Hey, it’s Jordan Samuel Fleming, and welcome back to That Real Estate Tech Guy! This week, I’m joined by Jon Nolen, President and Co-Founder of Pete REI, a CRM built by an investor who also happens to be a software developer.

Jon shares how his frustration with disconnected tools led him to build Pete REI — first as an internal solution for his own investing business, then into a scalable CRM for others. We discuss the real purpose of data and dashboards, how automation saves investors from chaos, and why clean data is the foundation of every high-performing business.

From automating follow-ups and building smarter workflows to using AI for rehab estimates and predictive analysis, Jon gives a behind-the-scenes look at how Pete REI helps investors make better, faster decisions. This episode is packed with real-world lessons for anyone looking to turn their tech stack into a growth engine.

About Jon Nolen

Jon Nolen is a seasoned real estate investor, entrepreneur, and software developer with a passion for solving problems and building scalable systems. With years of experience flipping houses, managing rental properties, and building long-term wealth through real estate, Jon has developed a practical, hands-on approach that emphasizes efficiency, simplicity, and results.

In addition to real estate, Jon is the founder of Pete REI Software — a powerful platform designed to help investors streamline their business operations, manage leads, and close deals more efficiently. By blending technology with real-world investing experience, Jon creates smart, effective tools tailored to the needs of modern investors.

Jon works alongside his wife Amy in their real estate businesses and is a proud dad of three. When he’s not building systems or improving processes, he enjoys flying the family in their plane, spending time at their cabin, and continuously pushing himself on the mats learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

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Important Links

https://www.youtube.com/@thenolensrei

https://www.instagram.com/theflippingitguy

https://www.facebook.com/theFlippingITGuy/

https://peterei.com/

I can tell you one thing. Technology is the single most important aspect of every business that has successfully scaled. It’s time for that real estate tech guy. It’s your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Each week, you’ll hear from real estate investors who have been there and done that and find out their favorite technology tips.

Listen in as Jordan speaks with tech companies and learns about new technologies and new ideas that will help you scale your business. And now join your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of smrtPhone, for this week’s episode.

Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy. I’m your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, and I’m joined on today’s episode by Jon Nolen, president and co-founder of Pete REI. Now, Pete REI is a, REI CRM, with the full featured system. And it’s really funny because in this episode, you know, Jon has a software development background, which I didn’t know about until I spoke with him.

And that makes a really big difference about how he sees the development of the system, how he looks, you know, he he ended up building Pete initially just to manage his own stuff. He was head software development background. And then he built up an actual, system that could scale. And, there was a lot of great, bits of this conversation.

Particularly, you know, one of the things that I thought was really interesting was we talked a bit about, the KPI element, you know, dashboards and KPIs. And Jon made a really good point about how dashboards and KPIs really can show you the outliers, you know, the the highs and the lows. It’s not so much about tuning.

Investors focus on this idea of data and having lots of data and access to data. The truth is, for most of us and for most investors, what really matters is that we identify the problems or the wins, what’s working really well so we can dial that up, what’s not working so we can fix it. And I think there’s a really nice conversation here, where we explore that a little more.

Definitely recommend you go check out Pete. Peter, I, the links, are in, the show notes and, enjoy the show. Okay. I’m live here today with Jon Nolen from Pete Ray. Jon, welcome to the podcast. Why don’t you just, introduce yourself and, your product to the listeners? Hey, thanks for having me, Jordan, I appreciate it.

Yeah, I’m Jon with PDI software. I’m an investor myself. Before I got into investing, which is a long story by itself, I won’t go into, but before I got into investing, I was in software development, and so I had a software development background and hated having all these different tools all over the place. And just started kind of pulling them together.

Creating Band-Aids at one point really is what it was, started out as to bring things together. So I wasn’t seeing things fall through the cracks. And eventually that kind of turned into its own thing. And that’s where Pete, our software came from. That’s why, you know, I so rarely see investors that have a software background, like, I mean, given how much the investment space relies on technology, there really aren’t that many people that I’ve met that have a a software background and can actually think about the systems and, and get annoyed enough by problems to look, you know, you’re I love your idea, the idea of a Band-Aid.

Right? That there’s so many times when you’re you cobbling together systems, you’re cobbling them together, and nothing’s quite working the way you want it to do. Right. Exactly. So. So you, how long is Pete? I’ve been going to st, to give me a background. All in all, it’s been around almost five years commercially. It’s been out there for two.

We kept it under wraps and kept it out. Initially, it was just intended for my own companies. For my flipping, wholesaling, rental companies. I didn’t intend for it to be anything else. But we released it a little over two years ago and into it. You I mean, you mentioned the, you know, flipping, wholesaling and rental.

So is it, you know, is your system one that can kind of manage all those different types of transactions? You can do wholesaling, you can do rentals. You can. Neil. So is there an element of property management in there as well, or a basically how how complete is it. Is that part of the system? That’s a fair question.

Initially we didn’t have anything for property management other than just kind of keeping track of what properties we had and some basic info like, leased our dates and, and dates and, lease amounts, but no, no portal for tenants to log in and put in maintenance requests and make payments. That stuff depend on when this goes live.

I don’t know, maybe out, maybe not. We’re very, very close to having that as a full functioned part of because that’s something I always wanted to do. I hated having another software over there. And so it really takes from when the lead comes in, takes over from there. So instead of just stopping, once you get the property under contract, you know, whether you’re wholesaling or flipping, instead of stopping right there, it goes all the way through your transaction coordination until you’re done with everything.

So all your stuff’s right there. So, an easy example is you’re wholesaling a property and somebody comes back and wants to know, you know, information about the roof or whatever the case is. Well, you’re dispo person, unless they have access to your CRM. Doesn’t doesn’t know that. So then it’s a oh, let me go ask the acquisition manager or let me go look at these notes in this big pile of garbage that people are trying to sort through, having that in one place so it’s all one just makes it so much easier for people.

Fantastic. I mean, when you I mean, I know you kind of started this by solving your own problems because that’s I which I think is the absolute. That’s that’s how I started smrtPhone. I was looking for a phone system that would integrate with Podio, and there wasn’t one. So, we built it. But, but everything changes when you start getting customers, like, it’s one thing to build for yourself.

And then when you start building product and start scaling a product, everything changes. Can you like when you started to work with other people, when you started to bring other investors in, what were the things you like? Were there anything you learned when you started working with other people, and how they were using systems that were different than them?

How you did? I’m fascinated by that. Yeah, there were. And now this is where my previous software background comes into play, because I worked for a pharmacy software company that made software for independent pharmacies in the US. So we had 20 some odd different pharmacies that all wanted to do things a little bit different. So I’d been through something similar before, although I wasn’t in the beginnings of that.

I’ve been in the situation a little bit before, so we approached PE with this is how we do things, but I hated it is example. I hated CRM saying, these are the dashboards you need to see. These are the ones that are valuable. Okay, well that may work for you. That may be worked for me now sometimes, but there’s every everybody has their own business.

So we kind of built peat, you know, when we were building it for ourselves with the idea that things happened in different ways, we need to look at things different ways. You’re not always going to go through the same process. So we kind of we had that in in mind to begin with, that we’re going to have different ways of doing things now, once you bring in those other users, you start getting other ideas of, oh, I never even thought of this whole paradigm.

I thought that I had all this, all these different angles thought of. And then it takes a lot of and you’ve been through this thinking about, you know, getting that feedback, getting those thoughts and then thinking, okay, is this going to be something that helps a few users? Most of my users, only one user. If it’s only one user, that can be a difficult conversation of, you know, I see where you’re coming from, but we really need to be able to help everybody.

But if it helps other people, then I’m all for it. I’m not. I’m not one that goes, oh, well, I didn’t think of that. Now, that shouldn’t be that way. I love getting that feedback in that interaction from our users. I love that I love that that you do that. I think it’s core to our approach to the smrtPhone.

I always had people 80% of our feature ideas come from our customers. Yep. And and that’s as it should be in my view. It’s like listen to them and then but to your point where you’ve got some really off the wall, this only helps one person because they’re very, you know, they’re really they’ve got their own really interesting model.

Sometimes you just have to say, look, I’m sorry, we can’t we can’t invest in that one. Yep. So usually people are understanding of that, 100%. And, and what I find is we made the decision. I know I’m curious about your process. We made the decision early on not to do custom development, that we would do features for all, but we wouldn’t build custom for people like bespoke, elements.

Is that also is that how you’ve approach it? Yeah. Same approach. Just because there’s no that’s a huge rabbit hole you can go down huge expense and then the person may end up going, oh, actually, the way you were described it before actually works best. And so, oh, great. We just spent. Yeah. Same thing. I’ve been down that road and it’s not a good road to go down.

It opens up scope creep. Like anybody who’s been in in software development, it’s just opens up a world of pain. And you never manage the customer’s expectation. Right. Even if it’s a small thing because they think it’s small. They’re like, well, why would this take more than an hour? And like, and so no, I grew right.

Yeah. Come on. This should be really easy, right? Oh, that’s not really how this works. But, so in terms of, you know, when, when I think of a good, you know, I truly believe that anybody who’s investing in marketing is a real estate investor should have a really robust CRM. The moment you start spending money on on leads, you should be managing them properly.

One of the ways I see people missing out on their CRM is a lot of time is on just leaving leads. I always consulting on the new leads and never concentrating up on the follow up. How does your how does your system? How’s Pete approach the follow up? What sort of ways do you do you, deal with follow up and help investors follow up on leads?

Yeah. Great question. Yeah. Most, that’s probably one of the biggest things I see with investors. Well, is they’re always focused on the new and they forget that most of the money comes in the follow up. We do it several ways, but generally the way we guide our people to doing it is we set up workflows or automations, drip campaigns wherever you want to call them, or attached to statuses within the properties.

So keep it simple instead of having to, you know, adjust the status, adjust the temperature, go and put in your notes and select what drip campaigns you want to have happen. We have buckets. We call them statuses. Long term follow up, short term follow up offer rejected. And then we have drip campaigns that are linked directly to those.

So they just make that one change save and it automatically starts applying. And those come out of the box with Pete. But they also can be customized to whatever people want. I mean, people can have as many different drip campaigns as they would like, and they can take into account things like tagging. So if you tag a property of tired landlord, you could have a different drip campaign.

That’ll see that and kind of key off of it. So so you can customize it. The more specific you are tagging your properties, the more specific you can be matching a cadence or a follow up sequence, which is which is incredibly important because the generic never sells the specific does. Okay. And in terms of another another thing that I’ve, I’ve seen, you know, given your, your point about sequences, automation is an absolutely critical element of good CRM.

Saving time, making sure things don’t drop, get dropped. But it’s not just about cadences of automated communication and things like that. It’s often a lot of times, you know, pushing things up in, in front of people’s viewpoints when they need them. What’s what’s your approach to sort of if I’m scaling a team because one person’s easy when you start scale people, that’s when things need, you know, break down.

How do you like how do you view kind of team management and visibility from, you know, as they scale? How do you kind of take tackle that bit inside beat? I tackle that with dashboards. Our dashboards. Peter customizable people can essentially, if it’s a data point in the software, you can create a dashboard widget to show it or show it over time or whatever the case is.

So an easy one. When I’m talking about scaling, a lot of times people try to get out of tasks. They think, oh, well, tasks are rigid. No task is how you know if people did something or not. I’ve had CRM that had tasks that were test driven, but then there was no way to report on those tasks or to see what tasks people completed.

Well, that’s very vital to I mean, somebody may show no overdue tasks, but if you look and they’ve only completed five of the last week, they’re not very busy opposed to somebody who may have completed 250. Now, if you have everybody at if most of your team is complete around 250 tasks a week, and then you have one person that shows a thousand, okay, that’s a little blinker and a little just a dashboard.

Dashboard can show you that, hey, something’s not right. They probably went in and burst and just marked a bunch of stuff complete. That’s a huge red flag. So dashboards are really what we what we focus on with that and being very, very task driven. Go in, see what tasks you have, the top tasks are the ones that are overdue.

If they’re overdue. If not, it’s what you need to do next. Focus on those. Just go down and from a high or higher level, just look and see what other people are doing. Are they completing tasks, do they have overdue tasks, etc.? Yeah. I love to hear that because I am super task oriented and I hate when I’m dealing with a team that isn’t, you know, you know, I put a task in for everything.

It doesn’t really matter. I got tasks to like. By milk, I mean, you brought my, you know, I, I, I did I, I task was up for everything because it’s also to me, being task oriented means it’s out of my head. That’s the the hidden superpower of tasks. The people who hate tasks, I think don’t realize is that the moment you take it out of your head and you put it into a system that’s going to remind you to do it, you no longer have the stress of going, he said.

What was I going to do? What was what? What was I supposed to do tomorrow? And I think that’s a really important part of tasks that I that isn’t talked enough about because everybody, you know, people don’t like task is like, oh, I don’t want to be constrained by tasks. Yeah, but you don’t want to be set free by tasks then.

And most of the time, all the time and most times I don’t want to be accountable to tasks is where that comes from. But even if you’re a one man show or one woman show, tasks are huge. Oh, you talked to seller Julie and you need to call her back next Thursday at two. Yeah, it’s easy to think you’re going to remember that, but you’re going to forget the majority of the time, especially as you start getting busier.

And then that’s just money going right out the window. You have to follow up with people, and if you say you’re going to up with somebody, a certain time, you better do it or you lose their trust and relationship immediately. Yep. No, absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, for me, the other other thing I caught on to your your what you said about tasks and dashboards was this idea of, you know, the outlier or, or those points that make you look.

And I think that’s something that I think people misunderstand about dashboards. A lot of time, I think they get obsessed with the idea of seeing pretty graphs. Some ways that people are just like, oh, look at my graphs and look, you know. But the truth is, dashboards to me are only ever about spotting outliers. Yep. That’s highs and lows.

Yeah. Your highs. And you look like it’s only you, you know, normally dashboards just show you the same damn thing. If everything’s chugging along nicely, your dashboards are going to be in a normalized place where dashboards you almost don’t need to look at them. It’s when you see the outliers or the problems that you should be able to use them to drill down.

Exactly, exactly. And that’s something I don’t think people do know. Most people don’t. And I can also say that most people don’t. They may spend a lot of time getting a dashboard configured or set up, or they have a VA doing it and then they never look at it. And oh, they do all the time. Or you get those other investors that are paralyzed by data and just and all the time, like making cool graphs and like, like I’ve seen investors spend so much time making these elaborate Excel sheets and they and they’re like, so you spent two weeks on this really big Excel screen.

How many deals did you like? How many calls did you make? Oh yeah. But look at all this data. I’m like, yeah, okay. But well, how many calls did you make. Yep. Data is not going to buy houses. It’s good to have the data available, but most investors don’t need to spend the time doing that. They need to have tools that create that data form because they’re doing it in technology.

That was something else I hated was, you know, one system would show that we had this many leads, another system would show that we had this many new calls. And it’s like, okay, why don’t these match up? This is ridiculous. Why pay somebody to to calculate your, your data and go through all that process? Just technology should have that information for you.

Now, I’m sorry to interrupt this amazing conversation, but I wanted to make sure you knew that smrtPhone, the only phone system built for real estate investors, connects to the best in class real estate. Invest in CRM. And because as it’s my show and I am co-founder and chairman of smrtPhone, I got some great deals for you.

Click the link make take advantage of 5000 minutes free calling with smrtPhone. The only phone system built for real estate investors. Click and call close more leads back to the show number one. Now with the new you know, you and I were sitting in a room the other day talking about AI, and, you know, obviously I don’t think there’s a software company on the planet right now that’s not looking at AI or doing things with AI.

I mean, it’s just the AI. It would be impossible not to. But to your point about the data outliers and dashboards, I think we’re going to get to a point really soon where the truth is, I don’t need to look at any dashboards because my eyes is going to tell me when there’s an outlier. Yeah. Like and I, I can’t wait for that because it’s like, I don’t really care about looking at pretty graphs.

I just need something to tell me, oh, this is maybe a problem. Go look at it. Yeah, just a blip comes up on the radar. Yeah I absolutely oh is there a are there any specific areas of AI in terms of real estate investment that you are looking forward to? Yeah. I mean, the bigger for everybody, I think even outside real estate, our AI agents that’ll interact with customers, or sellers, that’s obviously huge is something we’ve been working on.

But what I really think is cool and that we’ve been working on for, shoot, almost nine months, is being able to take pictures of a house or video of a house and estimate the rehab based on it. So idea. Here is a seller send you an pictures while you’re on the phone with them. You can look have I look at those pictures and have a somewhat.

It’s never going to be perfect place, somewhat reasonable scope of what kind of repairs need to be made. And then that’s kind of builds in and helps your underwriting process, you know, have to go in and underwrite it as well later because you already have that trained to look at it. That’s what I’m really, really, really excited about.

We’re not there yet, but we’re getting better. Yeah. And so so taking that and also speeding up the the speeding up that process that you’re not wasting time on a lead that’s just clearly not suitable. Yep. I think because that’s, that’s another part of I mean, one of the other things that I’ve seen as being probably the biggest challenge to people not using a CRM properly is because a lot of people don’t keep their data clean inside of CRM.

Which drives me nuts, but it means that they tend to you. They send to waste a lot of time on bad leads or dead leads or, you know, and because they don’t know any better, because their system’s a mess, right? I mean, yeah, and we have I had a cop was having a conversation with a customer the other day about AI and some stuff that we’re working on and that they thought would be cool to see.

And I was like, you know, that would be great. But if you don’t, they were talking about like, historical what what zip code should I be flipping? Which zip codes do I do the best? And should I wholesale this house. So these kind of awesome questions that I will be able to help. And I kind of posed back that, okay, are you actually updating your actual rehab amounts?

Nope. No. How’s it going to know if it was a good rehab for you or not? Yeah, well, it’s not magical. You do have to put in that. It’s it’s it’s funny. You know, I, I just, just came out with my new book, and the first chapter is about data, not about the phone. It’s about data.

Because without good data, without clean data. In your systems, then you are basically going into battle with one hand tied behind your back. In my mind. Yeah, yeah. It’s and and the and the what people don’t understand a lot of times is that the cost of bad data isn’t isn’t just it, it’s also isn’t just wasted time by your agents, but the amount of trust you can lose from people when you’ve got, you know, you’ve got this lead in six times because of crappy data management.

And four different people call this lead within the space of a day and a half. And they’ve already asked you to not stop calling, and you’ve just called them five times by four different numbers from four different agents. And all of that would have been avoided if you had taken the time to keep your data clean, but instead, what could have been a good deal will never, ever deal with you because of bad data and the and the and what it led you to do.

Yep. Yeah. That’s very, very, very true people. And I know that, I forgot who it was, but somebody used to have a shirt that said Data is King. It’s like, yeah, data is huge. Data is that’s what off all of our stuff in our world now is all driven by data. People don’t realize it. Whether it’s AI, whether it’s Google, I mean meta.

It’s all about the data. Everything is data centric at this point. And and more importantly, I also, you know, I, I think that good data is the conversation we need to be having. The amount of times I’ve, I’ve seen people just be like, have the attitude of I’ll just buy a lot of data and I’ll just throw, right?

Like, I’ll just I’m just going to buy a lot of cheap data and I’ll just I’ll run at it. I’ll run into the wall with it. And chances are I’m going to make enough sales to make it worthwhile. I mean, that’s a way of doing it. It’s not a great way of doing it, and it is. It’s inefficient and it loses 80% of the power behind the CRM.

Like Pete, if you’re not going to give it the tool, if you’re going to if you’re going to handcuff Pete’s and its ability to help you run your business, then what’s the point, exactly? That’s a very, very, very good point. Now, I saw I also, you know, just, one of the, the other areas that I find from a, CRM point of view is, you know, just the smoothness of grabbing data into your system so people will be using, you know, websites like carrot or any of these other systems.

Do you have a smooth way of grabbing all the leads from variety of sources and bringing them in, letting people understand the true ROI on the campaigns they’re doing? About that. How do you how do you guys approach that? Yeah, things are coming from carrot, or an external source like that. Generally, just like most people, we use Zapier.

We have the ability to do custom webhooks, but most of the time people just don’t do Zapier. Yeah. In the, we track them in marketing campaigns and in those marketing campaigns, everyone gets an attribution and you can put in your forecasted, ad spend and then you can also refine it as time goes on, so that it tracks automatically every cost per lead, every cost per contract.

But then you can take a little bit further. And some people do this, some don’t. You have the ability and Pete to mark a lead as qualified or not. Everybody has their own definition of what a qualified lead is. But the nice thing there is, if you have your cost per as well, I call them based on qualified leads, those spams, those wrong numbers, the other they don’t even you.

That doesn’t matter when it comes to your marketing spend. So throw those out, you know, for real, real time within five minutes or so. What your actual marketing spend is per lead, per contract based on when that lead came in. And, yeah, we try. I’m, I’m crazy about tracking that. You always have to track that. And there’s times that somebody may call my, my, integrity home buyers business and they call off the website number.

And one of the questions we ask was, how’d you hear about us? Well, pushback I got from people a long time ago was, well, they’re calling your website number. Of course. Okay, baby. Amazing how many times people say, I saw your TV commercial. We changed that campaign. We changed our campaigns. We’ve got that attribution. So it automatically knows when that, came in.

So if you see that true value that’s come in from that TV commercial, not the. Oh, I remember seeing that. Oh yeah. What was now I’m going to have to go Google it, which is how most people do TV campaigns. Yep. Because very rarely are you sitting in front of the TV and you’re right there directly to it or scanning a QR code.

Usually it’s in your head and you go, I have you have to look at that and, and that. And the next day is when it happens. Yeah. And we used to be on radios when we had majority of our calls from radio where people saving our number and we followed up with them and, you know, went through processes there, but most of them never reached out again or we never were able to reconnect with them.

And, you know, I didn’t want to include that in my KPIs because it doesn’t if somebody is just saving our number and never interacts with us again, we can’t go to respond. They never answer. I don’t want to include that. That doesn’t matter to me. Is the value of the qualified leads that matters when what I really like about your approach there, and something that I used to teach when I was building custom CRM, but back in the day when something I was militant on was every month, you should be putting in what you spend on each marketing channel because the, you know, every single month, because then you will have a genuine understanding of which channels are working for you. And over time, you’ll be able to see the trend and you’ll then be able to understand how can you dial up performance by just adding more money to this channel? Yep. Yeah. Everything good return on. That’s been. Yeah. And you never can do that unless you track it. Nope, nope. Been tracking it somewhere else.

Other sounds nice. Sounds easy, I should say. Have a VA keep, you know, go in and pull these KPIs, put in a spreadsheet. Why? Why pay somebody to do that when technology already has that same information? Just put in what your spend is. And for the people that say, well, you know what? It’s not going to be exact during the month because I’m not going to spend.

Okay, but at least you have an idea. At least you have an idea. You know how you’re progressing in that month. Oh, at this point in the month, my cost per leads $500. Ooh. Not good. Well, we’re halfway through the month. Let me see. Okay. It’s going to continue to go down. I can do it more I and it also I just think not enough people you know I, I if you’re not tracking this stuff towards right to the end of the process as well, I’m not actually that interested in how many leads I get from any channel.

I am, but I’m more interested in matter how much money I make from the conversions. That’s what matters. So vanity is to say I got 200 leads. Sanity is to say, but I made 50,000 profit look like you know that that’s what matters to me. And then I can see it. And if people aren’t doing your to your point, if people aren’t doing that, then they’re never seeing the actual case.

Right. And then in your example, you know, if I’m going to make 50 K on a deal, if that lead costs me $5,000, I’m fine with that. I of the cost dollars to get a $50,000 profit any day. You know, I don’t care what the lead cost is. It’s the cost per close is what is what we look at the most absolute.

Absolutely. And too many people, I think take do their KPIs on the front end. So just top of funnel like just how many leads they get and they don’t take it through to the end. Understanding the true cost of the conversion and the profit in there. Because you also can tend to see if you if you do that properly, you can then understand what markets are working right the best for me, what channels are working best for me based on timeline, effort and money.

And then you can really hone in and and kind of play casino on this and dial up exactly where you need to be, but only if you’re tracking that stuff and actually looking at it in the right way. Yep. Another one that we like to look at or not like to look at, but like to have out there is loss deal value.

So properties that win under contract, they end up falling out could be at no fault to us, could be any random thing. But then having that on a dashboard that our team sees on a constant basis, we do it for the year. So over the year we’ve lost $180,000 in, value. That kind of helps reinforce going through steps, making sure we’re doing all the I’s, crossing all the T’s that things are together, and it’s something negative to look at, but it it helps.

It helps people, keep their mind straight. I do like that idea. You know, I, I, I’m a big fan of visibility, of simple numbers as well. Like, you know, like, we’re giving the team us, like, one number for a target. Great. Giving a team one number for a reverse target. Sort of. In your example there where it’s really look at how much money we’ve lost and how can we, how can we do better?

Oh, either way, giving the teams simple number to focus on, I think is a really useful thing. I agree, and it’s very few simple numbers. I know at one point I tried this is years ago, tried getting too many KPIs to my team. I think every person had 7 to 10 every month and it was overwhelming to everybody.

And at one of the, masterminds that I’m part of, I was talking about it didn’t want to hear presentations, and rightfully so. I got kind of slammed by everybody. If you’re giving people too many things to worry about. Yeah, I always have a general. Everybody in our company in Smufl knows I have a rule of sort of three.

You should never have more than three priorities or three things to do at any one given time. Three, three things to focus on. Because if you if everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority. And if you’re you know, I want I want everybody I also and you’ll appreciate this probably from a technology point of view, if you got eight features you’re working on, chances are you’re not working on any of them.

Well, and the whole process, all of them will take longer than you should. Whereas if you just knuckled down and gone, we’re going to get these two done and then we’ll move on to the next. In your actual time frame will be much better. Focus is the key though. Yeah. When you said when you start talking about if everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority.

That’s really where my mind went. Is if every issue I know was a bug, if every issue that comes up, if every feature is the priority, then you’re just kind of floating around. You’re not going to have good, good direction on anything. You have to have a singular focus of where you’re going. Absolutely. And I and I tell like in, in, in the company I only ever, you know, I only ever lay out two maximum three priorities a given any given time because it’s like, because everything else, whatever, these are the three things we care about right now.

Because then you can focus everybody’s mind on those. You give them eight things to care about. They’re ping pong and back and forth and trying to figure out what to do next. But you give them 2 or 3 and you can you can genuinely focus. Yeah. Well, listen, Jon, as we close out here, before we get into how people can, can, get involved with Pete, I do have three questions.

I always ask people in the podcast. Number one, what is the biggest mistake you personally have made with real estate investing technology? Honestly, my biggest mistake early on was chasing shiny objects. Every new app that I looked at or saw promised to automate something or make this more efficient or do this or that. And before long I ended up with just disconnected systems.

I didn’t talk, and I didn’t have any reliability of data. You know, I’d have one system saying this or another one saying something else. So which one’s truth? So with that, I learned technology really multiplies, multiplies what you’re already doing. So if your processes are a mess, it’s going to make it ten times worse. If your processes are in line it’s going to make technology should make those things better.

So really just having a single kind of going back to one thing is a priority than nothing is having a focus and staying focused with that and not getting distracted by shiny objects. I think everybody listening to this will recognize the shiny object syndrome, particularly in the real estate, investing community. There’s that. That’s, that’s a big one.

I’ve seen over the years. Second question is, what’s your best advice on how to integrate technology into a real estate investing business? If someone’s starting out on that? I would say start with their workflow, not the technology. So start with what you want to accomplish, what you want to happen, and also what’s happening now. So you have that converse, view on it.

And then figure out how to bring technology into it to offer people look at it technology and go, oh, that’s great. Let me do it. Well, if it’s way outside the scope of where you’re going or what your process is, it’s not going to be a good, good solution. So map out your workflow. Start with what you’re doing, where you want to change, and then how technology can help it.

I think that’s fantastic. Final question if someone is just starting out, because I get a lot of people just starting out in the real estate and, leasing business, what, three, technology products, types of technology would you recommend they start with? First, I’d say a CRM. Obviously I’m biased towards PR for good reason, but, this that’s where I would start.

That’s the foundation. Handle your leads. Make sure you’re not losing money on those leads that come in. Then you don’t follow up with keep all your KPIs in one place, etc.. Second loom as you start growing. Loom is great. You can record doing things, paint it off to VA or just so that you remember it later exactly how you did something.

It was looms II features. Now it can create SOPs for you. So it’s super, super easy. Third third is like the least sexy of them all, but QuickBooks. QuickBooks so that you know where your money’s going and where it’s coming from. Too often, investors have no idea what their, balance sheet looks like, what their cash flow looks like.

They just see what’s in the bank right now. So it’s very, very non sexy. But quick caveat my parents were accountants, so I grew up in accounting on earth. This actually was my dad’s office. I’m staying in that right now. So that may have swayed my thought a little bit, but know where your money’s going and where it’s coming from.

Well, what I really like about that is you. When you the way you said QuickBooks was so sort of it. Yeah, it it was QuickBooks. It was yeah. It is what it is QuickBooks. It’s it’s not sexy. It’s not fun. It’s not a shiny object, but it is so valuable that people just overlook having simplicity and actually knowing what their numbers are, and not just at the end of the year.

Going to their accountant was, okay, here’s my bank statements. I don’t know how much money I made or not. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I mean, absolutely, and also, as you scale a business that becomes even more critical, I mean, everything happens with scale. If you’re starting out just by yourself doing, you know, if you’re a wholesaler who’s just starting out and wanting to get maybe 2 or 3, you know, deals in a year just starting out, you can do that with a piece of paper and a pen.

Honestly, I, you know, like I the truth. The moment you want a serious business, the most want that you want the actual a business that will grow with you and that you’re not going to be slave to, but instead you’re going to be reaping the rewards from. That’s really also where the technology goes from being a nice to have to being a critical component.

Yeah. Something you have to have. I don’t think there’s any business nowadays that can scale without a strong technological base to it. No, I don’t think so either. Hands down. Well it’s done. I was a pleasure to meet you, recently. And sit down next to you. Thank you so much for doing today. Before we leave, can you just let everybody know, how they can find peace?

And, you know what? What? How can they sign up and get more information? Yeah. The first thanks for having me. I really, really appreciate it. To get more info on p thing, go to our a.com. Our pricing is on there. We actually have a coupon code if they use the code smrtPhone, like half off their first month.

So just a little thank you for for having us on here. If they want to reach out to me directly, you can do it there. Or I’m on Instagram and Facebook as the flipping it guy. People think it’s the flipping it guy. It was supposed to be flipping it. Yeah, fantastic. Well, I’ll put all those codes and those, the Instagram accounts, everything, into the show notes.

Jon, pleasure to see you. Thanks so much for joining me. And, have a fantastic day. And thanks. You too, man. Thanks for listening to another amazing episode of that real estate tech guy. Head over to that real estate tech guy.com to check out all episodes and get special discounts on tons of awesome real estate technology platforms.