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AJ Hazzi goes unfiltered with the plays that built a #1 independent brokerage, a $1B+ PM portfolio, and the highest-performing agents. Expect battle-tested tactics, tales from the trenches, and raw convos with top operators. No gurus. Just the truth that grows your pipeline, team, and net worth.
AJ Hazzi (00:01.198)
Hi, welcome back to AJ Unfiltered. Boys and girls, I have a very special guest for you guys today. You are in for a treat. I have my boy, Mr. Ryan Young. This is a gentleman I've known for a little over a decade now. We belong to the same group of savages that meet up once a year in either New York or Palm Beach or somewhere cool. And and Ryan has had a very cool career. And one thing I know about Ryan is
Culinary school was probably the perfect, perfect starting point for a real estate business. It's very obvious that you would go directly from culinary school. It's a logical progression. But even in spite of that, you have built an amazing business. One that I think within our group stands out as one of the most productive, one of the most profitable, one of the most stable real estate businesses that endures, selling 500 homes a year, year after year. I think you have a very enviable business. And of course, you've been able to do what so many agents are striving.
Ryan Young (00:29.832)
Yeah. It's the logical progression.
AJ Hazzi (00:54.072)
To do, which is to work your way out of production, step into the CEO role, get that opportunity to really work on your business versus in it, and free up some time to work on some pretty exciting projects, which I'm sure we'll get into, but you've been able to diversify a bit and actually really get on the innovative side, solve some big problems in our industry, and now you're on a bit of a run with it. So I'm excited to introduce you to my audience. Everybody, this is Mr. Ryan Young. Welcome to the show.
Ryan Young (01:19.936)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And you know what's funny is I actually almost with my relationship with the young team, even though I own a hundred percent of it, I'm I'm almost like not even in the CEO position anymore. I'm almost in like a board of directors position. You know, it's like chairman, if you will, of like I make very little decisions. I participate occasionally in like an ad advisory capacity.
AJ Hazzi (01:36.846)
Chairman Roll.
Ryan Young (01:49.269)
Which I'm really proud of of like how we've got to where we have and how I've kind of empowered others. I do anticipate there will be a transfer of ownership over time and shifting to bringing to making other of the great leaders that are a part of our organization shifting in as owners. But it's pretty cool that I kind of am like this, yeah, chairman type of role. but still having a flourishing company, you know.
AJ Hazzi (02:17.27)
Yeah, that's that's awesome. I think that's the dream for so many. I am curious though, where do you feel like you still add the most value to the group? Like what's the tiny hinge that swings the big door for you still?
Ryan Young (02:27.434)
when I'm not causing chaos, because I'd like pop in and I'm just like, hey guys, I got an idea. You know, and it's like they're like, my God, like this guy again, like seriously, another idea. Cool, I would say I probably because of what with fellow and with some of the other things that I've built, I get a lot of visibility into other businesses in the real estate industry and outside.
AJ Hazzi (02:37.292)
Another? Yeah.
Ryan Young (02:55.604)
That's really allowed me to help kind of contextualize what some of the best of the best in our industry are doing to us here in Little Cleveland, Ohio. You know, we're in a small market. and I think they really value getting a little bit more of a macro viewpoint on like the entire industry and me like bringing that to them versus them kind of stuck in the little bubble that we're in. So
Sometimes it's kind of met with like some eye rolling of like, my God, here he goes again, like riff in on some stuff that like we're just trying to sell more homes. But I do think a lot of times they value when I kind of talk about, you know, some more macro trends that make them really look good in front of their clients, make them understand why things are happening the way they are. and it's just a much different viewpoint that I have that I think is really appreciated.
AJ Hazzi (03:43.82)
Nice. And are you still connecting with your agents on a one to one basis at all, doing any kind of sales management or any kind of leadership?
Ryan Young (03:50.238)
not as much sales management. I still, because our team is like full of like all these OGs, I just have like these very close relationships. You know, I've had some of these people seven, ten years, right? so I still have like very personal relationships. Like Jen on our team, we just ran a half marathon in Napa. And you know, Dustin on our team, we just went out to dinner with him and his wife. So it's like it's now almost like a little bit more like relational. And then also, you know, my brother and sister.
just like you kind of participate, you know, are leaders within our organization. So naturally not abandoning those relationships. I've kind of gotten out of in the trenches type of conversations, which is funny. is us as an industry, I think we like aspire to get out of production eventually. And I think there's this messy middle of getting out of production to ultimately where I consider this like chairman seat.
When you first get out of production, you still get sucked back in. Maybe it's not your own production, but to everyone else's production, right? Because you're so close to it. You were s you are doing it for so long. And then all of a sudden it gets to a point, like maybe it's 18 months, maybe it's 24 months, where the calls start to become a little bit less frequent. You know, they all of a sudden start going to other people for their problems. Maybe your your responses or your recommendations are a little bit antiquated. And so it's really interesting that like
AJ Hazzi (04:53.302)
yeah.
AJ Hazzi (05:16.834)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (05:18.683)
After like year three, it's like four year four. I like people don't call me anymore for advice. They just kind of know they're like, what's this dude gonna do to help me? It's like totally, totally. But we can riff on some like really cool I do like I do have a great relationship with my agents talking a lot more like I would say above the real estate business, but like more like investing, financial management, where we're places that they're excited about, you know.
AJ Hazzi (05:25.73)
Yeah.
There's someone better to call than you now, that's the deal. Yeah.
Ryan Young (05:46.55)
parking their cash, stuff like that. so the dynamic has changed, but there's still a very close relationship. One of the things that's really interesting is Fellow is a much bigger company than the Young Team. You know, we got about 160 employees and like it's this massive business. I still feel a deeper connection to the young team, even though it's like a very, very small percentage of like my
long term net wealth strategy and stuff like that. But there is just this emotional, you know, it's this biological thing that it's like, I I just these are my people, you know.
AJ Hazzi (06:23.032)
Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned too the like the more financial mentorship and teaching them how to invest and how to get ahead and the wealth part. I think for me being in a similar chairman role, that's still the piece that I get the most value from, for myself, like where I try it really fills my cup to be able to
Ryan Young (06:41.941)
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (06:42.488)
kind of go long range with agents, talk about where they want to be in ten years and kind of reverse engineer that and say, okay, here's what you'd need to do on an annual basis in order to work your way towards that and really try to 10x their life over the next decade. And I've always found that people always overestimate what they can do in a year, but we'll vastly underestimate what they can do over a decade. And so open their eyes to like what's possible, you know, you might be making a hundred and fifty grand now, but if you ten years from now, you can be making a million and a half with a twenty five percent annual growth rate.
Ryan Young (06:59.337)
All right.
Ryan Young (07:10.805)
Totally. Totally.
AJ Hazzi (07:11.086)
Right. And so showing them that if your your net worth might be five hundred grand today, it could be five million in ten years with again simple compounded growth rate. Here's how you do it, here's the investment strategy. I love that stuff. Like that stuff so gets me real excited.
Ryan Young (07:21.331)
Yeah. Yeah. It's in it's interesting because I think there are very few team leaders, probably in both of our, you know, local markets that can f all fill up their cup, the team members' cups in that way. Like how many people can ultimately provide the guidance and advice that you can provide? You know, you are a entrepreneur, both of us are entrepreneurs to the core.
Right. And me and you have talked about for the past decade all different types of things that like you've spun up. some successful, some still trying to find their footing naturally, like any entrepreneurship, like same with me. It's like had a bunch of duds and a couple, you know, good ones and some stuff I'm really excited about and some stuff that like fizzled out. But the fact that we can have those conversations with them, what it does is it creates a narrative that's much bigger than just selling real estate on a team. Right. And it's like
AJ Hazzi (08:00.333)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (08:17.991)
It I think one of the reasons why we've seen the retention that we've seen is because I'm always challenging them to like think bigger, right? Because my big is really big. Your big is really big. Their big without us might not they might not they need to unlock the potential and like to your point of what you can accomplish in 10. It helps when you look at someone that's already stretched kind of the imagination of what is possible. And it's like maybe they don't have to come all the way up to the top of Everest.
AJ Hazzi (08:28.259)
Yes.
Ryan Young (08:47.967)
But like halfway up is still pretty crazy. It's still, you know, there's still a lot of things that are, you know, challenging. And I think that is something I'm really proud of. And you mentioned like filling up your own cup and like fulfillment. I just in conversation, I think like a little bit of self realization is I always love those conversations with the young team team members. I always like walk away from them like that makes me feel great, you know.
AJ Hazzi (08:53.336)
Yeah.
AJ Hazzi (09:14.402)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (09:14.421)
Telling them about how to remove a contingency on an inspection, on a it's like does not make me feel great, you know.
AJ Hazzi (09:21.74)
No, the deal doctor role sort of loses its luster after you've deal doctored a few thousand deals. It just you don't get the same charge. And I I found that. I once you've sold a few thousand houses, is like even doing a big deal, you just don't get that dopamine hit that you used to get from doing a deal. And so now it's like you get past a certain point where the art of the deal is less exciting, but now sort of reaching back and and giving a hand up or or you know helping other people achieve the level of success they want, that is actually where you get the energy, where you get the
dopamine.
Ryan Young (09:52.735)
Funny, funny story. And this is how you know when you're just you're you're over it. You're over the production. I've been out of production for about five years, and maybe two years ago or so, it was about eight o'clock at night on a Tuesday. I'm cooking dinner for me and my wife, and I get a call from a good buddy of mine, and he's like, Hey, whatever you're doing right now, you need to stop. I need you to go to this house. It's the nicest house in all of Cleveland.
My wife is over there right now and she wants to, she's about to sign paperwork with someone else to sell it. And he's like, You need to go there right now. My wife convinced her to come meet with you. All right. $20 million property. So my all of a sudden I'm like, I'm literally, I'm like, dude, it's eight o'clock on a Tuesday. He's like, yeah, they're like drinking wine, like, you know, feeling good. Like she wants to meet with you. You need to go there right now. So all of a sudden I'm like telling my wife, I'm like, literally, I got like fish on the grill or something. And I'm like, babe, I gotta go. I got and she's like,
AJ Hazzi (10:32.462)
Cheese.
Ryan Young (10:49.18)
It's Tuesday. Or she's like, are you having an affair? Like it's Tuesday at eight o'clock. She's like, where are you going? You haven't been on an appointment. I'm like, no, I swear to God, I got to go to an appointment. She's like, this is weird. Like, you don't go on appointments. It's eight o'clock. I'm like, no, no, no. This is the unique situation, whatever. So, anyways, I'm driving to this house, and this house is like iconic, right? Everyone knows it. It's absolutely spectacular. And it's Tuesday night at eight o'clock, and I'm on my way over there. I get to the person's house, right? They they let me in. This house is probably 25,000 square feet.
AJ Hazzi (10:52.088)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Young (11:19.398)
And she's walking me through and touring me through this house and ever and the entire time I'm just like, I don't wanna be here. Like I wanna be home with my family. Yeah, I was like, seriously, I'm like, I'm like, I like I I I just don't really wanna be like she was like, Let me show you the seventh bedroom and I'm like, No, no, no, it's cool. She's like, No, no, I gotta show you it's like got different carpet. And I'm like, my god, can we speed this up? You know, it's a two hour tour and we
AJ Hazzi (11:27.33)
Think about that fish on the grill.
Ryan Young (11:44.201)
We walk out, I walk out of there at like 10 15, 10 30 or something like that, driving home. And I'm like, this isn't for me. Like I just this like this would be the pinnacle of an agent's career, right? The house. And the entire time, the trophy, trophy listing. And the entire time I walked through and I was like, I just want to go home. Right. And the funny thing is, so she called me up after and she was like, you know, want to talk to you more about like what terms look like, you know, want to hear your strategy.
AJ Hazzi (11:56.148)
Mm-hmm. The trophy listing.
AJ Hazzi (12:04.845)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (12:13.896)
And I said, I gotta be up front with you. I'm gonna bring Jen, the president of my luxury division. ultimately, like she will facilitate this, she will run point. full disclosure, if if like you're not comfortable with that, I'm gonna wish you the best of luck and I'm gonna respectfully bow out and let you go in a different direction. But I'm like, I trust her more than I trust myself. She knows the luxury market better than anyone. That's why she runs our luxury division. And so she was like, Well, let me meet with you and Jen.
So I called Jen up and I'm like, look, I'm gonna go with you on the second meeting, right? It was like at a normal time, it was like five o'clock or something. I'm like, I'm gonna go with you on the second meeting. If you don't close her and if you don't or if you don't take over the relationship, I will politely bow out and just say, So it's like it's up to you, right? And I say all this because first off, I had the confidence in my team member to pass a $20 million opportunity, which she ended up listing, right? You know, we're talking half a million dollar commission or whatever on it.
AJ Hazzi (12:48.398)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
AJ Hazzi (13:00.91)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Hazzi (13:07.694)
Nice.
Sure. Yeah.
Ryan Young (13:11.964)
I had the confidence to say, I I prioritize, or I had I'd say the self-awareness to say, I prioritize other things in my life right now that are more important to me, whether it's monetary or it's just my own time or my family's, whatever it may be, right? But I was comfortable walking away and drawing a line in the sand and saying, if it's not the right fit for you, I'm totally respect that decision. But then we are not, our organization is not the right fit for you.
AJ Hazzi (13:18.486)
That's it.
Ryan Young (13:41.317)
And I just think that people would really struggle. A lot of us say we want to get out of production, but like when that one opportunity comes up, or they just it's just a a friend of mine that just wants to buy one house. It's like I've passed up my best friends to other people on my team, and I feel great about it. Right. I just sold my house right now, like last week we closed, and an agent on my team represented me. Right. Like my my point of saying it is is like.
AJ Hazzi (14:00.46)
Yeah.
AJ Hazzi (14:06.595)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (14:09.628)
If you really want to get out of pr a lot of us say we want to be out of production, but we're only like halfway out. You know, we wanna take the easy ones. We wanna we wanna take the the the the layups, you know? And it's like, no, no, if you really are committed to getting out of production, fully commit to being out of production, you know.
AJ Hazzi (14:16.3)
Yeah, sure. The layups.
AJ Hazzi (14:26.969)
Yeah.
Now, I think obviously the biggest piece of all that is you had somebody and you said the words, you know, I trust her more than I trust myself. And I I use a similar talk track when I'm edifying my brother who will take over my my book. And that's the key though, is that you have somebody that you trust on the team. So kind of getting back to the team that you've had and you had you mentioned you've got these OGs that have been there for the better part of a decade, and we have a lot of that same kind of culture as well, where there's like a core group that have been around a long time and we've attracted new people.
Ryan Young (14:39.54)
Charlie.
Ryan Young (14:57.844)
Tell
AJ Hazzi (14:57.988)
But what what do you think has been sort of the secret sauce to the retention? Because most people have teams, you get this revolving door, people see being on a team as a stepping stone to being their own thing. How have you managed to keep people long term and to build the culture around that?
Ryan Young (15:15.838)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting. We probably have the lowest splits in all of Northeast Ohio, right? and when people join our team, we purposefully talk about everything except for the splits. And, you know, naturally a lot of times they ask, but we kind of say like, if that is the most important thing to you, you're just not a great fit for our team.
the other thing is that we don't really talk about leads a lot on our team. and so when we bring on people, it's like if you're joining for the leads, then ultimately you're probably not the best fit for our team. And so I say this because one of the reasons why our retention is so high is because the reason why people come and go is because splits can be commoditized, leads are commoditized, the things that we provide are
Are completely unique and special to us, right? The relationships, the accountability, the motivation, the, you know, kind of this logic of like thoroughbreds run with thoroughbreds. And like the average agent on our team's productions is 35 homes a year. We really push people away if they're not, if they're not stepping up to play in our kind of sandbox, right? We don't want them. And so I think one of the things that happens is.
is because we start out of the gate with the expectations that like you're not joining here for the splits and you're not joining here for the leads. Let's talk about all the things that are our superpowers an organization and how we help you build process, how we help you scale a real business fundamentally, right? And I think because of that, people people grow their businesses with us with no ceiling. And the their limitations are not, I didn't get any leads this week or this month or
The limitations aren't I'm not making money because my splits are too low. We have agents on our team that make a half a million dollars a year. We have agents on our team that sell $30, $40 million a year. and they they could go anywhere. They could go anywhere and leave us right now for a 90-10 or a 95-5 or whatever it may be, but we've created this environment for them that's conducive to that growth and productivity. And full disclosure, like I don't think that there is a ceiling.
Ryan Young (17:39.86)
To any single agents on our team's production. And if there was, I would be having a conversation with them about how can we build supplemental businesses that ultimate like together collectively that ultimately allow you to break through that ceiling and that give you more runway, right? And that's where the entrepreneurial kind of thing is like what I'm saying is like there's never it's like if you're at 35 million and you feel like there's like nowhere else to go here, unless you just have to work harder, which
AJ Hazzi (17:58.508)
Yeah. You mentioned
Ryan Young (18:09.135)
is not what I want to be a solution. I want us to kind of automate and create efficiency, then great. Let's look at like what else is your superpowers and how can we scale and drive revenue for you and be partner or back you and become partners to helping you continue to grow.
AJ Hazzi (18:25.826)
Yeah, I agree. I mean we have a very similar mentality. In fact, we had to make that same shift. I used to really lead with we have inside sales, we generate, we spend X amount of money on marketing, we run it through our inside sales, we don't give you leads, we give you appointments. And that was the value proposition early on. And it does become, once you get to a certain size, it becomes hard to scale the leads in the conversion part department fast enough to bring on the agents. So your value proposition has to be bigger than that. And so we came up with something called leverage drive.
Ryan Young (18:52.733)
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (18:55.76)
Yeah.
And the idea with leverage track is that we give you, I mean, the the premise is you get what you need when you need it. So as you as your rolling average, your three-month rolling average increases from two deals a month to three deals a month to four deals a month, you're unlocking more and more brokerage-level leverage, whether that's like the one, the big one, the big unlock that happens when you get to four deals a month is you get access to licensed help. And so we have our newer agents on the team who are on the come-up who are more than happy to kind of more like a gig economy go out and do showings for.
Ryan Young (19:11.805)
Yeah.
AJ Hazzi (19:26.416)
50 bucks a showing or whatever it is, that gives them an instant hit where they go go do showing, get money. And then that gives our senior agents leverage so that they can start to be home at night with their their family. And and if there's an evening showing request for a client that they've been working with for months, they don't feel like they gotta re-rearrange or miss a soccer practice or whatever, they can just send one of the juniors and say, Yeah, my partner's gonna show that to you, no problem. And if you like it, we can have a conversation tomorrow about it.
Ryan Young (19:52.241)
I love it.
AJ Hazzi (19:53.474)
But that that is a huge unlock. And then when they get to five deals and six deals, then we start to assign them like a co-pilot. So now they start to have this team built around them. Not only do they have transaction coordinator, marketing coordinator, they've got a licensed co-pilot that is in for, you know, they're getting 10% of what they're doing. So they're probably doing seven or eight hundred in GCI at this point. The co-pilot's getting 70, 80 grand if guaranteed, so they've been de-risked. They're getting a huge education, right? Because they're seeing, they're seeing 60, 70 deals a year, so they're getting 10 years.
Ryan Young (20:19.036)
Yeah, I love it. It's awesome.
AJ Hazzi (20:23.468)
experience downloaded into them every single year from their from their senior partner and they're building their own book at the same time and they're activating their COIs, etcetera. Yeah.
Ryan Young (20:30.352)
Well, the best part about it is that you're you're building a farm system, right? While you're essentially providing them value. But when you say four a month, is do you have like a rolling average of like quarterly or something like that? And then how how how how often do you optim like let's say I do eleven over a quarter? Do you have a little bit of a grace period? Because I've found some times where I get stuck in the like
AJ Hazzi (20:41.442)
Yes. Yeah, so
AJ Hazzi (20:54.306)
Yes.
Ryan Young (20:55.928)
man, I'm p penalizing you for you you won you fell one short, so now I'm gonna pull this person away from you. We've done this with like assistants showing partners as well, which I love.
AJ Hazzi (21:01.88)
Yeah.
That that that is the biggest challenge with this is you never nobody
You never want take something away from somebody. You don't want to clip you don't want to clip somebody. If their momentum's fading, taking resources from them isn't gonna give them the momentum shift that they're looking for. So it is becomes challenging. So it is a bit of a trust thing. It's like, hey, if you've if you've shown that you can get to this space before and you remain committed to getting back to that average, it's unlikely we're taking anything from you. I mean, we make it pr it's hard to get it, and it's also pretty hard to lose it, if that makes sense. And does that cut into our profitability a little bit? Sure, but you've got to look at the
Ryan Young (21:10.951)
Totally.
Ryan Young (21:28.06)
Totally.
Ryan Young (21:34.566)
Yeah. Yeah, I love it.
AJ Hazzi (21:39.2)
the macro and I I think the retention of that
exceeds the additional cost of sale that we sometimes incur because of it. It to me it's a no-brainer. And when I hear over and over again in the team meetings, like so we always start with gratitude and finish with appreciation. And and typically anybody who's at that level, their appreciation is almost always for directly to the agent that's helping them or more macro, like I just appreciate where I'm at in my career now, where I get my weekends back, I get I have my evenings, I get a little bit of location freedom, I have a bit of time freedom.
Now, I'm at a great cruising altitude, my income's great. And it's the first time that the time trade for money really, really starts to make sense, right? Where they're like, I can make a half million dollars or I can make 400 grand a year and also work a sane amount of hours and also be, you know, present with my family or be able to do the things I enjoy on the weekend. I mean, that's the unlock. That's where you've really unlocked the true promise of this business, right?
Ryan Young (22:33.618)
We are so aligned philosophically. I think that is like I think you're so spot on. And when you start, this is what I'm talking about, like entrepreneurial, when you start changing the the way they value their time, right? How many times have you heard an agent
That won't let go of the buyer that they've already showed 40 houses to because they're afraid the next home is going to be the one that they buy. And they gave up on the buyer after 40 homes. And then the next person's going to show they have like this kind of scarcity mindset, right? When you start shifting agents' mindsets to operators, to entrepreneurs, to leverage-minded, you know, kind of business owners, where it's like, I could go from 400 to 500, but
AJ Hazzi (23:08.312)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Young (23:23.66)
I ultimately could bring someone else on, work 70% of the time or 50% of the time or whatever may be, stick it 400, but reduce down the amount of hours that I'm investing into this business so I can do other things, whether it's build other businesses or and I just think it's like I I love it because I feel like it's an industry that because we don't get comp because we only get compensated at closing.
Right. We struggle to to to attach or to correlate dollars to actually the hours that we put in, right? Because we are like this person I showed 27 houses and this person I showed one house, and it's like this person I made a significant more amount of money versus this person essentially. If you actually look at the amount of hours you worked, one of the reasons why my business, the young team.
AJ Hazzi (24:04.334)
Well.
Ryan Young (24:22.402)
Is very listing dominant. You know, we're about 65% listings, which is I would say very unique for our industry. You see a lot of big teams that scale are probably 65 to 70% buyer focused because you can scale on buyer leads and buyers are a little more relational and stuff like that. When I started breaking down the dollar per hour, the return on time of a listing versus a buyer.
And I started looking at it. And the reason why we built our team around listing partners and we try to set just like you guys appointments for them, I can set a listing appointment for my team member. They go to the house one time, right? Maybe it's a two-hour round trip. By the time they drive there, they're there, they come back. They send them paperwork, docusign paperwork, do it at the house, whatever it is. They turn it over to a transaction coordinator. They never go back to the house ever again, right?
Now the buyer's agents show the house. If the deal goes under contract and it falls apart, they're not going back to the house. If during the inspection, they're not going and sitting at the house. During the final walkthrough, they don't go back to the house. And so it's really fascinating to me when you look at the like, sure, they have to maintain the relationship from a distance, having phone calls, check-ins, negotiate offers, whatever it is. But when you think about scale and the fact that I can go on 10 listing appointments this week, let's just say, or five or whatever the number is, and I can
AJ Hazzi (25:22.808)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (25:45.17)
pull three, four new listings and I've invested the 10 hours to go on those five, 10 listing appointments. And now I have inventory on the market that other people are trying to sell. To me, that is the leverage mindset that I try to instill in every single one of our team members. And it doesn't mean that like I'm saying don't work with buyers. It's just don't don't focus, don't spend time chasing buyers when ultimately it's going to require significantly more time to convert the buyer.
AJ Hazzi (26:01.538)
Yes.
Ryan Young (26:15.203)
into actual revenue. And it's just philosophically like it's how we've scaled our business. It's another reason why the agents say we've created a machine that produces a significant amount of listing opportunities. But once again, that concept I think is so important for our industry because we're not getting paid per hour. And the the the reason why I always have conflict with attorneys is the exact opposite mindset, billable hours versus being compensated at the end.
They're incentivized to spend more time doing something. We are incentivized essentially to be more efficient and do less, right? And it's like such a a hundred percent, you know? And so it's like interesting. Whenever an attorney gets into a deal, it's like, my God, here we go. And, you know, and so I just philosophically, we're very aligned to that.
AJ Hazzi (26:44.93)
Yes. Sure.
AJ Hazzi (26:50.764)
Yeah, we're diametrically opposed to their to their business model. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, here we go. But
Well, yes, and you used my favorite word many times in your last little bit there, which is leverage, right? And the idea of thinking about I mean, obviously listings are the highest leverage thing that you can get in the business. And I wanna come back to that and find out how did you make that shift? Because I think a lot of our audience would be cu says, okay, great, but I know how to generate buyer leads, how do you generate listing leads? So we'll get there. But one of the things just to round out your point about the dollar per hour earning capacity, and even going back to what we were talking about when agents come on the team, if they're asking about splits and leads, they're asking the wrong questions.
Ryan Young (27:09.478)
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (27:33.472)
Question is what is my dollar per hour earning capacity inside of your environment? What does the average person make and what do they have to trade in order to get that? That's the question, the smart question they should be asking. And so, you know, when you start, maybe you are willing to trade your time 50 bucks for an hour to go show a property to leverage somebody, and that's where you're starting. Maybe that's the entry point of our business, is fifty bucks an hour. But it doesn't even top out at $500 an hour. So what's the pathway that you have to go? And how do you go from
$50 an hour in terms of valuing your time to get to a $500 an hour producer in a short amount of time, in a few years. What is that pathway? And that's the part that I've been obsessed with. That's how we've built leverage track, which is like, how do we, as they go and gain experience and as their production increases, how do we continue to pull things off of their plate, off their plate? So they're only working on tasks that are, you know, $200 an hour stuff and then eventually $500 an hour stuff. And so it's like
That idea, and I learned it from Dan Martell, the 1080 10 rule. So the perfect world scenario for a top-tier agent who's worth $500 an hour or more would be to be involved in that first 10% of the transaction, the part where you help the client set the tone, set the plan, get clarity. Everything after that, in terms of implementation or facilitation of the deal, should be done by somebody else who's more available. And then the final 10%, you come back in for the, you know, the last bit, the negotiation or the high.
Ryan Young (28:42.203)
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (28:57.018)
High level problem solving, the stuff that really requires your expertise, the stuff that's actually worth $500 an hour.
getting over the the last couple humps that every deal has, the real tight negotiation, that kind of stuff. But everything else, you are way better off to have somebody with more bandwidth, more enthusiasm, more energy, a younger junior partner who's just happy to be excited to be out there showing property. They're a way better experience than you when you're you're over it, you're busy, you got another appointment you gotta get to right after this. Like you're not getting the best of you when I'm out like after you've been doing this for ten years, showing property is not where you're at your best, right? And so
Ryan Young (29:29.627)
Todo.
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (29:33.106)
pulling that off their plate so they can show up for their clients and figuring out how to articulate that to the clients which is like you're getting the best of both worlds here. It's like a doctor, nurse or a dentist, dental hygienist. You're getting my expertise, you know, I'll look at the x-rays and I'll come in and perform surgery, but you're getting their you know facilitation, their their nature and their availability, right? Because any good agent at some point you're gonna run up against the the bottleneck for you is you just don't have the availability. You don't have
Ryan Young (29:56.369)
Yeah.
AJ Hazzi (30:02.97)
the bandwidth to give people what they really need, the hand holding, et cetera. And so if you can combine your expertise with someone else's energy, enthusiasm, availability, then you're giving clients the ultimate experience. But it has to be framed correctly, because otherwise they feel like they're being passed.
Ryan Young (30:15.441)
Totally.
Totally. And and you know, d from a f once again, back to the kind of like s the twenty million dollar my business partner, are the president of our luxury division. If I just said like, hey, you're gonna work with one of my agents, Jen, right, they probably wouldn't be as excited about it. But it's like, look, you're gonna work with my business partner, right? Jen, who's the president of our luxury division, right? There's some really powerful words there of like business partner, right?
AJ Hazzi (30:42.509)
Yeah.
Partners big.
Ryan Young (30:47.473)
President, luxury division. Now, if I was referring a different buy, you know, you're gonna work with my business partner, Cassie, who is a buyer specialist in this certain market, in this like niche market that you're looking in. She is the best person. So it's like a lot of it is a hundred percent the way you are presenting it. If it's just like
AJ Hazzi (31:09.432)
Yes.
Ryan Young (31:10.475)
I'll refer you to one of my agents. It's like, wait, I don't want to be referred to one of your agents. I want you. You were I was referred to you. But it's like, it's it's the business partner, right? Like when you go to an attorney's office, there's four names on the wall, right? There's three, whatever. It's like there's partners, like there's status. There, and it's like whether you get this partner or this partner, you're normally excited that their name's on the wall. Well, you know, we're the young team right now. It's like it's not.
AJ Hazzi (31:18.126)
We didn't
AJ Hazzi (31:26.296)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Young (31:37.797)
the young and 17 different partners. So we have to find ways to position using strategic words that get people excited. And I think some people might hear this and think, well, like you're passing, you're passing people off. And it's not that I'm passing people off. It's I know when I see the five star review that comes in after they buy their home with Cassie or that after they list their home with Jen or me choosing to list my home with Jen, the president of our luxury division, right?
I know that they they chose the right agent to ultimately work with. I had to get them out of their own way on the the the introduction, like you said, 1080-10, right? My 10 is different than their 10. My 10 is how do I make sure that they receive the partner in a manner where they're just as excited as when someone told them they should call me? And I think that's really important and how we position that. And
AJ Hazzi (32:11.704)
Yes.
Ryan Young (32:35.032)
One of the things I know it's kind of back to like getting out of productivity, but you have to have the utmost confidence in your team member. And if you don't have the utmost co confidence in your team member, then that's on you as a leader to develop your team members to where you need them to be so that you have confidence in them, you know.
AJ Hazzi (32:52.43)
thousand percent. So I want to get to the the conversation around how did you make that shift? Like you mentioned obviously you started to to dis you made the decision to to scale your business based on listings because it's more leverage. What was the first step? Like how did you what was the very first step you made? You said okay I'm gonna stop spending money here, I'm gonna start spending it here, or how did you how did you make that shift?
Ryan Young (33:14.452)
a lot of it. So here's what's so interesting is, you know, I've I've heard some people say like everything is like so intentional. Like you can't get to the top of a mountain unless you have a strategy on how to get up. You don't just like one day just start walking up a mountain. But ironically, I've everything for me has been really unintentional. for me, it's always been I've been inspired by other people. And I've always wanted to like
level up the rooms that I'm in and the caliber of people that I'm in company with. And so a big component of it was rate. You know, like when I when I I'd say it was like I got in the business in 2009. I got a coach in like 2013 or 14. And it was like a coach that I started following people and it was like the best of the best coached with, right? Bob Corcoran. And then Bob Corcoran introduced me to Amanda Howard and she's also in rate.
And so I started coaching with her. And she was like, You gotta get introduced to Matt Wagner and get into rate, right? And I just kept like being like, there's these ballers in that room. I want to get into that room, you know? And at the time I like was the low man on the totem pole. I was scared shitless to be in that room. And it's like, I kind of like being a little bit uncomfortable. So I get into that room, right? And I start seeing people are all running these radio ads and they're starting to do these guaranteed sales and these, you know, and and I'm like.
I I don't I don't know if I'm ready for that, but it's like everyone else is doing it. So let me like I if I'm in the room, I gotta do it, right? So then I started doing that. And then I started seeing what was really interesting was my our business was very, like very local before I was in rate. It was like we service like a couple like school districts very deeply. But once you get on radio, all of a sudden your geographical market expands significantly, right? Because radio doesn't have
AJ Hazzi (34:45.58)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (35:08.482)
lines of school districts, like radio services, like metro areas. And so all of a sudden I start and I didn't even know that what I was getting myself into. I started getting phone calls from people for to sell their home because of the guaranteed sale, 30, 45 minutes away from these little niche markets that I was in. Right. And now all of a sudden I'm driving to markets that I didn't even know existed in my market, like little towns and stuff. And but I'm listing these homes and they're selling. And all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute.
AJ Hazzi (35:30.702)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ryan Young (35:36.494)
I drove there for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and it's like I never went back. And I just sold it for four, five, seven, whatever it is. And I'm like, dang, this is so much better than like it was just a different model. And I started to see the leverage side of things. And so it was like that was like the next step of like the elevation of like, wait, why am I doing all of these type of things, which I was doing like buyer leads and some of the other things when I'm like, I really like it over here.
With the listings all over Northeast Ohio. I'm starting to like take market share in some of these geographical markets that I was never in before. And I started to get a little taste of that. And once again, being entrepreneurial, I started to feel this sense of scale, of like leverage, of a little bit of, I would say, ego. Like people started at like, I heard you on the radio. I, you know, you start to kind of have like a local reputation. People are like,
AJ Hazzi (36:06.627)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (36:32.043)
I know that guy. Like he's everywhere. Their signs are on the west side. I saw your signs on the east side. And it just kept like l layering up and up and up until I just got to a point where once you get a taste of that, it's really hard to go back to the other way of like buy a buyer lead, try to convince them to, you know, come into the office or go show them a home or whatever it is. And you chase them around for and that just wasn't, and once again, I'm not trying to push away.
that because I know there's a lot of agents that love that. And if you love it, do it. Right. But I was never like in love with real estate. I was in love with business and growing something. And it just so happened to be the real estate industry was the place I found my career in. And so it was like more about the like the leveraging growth. And that I found was just the path that seemed the most the path of least resistance, you know.
AJ Hazzi (37:11.18)
Yep.
AJ Hazzi (37:26.254)
Hundred percent. Yeah. No, and I think that most people that's the progression. You start with the easiest thing to get your head around is serving the buyer, right? It's the easiest thing to do and that's that's typically the entry point for most people, yeah.
Ryan Young (37:34.415)
Totally. It's more relational, it's less transactional.
AJ Hazzi (37:39.02)
And I I think eventually you start to make that shift. One of the things I'm telling a of people now is is even if you are still generating a lot of buyer inquiries, especially in the market that we're most of us are in now, which is a relatively either flat or even potentially declining market, most people who are buying are not buying out of a sense of FOMO. They're buying because some life event has taken place, which means there's usually a house to sell.
Ryan Young (37:58.256)
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (38:01.09)
What's often missed I find is this people think that a buyer lead is a buyer conversation. And so they stay on whatever talk track they've been taught on qualifying them as a buyer lead, and they try to get them to come into the office to talk about buying, and then oftentimes put them on a portal, leave them on this portal, they get ghosted, and they never even get to the conversation around the house they needed to sell. And it's it's one of these weird things that people don't even realize they're doing it. But I can see it with our inside sales because a new inside sales agent might miss that nuance.
and all they book is buyer meetings from the same lead source that a more seasoned ISA is getting, you know, 50% of these are actually being booked as listing appointments because they're shifting the conversation to the seller opportunity. And so I tell people, you'll find what you're looking for. If you go into the call with a self with it with the preconceived idea that this is a buyer lead and they don't have a house to sell, then that's what you're gonna end up with. But if you realize that most people that are buying right now also have homes to sell. Otherwise, why would they be even contemplating doing this?
Right, unless they're a first time buyer.
Ryan Young (39:02.777)
Dude, that was the impetus of fellow, right? Like that was so here's what's so interesting. You're once again, like philosophically, we are so deeply aligned. when we there was a product, I don't know if you I'm assuming it's just in the States. there was a product called Forwarn that was provided by our MLS, right? And it's a safety criminal check type of product that like they wanted to make sure realtors were like before you
Go meet these buyers at a random house. You look them up on Forewarn and make sure they're not like crazy, right? And so we had a po we had a process on our team, which was like, and it was kind of more of a cover my own ass type of process of like, before you take a buyer out, you gotta look them up on forewarn, right? You gotta look them up on forewarn. Like, that's a part of our process. Do it, you know, like. So, anyways, my team would go to forewarn.
AJ Hazzi (39:39.085)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (40:02.585)
They would look up and be like, nope, AJ's not a criminal. I can go meet him at a house, right? This person, nope, Nick's not a psychopath. I can go meet him at a house. And I'm watching this behavior, and I'm like, while you're in Forewarn, their address is literally sitting right over their criminal record, right? Or their lack of criminal record. And I'm like, click on the address. Like
AJ Hazzi (40:22.338)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Young (40:27.949)
What go look in look in up that address and do they own that house or not? Right. And so when I started, especially meeting with buyers and stuff like that, I would already know that you lived at one, two, three Main Street and, you know, East Cleveland or whatever. And I would go to the buyer council or meet you at the house. And I'd be like, Hey, AJ, you know, like AJ, super nice to meet you. Like, by the way, do you live in the area? And you'd be like, Yeah, I live over in East Cleveland. And I'm like, No kidding.
I love East Cleveland. We sell a bunch of homes over there. What what streets you live on? I live on Main Street. No kidding. Did you see the home that just sold around the corner on Church Street? I would go in as the market expert for the home that they live in, knowing doing my homework because I knew that they own that house, right? And it's like, you you think that they even if I'm look showing them a house on this side of town, but they live on this side of town, they always walked out of there like, damn, this dude knows our market.
I didn't know their market. I learned their market 30 minutes before the showing. So that when I got there, I could articulate and confidently speak on what's happening in their market, which created a significant amount of conversion of like trust not only on the buy side, but ultimately winning their listing side. And so this concept of like, you know, and this is once again kind of like what how was the birth like of fellow was like there's all these homeowners sitting in your database. You have no idea they're in there. Like you're missing out on a significant amount of revenue.
was always like a core piece of like the way we ran the the young team business. I always looked at every buyer lead as really an opportunity to have a conversation with a homeowner. I was less excited about meeting a buyer and this is I don't I hope this doesn't sound like awful, but it's like I was less excited about meeting a buyer if I knew that they didn't own their home and they were like currently renting because I just looked at it as it was like 50% of an opportunity. You know, it's like I want to in the the vein of leverage and efficiency
AJ Hazzi (42:19.426)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (42:23.692)
I want to meet with buyers where they're totally. And because then that listing is going to drive me more buyers and wish you're going to have more homes. And it's just this like, you know, flywheel effect of like, that's how we've scaled the young team to, you know, how we scale them.
AJ Hazzi (42:24.078)
You want two for one?
AJ Hazzi (42:38.914)
percent and but it's a mindset right you again you find what you're looking for so if you've decided what you're looking for are are those dual opportunity clients then that's what you'll find and you'll find ways to un unpack those. If you're just looking for a buyer with a checkbook then that's all you're gonna find too. I'd love to get into to fellow I think that's a nice jump off into that I mean I think a lot of our audience especially like our our core group everybody knows fellow it's you know it's a household name at this point but I think for a lot of our audience especially the Canadians where you guys don't service us yet which you will one day I'm sure when we figure out
Ryan Young (42:52.61)
Totally.
Ryan Young (43:06.572)
No, yeah, it's get yeah, I went I need to the data is a you guys are real tight on your data out there.
AJ Hazzi (43:09.888)
I know. I know. That's it's Canada for you. But let's talk a little bit about fellow and you what first of all what was like the aha or what what made you even think of it? And then, you know, let's suck with that journey a little bit and then we'll get into Felix.
Ryan Young (43:23.746)
Yeah. so I'm gonna really quick bridge the gap from the young team and rate to ultimately how Fellow came about. we started doing the guaranteed sale, like I kind of talked about, and we we got to a point in 2019 where a gentleman heard my radio at he called me up and he said, Hey Ryan.
My name's Dante. I'm calling you from Alaska. I hear your ad. I stream I'm from Cleveland. So I stream Cleveland Radio out here in Alaska. And I want you to buy my mom's home. Right. And I'm like, Dante, I appreciate that, man. But like we do a guaranteed sale. Like, if I can't sell it, I'll buy it. But like we got to put it on market. And he's like, I hear you, but I just want you to I just want you to buy it. And I'm like, dude, it's not the way it works, man. Like, I'll list it. And if I can't sell it, then I'll buy it. Right. And he's like,
Just make me an offer. And he kept just, and I'm like, that's not the way it works. He's like, make me an offer, make me an offer, make me an offer. And finally I'm like, I'll give you X. And it was like insulting, right? I'm like, just to kind of shut him up. And he's like, I'll take it. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't want to take it because I can help you net so much more money if you put it on market. Right. And he's like, I'll take the offer. And I'm like, all right, fine. Like, I'll, you know, it's I had plenty of cash. It wasn't about like not wanting to buy it. So I buy the home.
And after the transaction, I was like, Dante, I gotta ask, man. I told you not to take the offer. I'm gonna make a ton of money on this house. Why did you sell me this house? I just don't get it, right? And he's like, Ryan, my mom is in assisted living. All the proceeds of the sale of her home are gonna go to Medicaid. I was gonna have to fly in from Alaska to Cleveland. I would have to get all the stuff out of her house. I would have to then loot stop, I would have to call off work, right? So I wouldn't get paid at work.
And all of a sudden he's like, You actually you saved me money by buying my mom's house. And it was this like aha moment of like, wait a minute. You you actually, I'm so conditioned to think we sell your home for the most amount of money. We'll help you net the most amount of money that sometimes in the vein of leverage, right? Sometimes you don't think about people's time or convenience or certainty or all these other reasons why someone might be willing to sell their home a little bit under.
Ryan Young (45:43.075)
market value in order for them to unlock whatever is on the other side of that. Right. And I think we make the assumption that that it's like it's predatory or it's like, or the consumer population or the agent population makes the assumption that it's predatory and like that we're taking advantage of people and stuff like that. And it was really like an eye-opening experience of like, wait a minute, there are other people out there that like value this option. And so
AJ Hazzi (46:11.064)
Yep.
Ryan Young (46:11.722)
Immediately I was like, I'm gonna stand up the cash offer program. So I stood up the Young Team cash offer. So now we offered the guaranteed sale, the cash offer, and then your traditional what we call worry-free listing. And so now I have three options. And I started getting people from the young team that were taking the cash offer. And I started buying homes, right? And then I got to a point where I was buying so many homes that I actually needed to insulate the Young Team's brand. And I stood up another company called Flash House.
So now Flashhouse is actually the cash offer solution that partners with the Young Team instead of the Young Team Cash Offer. And so it was this progression of like the guaranteed sale to the Young Team Cash Offer to standing up Flash House. So this is to kind of how we got to fellow. I had a major epiphany while we were running Flashhouse, which was I was doing direct to consumer eye buying or cash offers, right? It wasn't branded the young team, it wasn't Ryan Young.
And we started actually getting to a point where we were acquiring about 15 to 20 homes a month. So we were seeing good volume. We were actually spending money marketing direct to consumer on ultimately to generate more acquisitions. And I started to see people from the young team's database requesting cash offers from Flash House. And they had no idea that I owned Flash House, right? And so what happened was I'm starting to see, wait a minute.
AJ Hazzi (47:08.13)
Wow. Yeah.
Ryan Young (47:30.934)
A past client of mine is actually requesting a cash offer online from Flash House. Why aren't they calling me up and saying, hey, Ryan, we're thinking about selling our home? And it made me realize that like our the people in our database we don't own, right? They owe nothing to us. They're out there if they're on Flash House, they're on Open Door, they're on all these other places. I don't have a lot of control over what's happening in the young team's database. And it made me realize that very quickly. So this is where fellow came along. We had a concept where
AJ Hazzi (47:50.84)
Yep.
Ryan Young (47:59.694)
There's all these sellers in your database, just like I told you from forewarn, but we don't even know they're in there. What if we synced our CRM into the fellow platform? We found all the sellers using data enriching, right? And then we started marketing to them that the young team could actually get them a cash offer partnered with local partners, right? And what ended up happening was we with Flash House were the actual acquirer, acquisition partner.
So now all of a I had the Young Team driving Flash House a lot of cash offers out of their database. And then I had Flash House actually supporting the Young Team and creating a lot of opportunities, listing opportunities for the Young Team. And it was this beautiful flywheel, Young Team and Flashhouse working together. And I started talking to other agents and they're like, dude, I'd love to like drive more cash offers and sellers out of my database. And I'm like, well, here, use felt like you don't know, I'm not gonna charge you for it. Just like use this platform.
And what you'll drive me more cash offers, and we'll start generating cash offers for you. If we buy it, great. If you create engagement, great. So we got to the point where we stood up, fellow, the concept of being the first like agent-led iBuyer, where we give you this software that creates all of these cash offers out of your database, and we will be the buyer of the home. The logic was instead of us going direct to consumer, we're now in this B2B business.
Where the agent is actually marketing cash offers and driving them to us, and our customer acquisition costs is nothing. We just had to build the software, the marketing engagement software, and give it to the agent, right? So we go to market June of 2022. At that time, we had 600 agents in Northeast Ohio and beta. Within the first month, we received 400 cash offer requests with zero spend. And we're like, we just cracked.
AJ Hazzi (49:28.972)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (49:45.602)
We cracked the code, right? Like gold mine, this is gonna be massive. Now we'll just go market to market to market, and this is gonna be huge. So all of a sudden, interest rates in June of 22 started going from like four and a half percent to five percent to five and a half percent to six percent. And all of a sudden we're sitting with a bunch of inventory on market, and it's not selling because interest rates are rising. We're starting to reposition our offers down because the trend of interest rates are going up.
AJ Hazzi (49:47.459)
Yeah.
AJ Hazzi (50:00.206)
Yeah.
AJ Hazzi (50:05.784)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (50:13.175)
So ultimately the affordability and all these things. And so now our conversion on actually cash offer submission to conver to acceptance is drop plummeting, right? Because they're like, dude, my house that my neighbor's house three months ago just sold for 40 grand higher. And it's like, yeah, but three months ago interest rates were a percent and a half lower, right? And that was really hard for the homeowner to grasp.
AJ Hazzi (50:24.163)
Yeah.
AJ Hazzi (50:33.676)
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Young (50:36.545)
And then I went on stage and I was in Austin in front of like 5,000 people and I was talking about Flash House and how it's been really good for the young team and fellow. And all of a sudden I started getting all these calls from agents all over the country saying, Hey, will you expand to my market? That sounds amazing. And I'm like, Well, we got to get a crew and we got to start getting a a more a local a pricing expert. And we and I'm like, wait, I can't scale to all these markets. And what I found was the agents didn't really care that I bought the home or Flash House bought the home.
They were just loving the concept that there's all these homeowners in their database that they never knew were in there, and that something is creating engagement for them to have a conversation with them. So we immediately pivoted in October of 22. We basically unwound the entire acquisition arm of Flashhouse. Fellow completely moved over to just being purely SaaS subscription-based kind of software, right? And we basically went live on October 22, October of 22. We haven't looked back, you know.
AJ Hazzi (51:13.528)
Hundred percent. Yeah.
Ryan Young (51:33.517)
Three plus years later, almost four years later, we work with 3,000 teams in the US. You know, we're incubating about 50 million contacts across the country to create, to find the homeowners in their database and then to ultimately market to them to create the engagement for the agent to have a conversation. So it's kind of this like progression of like the guaranteed sale to the cash offer to the actual acquiring homes, to marketing to them, to like how we got to where we are now.
AJ Hazzi (52:02.368)
I I get it, man. And I dig it. I'm actually on a similar journey myself. I mean, we we started Cash Offer Canada, which was our own iBuyer, because we're in the same room, right? We're both in rate, we're hearing this is happening. We're in like 2019, 18, we're seeing it. It's starting to pop off. And so we gotta get a piece of that. So you know, I created the iBuyer, same thing to protect the brand. I had it at arm's length. And then same thing, went through that same journey where we were buying houses, paying, you know, as much as we could at the time, but knowing that things were going in the right direction. Came down on the other side of that, weathered that storm, but then I pivot to the business.
Ryan Young (52:10.145)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (52:13.931)
Yeah.
AJ Hazzi (52:32.352)
model and then now moving cash off or Canada
platform-based thing where you know we get it's a fee-based model where we're taking a little bit of recurring revenue from agents, a little bit of recurring revenue from investors who want access to off-market deal flow, and then and then a little bit of fees, right? And creating the marketplace. And that's been the evolution for us as well, where we don't have the balance sheet risk anymore, but we're able to service and and to your point, the thing that a lot of agents want and are most excited about is that, you know, that that engagement and that ability to to find leads that wouldn't be there otherwise.
Ryan Young (52:46.272)
Yeah, it's double sided marketplace love it.
AJ Hazzi (53:05.648)
Right? There just there just wasn't gonna they weren't gonna have that conversation. We both know and when we get into the Felix conversation we can talk about you know the likelihood of going back into the bowels of your database and making calls is next to nil. So this is a way to to surface a lot of opportunity that would otherwise be missed. So when you when you got fellow rolling, like what kind of a bump did you see with your team? Like did you suddenly start booking a whole bunch more seller opportunities and that's where you really saw production crank, or how did that affect the team?
Ryan Young (53:33.665)
Yeah, I mean it's funny because we were all we started doing that, like we built that homeowner database muscle where we were doing it manually from using the forewarn, like which was once again kind of like the inspiration behind like, wait a minute, if we're gonna try to find sellers, why don't we just first tell them who the homeowners are in their database? Like that would be an easy first logical step. And plus we see significantly higher engagement when you're sending something personalized to a homeowner versus
generic, right? Guessing whether they're a homeowner or not. yeah, so the young team saw the young team, it's funny. I give the young team a lot of credit because they're the laboratory for all things, fellow, right? They're the guinea pig. we've, you know, killed a lot of mice, trying new trial, clinical trial type of you know, it's like one of those things, like there's times where they're like, dude, you just screwed up everything in our database or like this is crushing us. Like,
AJ Hazzi (54:20.374)
Yes. Yeah.
Ryan Young (54:32.308)
we please chill? But there's also been like major accelerants and unlocks. The goal is ultimately taking those accelerants to actual market, right? Like realizing the scale of them. So the young team's always been the beneficiary of the first concepts of all things fellow, Felix, et cetera, which has been massive for us because what I have access to, you know, like I said, fellows, 160 team members, and I'm talking about like
Brilliant, brilliant engineers and product managers and revenue leaders and customer success leaders and all these different and enablers and all these different like corporate positions that you have at scale, you know, versus you don't have a lot of us we don't have, we can't afford the ability to have all these niche roles. We have a lot of like generalists, like whether it's a director of marketing or like we have a demand gen marketer and a content writer and like all these like
AJ Hazzi (55:23.459)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (55:30.448)
Type of things, right? And so the one like a really nice benefit is the young team gets access to a lot of the fellow resources. So we can like pop into you know a massive company and be like, hey, can you guys help us understand what's going on with this display ad campaign? Or can you help us optimize this or whatever it may be? So that's really like the biggest place where we benefit is like we always get the earliest stage of.
product. and you know, we call it alpha. And it's like we get to see how it lands, what the excitement is. but ultimately by the time the product gets to market, the young team's taken some, you know, we have some scars on like helping iterate to get it to where it is. The real benefit is actually the access to these VPs and executives and stuff like that that treat the young team like
they're a we're a part like the young team is a part of fellows company, you know.
AJ Hazzi (56:31.714)
Yeah, because it's the R and D. lab, right? And that's I I I look at Vantage the same way.
Ryan Young (56:33.396)
It's the R and D lab. So yeah. And they know that they put up with they know like, once again, we break a lot of stuff. We get access to everything first, which is really cool. But everything that we get access to is always like more like it's pretty diluted. It's pretty like at a place where it's like it's an idea, it's a concept, it's like an an MVP type of version of something where we're like duct taped and stapled together. and then w the crazy thing is though,
AJ Hazzi (56:54.306)
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Young (57:02.272)
I and I say this to the fellow side of things, and this is why I'm so bullish on Felix. I always know, I I know deep in my heart when something is going to be massive for fellow. And it's because of the way the young team receives, adopts, evangelizes, even in an MVP form, when when they really get excited about that early stage concept and like.
AJ Hazzi (57:31.342)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Young (57:31.988)
And when you actually see the excitement internally, it's not top down me forcing it on them, but it actually has this like bottoms up excitement. Whenever that happens, I know like this is gonna land really, yeah, this is gonna land really well. And there's times when it's like it is top down. And I'm trying to like encourage them and motivate them and maybe even incentivize them to like try to use it.
AJ Hazzi (57:43.918)
We're on to some.
Ryan Young (57:58.612)
It no matter how much I incentivize them, if they're not excited about it, like it just normally doesn't land as well within the fellow community as well, you know.
AJ Hazzi (58:05.08)
Yep. That's a good point. It's a little more organic. It's pull versus push. So so you started into into this new venture, like the first time I heard about Felix was in in Palm Beach, but when did you start working on it? Like how how far back does that go?
Ryan Young (58:10.763)
Totally.
Ryan Young (58:20.701)
About a year and a half ago.
AJ Hazzi (58:22.838)
Okay. So still it's pretty new. you know, in tech in in tech world it's ancient, but in the real estate world it's a pretty still pretty new concept. So give people the you know, the the big overview. What is Felix so that people know what the hell we're talking about with
Ryan Young (58:25.39)
totally.
Ryan Young (58:31.199)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (58:35.189)
Yeah. All right. So I'm going to continue to tell a story. I'll make this one a little bit more short. so we we create this fellow platform. We're working with all these top teams. We're creating so much engagement within people's database because we're finding all the homeowners and we're doing a lot of email marketing and getting all these hand raisers. And we consistently heard the same pain point when people left the platform or
AJ Hazzi (58:43.406)
No no.
Ryan Young (59:03.691)
Complain to us, like, I don't think it's working. The same complaint was we see all these hand raisers, we see all this engagement, but then we also notify them every day of all the sellers in their database that list their homes without them, right? We call it a property intelligence report, and all the buyers that buy a home without them. Because we're enriching the data, we constantly can say, AJ just listed his house today in your database and he listed it with this with your competition.
AJ just bought this new home today. And it's like it drives people crazy, you know, and it's like every day, you just lost $3 million worth of revenue. And it's like, and it was sitting in your database. You didn't have to buy it. It wasn't a new lead. It was sitting there, right? And so the number one response that we just kept getting over and over and over and over again is I can't get my agents to call the leads. It's cool that you guys make all this create this engagement and shake up the database and create all these hand raisers.
AJ Hazzi (59:35.556)
you'd want to puke, right? You just lost three million dollars worth of revenue, yeah.
Ryan Young (59:58.464)
But I can't motivate my agents to call these leads because when they do, the lead doesn't pick up or they're too top of funnel, or they're just, you know, they're chasing them or whatever it is. And so we've heard this now for qu probably a couple of years. And people have joked, our customers have joked, like, well, you just call them for us, right? And it's like, no, dude, we're not a service. We're not gonna stand up like this big ISA call center and start calling your leads and
AJ Hazzi (01:00:20.674)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Young (01:00:27.733)
taking referrals and stuff like that. We're not inspired by that. We like to build software. And so we we started thinking like, how do we scale calling their database for them? And it started lead leading into some of the AI solutions that we've seen in the past. We started thinking, well, maybe voice AI. But then there's already a bunch of people doing voice AI and it's kind of like a little bit commoditized. We started thinking, well, maybe we could text them, you know, but then there's like, there's already text solutions out there. It's like,
It's already kind of commoditized, a little boring, like it's just not that exciting for us. And we started thinking as the world was progressing over this last year or two, this concept of agentic AI and this concept of like the transformation from generative AI to agentic AI and building AI agents, right? And so we started thinking if we were to hire the perfect person and have them work your fellow database, what would that look like? Well, they would call your database when people ultimately were engaging.
They would probably text people after they made the phone call if you didn't pick up, like AJ, hey, it's Ryan. I just tried giving you a call. Give me a call when you're free. They'd probably send you an email, you know, just about information that's happening in the market and make it very personalized. And we started seeing what is the the perfect team member? How do they convert the most amount of opportunities out of your database? And that's where Felix kind of, you know, came about was Felix is this agentic real estate platform.
That sits on top of fellow, that basically takes all of your contacts, all of this rich data that we have, because every day we're updating data, finding stuff like that, and basically calls, text, emails, but creates a unique strategy for every single contact. Meaning, like it's not like a template. It's not like every day you call at 4 p.m. or like you call 10 days of pain or you have a 36 touch. It's like if AJ
AJ Hazzi (01:02:16.184)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (01:02:24.355)
Is actively clicking on content, then we should probably iterate our strategy based on his behaviors. And then Susie, who's been in her home for over 20 years, that just made her last mortgage payment, it might change the way we have an outreach strategy. So the reason why people are just going absolutely crazy over this is you're hiring this new team member that has no limitation to scale, right? That has the perfect follow-up plan for every strategy, looking at every single contact.
AJ Hazzi (01:02:32.674)
Yes.
AJ Hazzi (01:02:48.654)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (01:02:54.217)
Builds his strategy based off of the rich data on the contact, the behaviors and the engagement, and comes up with the perfect multi-channel st outreach, right? To ultimately winning that opportunity and then transferring them over to your team when the person is ready to have a conversation. And what's so fascinating to me, and the reason why the biggest epiphany that I've had, now I've had Felix for four months now.
Felix has made about 100,000 outreach attempts within my database in the last four months. To think that my team, he's transferred, he's made 550 handoffs roughly to my team, which means that he's had to have 100,000 outreaches. And these are calls where no one picks up dials. These are texts where people don't respond. Some people he's called fit, yeah, 5%, right? He he has to make
AJ Hazzi (01:03:32.77)
Wow.
AJ Hazzi (01:03:40.962)
Five percent five.
the same.
Ryan Young (01:03:46.821)
So we're expecting our agents to do the things that Felix is doing and they don't want to do it, right? Like that's not what they got in the real estate industry for is to for a hundred people to outreach to have a conversation just to get them to hand off to our team. And then here this to just to contextualize of the 550 handoffs right now in the past four months, we've set just about 90 appointments, right? So we have to have 500 handoffs.
AJ Hazzi (01:03:52.59)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (01:04:14.782)
To set 90 appointments and we expect our agents to be working all of this top of funnel and calling and dialing and emailing, and they don't have the perfect strategy. They're following the 10 days of pain process that we gave them 12 years ago. It's not customized to every single person. It's a one size fits all. And so when you think of this agentic platform and this concept of like everything is being created dynamically, intuitively, in real time, it's so powerful at scale.
When the only limitation to Felix's productivity is the amount of contacts that I have in my database, right? So my focus is how do I build more of a database to keep feeding Felix, my best team member, to have them working all of the top and mid of funnel to bringing them further down to transferring them over to when they are saying, Yes, I'm ready to have a conversation with one of your agents, and then bring them over to my agent. And that's the concept of like the last step. And I kind of joke.
The only place we can go from here as fellow is you look at my progression or my journey from like getting into real estate, guaranteed sale, cash offer, fellow, Felix. The only place we can go from here is like building robots to go on the appointments for these agents because we are at a place now where it's like I'm surfacing to you people that are ready to have a conversation. If you can't do anything with that, then it's like I'm I'm bowing out. You know, it's like I got nothing, I got nothing left to give. You know, it's like.
AJ Hazzi (01:05:26.872)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Hazzi (01:05:38.262)
Can't help you. Yeah.
Ryan Young (01:05:41.726)
I'm not going on the appointments for you. Yeah, it's like one of those things. I gotta I gotta go ninety percent. Can you bring me the last ten percent? Just take it home, go on the appointment and convert into an opportunity.
AJ Hazzi (01:05:41.964)
You solved the final problem.
AJ Hazzi (01:05:49.962)
And we want and we don't want to lose that last bit because the minute the robots are doing that, there's no more.
So if we can if we can no so we definitely want to keep the humanized component of this where we're going out belly to belly and we're meeting people where they are in their space, showing our empathy, showing our expertise. It's what the agent wants to do. Nobody wants to do follow-up, everybody wants to serve, right? So if you can hand them the opportunity, they're warmed up, and you they're in the best thing we're starting to do now as well is pre-frame. So I don't know if you do anything like pre-listing packages.
Ryan Young (01:05:56.862)
There's no more us, you know.
Ryan Young (01:06:06.09)
Totally. And it's what we want to do.
AJ Hazzi (01:06:26.2)
Or anything like that, but I am trying to really beef up what happens in advance of the appointment so that that client not only have they requested the meeting, but they've also been pre framed, and so that 80% of the of the selling is done. So the agent can really show up from a place of consultation, right? They're not they're not there to to promote and to sell into grandstand about our company. It's like, hey, let's talk about your situation. Let me run you through our diagnostic process. Let me ask you few questions to make sure I really understand. Let me tell you about the different. Now it's about which program.
Ryan Young (01:06:43.946)
Totally. To pitch, yeah.
Ryan Young (01:06:52.916)
I think that's so smart.
AJ Hazzi (01:06:56.08)
programs we have because we have about seven different programs to give people a bespoke exit in their in their next move but if you're spending an hour to talk about how great you are at marketing then you kind of miss the opportunity to connect on how to serve these people and how to help them right but most agents most agents only have one tool right like if everything if all you've got is a hammer everything's a nail right but if you have more tools whether it's the instant offer or the guarantee or the cash and sell or the fix and list or the sell and stay we have all these sort of two-word programs
Ryan Young (01:07:10.888)
It's so true.
Ryan Young (01:07:16.938)
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (01:07:26.1)
But it it really depends on what they're trying to accomplish and what's important to them, and then how we can de-risk this process for them. So I really am getting obsessed now with like how do I make sure that before my agent even arrives at the house, that that client is fully convinced that we are the best at what we do when it comes to marketing and demand generation for their house, so that this conversation can be solely on that. So my thought is we've got this really good listing package that goes out with our marketing brochures and everything in that.
explains the marketing. Then there's a video from me that goes out. It's a mini presentation, but mainly I'm edifying my partner that's going out. I'm also explaining a couple nuances about our company, what makes us different, and making sure that they understand the reason they're watching this video is so that when my partner gets there, that you can have that whole conversation about you. You don't want to hear about us for an hour. Let's make this about you. And so I think that pre-framing now this is in its infancy, but I think that pre-framing is going to be a home run for our agents.
Ryan Young (01:08:22.715)
You know it's so funny. and I highly recommend everyone to do this. go into Claude or to your LLM of choice, right? I I I I found a lot of value in using Claude. and I basically extracted a bunch of data and artifacts from like my transaction management, my the way we kind of classify deal structure and comp.
For the agent and for us. So, like kind of like our what we call our business tracker, our database, our CRM, our our fellow account. So we see all the lost opportunities. And I went into Claude and I kind of pushed all this data in and I said, build me a model or straight get, you know, get analyze what's going on in our business right now. And it's so interesting because the number one thing that it said, the biggest opportunity that we have in front of us is.
We're going on so many appointments, but our conversion on the appointments being set by our ISAs and that by team generated leads, our conversion is significantly lower than our sphere of influence set appointments. Like if an agent knows the person, they're listing like 90% or 85% of the time, right? When the team is setting it, we're seeing like under a 50% conversion. What's interesting is I've always looked at, and this shame on me.
AJ Hazzi (01:09:36.973)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (01:09:45.79)
I've always looked at the blended data of like us as a company sit somewhere between 65 and 70% conversion. And I've always kind of felt like that's like industry, like that's a that's fine, right? Like we we list six to seven out of 10 appointments. We're gonna be just fine. But when you all of a sudden start looking at the gap between the self-set appointment versus the young team set appointment, and we set 100 appointment, 100 plus appointments a month, right? You know, normally somewhere between 100 and 150.
AJ Hazzi (01:09:52.717)
Yeah.
Ryan Young (01:10:14.973)
Part of our superpowers, right? we are leaving so much revenue and more so much profit on the table. And so to your point about the pre-listing, we've started working through just some strategies about like the pre-listing. I love because right now we don't do that. That's right now on up for conversation. We're also moving into my brother and sister, my sister runs sales team, my brother kind of runs the company.
24 hours post appointment, they're getting a personal phone call from either my brother or my sister asking how the appointment went, right? just to see is there anything that our agent couldn't help answer. And what they're really doing is two things. They're trying to help the agent close the deal, but they're also doing a little bit of phishing on how was that agent on that appointment, right? Did the agent show up prepared? Were you aligned with the price the agent recommended? You know, and like stuff like that. So what's what's happening is it's actually helping us identify.
Who are our best agents, which we've been somewhat insulated by just looking at data. And so you you get to a point where all of a sudden, like now we're seeing such an abundance of appointments being set. Now, if we can close the gap on once we set or meet the appointment to actually winning the opportunity, it is, it's found money, you know?
AJ Hazzi (01:11:35.104)
yeah.
One other thing that just came because I've been thinking about this problem for a little while, so this might be beneficial to you. Have your agents that go on the listing appointments, have them get in front of the camera and make a video that says, hey, I'm really excited about our listing opportunity. One of the things that a lot of my clients have found value in is before the appointment, just me walking through some of the like the five main things that I'm telling sellers right now on how to get a home sold for top dollar in this market. So kind of here are the five main things that I think are really important. You know, talk about prep, whatever, but it's your five best points. It's a generic
But it feels like it's right to them. What it does is it starts to transfer that relationship to that agent because they've never met this agent before, right? And so now they see the agent in advance, they get to understand in advance this person has expertise, they get a bit of an upward view of them, there's a little more reverence to that agent when they get there. Because as you know, when people watch you on video, there's a bit of a parasocial relationship that starts to starts to be created. And it also because you have to imagine every client is looking at it going like
Ryan Young (01:12:13.949)
Tordi.
Ryan Young (01:12:27.805)
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (01:12:34.338)
Can I trust you? Like, are you good at what you do? You know, and are you like are you competent and are you of good character? And if you can solve the competency piece with a video in advance, and then your whole presentation is about demonstrating character in terms of, you know, diagnosing before you make any kind of prescription, then I think you've got like the magic sauce here. But again, if they don't have to go there and promote all of our whiz-bang marketing, and they don't have to sit there and flex on all their market knowledge and all their all their expertise, and they can just talk to the client and meet them where they are.
that I think it's it's your business to lose at that point. Like how do how do you lose that business?
Ryan Young (01:13:07.153)
Yeah, I think that's so spot on. I think you're so spot on. And once again, this is where you know, I know you have, I would say, a sophisticated audience watching, right? these are the little things, you know, you you mentioned tiny hinges that swing big doors or like, you know, what moves the needle. When you start getting your business to scale, you know, and right now I don't feel like the young team's businesses scale. I wanna see us doing a thousand units a year.
2,000 units a year, right? but even at my business of 500 homes a year, 1%, 2% swings are significant amount of money. And when you talk about, you know, we started the conversation about retention and building runways and you know, providing opportunities for your team members.
If you can unlock these things for them and help them increase their conversion, it's the same thing we do on commission, on compensation. Our compensation ask is significantly higher than the market. And when we get agents who join our company, they're always like, I can't get that much. Like that's way too high. I've never gotten. And we're like, we're gonna show you how we instill value and trust and confidence into the customer. And after, not only are they gonna compensate you with X.
But they're gonna leave you a five star review and talk about how amazing the experience was, right? And once again, it's just a mindset shift of like this is way, you know, it's like it's just a it's like this is what we empower our agents to do. This is what we teach you. You know, we're teaching you to fish, we're not giving you a fish. Like, it's just a different mindset. And there's no limitation. And I'll like, I know we're probably at time, but like they're but just when I'm talking about like,
AJ Hazzi (01:14:46.744)
Yeah. Okay.
Ryan Young (01:14:55.068)
Providing the entrepreneurial wisdom. This is the type of stuff that we focus on teaching our agents. Is how do you net more? How do you you go into that cus you go into that house, you're doing the exact same work? If your compensation is 50 basis points, a full percentage point higher, you basically just increase your time per hour by s 20%, 30%, whatever it is. And you you if you take that to ever if you can convert.
AJ Hazzi (01:15:16.663)
Huge.
Ryan Young (01:15:23.122)
30% more listing appointments that you go on if you can convert, you know, and it's like you just put that into every kind of piece within your business, they're they don't they don't leave, you know.
AJ Hazzi (01:15:33.996)
Yeah. If you can increase, you know, on three different levers by 25%. If you can get 25% more per per deal, if you can increase your conversion rate by 25%, going from saying 60% to 80%, for example, and if you can go on 25% more appointments, you double your business. That's it. Three three interconnected levers that will double your business. You find the three that are the lowest hanging fruit where you have the most to gain. If you want to double your business, find the three levers that connect to one another and you double it.
Ryan Young (01:15:47.016)
Totally.
Totally.
Ryan Young (01:16:00.617)
Sorry.
AJ Hazzi (01:16:02.08)
I wanna get I just wanna 'cause I've just been seeing so much chatter in within the rape community and and and others who have been trying Felix, like the early adopters that are in the beta, and I'm seeing these like obscene numbers. Like just give me some of the highlights. Like I've seen like fifty appointments added to the calendar this month and like just insane stuff. Like it's blowing my mind and I have the worst phones because we can't get it.
Ryan Young (01:16:15.336)
Crazy.
Ryan Young (01:16:19.398)
Yeah, it's here, let me just I'll just give you here, just I know it's and I apologize to all my friends in Canada. I love all you guys. it's just one of those things that it's like we the what makes Felix's superpower is the data, right? Otherwise he's just blind calling and texting and blasting people. here's the crazy thing is Felix today just across about 300 teams, we launched it two weeks ago today.
he's handed off 290 prospects to live conversations to teams, right? So you got to imagine, like we're seeing in some of these teams literally just onboarded seven minutes ago. They haven't even turned them on. It's crazy when you look at today, he's made 30, no, no, no, I'm sorry, 79,000 calls, about 120,000 text messages, right? And it's like
And these are and here's what's so cool about it. I I don't want people to be like, my God, you guys are just AI spamming the shit out of people's databases. He the marketing muscle that has been built is ultimately what he's following behind. So he is taking marketing and leveraging marketing to create consent and to create engagement and brand awareness within the prospect at a very low cost, very high frequency, high volume level. And then he's following behind.
people that are clicking on the emails that are cutting form submissions, stuff like that. The reason why. So Felix works in buckets of 5,000. And the reason why, like some people are like, I have a database of 200,000. I'm gonna have them go do it's like, first off, that's super expensive, right? Like that doesn't make financial, it probably won't make financial sense for you. But Felix is constantly working 5,000 contacts at all time. If someone says stop, he moves them out and he brings a new person in.
If someone says, I want to speak to an agent, he moves them out to an agent and he brings a new person in. So what makes it so powerful is every day he's bringing people out and bringing new people in. And so it's like it's this fresh batch of like 5,000 people that he's always working actively, but he's following behind all of the marketing muscle that's been built within Fellow over the past three and a half years. And so it's like it's not just cold blasting list of people. It's actually very intentional and strategic.
Ryan Young (01:18:43.488)
And once again, we have I was texting with someone last night. They had like 24 handoffs. They were like freaking out a little bit. They turned it on and like within three days on their third day, they had 24 handoffs. Like these are like live transfers to their team. In full disclosure, I think we came out of the gate a little hot with like how many people got enrolled into it. But like they were like, dude, I I can't like we cannot keep up with this. And I'm like, there's two, there's two solutions, right? We can either dial them back a little bit, which is it's an option.
Or you could go like bring on more team members, right? Like and just start to like scale your you know, it's like one of those things that it's like there's this is the type of there's this is the type of problems it's creating is like I'm being overwhelmed with people that want to talk to us. And I'm really proud of it. You know, like people hear it, they're like this is they see it and it feels magical. And if you are in Canada, I know that.
AJ Hazzi (01:19:16.162)
Mm-hmm.
AJ Hazzi (01:19:21.356)
Good problem to have. That's a good problem.
Ryan Young (01:19:41.606)
While fellow and Felix right now isn't in Canada. but I do really, I highly recommend you start playing around with building AI agents. and I I really want to inspire you to start, you know, start looking at the future and w the opportunities that are in the future with this back into the theme of leverage, this agentic world that we are moving into is like the ultimate lever.
It's the ultimate leverage. And I try to explain to people that like generative AI was the largest technological revolution we've ever seen. And it was like five years ago, four years ago, you know, like when generative AI started like really moving. Agentic AI is the largest technological revolution we've seen. And it's three or four years after the last technological revolution we've ever seen. So if you think of the scale and the speed.
And for all the reasons why we say this will never be able to talk to a human, or this will never be able to sound like a human, or this will never understand the emotions of a human, I am I am highly confident that on the speed and velocity at what this is happening, the the you know, that how fast it's like improving and growing, that you will be absolutely shocked within 12 months from now, 24 months from now.
Our world is gonna look like a completely different place. You mentioned Gary Keller's seventh level, you know, R E A seven levels. I talked to Gary, I was on a call with him a couple weeks ago, and I was like, you're gonna think I'm just going off the deep end and I'm like getting a little weird on you. But like the seven levels, there's actually like one level, which is like owner in a bunch of AI agents, you know, and then maybe like we have a couple agents that are facilitating deals. And I'm like, I
AJ Hazzi (01:21:22.112)
Eighth level.
AJ Hazzi (01:21:28.802)
Yes.
Ryan Young (01:21:33.713)
I don't know if like marketing directors and ops directors and like, you know, these generalists of people, I think like you're gonna see very quickly you can build agents to automate a lot of the stuff that's happening. It doesn't mean it's gonna replace everyone. It's gonna be an accelerant to people that leverage it. It's going to replace the people that don't. Like that I feel very strongly about, you know.
AJ Hazzi (01:21:54.424)
percent.
If you're an organization of three people or thirty people or whatever, you can now ten X your business without ha adding headcount. You don't have to cut headcount. You just now have the horsepower to go ten X versus having to incrementally hire the way you always have every time you add two hundred grand of revenue, you need a new person. You don't need that anymore. You can continue to scale. I love it. And I think for people listening to, especially the Canadian audio audience who can't get access to to Fellow or Felix, I think we've been playing around with it, but GHL has the ability to have
Ryan Young (01:22:07.655)
Totally.
Ryan Young (01:22:13.605)
Order.
AJ Hazzi (01:22:26.784)
The multimodal thing that you're talking about with voice, with text, and email. And probably from a low from a cost standpoint, like a Go High-level account, it's gonna cost you very little. You can move you know your database or share the database that you have, let's say in Follow Boss or whatever else. You can port CSV file over into that, and you could start having it not monkeying around in your main database. You could have it in GHL and start playing with different workflows with the Gentec AI. You could wire claw it into the into the mix and have it doing it and and
Ryan Young (01:22:29.991)
Calling that yeah.
Ryan Young (01:22:49.233)
Totally.
Ryan Young (01:22:55.217)
Totally.
AJ Hazzi (01:22:56.514)
To your point earlier, just duct tape it together for now, and you will find that there's lots of opportunity that can be created with very low-cost tools now.
Ryan Young (01:23:04.975)
A hundred percent. And they're you know, one of the things that we at Fellow are like paranoid but also inspired by is anyone can build anything now, right? And so exactly what you're talking about, like multimodal, multi-channel, like outreach and stuff like that. While I'm really proud of what we built and the models that we've built, and we're talking about like, you know, dedicated GPUs and like we've got like a whole infrastructure and an orchestration layer and like
all this like craziness of like why it's performing the way it is, don't let that discourage you from going and building and playing around with your own thing because that's ultimately how all these companies start is like I was just on the weekend messing around with dot dot dot and I all of sudden got inspired and then I just tried it on a hundred contacts and it actually, you know, and then it's like I s and then it it becomes an obsession. And then it's like, I want all of us to be building. It will make our industry better, you know?
AJ Hazzi (01:24:01.262)
hundred percent which makes me think I'm actually working on something right now you might get a kick out of this so you know we we we train our agents on the the perfect appointment framework and we say okay you know here's the steps you want to take and here's what you say when you get to the house and here's what you say when you finish the tour and you've got all here are the value propositions that you want to make sure they understand all these things. But of course you're not on the appointment so you have no idea how they did during that.
And their perception of themselves or what they think they said or did. And you tell them, hey, listen, make sure you do less than 50% of the talking. Make sure you're asking these great questions. Make sure you're, you know, and you're giving them this nuance. Make sure you show up as the authority. Make sure that you're expressing empathy. Make sure that you demonstrate conviction in both yourself and your company and all these things, right? And you have all these great chats on the Thursday meeting with them, but you have no idea what happens in the field. No clue. Right? And then you start seeing that the appointment conversion is low, but you don't know how to diagnose.
So that, like, how do I make these guys better? And so to that end, now I don't know if you can see on the back of my phone here, but I've got this plot device. And so I've just I've got a couple of guys that raised their hand today. I said, okay, I don't want this to feel like surveillance. This is all about a feedback loop that's gonna make you guys better. But I'm building out, I've cut it, I've created this AJ bot. It's through Telegram where basically you can chat with it, it has all my coaching frameworks, it has all of our you know transcripts of every coaching call.
everything that's in there. So now it will be able to take the transcript from the plot from the plot device of your meeting and it will score it against our perfect meeting framework and then provide suggestions. So it's like having me in your pocket. I don't even see it. I don't even need to see it because the AJ bot will take it from there. It'll provide them with that one-to-one coaching and say, like you know what, you did about 65% of the talking on this meeting. Your meeting ran 75 minutes, you probably want to try and get it down to 45. It'll give it all the real time feel
Ryan Young (01:25:32.55)
Sure there.
Ryan Young (01:25:48.55)
So cool.
AJ Hazzi (01:25:51.402)
feedback, right? And you didn't you you didn't mention these three value propositions which are probably biggest part of your secret sauce. You you skipped over the guarantee. Whatever they missed, right? If they didn't get the listing appointment, it'll tell them exactly why. Like here's what you scored and here's where I think the three areas where you could improve on the next one. But real-time feedback, which we just don't get.
Ryan Young (01:25:52.486)
It's so cool.
Ryan Young (01:26:10.352)
Dude, I'll leave you with this, but I literally posted on Facebook today. I said, imagine if you had a team of it's a screenshot of me and some of the engineers and product managers on my team. I was on a call this morning, just like we were looking at all this data, and I was really inspired. And I said, Imagine if you had a team of brilliant people focusing every day on your agents getting better. That's what's so cool about Felix. We look at data and performance daily. Iterate, measure, repeat. Felix gets better every single day. Think of how that compounds. Felix is far from perfect, but damn, it's crazy to see.
how much better he is than last month. Can you imagine how much better he'll be next month? And what was so interesting to me on today's call was we're looking at about 300 teams, right? across, you know, the that are that just turned on Felix in the last two weeks. And we are looking at a significant amount of data that is Felix's conversion and his conversations and the strategies taking and all these different things, right?
AJ Hazzi (01:27:05.56)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Young (01:27:05.59)
And we found a little something that was interesting that was of all of the contacts that were enrolled, that we found about 20% of them overall were actually residential landlines. All right. And multi-channel doesn't get as much value from a texting perspective if you're texting a landline that can't get text, right? And so this one little tweak of like, wait a minute.
Teams that are using Felix, we need to bifurcate landline versus mobile. Let's top grade out all the the landlines and bring in mobile because Felix is always working the 5000. So it's like one little unlock all of a sudden changes the trajectory of Felix's performance across 300 teams, right? Could you imagine if I had an ISA on 300 teams, a new ISA.
I was trying to train the same way, the same people, right? The the the the to try to get them to say the same script, all 300 of these people. And you start to think the power of this, of like in just like you with like Plaud and listening to the meeting notes and essentially grading and like it's like the scale of this stuff is so wow, right? And this is why the interesting thing is.
I hear a lot of people that talk, you know, about AI and it's like it's gonna displace jobs and stuff like that. And every time they look at like technological revolutions or or any type of revolution, you see a massive lift and it's an accelerant to GDP, right? And I think it's the same thing. Like sure, it might replace the Uber driver because there's Waymo cars or what you know, the robotic type of things that are potentially happening. But I think you're gonna see such an acceleration.
of ultimately opportunity. It's gonna create more GDP, more revenue throughout the ether and ecosystem and stuff like that. And I just it's like I'm just so excited about it. You know, it's like it's so it's hard not to be excited.
AJ Hazzi (01:29:16.43)
I appreciate your optimism because there's so many people doom and glooming about it, but I'm I think it's gonna create an era of abundance that's that's gonna be just amazing. We're gonna have to crack a few eggs to make the omelet for sure, but it is gonna be great on the other side. It's gonna take a few years to see it play out. So stoked for what you got going on, man. I love jamming with you. We're we are insanely aligned on so many things. this was a lot of fun, dude. I appreciate you sharing your time. I know you probably got a pretty full dance card here tonight. So thank you for spending 90 minutes with us. I think our audience got a ton from you, buddy. Thank you.
Ryan Young (01:29:44.23)
Yeah, man. I appreciate you. Let's let's keep it rolling.
AJ Hazzi (01:29:48.3)
Yeah, buddy. Excited to watch you rock this. Stay in touch, buddy.
Ryan Young (01:29:51.174)
Appreciate ya. Later.