shy away from, and my motto is, your network is your net worth. So if that's another tip I can provide, it's all about the people. Make sure you're meeting people. Speaker 1 (35:23): Yeah, I mean just specifically I think you could add a lot of value in building out a recruiting funnel. Absolutely. And by funnel, I don't just mean getting up some indeed ads and getting some appointments on your dad's calendar or something. I mean, what does this process look like? Where are we in it? What does the pipeline look like? Where are the points? Where are we losing people that we thought we maybe wanted? Speaker 3 (35:47): I actually, I'll add a little bit more to that and it's funny you bring it up. So I just onboarded a marketing coordinator two months ago roughly, and one of the biggest things that I wanted to focus on right away was how do we get in front of agents' faces, not in a superficial way where we're like, yeah, this is what we have to offer. Come join our office because who cares? I want to provide value to them. I want them to know Team Z is going to provide me value, and here it is. So the couple of things that we focused on when she got on was, okay, how can we start to build a series of quarterly networking slash recruiting events where we can invite people to not only our office, but build relationships with local coffee shops or local farm stands, whatever it may be to get our name out there, but also invite people to learn more about Team Z and what we have to offer to them. Speaker 3 (36:50): So that was one second, email marketing. I wasn't doing any email marketing before my marketing coordinator and we just sent out, this sounds so small, but it really was a huge win for me. I've been working on this for a while, is we just sent out our first email marketing recruiting campaign for a vision board creation night that we're hosting. So that was huge. That was a huge win for me. There's so many things that you can do that's not just calling an agent and being like, yeah, team Z does X, Y, and Z volume. Great, so doesn't everybody else. It's really about that value and making sure that they know we're going to provide you with support. The processes are complete. You really kind of just have to come on board, adopt the processes and run with it so that you can build your business Speaker 1 (37:47): And to know the most important part up first, which is am I going to like being around here? Absolutely. Am I going to like being around these folks? What advice do you have for a team leader who's looking for their Mateo? To quote Camilla Rivera from her most common question is, where do I find my Camilla? What advice do you have for a team leader who's like, yeah, the way he was describing Team Z on his way in the door sounds a little bit like my business. I need someone like that. Someone who will go figure out how to integrate the technology pieces even though that's not their background necessarily. Someone who can go figure out regulations if they need to, et cetera. What advice do you have for someone who needs someone like Speaker 3 (38:29): That? Her podcast episode was fantastic, by the way. I'm right on the tail end of it, it up. If I were to step out of my shoes and kind of reflect on the process that happened when I first came on, it really had a lot to do with my personality and the skillset that I brought to the table. I'm incredibly determined. I don't really take no for an answer when it comes to operations and just building your business, and I know that if I put my mind to something, I'm going to get the job done. I had no idea what I was doing. I'm going to be totally honest with you. I had no idea what I was doing. I don't think it's any surprise. I was in a totally different industry, but I knew that if I put my mind to being the best operations guru that I possibly could be, I was going to get there. Speaker 3 (39:32): I educated myself on so many different things. I mean, again, real estate team os thank you so much. Just surrounding yourself with the right people and the right resources I think was paramount to just getting to where I am today and I acknowledge that I still have a bunch of learning to do. I know that's not the best answer to that question. I know a bunch of people are like, send me to the link, right? But it doesn't really exist that way, and I kind of learned that as I was meeting agents, right? They're going to sell you on a bunch of things that maybe don't pan out perfectly, but you need to identify the core personality skills and traits that you're looking for, and you can kind of mend them to become exactly what you're looking for as long as they're willing to do so. If not, you got a problem. Speaker 1 (40:33): Yeah, I think the determination, I mean obviously you need a sharp person. I mean, you don't get a master's degree without being committed to what's in front of you and being a sharp person in general, not that that's what everyone is going to be able to go find and get, but some amount of just a sharp person who is on top of stuff, who has a good deal of determination, who can, even if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, cast a vision for. I mean, in your story, you kind of had the vision for what they needed as much or more than them, but it's very often the other way around too, where they don't know exactly what they need, but they know they need it. They know they need someone to have a vision and bring a vision to life. On the operational side of the business, we always kind of generically say integrator, sorry, visionary and integrator. Speaker 3 (41:24): But Speaker 1 (41:26): A good integrator isn't just following instructions. I mean, you have a vision for how to make this thing better yourself. Speaker 3 (41:32): Exactly. Speaker 1 (41:33): So you can shape this role out of the right raw material, and the right raw material is intelligence and determination and a passion to fulfill a vision and make it their own. Speaker 3 (41:44): Some people are just doers Speaker 3 (41:47): Tell them what to do, they'll do it, and we need those positions am not saying we don't, but we need that person that's going to take the role and really catapult it to the next level, and I promise you you'll be able to identify that the right person very quickly, very, very, very quickly. I know for example, I'll throw out my marketing coordinator really quick. It's one thing to interview people. Some people are really incredible interviewers, but then they come into the organization and maybe they don't pan out. I've been alluding to, right? I knew this individual was the right person because of the innovation and the initiative that she brought to the role. I had SOPs for her to follow on posting on social media and stuff, but then she would come with me, come to me with different ideas, and I would be like, this is incredible. This is exactly what I need because I don't have all the time under the sun to build the marketing department and sales and budgeting and finance and whatever it may be. I need people that can follow the vision and give their own spin to it. Speaker 1 (43:07): And I'll just say in your seat, it is a relief not to have to worry about all of the details. She's got it. She's got it, and you can trust that. And I look forward to more team leaders who are kind of right at that edge of doing something powerful with their business, finding that person that they can trust and share in future growth with. Mateo. This has been awesome. I'm so glad we connected to the podcast. I'm always happy to hear from you anytime on anything that's going on. I'd love to keep update on how 2026 shapes up for you. I think these three pairs of closing questions are coming. The first one is, what is your very favorite team to root for besides Team Z? Or what is the best team you've ever been a member of besides Team Z? Speaker 3 (43:48): Is it okay if I give three teams? Speaker 1 (43:50): You can do whatever you want. Speaker 3 (43:51): Okay. Okay. I have three. So Shannon Gillette with the Gillette Group out of Arizona. You do not know me. I love you. You are fantastic. That's number one. Number two, who I learned actually from this podcast, I became familiar with them because of real estate team os the Wemert group out of Orlando. They're awesome. I absolutely love what they're doing. And then my biggest idol in real estate right now, I have to give it to him, Ryan Sirhan, with Sirhan, the blend of these three teams. I think they've really mastered the fusion of brand systems and performance. So they've been so helpful with just kind of building that path forward and knowing what to do. Shout out to those three. Speaker 1 (44:47): Cool. Good call out. What is one of your most frivolous purchases, or what is a cheapskate habit you've held onto even though you don't need to anymore? Speaker 3 (44:56): When I hit huge milestones, one of my passions is designer brand. So Louis Vuitton is my number one designer brand in Aires is kind of tied with them. When I hit huge milestones, I reward myself to commemorate that milestone. So for example, today for this podcast, I bought Apple AirPod Max headphones. I really wanted them. So I think that's probably, it's one of my biggest frivolous kind of tendencies is you find a good reason and you get what you are. Yeah, it's commemorating milestones with luxury items. Okay, okay. Speaker 1 (45:45): Yeah, yeah. Luxury, connotes, frivol at some level, but also has value to you. What are you doing to learn, grow, and develop, or what are you doing to rest, relax, and recharge? What are your favorite activities in one of those directions? Speaker 3 (45:58): Yeah, so I don't really know how to rest, relax, recharge. So let's put that to the side. We'll talk about kind of growth and development podcasts, number one, huge books right here, wrong way, year two books I've started reading, and then another one, oh my God, I'm blanking on this book. The 10 x one, Speaker 1 (46:26): 10 x is easier than two x. Speaker 3 (46:28): Yes, that's been another great one. And then the Visionary Integrator one, rocket Fuel, that was a great one. So podcasts, books, and then I've been taking a bunch of webinars. Tom Ferry is huge and really, really helpful. I have to really thank them for a bunch of our growth and just getting us in line. So that's another one. But I would say those are the three top priority ones. Speaker 1 (46:57): This has been great. I appreciate you. I wish you continued success. Where can someone, if they want to connect with you, learn more about what you're up to or follow you, where should they connect with you? Speaker 3 (47:07): I love networking. I love connecting. Ask me any questions. I promise you, I'm going to give you the absolute truth. I'm not going to sugarcoat it because I know the shiny finished object looks awesome, but there's a bunch of hard work, sweat and tears that goes into it. So you can find me on Instagram. My direct handle is at Mateo on ops, M-A-T-T-E-O-O-N-O-P-S. I have LinkedIn, Mateo, Zingales, and then TikTok team, Zingales Realty. They're periods in between Team Zingales Realty. So that's where you can find me. Speaker 1 (47:50): I will get all those links right, and I will get them rounded up and they're down below. The descriptions are useful for this show. Feel free to check those out. Mateo, I appreciate you and I hope you have an awesome afternoon. Speaker 3 (48:00): Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. It was an awesome time being on this podcast. Again, huge fan. Thank you. I cannot thank you enough. Speaker 2 (48:07): Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. Get quick insights all the time by checking out real estate team Os on Instagram and on TikTok.