Rafael Cortez shares his journey from firefighter and entrepreneur to real estate investor, coach, and founder of CEO Pulse. Drawing from years of wholesaling, leadership, and organizational psychology, he explains how systems, processes, and continuous learning helped him scale multiple businesses and become a trusted mentor to real estate investors across the country.

The conversation explores the balance between taking action and building the right operational foundation. Rafael and Jordan discuss common mistakes investors make with technology, CRMs, KPIs, and automation, highlighting why simplicity, accountability, and clear processes are often more valuable than chasing the latest tools or overcomplicating a business.

They also dive into the vision behind CEO Pulse, a platform that combines training, coaching, systems, and automation into a single experience designed to help investors move from chaos to consistency. Packed with insights on leadership, growth, mentorship, and operational excellence, this episode offers practical guidance for investors looking to build a scalable real estate business.

About Rafael Cortez

Rafael Cortez is a real estate entrepreneur, investor, coach, and the founder of CEO Pulse, a CRM and business operating platform built specifically for real estate investors. Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Rafael has been active in real estate wholesaling since 2009 and has built a career around helping investors create scalable businesses through systems, processes, and operational excellence.

With a background in organizational psychology, Rafael combines leadership principles, business operations, and real-world investing experience to help entrepreneurs grow with clarity and consistency. Before becoming a full-time real estate investor, he served as a firefighter and successfully built and exited a medical transportation company, experiences that shaped his passion for systems, leadership, and continuous improvement.

Today, Rafael runs a successful wholesaling and fix-and-flip business, serves as a real estate broker, and mentors investors through The Wholesaling Academy. Through his coaching, speaking, and software platform, he has helped hundreds of investors streamline their operations, improve follow-up, and build businesses that are driven by proven processes rather than guesswork. His mission is to simplify real estate investing by bringing education, accountability, technology, and execution together in one place.

Important Links

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• CEO Pulse CRM – The CRM built by an active wholesaler with coaching embedded inside theraypulsecrm.comRafael Cortez – Instagram: @RafaelCortezCEO

  smrtPhone – The only phone system built for real estate investors

  ThatRealEstateTechGuy.com – All episodes and exclusive tech discounts

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 Smart Mom, for this week’s episode.

Hey everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of that real estate tech Guy. I’m your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, and I am delighted to have my man, Rafael Cortez. From the CEO pulse. Now, Raphael, someone who’s been a long time customer is mine. And I’m incredibly grateful that we’ve also become very good friends of the last year as we’ve sort of gotten to know each other.

And we’ve spent some time together, at masterminds. And I visited him at his place, and, he’s got a really great operational mind, and it really comes through in this, podcast where he dives into the CRM that he has launched. And, why it’s starting to really gain traction because it’s combining his true operational mindset with a tremendous amount of value in that he embeds his courses and his learnings directly into the CRM.

And, he really does dive in, to, you know, not only his own personal arc, but also how he, as an operator, has really continued to refine his CRM because he’s an operator using it. And so every day as he’s working his deals, he’s able to kind of continue to finesse the CRM to the betterment of all the investors who are using it.

Rafa is a fantastic guy. I got to check out his own podcast on leadership, which is absolutely fantastic. I was honored to to be on that podcast as well. And take a look at, his program is course at his CRM because it’s very rare that you get such an operators mindset. With that sort of executive level thinking combined in one product, and, Rafael and his, CEO pulse really bring that there.

So, again, this is another episode I recorded live in Tampa when we were both at a mastermind. So I’m here in my office after the fact. If you’re watching on YouTube, this is actually a live podcast where Raphael and I are, together in Florida. And as a little nugget, stay to the end, because some guy just decides to walk up and walk around us for no reason at all.

I want to leave that in the episode because it’s really funny and it’s, you know, you never know what’s going to happen when you’re live. But to find out what happened in this episode, let’s head right to my conversation with Raphael Cortez. Okay, I’m live here. I’m literally live here with my good man, Raphael. Raphael, you’ve never been on the podcast for.

Give everybody a sense of who you are and what you do. Awesome. Well, first off, thank you for having me on the podcast live. Live. Great time, great outdoors. And, Yeah, my name is Raphael. Cortez. And based out of Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve been a real estate wholesaler since 2009. My background is organizational psychology. So I built systems, processes, operations all together, and I’ve been mentoring and coaching since, 2017.

I have a wholesaling business. Fix and flip business. I’m a real estate broker as well, in Phoenix. So, so kind of my whole endeavor revolves around real estate. And I’m really excited about today because, not only have you been a long term customer of ours, it’s my phone. Yeah, but you have now transitioned, into the SaaS space you have now built.

You know, you are now, building and, building tools for investors not only in your community, but building it for all sorts of real estate investors. So what are we going to do? We have to dive and do what makes your system unique, who it’s for, and all of that. So before we get to that, though, you have an interesting backstory as well.

You have a really interesting backstory as well because most people have an arc. You have like you got you got a couple arcs. So, you give us your professional career from when you kind of became an 18 year old, give everybody a little of the backstory of the different things you’ve done. So, yeah, I mean, I’ve had a couple of different lives.

I guess they’ve all been fun. So my first one was, I became a firefighter when I was 19 years old in Yuma, Arizona. And, I did that for years. That was my first exposure, really, to to leadership. And just, you know, looking up to somebody that that could probably guide me. And I think that was like the, the perfect time in my life because, I mean, it was just, you know, I was all over the place.

I was, you know, I was a 19 year old kid that was making some cash. And. Yeah, I mean, I finally had it made, and this is it. And, I ran into, some really cool people at the fire department that, I would just observe what they were doing and learn from them. And I started opening up my my mindset, my, my thinking got a little bigger, right?

So, after after that, and like, one of the, one of the pivotal nights was, me having a conversation with one of the captains. I wasn’t even part of the conversation. I was a fly on the wall. But, he was talking about how to build businesses, and I was like, we had we had a lot of time as as firefighters, 24 hour, 24 hours, that type of stuff.

We should build a business. And, you know, really dig into that. Like, that sounds like a great idea. So I took the idea. He had a couple of ideas put in one of the table. I took one of them, ran with it. Fast forward, you know, I don’t know, but for years, the idea that he was talking about, he was, he was going to launch a funeral home.

The second idea was a transportation business for medical transports. Right. So I ran with the other one, and both businesses. I mean, he’s got a, you know, couple of, funeral homes that can humor now. So he’s he’s like the the spot to go for if you if you die. If you die, that’s where you want to be.

Yeah. He’s the guy. Yeah, he is a guy. And, and, I built the company and I sold it in 2014, my transportation business. So it’s pretty interesting, right? You never know when when the seed is going to get planted. But it all started with a fork on the road where I jumped into the fire department. Fire department opened up another road, got into business, and I started getting into, you know, mentorships and masterminds and just learning.

Because the one thing I know is that I don’t know it all, so, so coming into any space with a with a learning mentality has always been my, my, my secret weapon, per se. So yeah, it’s been pretty interesting. Well, and you also if I recall, you also did some like woodworking carpentry. Oh yeah. Work as well. Right.

Yeah. I kind of shoot from the hip a lot of times. And that’s a, that’s a trade that, you know, I haven’t drafted really. But, so when I switched from the fire department, you know, full time into entrepreneurship, because of the model of the business I was in conflict of interest with, with the fire department.

Right. So they said you can’t be a business guy. And I said, yes, I can. And they left the fire department. So I was, you know, I went back to my old roots. I used to work construction in high school and college and, and, so I went back to the guy that that hired me back then, and I started working for him in construction.

So we started, you know, going back to the swinging hammers and, and that type of stuff. But it was a master carpenter. So we started building, like, really decked out bars. He taught me, you know, how to build out on CAD and design and all that stuff. So it’s, it’s, it’s something really special to me that I still, you know, you know, knock out around there and it’s, it’s it’s almost an outlet.

Right. But, I did that for a while as well. And after that, I mean, I had a couple of different gigs when, when I was still building the first business, I became a case manager. I had a decent background of of steadiness, and longevity in the business with good rapport and good references. So I became a case manager.

I, you know, I was in loans for a while, so I just kind of bounced around. And during that time, there were old stepping stones for me to build the transportation business. As soon as I landed the first, you know, few big contracts, I, I left everything, went all into it, ran with that. I figured that transportation sucked.

And, I was like, all right, cool on this work. And, but I built it out with an exit, and, and I started doing real estate investments in 2009. Now, you mentioned masterminds and learning. Yeah. And I that I wanted to, kind of to follow up on that, particularly for your story and the transitions that you’ve made from investor to coach to systems, because when you say, you know, masterminds, communities, we’re here because of a mastermind right now, one reason why you’re in this room together or this room, I mean, we’re we’re actually saying together is because we’ve been spending the last four days surrounded by.

Right, unbelievable people learning, sharing, and, and and I think one of the, you know, if you’re a newer investor or, and you’re really trying to figure out how to scale up, leaning on other people getting in those rooms, you know, figuring out which rooms to go to, you know, communities to listen to, where you can get help, where you can get guidance.

We can get support. We can get accountability. Right. I think that’s an incredibly important part of of that journey to building a proper business. And you’ve done that as well. Not only did you, absorb learning, you you soaked it up like a sponge, but then you created a community and you created a program where you could help people, which led to know your software.

So can you tell us a little bit about your kind of the the way you’re teaching, the coaching that you do works your community and, and, and how you made the transition from being an investor who was soaking up knowledge to helping guide new people. I think you and I yeah. Good question. I think I think the, the transition almost becomes a natural progression when you do and when you start doing a lot of, you know, a lot of the business, right?

So you get exposed, people start asking you, hey, how are you doing this? Can you show me how to do it? Condition. Then the question just kind of repeats itself to me. It’s one of those things that it found me the, you know, mentorship. And I didn’t know I was going to be you know, enjoying it or it was going to become one of my passions.

I just, you know, it was after the deal. And then I sat down and started consulting and doing one on one just, you know, hey. Yeah, let’s sit down. You know, we’ll carve out a couple hours. I’ll show you what I’m doing. And if it works for you. Great. This is, 2015, 2014. At the time I sold my transportation business, I got into a full time.

I actually applied to work with Sean Terry because I wanted to learn from from, like, the tip of the spear and Sean Terry the guy, he’s one of the OGs in the field. So I ended up becoming his acquisitions guy, and he put me on stage, you know, to talk about acquisitions and what I was doing in the way that I was, you know, locking up deals and everything.

I did really well on that side. Right? So I got exposed to the Q&A after the presentations. And so it was really the first taste of it. You go on stage and then there’s like, hey, listen, this is my slide of, of of how I do things, how I negotiate deals. And then boom, you get off the, the, the stage, which I was a total stranger to.

And and there was a lot of question and made me feel good to answer questions like, this is new. I haven’t done this before, and I felt like I was empowering somebody else, especially after, you know, people came back and weeks later is like, oh, that that was really good. I used it and, and helped me out and, and, so I just kind of leaned into that, you know, fast forward a few years and I started, to consult one on one.

I didn’t have group, group coaching yet. And, fine tuned that dial in the processes. Understood that one of the best things that mentorship does, it forces me to hold the space. So if I’m mentoring somebody and then you go to coach will tell you that or mentor, if you’re if you’re mentoring somebody, you have to hold the space for yourself.

Like, I can’t talk to you about good lead generation or great follow up or strategy if I don’t have that stuff in my own business. Right. So as I’m as I’m getting better and fine tuning, you know, the, the program itself, I have to apply my results get better. So it’s always a, AAA2 way street when it comes to mentorship.

You’re learning, you’re teaching. But as you’re teaching, you’re improving upon yourself. And I think that’s the thing that pushes it forward. So, to, to kind of, you know, wrap it up on that, on that note, it’s, I brought, the same stuff that I learned at the fire department, you know, SOPs, new processes, system for other and procedures and bring brought them into the way that we did wholesaling.

Right. It wasn’t wholesaling. It’s always been kind of, you know, a Wild West type of business. You don’t say. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I started, you know, system izing back then and, I mean, first in paper spreadsheets and you know it, right? You know, you have, you know, multiple, multiple different resources that you tap into. And then it all led into, oh, I built my first Podio setup.

That’s when I started signing up with you guys. You guys are the only ones that are innovating all the time and growing with the times. It was like, yep, those guys so, so, so did that. And then I started building the tools. And then the community, the, the everything else just, you know, kind of came together in 2009 for good mentorship.

So I’ve been doing guru mentorship. I still do one on one as well, but group mentorship since 2009, the wholesaling academy is is what I do, and it’s a beginning to end mentorship program for real estate wholesalers. But I have all the systems and processes and SOPs, everything. Calculators. Right. What I’ve done lately is build the, the software support or the technology to just, you know, keep it.

All in one place. You log in, you have the modules or trainings, the follow up sequences, the AI that does follow it specifically for, for follow ups. And, I mean, it really just eases the, the, the, you know, the, the mess that we often cause when we’re trying to, to figure out how to do the business.

Right. So, well, let’s, let’s follow up on that. The mess that we often, cause because, you know, a question I get all the time, when I speak to newer investors who don’t necessarily have a system, they don’t necessarily have a CRM, they don’t necessarily have that yet. And, and a lot of that, if you’re if you’re relatively new, then you’re probably going to be concerned about money as well.

Like, yeah, you know, you, you, you know, every penny matters and you know where, where you spend it. You don’t have a lot of it. You’re if you’re trying to escape a W-2 or, or whatever it is. So there’s always a question of what is the tipping point where I need to really start to, to invest in systems to make sure that I have that kind of that dialed in.

And it’s rigorously tracked. Everything’s done. So in your experience working with so many people in mentorship, seeing it all, what what point do you usually say to someone, man, you you really need to have system as your systems dialed in? I used to I used to think right in my thought for the longest time was, hey, listen, you’re going to take actions as a first step.

And you don’t need a CRM, you don’t need fancy systems. You can do it all with a piece of a, you know, piece of paper on your phone. If you have less than 100 leads right now, that was kind of like the breaking point. And, and I, I’m still I still believe that. However, what I’ve seen is that you have you have the logic of what, you know, when you should, you know, start to deploy, you know, systems and processes.

And then you have the emotional component which is creating excuses for everything. So, so and this is a real thing. This is through mentorship. Right. So it’s like, all right cool. Your excuse is that you don’t have a website. So you haven’t called the 50 leads that you need to call this week. All right. And and yeah I got to figure out the logo.

I got to figure out the website I have to figure out, you know, oh the calculation on the CRM and all. So we, we procrastinate in a very creative way to push things back when we don’t have a system or you know, something in place that we can just follow and, and click through. So I still think that anybody who’s got that fire and you can tell right away when somebody jumps into the mentorship program is like, dude, I can give this guy two carrots and he’s going to figure out how to, you know, work a deal.

All he needs is a little fire, a little structure and a little boom, like, give him a direction and a and or gal, and, and they’re going to, you know, they’re going to go and take off running. And then you have, you know, the the student that jumps in is like, I need to have everything perfect to a tee.

But at the end of the day, it’s, it’s, there’s a fear behind that. There’s so, you know, there’s a procrastination caused because of the next step that you don’t want to take. Maybe you’re uncomfortable with the conversations. You’re uncomfortable with what you want to say, how negotiate, how to negotiate a deal, how to comp that type of stuff.

Right. And it all comes down to a let’s figure out what the easiest way to push that back a couple of days is. And that’s what I found, right? That, like, I don’t have a system, I don’t have a CRM, I don’t I know the follow ups, I have to do follow ups. And I called three people.

They didn’t answer. So so I forgot about them. So to me it’s it’s somebody jumping into the system. Now, what I like about having it all and you know, in convergence per se. Right. Because you have the system to support and then the knowledge in one place is, is there’s what I’ve gotten rid of is, yes, bottlenecks systematically in the business.

But I’ve gotten rid of excuses one by one where like, you don’t have a website. Yes you do. It’s right there. Boom. Next step. But please, let’s move forward. And then, you the contracts. Okay. Boom. Yes you do. Let’s step. Let’s move forward. Right. So it’s all I feel like we have to tackle it. And this is a psychology part in me.

But you have to tackle it from the mindset perspective. And then the systems and ops it just got to make it has to make sense. Right. So yeah I mean it’s a it’s a very interesting, mix there that you have to tackle when somebody is getting started because it is a new learning curve. Right? It is scary.

It can be daunting too. It’s like, hey, listen, I’m going to beat on this thing. I have no idea what it is yet. Well, and actually I follow up on one little bit about that because I agree with everything you just said. And I think that that not, you know, seeing, you know, with the mentorship background and all that, you have a unique insight into it.

But systems can be their own paralysis as well. Absolutely. I’m sure you have to deal with that in your, you know, because they’re like, how many times I’ve seen someone who gets, you know, topical with AI right now. Yeah. Oh. All right. Where, you know, you listen to people and, and people can’t wait to tell you about all the time they’ve spent with Claude Bot or.

Yeah, or whatever, doing this thing and doing this again. And a lot of times you’re like, is that what your business is for? Yeah. You know, like, where are you spending your time? Where’s your focus? Yeah. And now that’s a new part. But even just a CRM can be a sense of paralysis for people as well. How many times have I seen people, you know, I was going through and, and rigorously making sure they, they do even more metrics.

Well, yeah, let’s let’s have more KPIs. Right. I’ve got 52 KPIs. Now, what the hell are you doing? How many deals? What? Yeah. Yeah. But there and so there is a find. You know, I’m sure that when people are, when are, you know, when they’re beginning, one of the things I always do try and say to people when they’re beginning with technology, because I think I’ve always said, you need a CRM the moment you start spending money.

Yeah. If if all you’re doing is doing is driving for dollars and and knocking on doors. Yeah, honestly, you probably are okay for the first one a while until you get volume, until you get, you know, but if you are spending money on mailers, you buy an absolutely well and you’re spending money, you better damn well track it.

Yeah. But I always, you know, there’s always a, a balance for new people of not overwhelming them with technology either. Yeah, not overwhelming them so that they spend all their time thinking about the system and not get on the fucking phone. Yeah, it’s got to be. What? So, I mean, we talk about new I all the time, right.

Like the user interface or the user experience. From the software standpoint, it has to be easy. Like if you have to go through a university course to figure out how to use the damn thing, it’s going to be really tough. Right now. You have the learning curve of the business itself and then the learning curve of the tech go hand it.

Yeah. And the mindset learning. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like and then you have I mean I, I’ve heard it more than a million times right. I’m not a techie person. It’s got to be easy to use to deploy. It’s going to be a fun thing. It’s got to feel like a, like a, like a positive tool that you can reach out to and makes you, improves you, and helps you be better in the business.

Then it’s like, man, I gotta, I gotta run everything through this and figure it out. And and learn it. And it’s I mean, that’s a wait. We can’t we can create weight, right? Like, I feel like from the, from the SAS perspective, it’s the one role that we have is, is improving and making things easier. So in my head, if I can turn it, you know, any given excuse into a button like the excuse is gone and then they can move forward to the next, you know, a locked, you know, chapter of the congratulations that your princess is in another.

Exactly. That’s dating us, by the way, because everybody is not, all that is going to go. What the hell? Yeah. Doug. Well, that’s Super Mario Brothers. Yes, yes. You know, you know, but not this movie shit. Yeah. Not this movie right now. I’m sorry to interrupt this amazing conversation, but I wanted to make sure you knew that smart phone, the only phone system built for real estate investors, connects to the best in class real estate.

Invest in CRM. And because as its my show. And I am co-founder and chairman of smart phone, I got some great deals for you. Click the link make. Take advantage of 5000 minutes free calling with smartphone. The only phone system built for real estate investors. Click and call close more leads back to the show I. Let’s dive into your system yourself.

So you, because I think you doing systems because it comes from a unique Venn diagram of the all of your experience, everything that’s led up to you, your coaching, your psychology elements, the work that you do, just like organizational structuring, leadership, you know, you’ve got all these components that gives a different shade of perspective. So that when you think of of of a system, then you have, a way of understanding that that is more mature than someone who’s just like, I want to build a system like, because a lot of people try and build a lot of people in wholesaling.

I can’t tell you how many people over the years have come to me like wholesalers particular has come to me and they’re like, I’ve got an amazing Podio system I’m going to sell to everybody and be like, yeah, you know? And the truth is, a few of them did it like this. Many people did it. And and even that, like that.

Now with vibe coding, they’re like, I’m going to build this amazing system and it’s going to take over the world. It’s, no, it’s not. And and sure enough, you spent a lot of time and it’s gone nowhere. You’ve got a system that I think is really interesting because it combines, the processes, the SOPs. It combines the system, the processes, the education and knowledge.

Yeah. And it can. And the activity, whether it’s by dialing, texting, using smartphone, using AI phone, whatever you’ve got all of those things built in a way that is designed to sort of push a business forward. So, tell us, like if you think about your system right now, what are what would you say if you were giving me your your minute pitch?

I’m going to give you more than 30s. I’ll give you a minute of what three things do you think working in your system is going to bring someone even more value than any other system out there? You have to. And again, you have to break it down into stages, right? You know, every, every especially in wholesaling, it’s not a lump sum of actions.

It’s everything is, is, is broken down into lanes. For example, there’s six stages in any business that you look at. Wholesaling is not any different. Right. I brought it down to sourcing leads, converting leads, acquisitions, dispositions, measuring and improving. Right. So there’s six stages in that every single one of those stages needs to be covered for your business to move forward.

If you’re just doing sourcing, where you’re doing outreach for leads and whatnot, and you’re not converting leads, your acquisitions get stack gets bottlenecked and then you get you ended up talking to a bunch of crap leads, right? We don’t want that. So you fix the converting, in your acquisitions as well. But if your disposal sucks, you’re going to get a bottleneck.

You’re still not making any money, so they all have to talk to each other. Now, what most businesses out there do is they’ll they’ll work on the first four stages and knowingly or unknowingly, right. Because they’re just part of the action. But the measuring and improvement sections are often left out, right? You boom, you close a deal, you get paid, you get the escrow, you then all of the X onto the next thing.

Right? But there’s no, there’s no review, no tracking on, on on valid KPIs. And I’m saying and KPIs not not not, measuring metrics. Right. There’s a big difference between, KPIs and navigators. But, when you look at the right stuff and then you actually deploy it and improve it upon, you know, every single dollar you go through, you’re going to end up with a pretty dialed in system.

What happens with, with, a lot of the software out there is, is it’s built from a unilateral perspective. So it’s like, oh, I’m going to build, you know, this platform that works for me because it’s great. And this is my model. Right. And you see platforms come together. What I’ve done is I paid attention to what works for me.

I pay attention to what works for hundreds of my students throughout the years. Right. As we’re building calculators, as I’m having multiple coaching calls every single week, thousands of hours of of of just input and content right there. So building upon that, and rolling it into the systems and processes right off the actual automations of the triggers, of the UI, meaning a you start here, you have two things that you need to look at at the at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, those things need to be gone, right?

And the way they do it, as you go to your opportunities and follow cue here, it’s a very linear process. But you give somebody three, you know, three sets of instructions to follow and, and even though the platform may be robust and do a ton of things, they’re happening on the background, like you don’t have to worry about, oh, how the thing is connected to this other, you know, piece of conversation.

We have to simplify the front end. And I think that’s that’s how the redundancy is getting get, you know, get push forward. You know what I mean. They get they get actually mitigated. And and then you have, you know, you have better results. But yeah. So, so when it you, when you bring it back, I mean there’s going to be key things in each one of those, steps that I told you.

For example, if you have a way of creating automatic follow ups and sequences, yeah, I can you can, you know, throw somebody on a drip. But with all the tech that we have now, you can throw somebody in a drip, get interest back from them, and then have I come in, pre-qualify them actually classify the lead. Right.

Which is one of the things that happens in the system right now. If you look at my platform, my dashboard, when I do demos on it, I’ll show my personal dashboard, it’s working over, I think, 40 over 4000, 4000 leads that are on, on, on, just on the constant work for the next year. Right. That’s that’s legwork that my team doesn’t have to do.

I don’t have to do whenever they come back get they get pre-qualified automatically. Boom. Pop up on on hot lead or warm lead. Or continue to nurture. Right. But it’s a system doing the lift. And I feel like a lot of times in the past it’s, it’s there’s been systems created but not necessarily designed to, to operate as an additional arm of the business, but more of a holder of that.

And information. And, and also I think what’s interesting about that, there’s two things I want to follow up on that. Number one, just the sort of, You know, to your point about, about the clarity sort of, the clarity side of being able to not overwhelm the front of the experience. Right. But, yeah, like, because because you can kill people with you’ve got you can kill people with tasks.

Absolutely. If you if you give someone if you’ve got give someone, say that is 15 steps to in order to do something. Yeah. You can kill someone’s motivation by give them 15 steps. Yeah. You give them one step. Yeah, right. But I won’t pick up on one of the things you said to you. You talked rightly about the difference between KPIs and metrics, right.

Excellent. Because I think a lot of people get a they don’t understand it. And B, they get focused. They get so focused on the wrong things. Yeah. Around metrics and KPIs. Can you give us your take on this, from your platform, but also just your take on why it matters and how you focus people on those two things, how you focus maybe on C to me, I never think you should have more than five KPIs.

I agree. Yeah, like what so else could you need. There’s a yeah. So there’s a big thing. And you know, if you want to put a dashboard together you’re going to have a ton of metrics. And and what I call them navigators, they’re lagging right. They’re lagging indicators. Navigators similar thing. But then you have your key performance indicators, a thing that if you if I improve this right now, my bottom line increases.

Right. So my revenue increases my you know, my for example, if you improve your closing ratio or your cost, I’m sorry, your revenue per deal, that’s that’s something that’s going to boom immediately. Right. Raise up. You see that effect when you’re closing a deal and then you see your averages go up immediately. That’s going to be a KPI.

A navigator is going to be cost per lead, right? Cost per lead doesn’t necessarily impact your revenue. Your income, like money coming in right now. It impacts your expenses. But it’s going to be a lagging indicator of revenue and profit down the road. Right. Depending on whether it’s a good, you know, vehicle battery and what I see, you know, what I see happen often is like, oh, I’m getting so excited about understanding all these numbers and metrics.

And if I, you know, put a dollar here, these numbers change and it becomes almost like a casino game, bro. It’s so it’s like, what am I going to throw my chips today. Exactly. I’ll put to about 7%. Yeah. And you don’t really need to to, you know, for the sake of performance and actual production, you don’t need to get lost in the weeds, all right?

If you have your average revenue per deal, if you find out how much your, your average deal cost, because you can’t have, you know, cost per lead, cost per prospect, cost per click, cost per, you know, whatever. At the end of the day, you know, when you’re talking about the five, you know, having a set of really one, you know, the ones that not this one matters, right?

Everything is going to be a subset of those. But you do have like for example, your cost per deal overall. You know, how much am I spending? If you see something wrong going on with that number, then you can go into the subsets and analyze it. But don’t spend all your time building up, you know, KPIs and dashboards for crap that’s going to be, you know, you don’t need to lock up the next deal.

What you need to do is pick up the phone, have a conversation, know where to go. Understand, you know, the the insights and outs of that particular deal and be able to move it forward fast. Right. Speed is the biggest thing. If you get bogged down by tracking and measuring this stuff, you end up playing a different game, right?

Your side gig and wholesaling, and then you’re building your apps. It makes it makes a lot of people feel really good when they’re building the ops, the systems and the processes. Yeah, I’m not saying don’t do that if you want to individualize it, but, you know, focus on on your biggest and your your, your highest and best right now, right now there’s different stages to business.

When you’re in stage one, you’re barely building it up. Profit is going to be at the top of the list. You know, profit systems and processes like that’s a priority process is at the end. Right? I’m sorry. Profits people in process. So you have profits as a as a number one. You can’t keep going if you don’t.

You know, you don’t make your money. You’re not making money. Right. So as you grow and there’s different stages and triggers for that. But as you grow the, the, the profits still remain. Even on the second stage, they still remain at the top. And then your systems and people kind of change, right? You dial in a little more into building systems because you got to fine tune and you got to hire for later.

And, and there’s sequences to follow when you’re, when you’re developing a business. And what I see is like, it’s almost always inverted, like, I want to have everything dialed in. I want to have the business flow navigate by itself and I’m thinking entrepreneurship when you well, all you need to do is close the first two deals a month.

And, and I’m thinking, you know, this, this company is going to be automated and it’s we all need baby steps. Should I need baby steps right now in baby steps. Last night, I was talking to you about baby steps on the SaaS world. I mean, you, it’s, you know, in terms of of, understanding where we’re at and understanding the next actions.

Clarity is going to be our biggest, or biggest, tool. I think that’s so important. I think and I think it’s so important, and, you know, like, so I even say so we’re a, we’re a relatively large business now. Yeah. And, we have one set of numbers that we religiously look at, as a business every single week slash month.

And they are our North Star numbers. Right. Because the moment one of those numbers and it actually the graphs, the moment we see the graph change the curve, change, we know we have to look deeper because to your point like this is telling me I need to dig in. Yeah. What’s causing that. Right. But there’s only four.

Yeah. Because the rest are. If those are all green, if those are all good. Yeah, we’re we’re going in the right direction. Yeah. Now, we may still be able to improve and go faster. And of course different teams will do that. But as a company as an existential threat to your company. Yeah, right. Because that’s where I turn that I love, like our board meets every month and we go through existential threats to the company not, you know, are we, you know, is the sales team doing a little bit more of this or whatever?

Are we are we doing better at this lead gen up on there where those are all important for each teams to look at. But at the company, there aren’t that many metrics that tell you whether or not you’re going towards death or glory. And I think it’s really important that people understand that you can get real paralysis around this idea of minutia data.

Yeah. When my news show numbers, like, you know, so and so, there’s this was did you make money? Yeah. Like like like, did this make money? Did this move you forward? Then chances are the little bit of minutia work out over time. And no matter now unless they’re those key critical ones. Yeah. I think that’s a really important point.

Another another thing that we often I mean, we deal mostly with founders, right? Like, you have to understand that if you’re the person building the business, you’re the person doing, you know, okay, I’m launching this. I’m betting on myself. You’re part of a 5% of the population. You’re for that, right? People that you know take a risk on themselves.

I decided to go out there and then, you know, venture into entrepreneurship. And I get again, bet on themselves. Your thought process by default is going to be different, right? You your thought process is going to be different and maybe maybe gray to how all these levers and and, you know, micromanagement buttons and, and and points of perspective.

But at the end of the day, the people that come and work with us, they don’t need that stuff. They need a one, two, three step. They need clarity. Why? Because that’s 95% of the population I’m throwing number out there. But I think it’s well, in the 90s, and I think tire. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I was, I was leaving some room there for, for optimism and, but if you think about it.

Right, our thought process is also going to be different. So the way that we approach business, it’s not going to be the way that your employee or the person that you’re going to hire your VA that’s going to have to deploy your scorecard is going to think about it. It’s going to be confusing as hell. So we need to simplify and take it, you know, take it from that perspective is like, all right, cool.

This works well for me, but how can I take this box it up and then so it becomes a universal understanding across my business. Right. Because eventually, even if you have one VA or two VA, if, if, you know, the second that you bring somebody else onboard, now you’re, you’re in charge of training them. If you didn’t even have one person, let’s say they just hire a VA for cold calling right now.

You got to train that person. You have to retain that person. You have to make sure that you have accountability over that person and what they’re doing and understand the process. Right. So the way that we build the business in the first place is going to be very different, that the way that we operate a business. Right.

So. Well, and final thing, I just want to talk a bit about this in terms of your system before we we sum up and let people know how they can get hold of it, which is most important thing, is I really like your concept of bringing the, the, the training that you’ve developed in your community and in your coaching into the system, because, I mean, when we think about training inside of systems, we usually talk about just training on the system.

Yeah. And right. And like, but what I really I enjoy about your model is because you’ve got that background of a coach, of a mentor, you’ve built a community, you’ve built core like you’ve because you’ve got all that and you’ve seen what helps people get successful. You see all that by actually bringing those two together in a very real way.

Yeah. Then you’re, you’re providing someone, with an experiential, kind of, process of not just systems, but business growth. Yeah. Because because the systems aren’t the growth. The systems are facilitators. Yeah. For the actions. Yeah, yeah. But but the knowledge and the, you know, all of those things and they’re usually so desperate. Yeah. You know, I’m taught by this, I’m reading this person’s book or I am in this person’s community, or I’ve watched this person’s webinar.

Now, they’ve told me I like this system. Right. Here’s my knowledge. Now I’m turning on this site and it’s almost like, you know, my knowledge is here, my systems are here and all that. And I really enjoy the fact that you’ve intentionally brought those things together. I think it speaks to probably who you are and all those experiences and, and what makes you you and what makes your, you know, the people who engage with you so successful.

But I think that’s a really important part of your system. I think, you know, I have this exercise that I do at the beginning of every year, and I think I told you about it, but, you know, right around, you know, the last week of December when I’ll try to sit down and kind of map out the next, you know, the next chapter, right?

What’s the next you’re going to look at? I have a deep, just personal session on. On what? You know, where I want to go. And I’m headed in the right direction. The theme, the thing that came up for me this this year was convergence. It’s putting everything together because of what you’re saying, right? Like there’s I have mentorship here.

Mentorship. Mentorship happens here. And then we have operations and we have, you know, things that are kind of, you know, dispersed, bringing them together just makes sense, right? For for for the sake of simplicity, for the sake of, of action, like in my head, if I have one log in to go into and then just deploy everything I need to deploy, ask the questions I need to ask, watch the videos and trainings that I need to, you know, click the buttons that I need to to send out a contract, you know, to do follow up automatically and prequalify and all that stuff.

Right? It just it centralizes everything. And I think it simplifies the process. It goes back to that comment you know, we made earlier about, hey, you give somebody a checklist of 15 things that. Yeah, exactly like, this is too much. It’s I’m not I’m not even built for this lean work. Right. When the reality can be very different.

It’s like you’re just getting a big, gatekeeper at the door. It’s really what’s happening. But if you simplify that to one or 2 or 3 actions, it’s a lot easier to consume. So that’s been the whole, principle behind, how I’ve developed the, the platform, the mentorship, the coaching. It’s all very, very objective. Think bullet point style, think linear.

You know, you begin here at sourcing and then you end up here measuring and improvements, everything else, you know, it’s laid out, frameworks and everything in between us as well as the, you know, the tools with the buttons and everything that we need to deploy it. And I feel like one of the things that helps me, too, is I’m an actual operator, so I still wholesale, I still fix and flip, I do all that stuff, and I use the platform on a regular basis.

So whenever something happens that feels like I is a little redundant, I’m getting feedback from from our multiple calls that we have during the week. It’s it’s always it’s always, you know, it’s a constant, you know, race for improvement. You know what I mean? It’s a something happens, a new tool, a new tool pops up. We had like, oh, it’s a great and best thing.

And then boom, cloud popped up. It’s like, all right, cool. Now we can do stuff in cloud. You know, you just never know what’s going to happen next week. And we have to adjust and adapt right as we’re going. So that’s a crucial thing. But you can’t overcomplicate the, the, the framework of the elemental systems that the fundamental system they have in place.

Well, listen, I mean, I appreciate you coming on. I also just, I, you know, I appreciate you in every way. I mean, for those for context, you know, Rafael has been a customer of smartphones for a long time. A long time. And, but only in the last 6 or 7 months did we actually meet in person and become friends.

And, and I’ve been able to see firsthand, you know, not only his capability and generosity, but also how much he deeply cares about the community that he’s involved with. And I always tries to push people forward. So, I think if you have a chance to work with Rafael, you’re going you don’t want to miss that out.

So make sure that, why don’t you close this episode out by telling everybody how they can find you and how they can engage with you. Thank you. Well, first off, I want to thank you again, brother. You’re one of the best people I know. I knew you were a cool guy before I met you in person, but then, I mean through the roof.

So a lot of respect, a lot of love for you. But, yeah, you. I’m really active on social media. You can find me on Instagram at Rafael Cortez CEO. You can also, find me on my website, which is the Ray pulse crm.com. The right pulse CRM doc. And, and yeah, I’m going to answer all my messages, so I’m easy to get Ahold of.

Yeah. I mean, we got fans and, you know, and I’m not I’m not even that out because I think that funny. I have I have actually a quick story I learned, actually, on a weird story on this one because it’s relevant to, whatever. Just, happened there when we were, we were getting you’re going to.

And we made it. We had to wait. Let me let me sidestep here. But we had this thing called situational awareness at the fire department. No, but so when we were getting married, when my wife and I were getting married in Italy, we were in this really beautiful church. This is the episode’s kind of over, but, like, just.

You may like this story. We were getting married in this beautiful in Italy. Beautiful, huge church, right? A real tourist place. And, I’m standing I’m sitting up. I’m standing at the altar with two guys in suits, tuxedos, kind of suits next to me. We’ve got the bridesmaids over here, an altar here, people in the pews looking.

I’m sitting there waiting for my wife to walk with, you know, down towards me. And this guy comes in me, walks down. He’s got a camera. This looks. And he walks out. Yeah. How? He’s he’s like, let me just taking a picture. I just and I mean I’m and I’m sitting up at the altar with my guys and, and we all like we all kind of go yeah.

Do you, what do you think is happening here and that sort of that. This guy walked literally like 100 yards this way to walk behind us, to walk all the way over there for zero reason. But anyway, on that bombshell, I just want, I’ll make sure I post out all the links, to Rafael’s communities and to socials.

He’s also going to be coming live inside a smartphone very soon to do a masterclass. With us. With me? To all of you guys, because he has such value to bring. So do me a favor and hit Rafael out. Up. Not out. Yeah, I had to hit Rafael up. Make sure you check out, both his communities himself and his, amazing system.

And, you know, have a fantastic week. And thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Brother, thanks for listening to another amazing episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy. Head over to thatrealestatetechguy.com to check out all episodes and get special discounts on tons of awesome real estate technology platforms.