Being a refugee in a new country can be scary, confusing, and lonely. While there are agencies in the US that help refugees with resettlement during the first 3 months, resource constraints leave them unable to assist past that point.
Sloane Davidson created Hello Neighbor to help connect refugees with friends and mentors in their community who can be a sustainable support system. The families Hello Neighbor supports all have kids under 18 in the home. Mentors range from young professionals to families and seniors, making Hello Neighbor a family-focused volunteer opportunity. In this interview, Aaron and Sloane discuss common things refugees need help with, how her organization has grown so quickly, and why she was inspired to start this organization. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter. Sloane’s Challenge; Find one way to feel uncomfortable. Connect with Sloane Connect with Hello Neighbor Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 317 with Tammy Thompson where we discuss poverty, homelessness, and the importance of social cohesion.
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Dr. Christopher Howard is the eighth president of Robert Morris University. A university with more than 80 undergraduate and graduate degree programs , more than 5,000 students, and a 100 year history.
In this conversation, Chris and Aaron discuss the future of college, timeless leadership lessons, and Dr. Howard’s background. Dr. Howard is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, a Rhodes Scholar, and a graduate of both the University of Oxford & the Harvard Business School. He also offers an excellent challenge at the end of the conversation. Resources Mentioned What Happens Now? by John Hillen RMU 100 
Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter.
Chris’s Challenge; Don’t become Glib. Connect with Chris Website If you liked this interview, check out episode 361 with Jason Wolfe where we discuss leadership, entrepreneurship, and how to build a great team. 
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay Watson: Chris. Thank you so much for doing this podcast. I'm really excited to be speaking with you. Howard: My pleasure, Aaron. Thank you. Watson: I want to start off by maybe just in, in basic terms, because most of the audience won't necessarily be familiar. As the president of the University here at Robert Morris, what do your responsibilities entail? I think we can speak broadly about leadership, but you know, very tangibly, like what are you focused on? What are your goals? What is your kind of week to week life look like as the president of the university? Howard: You got a couple of questions in there, Aaron, they're all very, very good ones. So what does a president of a university actually do? Well, you're responsible for everything, but really have the power to do very little. You have to work through other people to get the mission accomplished. What are the missions that you need to accomplish? You need to make sure you're an ongoing financial concern, and this is a $130 million enterprise with upwards of 700, 750 people that work here between faculty and staff, 50,000 alumni, almost 5,000 students. It's a big enterprise. You've got to make sure that you spend less than what you're bringing in in terms of revenue, in terms of tuition, fundraising, other auxiliary enterprises. And that's the business of education on the one hand. On the other hand, you have a mission which is to help young people, help people in general, not just young people, help people in general, in many ways, understand themselves in the world, around them. Whilst at the same time, giving them deep domain skills is a university that focuses on the professions, accounting, engineering, education, nursing. So when you see people like actuarial scientists, Aaron, when you see people like that in the world, you're interacting with them, they need to have deep domain expertise in their respective enterprise. So we have to do, we have to educate and train them as well. Your job feels in many ways like a CEO, like I said before, making sure that the bills are paid, but by the same token, you feel a little bit like a general or an Admiral because sometimes when things happen, you're kind of the commander of the ship. And also you feel very much like a governor or a pastor. Let me explain those. There are a lot of constituencies in a university and the key is to make sure not all the constituencies are mad at you at the same time. This is easier said than done. But having said that, because I mentioned before, your alumni or a constituency, your students are part of your constituency. Your parents are part of your constituency. So when I spend time with them, you know, whether it be Governor Wolfe or Mayor Peduto, or our Allegheny County, executive Rich Fitzgerald, we have a lot in common as we try to understand what our constituencies need, and also recognize that those are at loggerheads at time, they bump into each other, and that's where leadership comes into because you have to reconcile those things. Use your mission as a North star to get us away, you need to go in terms of vision for the enterprise, for Robert Morris University. When I first came here, I felt that I observed it for three years or so that Robert Morris was a place that is big enough to matter yet small enough to care, big enough to matter yet small enough to care. So we are a university that's a national doctoral granting university with close to 5,000 people attending. So in many ways, you know, when we break bread with, or I break bread with Pat Gallagher over at Pitt or Farnum, CMU, we can feel CMU our Pitt-esque , because we're doing serious research, we just got a million dollar national science foundation grant, which is a big deal. We do things with Amazon with cloud services. We're one of the cutting edge universities in the country offering that to our students and to people that attend the institution. But then sometimes when I'm doing, you know, when I go out in a couple of weeks to watch Battle of the air band for Greek life, it feels a little bit more like a smaller bucolic, liberal arts school. As you and I look out across the landscape it feels small and intimate, but it's big and mighty at the same time. So my vision is to make sure we're big enough to matter yet small enough to care, and that we're student-centered and that we're ensuring that we're touching these students lives so they can be successful in their careers and in their careers and in their lives. Watson: And as you were speaking about the constituencies and this kind of, we could frame that as, as a problem that you kind of have to solve or manage or oversee, I'm reminded of, of a very good friend and he always uses the analogy of sharks and minnows. And when a lot of people are maybe an entry point of their career, they have all these problems that they're facing and it can induce anxiety and it can be, you don't necessarily have the skillset to deal with them, but as you gain more experience, and as you get more tools in your tool belt, you realize that your sharks are actually kind of minnows, even to your direct manager. And as you kind of continue to go up and you start to reorient your landscape of sharks and minnows, or what problems may be, depending on where you sit, and what it really sounds like given your position, and even the way you explain that answer is that there's this two pronged approach of the story and the strategy. So the strategy is I have this budget, we need to allocate this in the appropriate way. And then the story of you're not necessarily implementing every single plan or even on the ground executing it, but the story of where we're going and why it matters is incredibly important for you to articulate so that it actually gets done. Is that accurate? Howard: Very good points. I would not call any of the constituents minnows. Watson: Fair enough. Fair enough. Howard: Or typically wouldn't even call them sharks. I understand the analogy you're getting into and there's this whole idea of how you sort of scope your job and what what's important and what's not important. That's interesting. I always jokingly say that it's easier being a sophomore president than a freshman president. So in my second presidency, I just, you know, I just saw some things and did some things well and not so well. I like to say I got a PhD in myself, so I'll learn from what I didn't do as well last time so when I come to this institution, I can understand, and I can anticipate better going forward in terms of sort of matching up strategy and narrative. You're right. There's a lot of different levels you operate on as a leader of an institution because universities are just special. They're unique. Not that now I've worked in the corporate world as well. I've worked in the military government, et cetera. And not that firms or non-profits are not important. There's something about a university that is soul stirring and uniquely American. You know, we're the only country where we have, you know, College sports to create that sense of identity and connectedness. It's essential. You know, we talk about Alma mater. That's your second mother, right? And so there's a deep human, sorta piece of our humanity that caught off and especially if you go in the traditional years, That that grows and it, and it is embodied in your university or college experience. So you're reconciling that with sort of the grand strategy of where higher education is going. How can you position yourself effectively to get the job done, this kind of the blocking and tackling of strategy. So there's a duality, if not even beyond that and how you lead an enterprise like this effectively, and you'll never do it alone, you do it to and through and with other people in that, in that community. Watson: Certainly. I'm excited to talk to you about the future of the university, but I want to start off with a little more of your past and take it back to flying helicopters and your military service. Can you talk, I mean, most people's early career sharks and minnows would probably pale in comparison to that experience. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like and what you learned there that you carry with you now? Howard: Oh, I'll go back to my time in the military. I would never be the person I was today, but for my time in military service. I was an army JRTC joint reserve officer training Corps, starting at age 14 or 15 when I was in ninth grade in Plano at that point vines high school. I did that for four years. My brother who's a year older than me, big student athlete played football at Baylor, he's been teasing me. I'm 50 years old. He's been teasing me for, you know, 30, 35 years about Chris why did you put on a dog on uniform when you're 15 years old? I go, cause I wanted to. I've had a deep and abiding sense of patriotism, probably an overused term, but patriotism and wanting to serve my country. One to whom much is given much is also expected. And so that spirit of service has imbued every decision I've taken, including becoming a university president, but through the air force Academy and through my time on active duty and in the reserve. So I learned discipline. I learned teamwork. I learned selflessness. I learned this idea of mission first men and women, always. So to me, I would say driven can be a double-edged sword. I don't want to. Sound like I just driven to be driven, but mission driven because the mission is more important than me. I learned that in the military and then having had a brief career in aviation and having had a longer career in intelligence, it's been neat to see the tactical operational and strategic come together and places as far as Bhagwan Afghanistan to Tuzla Bosnia, and in many places and state side. So all that has informed my ability to, I think, make effective decisions for the organization and do it for the right reasons. Watson: It seems like it's also an interesting balance where you had to be immensely impacted by going and visiting these different parts of the world. And while you're certainly investing to cultivate a campus that students feel at home at and are welcome to, there's also a quintessential or arguably essential part of the education experience that is going and departing vastly from wherever it is that you may be from, whether you're a, Pittsburgher coming to Robert Morris or coming from all the other States where you source your students. How do you kind of think about that in the context of the university? Howard: Well, there's a great quote by Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former head of the Soviet union in the cold war. He says, travel, broadens the mind and loosens the bowels. That paints a pretty vivid picture for our listeners. But having said that, to be uncomfortable, to deal with discomfort, to be as Dr. Warren Bennis, who ran the university of Cincinnati, was a great leadership guru who just passed away a few years ago, to be the other is very compelling, and it's a great way to develop empathy. And I think empathy is sort of a, one of the, the amino acids are the building blocks for leadership is the ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. So if you have had to be the other, it's easier to appreciate what the other's going through. And so with our global engagement office here on campus, whether it be receiving students from abroad from, I did a pizza with the president from a few, a few weeks ago, and I had a young lady from Mumbai, a young man from Nepal and another young lady from Beaver County. It was great to see that sort of spirit here, but whether they be students coming here and we have a pretty significantly large international population for the size of our campus, or it'd be sending students abroad for either a year or a shorter faculty led enrichment program, or even our men's basketball team going to play in Ireland for two weeks, it teaches them how to be the other and it, and it's a great stepping stone or building block for their, you know, deepening their humanity and making them better leaders. Watson: Certainly. The other core aspect of this experience, one could argue, is the preparation for the working world, the time beyond the university, a big part of that is entering the private sector for a lot of the students. How does your time in private sector inform that aspect of the curriculum and optimizing for students who will eventually be in the working world? Howard: Well personally, there's a pace in the private sector for better or for worse, because it's just a real, it could be triple bottom line, but the main bottom line is profitability. If you're not a profitable enterprise, you will go out of business and everybody's going to be sad. And so if you're dealing with firms, whether it be fortune thousand firms, fortune 500 firms, or even mom and pop shop, it doesn't really matter your ability to understand the trade offs and sacrifices you need between your strategy or marketing or operations, et cetera, to be an ongoing concern is a mother's milk. And on the private sector, when you come to the higher education sector to bring that impetus, that sense of a bias for action has served me well. It kinda set me apart as part of my leadership portfolio that some presidents who have never experienced private sector don't have, it gives me a point of connectivity with many people because most of our alumni go into, like you said, and I'll come to in a second go to the private sector. So it makes it, you know, it gives me a lingua franca is at war with a lot of constituencies that maybe some of my colleagues don't have. I'll mention real quickly, we have a strategic plan called RMU 100. We turn a hundred years in 2021, and we have a one pager that is steals our strategic plan down to one page. It's just easy to, as much longer than that. Well, we have a one pager. And when I showed this to CEOs of top companies in the Pittsburgh region and beyond, they just sort of do backflips, they go, wow, you get it. You get us. We don't have that much time. We've got to get to it. So that's been, that's helped me out personally. In terms of a university, Aaron, we have always focused on the professions. So it used to be, you know, Robert Morris or Bobby Moe meant business. We sort of all visited. We set up as the Pittsburgh school of accountancy in 1921 in downtown Pittsburgh. And then it became the Robert Morris school, Robert Morris business school, the Robert Morris school, all for profit in business and accounting, and then became a junior college nonprofit. Then we became a college, a university, regional university, and now we're national doctoral granting, but we've gone from accounting and finance and management and marketing to other professions, nursing health administration, actuarial science, teaching, engineering of every flavor you can imagine. And so Bobby Moe, I like to say has gone Bobby pro. So compared to many other schools, bigger and smaller, we have an eye to getting you into your profession and an effective way and an efficient way. And it's in our DNA. And so we're particularly good at that. Watson: And that's so important because by my estimation, there's kind of two directions that the curriculum of these universities can go. And sometimes it's some of both, it might be, you know, we have the only school for bee agriculture, or we might have the only school for something incredibly specific that we can just completely separate ourselves from us as having that sole curriculum. And then there's also the direction of steeping the curriculum and the focus in these broadly applicable skillsets. I can plug an accountant into a fortune 500 corporation. I can plug it into a small company. I can plug it into a nonprofit like it's a broadly applicable skillset. And most of the other ones that you articulated either have that or something like nursing, we're facing a cliff, statistically, it's the median age of the average working nurses over 55. And you can see a huge generation graduating if we're not going to replace those with all robots, we need humans to provide something that is fundamentally predicated on care and interest in one another. So that, that's something that I've noticed before and you articulating, I think, will really speak to what's happening here at Bobby Mo. Howard: Well, you know, there's a fine line, and it's I think an important balancing act between preparing people for very specific jobs and careers, many of which are morphing as we know them. So we have lots of accountants that are associated Robert Morris and their alumni base, some are like Morgan O'Brien, who wants people's gas or rich Harshman runs ATI. They were trained as an educated as accountants here, but when they were CEOs of their respective companies, chairman of their respective firms, it's not the specific accounting skill that they're looking forward to these overall global leadership skills and managerial skills that, that, you know, in other schools they say that's kind of comes from the liberal arts. We say, we're gonna, you know, you only have so many resources, we're going to tip toward the professions, but we're going to do something called communication skills, which is kind of like our core curriculum, our not too liberal arts, where we do argumentation, rhetoric, public speaking, et cetera, things that are going to allow you to be effective no matter what jobs out there, because, you know, I think I always laugh and I'll say I'm going to go Uber or something. Or I might hop in my car and use ways, or I'm gonna Google something and all these different words that weren't even in our vernacular, you know, if I said I was going to Google you 10 years ago, you might punch me in the nose. I mean, I don't know what that was. So my point is that we need to prepare people for careers that are not yet been identified. Yet we still need to be the human capital sort of engine of these careers that we need right now because of what you said, the graying of the baby boomers passing on, or what have you and retiring. And these things, everything from, from nursing to, occupational therapy and not just in the health sciences, but other jobs out there. So it is a constant battle of. Understanding you need some specificity, but you also need general ability, I'm going to call it a growth mindset, so that you can understand larger sharks so they can become minnows to you later on so to speak. Watson: I love when people use my metaphor. Another aspect of that, that's really interesting and it speaks to the need for institutions to Quicken their pace. As you alluded to earlier is a book that has been immensely impactful on me. I've referenced it before in the podcast will be familiar to some listeners is called The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly, and one of the forces or kind of frameworks that he leverages is there will still be accountants. There will still be all these kind of traditional professions, but they will operate as a human in tandem with an artificial intelligence, with a highly capable computer sidekick. For lack of a better- Howard: Jarvis from Ironman. Watson: There you go. And the notion that that can sound scary, that can sound daunting. That can be incredibly disruptive for many parts of the community. It's actually the next generation that grew up with the device or the multiple screens that are going to have the easiest time adjusting to that new reality. Have you seen that to be true? Is the students like that? Howard: That's very powerful. So I'll go back to my time at University of Oklahoma when I was director of a leadership center and a vice president there and I was teaching more actively than, than I am now. And I used to, and I had a class. It was the leader in you, the leader in us, it was for our top grade, our top honors students, many of whom went on to get pretty elite scholarships, roads and marshals, et cetera. And we were reading some great books and talking like that, and I kind of came to the conclusion, Aaron. I said, you know, I'm a big Lincoln fan, right? I'm actually reading a biography of Frederick Douglas right now. And just interesting watching how Frederick Douglas and Lincoln steel sharpens steel throughout the civil war as they kind of, they both grew wiser through the whole sort of enterprise of the war. But I mentioned that because Lincoln who's this deeply wise human being wisdom wit read the Bible cover to cover, read Shakespeare, even though he was ever formally educated. He was, he was actually a very soulful individual, very smart individual, but I thought if you could be Lincoln and have Google. Wow. And this was, you know, 10, 12, golly, this is probably 12, 13 years ago. This is when Google was, you know, all that. Now we know there are other things that are much more advanced between AI and machine learning, everything, you know, sort of the, you know, that you're kind of alluding to, but that whole idea that is this deep understanding of the human condition, coupled with hyper technology. Wow. So I agree, you know, this Jarvis for those people that like the Marvel universe or, you know, if you're lost in space computer, you know, having something there that helps accelerate and deepen your ability to process data. We do it some already, you know, between the internet of things, between, again, just our smartphones, our computers, or what have you, but something that is sinked up to you, I'll mention something right now. Again, it's already happening to some extent. So when I'm on my, my GABA galaxy phone, my family teases me. I don't have an iPad. I went with the guys it's similar. It's cheaper when it serves its purpose. So, and I'm sure it's happened to you as well, but I type an email and then it anticipates the next six words. And all I have to do a swipe right a little bit. And then I'm onto the next one. So it's already doing that for me. You know, you can imagine what's going to happen next when I can say write that thank you letter to Aaron. It just writes a letter and gives it to me for a final proof because I need to see it. But once it shows it to me 105 times, 106 times, it's going to be pretty doggone good. So I like what you're saying. And I'd also like to say that we're getting there. We're tapping to us right now and it's not scary. It can be scary for some people, but it's rather empowering. I write faster emails now. Watson: So, I wasn't expecting you opened it an excellent door for me here. As we talk about someone like Lincoln or some of these wise characters from history, how have you gone about becoming more wise in these areas? You you've adopted the technical tools. You've tried to, you know, Keep up with the pace of change as we all are, but is it, you know, whether it's books that you read or specific efforts that you've made over a career in different industries to get to where you are now, you've got to have a degree of wisdom. What concerted efforts have you made to make inroads in that direction? Howard: When my friend wrote a book called, Oh, golly. It's by John Hill and he's going to kill me. I can't remember the title of it, but he talks about sagacity. I love that word. It's like becoming a Sage and Sage is wisdom. It's these are all proxies for the same sort of thing, for the same concept. But, you know, one of the concepts of turning experience into insight. And I had another friend who, Chris Wilson, who's a defensive line coach for the Philadelphia Eagles and speak at my classes years ago when he was coaching in Oklahoma, he's always say you need to do a lot of STL habit, have a real BS. So S T is self-talk and BS is your belief system. So you need to have some thou shalls and thou shall nots. You need to turn over in your head, whether it be in prayer, meditation, walking down the street, I do it when I work out, and you need to try to do your best. I sort of helicopter up, take your life. And then this is, this is like yoga is easier to do later than it is when you first started doing it. Not that I'm great at yoga or anything like that, but the principle is these things get easier and it's that constant synthesis of, how am I doing? Right. Running the tape in your head and then saying, what am I going to do differently? I'm going to stop, start, continue. And I'm, you know, one of the things I've been pretty good at since I was a kid is, like I said, getting a PhD in myself, my belief system, my self-talk and, you know, at my age now, and having seen as much as I've seen, I'm pretty good at sort of self-correcting autocorrecting. But it's taking, like you said, it's taking these books, you know, the thesis, from the book or from the article or the blog or the podcast or the newspaper article, but also the meeting you had with the chairman of your board or your senior leadership team, or that student on the street or whatever, or your wife or your kids, and trying to mash all that stuff up and say, What is the lesson? What can I distill out of this to make myself a better leader, a better human being going forward? Again with me, it is, I'm a morning workout guy and I kind of go in, it's not, I got friends that meditate, like, really know how to meditate and I've tried it. I'm okay. But it's kind of a form. A buddy of mine told me, he said, you know, you can kind of meditate when you're working out too. So I kind of do, I'm going to be things in my head and I, and then there's a crystallization that happens to me in the morning where I just kind of, it all kind of comes into focus. I kind of have had made sense of, and I like to use this phrase, sense-making, I've done some sense-making of my life and now I can use that to move forward. Watson: Gotcha. It's a constant... battle isn't even necessarily the right word, but it's the type of thing that you churn more and more in the direction of trying to become wiser. And it's like, you're actually fighting against yourself to some degree, whether that's with meditation or just in general, because, you know, my dad's one of the wisest people that I know, and I ask him like, How did you become wise? It's like it's experience, it's these kinds of frameworks. And I just, I get it a little bit more than I used to, but it's the type of thing that takes patience. It takes faith. Like when you're talking about belief system of any shape or form, you have to have faith that that belief system will serve you well. And so as you piece those things apart, it's something that this podcast has contributed a lot on my own end, but it's something that I'm constantly in pursuit of. So I appreciate that. Howard: Well, the journey is the critical part of it, right? I mean, there's a great story of the person who scoring on a great trip and he's traveling over the mountains and Hills of Europe and the journey is to go to an Inn, you know, in journey to this place. And then the person shows up there and they realize that journey to the Inn or the end was less important than the journey itself. It's The idea of the Greek legend of Sisyphus, pushing the rock up the Hill and never gets there. You know, if you think about faith, if you're Christian or you're Buddhist or Muslim, whatever, Jew, what have you. No one ever perfects their faith and there's no rabbi or Moolah or preacher or priest that stands up says, I'm done. I perfected this. I have all enlightenment. I know all the answers. No, but that cathartic sort of effort to try to be, which is a very Aristotelian library concept of the good life or of discernment. That's what makes us human. Right? Just that whole process of trying to do that. And if we give up on that and we don't have self or life reflections, and if we not try to become autodidact where we teach ourselves, we don't have a growth mindset. Is that the book from the Harvard professor that she wrote was very, very compelling book that she wrote about growth mindset. And that's when we're not, that's when we're less than human, right? Watson: Absolutely. Chris, this has been fantastic. I feel like I could do this eight more times with you, and that would be an absolute treat for me, but we gotta be respectful of your time. We got to start aiming towards wrapping up. Before we ask our standard last two questions, is there anything else that you were hoping to share today that I didn't give you a chance to? Howard: No, Aaron, I appreciate the time and I commend you on your journey and let me be a part of it. And, it's great to sit down with people who really care deeply, and it's evident. First time I met you through our mutual friend, Jason Wolfe, and I know my podcast was much better than Jason was. I mean, jeez, but I'm glad to be a part of it. And as you ask me these last questions I'm going to be Lincoln on Google. Cause my friend John Hillen would kill me if I did not mention the name of his book. It only take me two seconds. Watson: Certainly. So what I'm going to remind the audience is that I'm going to try and get links to all the books that Chris mentioned in the show notes for this episode, so that you can follow along and, and deepen your wisdom a little bit as well. But the other thing that we're going to also share in those show notes are the links to best connect with you, to learn more, not just about Bobby Mo, but also about Dr. Chris Howard. Howard: Okay. And the book is called What Happens Now by Dr. John Hillen. So I did Google that and John's been a friend of mine for 30 something years. So he'd kill me if I didn't say that I'm actually in the book too. So really be bad if I didn't say it's a very, very thoughtful writing. The best probably way to follow me or stay in touch with me would be my Twitter handle is @DrChrisHoward, and they can keep in touch with me and interact with me on social media. That's probably the best way to. Watson: Beautiful. That will be, as I mentioned in the show notes for this episode, as it is for every episode of the show, you can scroll up and down in your podcast player to find that. Howard: What we'll do also here, and I'll send you that one pager on the strategic plan and people can look at that and be wild. Like the CEOs are that we have all of our next five-year plan on one piece of paper and how we want to move forward. Watson: And when you show the CEO's that I'm guessing that the wow factor comes from every company's in a competition for talent. We see it at our company Piper, but across the board, if someone is particularly skilled, that does so much more than just like handle some of the workload, it frees leaders up to go ascend a little bit higher and chart more of the course and put more systems into place. So I'm, I'm sure that that's where the wow factor comes from. Howard: Well, yeah, you know, a plan is a common point from which to diverge. And so it gives us enough guidance of where we want to go to where, when things go to heck in a handbasket, we still can be striving toward it. And to have that sort of as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr would say, simplicity on the other side of complexity. Is something that I think we all sort of strive for is like this, like having a house it's less cluttered. You know, it's sort of, I think it's something to be proud of. Watson: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for all this information, all these links. I want to make sure that people connect with you. And I also want to make sure that we give you one more chance to issue an actionable personal challenge for the audience to set us off. Howard: Don't become glib. It's easy to become glib. You know, there are things that are happening around us and our society, whether you're on the left, the right, the middle, whether you're you're black, you're white, you're green, you're purple. You're straight. You're gay. Doesn't matter. We get very, very cynical. But understanding that this country is one that has seen the darkest hours and great deprivation and always come out on top. Winston Churchill said that Americans can be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting, all the other alternatives. And, you know, again, this is not an indictment of anybody in the political spectrum, but all that stuff happens and people get down and then they get apathetic. They don't, they disengaged. They just go back into their own little shell. Don't do that, because the greatest answers, the way we're going to move forward as a country is we working together, engaging recognizing the humanity in each and every one of us to come up with better solutions to these daunting problems. So don't get glib and don't give up. Watson: I love that. One of my favorite recent reads is by Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life. And in that he articulates that in order to really do great for others, and be a great individual is to recognize the darkness within, you have to look inside yourself, recognize that darkness and its existence in order to really reflect in the opposite direction. And so I'm curious as you give that advice and you strike me as a precisely the opposite of glib or cynical man, when have you been the most cynical and what did you do to emerge from that point? Howard: Yeah. I've had a couple of episodes in my life that have been pretty dark. I had a plane crash when I was in flight school years ago, and that was pretty daunting, and another one that we want to go into is many specifics. We've all had a professional setbacks, but one thing I try to do is go out and help somebody else. You know, you think you have it bad, look at he or she. Don't feel sorry for yourself because unfortunately, no matter how bad it is, somebody has it worse. And if you can spend a little time getting out of your own head and trying to help that other person out, whether their situation be worse than yours, the same, or even better, it reminds you that, of the great things in life, which is just great source of love, which is just giving. And so I have had situations where I remember a really tough day, years and years ago without going to the specifics. And we all, my wife and I, we went to a soup kitchen at my, at that point. We only had one son. Now we have two. And we went to a soup kitchen and it just kind of perspective Watson: Makes your sharks look a lot more like minnows. Howard: Amen, brother. Watson: Thank you so much for doing this. Howard: Thanks a lot, man. My pleasure. 
What does it take to become the top referred real estate agent on Zillow? A lot of reviews and hustle.
Brian Teyssier shared his perspective on the industry during a riveting 30 minute conversation at his home in Mount Washington. Brian has worked with some of the top real estate coaches in the business and has some seriously impressive stats. He's surpassed $19 million in volume in both 2017 & 2018. He's accrued 333 reviews on Zillow. As Brian battles to the top of the luxury home market, he runs a lean and digital practice. You’ll be blown away at his story of selling a house for more than $500,000 without ever meeting the owner in person. In this conversation, Aaron and Brian also discuss how he got started flipping houses, how he goes above and beyond with his open houses, and where the industry is headed. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter. 
Brian’s Challenge; Push yourself out of your comfort zone.
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Brian Teyssier
https://web.descript.com/b63b5e66-6c16-47a2-9a96-15f39e6ba2db/8402b Watson: Thank you so much for doing this, man. I'm excited to be talking with you. Teyssier: Well, I appreciate you having me. I'm usually on the other end. So this is nice. Watson: I know. I am so excited to extract all sorts of wisdom and nuggets from you, but I want to start off actually explaining one of my assumptions. So you are a real estate agent and in these types of businesses, it is my assumption that when you started off it wasn't about marketing and branding. You started off and you just had to hustle. You had to make it happen for yourself, starting from square one to get your business off the ground. Now you're the top Zillow agent in Pennsylvania. You have all these accolades. You were speaking at the event in Vegas just last week, but when you started off, can you paint a picture for everyone of your situation and what you had to do to get your real estate business off the ground? Teyssier: 100%. So the first thing I was doing is I was flipping houses. This was probably about 15 years ago before flipping houses was coal and there were. Before even Facebook didn't even exist. Instagram didn't exist. None of these social media platforms existed. YouTube may have been in its infancy. So there was no video go-to videos. So I wanted to become a real estate investor and flip houses. So I took a couple courses, there's American Congress of real estate that meets in Pittsburgh once a month. So I went there. I took some courses and they said, even if you're going to have contractors come in and do all the work you should do at least two houses as much you can with your own two hands so you get an idea of what things cost. So when you start hiring people out, you don't get the wool poured over your eyes. So I flipped to maybe four or five houses and I would be a little different. Like some people are high volume flippers, or they just, you know, do a little bit of lipstick on a pig and flip it and sell it. So I would take about a year I take on the super ugly ones and I would live in them as soon as they were habitable. So some of them didn't even have flooring, like no carpet, no tile, no hardwood. As soon as we would get heat, I would move into it because what happens is you get hit with capital gains tax. That's the profit you make on that house, you get hit with like a 25% tax in the first two years. So if I could change my mailing address to that address, I could start the clock running as that being my primary residence and minimize the amount of capital gains I would get hit with. So that's one little tip and trick that I used to use. And I used to get all my stuff at Home Depot and Lowe's and they would have their credit card, no interest, no payments for a year while we'd get the house, start it and finish it within a year. So I basically used all of their money. So for the materials, most of the materials have flip the house. Right? So as I, as I did a couple of houses, I said I'm always looking at ways to improve. I think that's the true, I think that's a fabric of any entrepreneurs. How can I, or business owner, how can I maximize my profit? How can, and not just profit to take and buy nice suits. I mean, so you can build your business a little bit further and bring on another employee, open another office. Whatever. So I'm always thinking how, and even in, as a realtor now, I think how can I increase my margins and shrink my debt? One of the ways was to get my real estate license. So I didn't pay myself to buy it and sell the house. Watson: So before we get into the real estate license, when you're flipping these, let's call it five houses and you have the two year window where there'll be capital gains tax, but you were setting up the address there. Were you doing one at a time subsequently or multiple at the same time? Teyssier: One at a time subsequently. My father is retired. We only had so much money and time to do that. So I was on a, I guess you could say I was unemployed, but I was a real estate investor doing that. So we, the profit, I think the least I ever made was 20 grand profit. And the most I ever made was like 80 or 90 grand profits. So it was pretty substantial. And that's why you really wanted to shrink that capital gains down as much as possible and increase your margins, which some of which I'm going to lead into now is the gateway to me become a real estate agent. So I got my real estate license. Then I would, you know, capitalize on that by paying myself to buy the house and then only paying half the commission because I didn't pay myself. Obviously. Then the flipping business became somehow like a flashlight was shined on how great Pittsburgh was when I first started flipping houses. I could go on the MLS and there were 10 15 houses I could choose from that had a great profit margin in my mind, where I could just buy it, take a year, flip it, and then buy the next one that was called a buyer's market. Then as time started going on, these flippers started coming into town and I couldn't find any of those houses. They all dried up and went away. So I couldn't find anything that had a minimum of $20,000 well profit margin, because if I'm gonna work a year, I need to, at least people have what, $20,000 in the bank for the next house. So flippers came in YouTube, got bigger TV shows came out and it basically pushed me out of the flipping business. So as it stands now I have about $50,000 worth of tools in my parents' garage collecting dust but if you ever need your backslash tiled I'm the guy to do it. So then what happened was I started representing some of these flippers as a realtor, and I'd made the decision that I'm not going to be able to flip and be a real estate agent at the same time, the flipping has kind of gone on the back burner until the market changes forever. Watson: And that's also something just to, just to put a bow on that is a very intensive job, like the, the illusion with almost every industry, but particularly for some reason with real estate and where it's like passive income and things like that, you kind of get this perception that you can just kind sit back and let it happen. It does not sound like that was in any way, a passive experience for you, right? Teyssier: A hundred percent not. I mean, just think the market could shift. And in this happened, the market shifted before I got into real estate where they went in and went into the proverbial Cropper. So we got flippers that had flipped houses on the market that they bought out a foreclosure and went back into vert closure. So when you're flipping houses, like I did long periods of time, you got to make sure you have a profit margin built in there. So if the market took a dip, you would still come out a little bit ahead. And that's why I always lived in it. I always wanted to be able to live in it is because of if a dove and I had to eat the house, I would just be able to live in it. And it's like a backup plan and a security plan. Watson: It's also like the idea of a paper loss versus a real loss. If, if you're holding a stock and it goes down, it's only a real loss if you have to sell at that point in time, but if you're living in it, then you can say, well, now's not the time to sell. Let me hang on to this for another six, 12, 18 months. Teyssier: Correct. Right. Absolutely. You always have. I think anytime I do anything, I always have a backup plan. Now people may say that sounds like you're preparing for failure. I think, I think, no, I think it's intelligent. I mean, I want to have out, that's going to be able to clean up any mistakes I've made or minimize any damage. So, and I even tell him, I see flippers that I'm representing as a listing agent. I tell him the same thing. Like we've got to be careful. You don't want to overspend the market's going to shift. How big is your profit margin? You know, what do you have built in, et cetera? Watson: Right. So you got the real estate. A real estate license to reduce the, or make the margins better so that you could take some of that commission for yourself. And you realized that it was time to end a flipping game and get into real estate full-time what was on the other side, the positive signal that you're like, Oh, I can do this. I can make some moves? Teyssier: So I decided my business plan will be aimed towards the younger generation, nothing towards the older generation, but the older generation has a ceiling. They're only gonna be able to buy so many houses before they're not going to buy houses. The younger generation is going to buy a whole lot of houses. So what I ended up doing was I used to sit brand new construction, open houses on a team for an agent bigger than myself. And I would just read these magazines that came through on real estate on what to do. And one of the things I recommended was Zillow reviews. That was going to be the big thing. So as soon as I started selling some houses, I would automatically get these Zillow reviews. And this is, I don't know, maybe six years ago. So I've been chugging along all these years, getting the Zillow reviews, which I then push out on social media. And we all know we're a review driven buyers, I would think, or, or renters or whatever it is. Anytime I go into town, I'm looking what's, even if I'm not sure, I believe there were. View. I still want to see what the worst one is. I want to see what the best one is. So that's when I made my decision as to go after younger people, I knew they would be looking at reviews of a product, of a service, something like that. Anything online is what I adapted. That technology doesn't matter what the technology was. As soon as it came out, I adapted to it. Drones, GoPros 360 imagery. I don't care what the technology is. I'd usually jump on it right away to give me the advantage over everybody else and be able to, you know, appeal to the younger demographics, so to speak. And then of course, social media has come along. When I first started, there was no social media. I sat at open houses every Sunday. It doesn't matter whether it was 20 degrees or 120 degrees. It doesn't matter if there was a Steeler game on or not. I would go put my, this is what we're going to talk about the grind and what I did before on social media, I would put open houses out hours before the open house. I would go knock on the neighbor's doors if it was in a neighborhood the day before, and just hand them a flyer and say, I am Brian Teyssier, I'm with blah, blah, blah. And I'm going to have an open house tomorrow between one and two. Why don't you stop over before that? Because I didn't want the neighbors to bog down my potential buyers. So I would invite them to come before the real open house. And then, um, I would throw these lavish open houses. Now when I say lavish, I mean, Pittsburgh lavish. So this is like hood lavish. This isn't a million dollar listing lavish. So I had a speaker, if it was cold out, I'd have schlepped my coffee pot in and hot chocolate. And I had a speaker music. I always had a candle. I had balloons on every sign and if it was hot outside. I had to have a little water bottles just to kind of keep them at the table in the kitchen so we could just have a chit chat, but also you are on display. You're being interviewed by them if they're a seller. So I've actually picked up sellers from open houses because they saw how 100% percent I was all in. Watson: Yeah. It's a great representation of the work that you put in to see all those little details covered and people like that now. So, so I'm guessing another aspect of letting everyone in the neighborhood know, not just when those neighbors would come in so that they could go through and you could find the real buyers, but there's also a social phenomenon of you might know someone who wants to get in your neighborhood, if it's a good neighborhood and they'll go call Jack Susie, whoever, and say, Oh, there's an open house for a place in my neighborhood tomorrow, you should come by and they're almost like a potentially defacto Salesforce for you. Teyssier: Right exactly. That's one of the scripts that we used was, Hey, you get to pick your neighbor. And whenever I would send out just listed cards, I would in that neighborhood, I would say when the open house wasn't, sometimes my title would be pick your neighbor, helped me pick your neighbor. Now's the chance to improve the neighborhood. Yeah. Just little, little things like that. And they would become a sales person for myself. Watson: Gotcha. And all this stuff, and this is like a framework, you know, we've done more than 300 episodes of the show and I keep coming back to it, that all this stuff seems very simple and straightforward, but that by no means makes it easy. It's hard work to do repetitively, consistently with discipline, but a lot of these things are really just that, a discipline, as opposed to being so complex that someone couldn't piece it apart. Would you agree with that assessment? Teyssier: 100%, there's nothing complicated about, having an open house, having a coffee pot there and just being able to talk to people. It's, it's kind of a grind. Nowadays I think a lot of people don't understand don't mean millennials. I mean, anybody in general wants to do as least amount of work as possible and make as much money as possible. I know another agent that he doesn't have physical open houses. He has virtual open houses and he's not really getting much traction. I said, you know, they want to interact with you. You have to have two things, passion and personality, and you can't get the, you kind of get so much of that through a video where you need to actually be in the same zip code, the same airspace as the other person, and, you know, slap some skin together, shake a hand and see if you're a fit. I mean, I've won over many buyers that weren't ready to buy at that open house. It took me 18 months to incubate him, but just because I had great personality and we may have had something in common and they felt safe with me. It's all about trust in the sales industry. If I trust you, I'll buy almost anything from you and I'll use you forever. Watson: Yeah. Trust is a huge deal, but let's talk about that 18 month incubation. Cause that's another part of the grind and that's the type of thing that if you are able to accomplish it, a couple of times you start to get the framework, you realize it can continue to happen. And then you're going to set the proper practices in place. But early on, it's only hard to be patient, but it's hard to have faith that that can occur if it hasn't yet happened for you. So talk a little bit about incubating these people over that period of time and what that looked like on your end. Teyssier: Right, so national association realtors has done studies and they've proven it takes 18 months from the time the thought first goes into buyer's head that we should probably buy a house to the time they actually take the keys and grab possession of it. So there has been someone else, I suppose, in my mind who it is that they have said that sometimes I get the deal because I'm the last man standing. So if it's a buyer, I'm the last person that has been in touch with them to the very end, when they decided to make the move. And if the seller, I'm the last person that they talk to, whenever they're ready to list the house. It's a lot easier now than it's ever been to be able to stay in front of sellers. And that's one of the reasons why I have such aggressive branding and I'm so aggressive and consistent on social media is because I have a lot of buyers and sellers that come to me just because I'm always on social media saying I sold this, I'm listing this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's basically staying at top of mind. So if you can do that throughout the 18 months, you're the last man or woman standing. Chances of you getting the deal was great. And if they already liked you from the beginning at the open house, it's not hard. Watson: So you were really just playing the sales playbook for the first, at least year. When did things start to turn? Whether it's from a momentum standpoint or reputation, maybe inbound referrals. And you started to recognize the impact of not just being a salesman, but also a marketer and a brander? Teyssier: Right, so I've only been in real estate 12 years, which is not a lot of time. I'd say the first six years, I probably only sold two houses a year and two of those are my own flips, so I really sold nothing. So , I had to sell flips just to be able to have an income, but I saw the big picture I saw it was going to turn around and I said to myself, If I can make it in this slow crappy market, when the market turns around, I'll be banging. And wouldn't, you know, that that's exactly what happened. The first five or six years, I struggled slowly started gaining momentum. I joined Remax and then social media and video and all that started taking off. So I've only been successful for about six years. And then you could just see your income going up. And the way I built my business was I would. Spend a little money. FOC free of charge was always my theory. I didn't want to spend any money on marketing. I wanted to shake hands, kiss babies, get out there and grind it out. So I wouldn't spend any money. Again, it goes back to my original point of always trying to maximize my margin. If I don't spend, but I can still make money. I'm in a great position. And then over time, you know, your income grows, your income grows, and then you can have extra overflow of cash where you can start buying leads or getting professional headshots and paying someone else to do photos, videos, and drones. Watson: Right. Teyssier: So I'd say about six years ago to answer your question is whenever it finally started turning around. Watson: So six months, you start to recognize that there's a budget for this stuff. Teyssier: Six years. Watson: I'm sorry, six years, six years. You start to recognize that there's a budget for this stuff, and you have not only been very aggressive with this, but you've gone out and sought coaches sought mentorship, sought frameworks so that you weren't just maybe discovering naturally through your own experimentation, but quickly adopting, not just the technologies, but the strategies, the tactics, the playbooks of other people who had found success in using social media to build their real estate business. Can you talk a little bit about why that was the approach you took and how you did it? Teyssier: 100%. I mean, my egos, most people's egos are never so big that you can't learn from somebody else. You can never know everything. There's no doubt about it. So once I got extra cash, there was the number one real estate coach out there. I've heard about him for years, Tom Ferry. So I always knew once I get extra money, I would be able to take those courses. So I decided to get coached for two years and it changed my life. It changed the way I've done business. It gave me budgets because as an entrepreneur, as a realtor, you are accounts receivable, accounts, payable, marketing, inventory, you are everything. So they help you structure that, they help you structure your day. So it gives you structure. It helps you overcome some things you're afraid to do, like maybe calling expireds or fsbo's. They give you the blueprints. Watson: Fsbo's? Teyssier: For sale by owners. Watson: Okay. Teyssier: Yeah. So for sale by owners are trying to sell their house by themselves and what you do as a realtor, you kind of get your way in the door and you don't say, Hey, I'm the best I want to lease your house. But you may say, Hey, I'm here as a resource for you. If it doesn't work out, here's kind of some of the things you should be doing and it'd be like drone stuff, you know, they're not going to do. And then again, it goes to that last man standing thing. If I stay in touch with them, by the time they throw in the towel because they're just trying to shine, tired of trying to sell it themselves, brian sells Pittsburgh is there to pick up the pieces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That works. Watson: So another aspect of this, and I wanna get back to the coaching, but as you were saying something, something just kind of clicked for me. You had the houses that you were flipping on the side early on, and once your business got to a place where it was humming a little bit, and you were getting at least an income where you could survive and be comfortable and maybe start investing in some other areas, you had the luxury in perhaps both of these instances to not be desperate. So what someone might go might do when they come to the, for sale by owner, character is be really pushy, kind of like you said, and that's going to turn them off and like, come on, come on. But by being able to be patient and coming with an attitude of, I'm not going to get everyone, if this isn't the one it's not a big deal, probably translates into the entire interaction as being much more pleasant and probably ends up actually leading to more people, wanting to work with you. But the core of that is setting yourself up to not be in a place of desperation, a place to be comfortable and patient. And I I'm curious both early on, and then later on, if that's how mindful you are of cultivating that kind of perspective, right? Teyssier: You hit the nail on the head. And I actually mentor some people offline and I try to tell them something the coaches told me that it stuck with me forever. And that is when you go into that listing appointment, you have the mindset that they need you more than you need them. So it doesn't matter where you are in life. If I need it, I live paycheck to paycheck I have to walk in with a swagger, not ego, swagger. That I have what you need to get the job done. And that's what I did whenever I was making no money. And that's what I do now when I go into listing appointments, I go in, I prove I'm the expert. I do that ahead of time. Most people already know me. Cause again, social media branding, social consistency. Yeah, social proof. I mean, you can't hide, whether you're a success or a failure of social media nowadays. So I already have that swagger going in, but I go in there and I don't let them know that you need me I don't need you. But I make it so that I am bringing in a wealth of knowledge experience. I've seen everything and I could prevent you from going into a black hole, falling into some legal battle or whatever. And that's one of the ways I prove that you need me and I don't need you without actually saying that. And once you do that, it's easy to get a buyer or seller to work with you. Watson: Yeah. So back to the coaches and how you went about. So clearly though, the one character, it was just like the number one real estate coach, or had effectively branded himself as such to get you in there. But in terms of seeking those characters out and what you looked for to know that this was the person you're going to part with some hard earned dollars to have them coach you, but that you knew they could help you take things to the next level. How did you evaluate that? Teyssier: Right. So Tom Ferry had already done all his social proof to realtors. So he is the gold standard that you as a realtor are trying to accumulate 12 grand a year to be able to part with and justify in your head that you're going to be able to make 24 grand off of this 12 grand by investing it in coaching. So he already has all of us with his ads following us around the internet, his Podcasts, his vlogs, his emails with the vlogs coming into my email. He has a lot of the top realtors and he talks about it. He was smart and wrote a book. So now he's an offer, which I'm actually looking into. So you want to be able to get Tom Ferry to coach you. It's almost, you almost seek him out. It makes social proof. And then I have a social media coach as well. Katie Lance, and I saw her at the Remax convention years ago, and then I followed her. So I would research these people before I decided to part with my hard earned money. And it took me years to finally decide to let $12,000 a year go, which is a lot of money for Tom Ferry. But in hindsight, I don't do it anymore, but it was well worth the 12 grand. So, and anytime anybody asked me, I'm like, I highly recommend getting a coach. It's going to change your life because there's no way you do everything effectively daily. Like they would have me write out my hours each day and what I was doing. Yeah. Made me read books. I mean, they lead you to, they give you the tools for success. They give you the scripts for open house. They give you the scripts for fsbo they give you the scripts for buyers. The one class I went to, they made me all of us as an audience, stand up and repeat the script five times to each other and practice. So it was getting nailed in our head and we knew what practice will look like. Me telling you to go read the script. Five times is different than me making you to do it right in front of me because now, you know what you're supposed to be doing. Exactly. It's great. Coaching, highly recommend it. Any, any industry. Watson: I love it. Teyssier: At least for, like I did two years, and then you can kind of, you know, you grow your business and you can kind of phase out of it if you feel it's not working for you. Watson: And hopefully that stuff will be internalized. And then, you know, back to it being simple but hard. It's, it's about the discipline to repeat that stuff. Maybe you need a tune up in another couple, two years. Maybe there's a couple of new things from a new coach or new source that you can put together. But that all makes a lot of sense. Another thing that I wanted to ask you about, given that real estate is a sales business, I have a framework that we talk about at Piper that people buy for one of three reasons. They buy because you are of the highest quality they buy because you were the cheapest. Or they buy because you're the easiest. And where I like to sell is where we can be the easiest. I also think we're the best. I also think we're at a very high quality, but being able to make things easy on the other person, as opposed to a race to the bottom. I do some coaching with some entrepreneurs at the university of Pittsburgh, and they're in these different competitions and they're always selling on the fact that they're the cheapest or the least expensive. And I mean, that's a bridge, no, that's a race to the bottom. Unless you can get scale being the cheapest, isn't really as good as you might think it is, which is understandable if you're early in the game. Can you talk about how you navigate those three kind of dials of quality ease and, price as people maybe come to you with objections as to whether or not to work with you? Teyssier: Right. So the pricing is easy because, you know, we all charge the same commission. It's either 5% of your listing agent, 5%, 6% or 7%. And it depends where your property value falls. If you're a low property value, you get charged 7%. If you're high property value, you get charged 5%. Now you may have some newer agents. And when I did this whenever I first started, I would offer the cheapest. I would say, I'll do it for a half percent less, but I had no tools. So again, social proof is where it's at. So I am the expert. I have more of our multiple designations. I've spoken at different events, which I make very public. So everybody knows I am the expert and it's been drilled into me by my coaches. If somebody knows you're the expert they'll be willing to pay for it. And I'm not asking you to pay more, I'm just asking you to pay market value. It's I'm the same commission as the agent over there that just started three years ago, or the agent over there that has been in the business 50 years, but has no idea what Snapchat even is. So it's no different. So you kind of said that you haven't been in the game that long, 12 years. That's still plenty of experience on the real estate industry in general, the Pittsburgh market. You've seen these ups and downs of buyers, sellers markets, but I'm more curious at a macro view outside of the advent and the adoption of social media. Watson: What other forces are acting upon the real estate industry, maybe Zillow as example that people outside the industry might not really appreciate, but you have had to look at in terms of a changing landscape as a real estate agent. Teyssier: Well, I mean, I tell every seller and I go in to list their house. That the way the tools we have available to us to market their home, to the maximum changes almost by the week. I mean when I first started listing houses on Facebook, people thought I was freaking nuts. They called me stupid. And what the heck are you doing that for? And then all of a sudden Facebook takes off and now it's a necessity to be able to market on your Facebook business page, share it to your personal page. And then Instagram comes about, and then there's Instagram, Instagram stories. There's IG TV, there's the feed, there's Facebook live. So there's all these different tools in the last two years that have been presented to us, that are forces that have affected the way real estate is being traded on a daily basis. We have DocuSign and dot loop, which are digital contracts. So I have represented sellers in the half million dollar price point that I have never, ever met. Wow. From beginning to end, never met. It may be like a $20,000 paycheck. Watson: How is this possible? Can you, can you make that? Teyssier: Absolutely. So what happens is a seller saw me on Instagram posting all these higher end homes, showing that I do drone work, professional photos, and I would be constantly putting it on my Instagram, constantly promoting it. And then I finally sold it. And then I put all the stats there. How long was on the market, the list, price, sale price, and all that. And they saw that and they loved that. So whenever it came time, and they had been following me for years, and this is, this is a key point for people out there on social media, they think you're going to social media and you're going to get the immediate gratification. You've got to consistently post this stuff for years and keep it interesting. So whenever it came time for them to get relocated because of a job thing. They immediately cause I'm top of mind, they keep checking my Instagram feed because I'm interesting. Contacted me through Instagram, direct message me. They said, we carry a very busy schedule. I'm like, listen, if you have a garage door keypad, they said, yes, I said, you can trust me, just give me the code. I'm going to go walk through on X day, X time so I can do a market analysis. Did, did that walk through, came back, did the market analysis, emailed it to them. They said, well, listen, X price, whatever. I think it was like 500,000. Send him the paperwork digitally and you just had to touch it on their phone. They don't have to do anything. As soon as they're done with that, we each get a PDF of what they just signed. I called the photographer, give her the key pad code. Goes on photographs at the drone guy, does his work. They'd send it all to me, put it on the MLS sits for a couple months, and then it finally sells with the closing documents that closing company sends it to them out of state, wherever they move to. They sign it in front of a notary. Then they FedEx it back overnight. They either gonna check mail to them or they get funds wired into their account. Never met him. I don't even think he had their phone number. Watson: Wow. Teyssier: I mean, that's rare. I mean, doesn't happen all the time, all the time, but wouldn't you take that? Listen, in the beginning of the conversation, I was saying I had to make $20,000 on a flip. Right. I just made $20,000. Never met the person. Watson: That's why I'm mindblown. Teyssier: And that's just from Instagram, from social media. Watson: And the reason, that story epitomizes why I do the show, because the. I have another kind of philosophy that I use, that creativity is just access to information, right? If I've never heard that story before then I don't have the creativity to say, you know, maybe outside of real estate, but industry X industry Y, this entire transaction can be handled without the two parties ever meeting. And someone who's never heard that story is like, that sounds ridiculous, but that is the fact that you can speak to it. And this isn't some small kind of insignificant sale. It's not like I'm selling on eBay my $20 toaster, half a million dollars. That's still a big sale even to me today, in a Pittsburgh market, our average sales price, like 160,000, so 500,000. Yeah. It's pretty substantial. Absolutely. That is awesome. So let me ask one more question and then we'll aim towards wrapping up here. And this is just once again, my ignorance, as it pertains to the real estate industry. I go into these different spaces for interviews, and there are a surprisingly wide range of things that people are very quick to offer. I find that people are becoming almost more and more transparent and just generally carry themselves with a willingness to help others out and about. Are there, and you don't have to like give me the actual number, but are there numbers that real estate agents keep close to the vest for a perceived competitive advantage? Because as I was kind of studying you and I've watched you on social media, you're out there with a lot of, this is the address that I'm listing. You just shared some of the prices of the buildings. And on one of the pages, it says like your average sales price, how long the average house is on the market, which are all positive signals for a potential seller. But are there things that like it's unwise for a real estate agent to share because of reason XYZ? Teyssier: I don't know. I mean, I make it a point to think out of the box and to act out of the box. So everybody goes left I always go. Right. So that's why you probably won't see too many people posting their stats. A lot of agents think that's braggadocious, but my coach tells me it's branding. It's not bragging. It's branding. It's not bragging. I've had buyers and sellers both tell me, they've seen my stats on my email signature and they love it. I post those stats in my closings. Some of the stats aren't even good. Yeah. Days on market one year, but people like the fact that you're showing that you're a fallible, so to speak. And sometimes on my Instagram stories, I'll even post my income and I'll post all of the expenses that it costs me to operate. And I just don't believe in taboo. And I want younger agents and younger entrepreneurs to understand that, you know, some drive to McLaren and have this and live here and all that. You know, there's a lot of money made, but there was a lot of expenses that I've got to pay to get there too. I think that's something I didn't learn in school was, you know, how to balance a check book or to understand. And I think a lot of people come out of college with credit card debt because they don't understand, you have to pay that shit off. So I want to make sure I'm transparent to everybody. I don't think a lot of people, a lot of agents are transparent. So, I don't know why they'd hold anything near the vest. I mean, it's your social proof. It's your resume. If you look any agent up on Zillow, That information is there. It shows how many listings we currently have. It shows all of our past sales. We can't change that. That is uneditable. I don't know if buyers and sellers know that if you look up any agent on Zillow in America, in the continental United States, their stats are there for all to see. I can't change it. I can't go in and add sales. I can't take sales away. There's a resilient reviews of us. Current listings. Sold listings. They're all pinned on a map of where we sold. It says how many years we've been in the business. It says how many sales we've had in the last 12 months, even. Watson: So that's really interesting because part of what we're doing with Piper is being super transparent about like, we posted a video on our first day. It was just me and Hannah. We were like, we're starting a business working out of our homes, like for now and still figuring this thing out. And it's brought in so much goodwill to us and we've had people be like, Oh my gosh, like you're telling people that you don't have an office. You're telling people that it's just the two of you. It's like. I mean, that's what it is. Right. And it's refreshing. Like I started this based off a thesis. I thought it would work. It seemed like it made sense, but for someone who has found so much success in their industry to also embody that philosophy is reassuring for me. But I also think it's helpful for other people to feel a little more confident opening the kimono or just sharing where things stand because as you said sales is built on trust. And it's not always that people are buying for quality or the person with the biggest list of potential sales. It might be just, you're easy, you're nearby and I trust you because you're honest. Teyssier: 100% . I mean, that's, the coach has even told me that I even have that in a lot of my abouts, especially on Zillow, "the most trusted agent, Zillow trusted agent." Cause that's a key word. That's a hot topic for a lot of buyers and sellers. Watson: Make sense. I just remembered one more question as we're going on here, I apologize for going on so different skillsets. So real estate, once again, as an outsider, this all kind of rolls together, but there's a house flipper. There's a real estate agent. There's a real estate investor and probably a dozen other hats that I'm missing. But the idea that being skilled in one does not necessarily guarantee that you are skilled in another area. You're obviously a very effective agent. Do you also do real estate investing? How much of an overlap are those skillsets in terms of the full tool belt? Teyssier: Right. So I used to do the flipping as we covered pretty extensively. I don't, for reasons I've already discussed. So that is the extent of my real estate investing so to speak. I do not have rentals because I just don't want to deal with that. And I don't do flips anymore for the reasons we said, but that's flipping and I didn't realize this there's a lot of times, Aaron, you may do stuff and you don't know what the results can be. You don't know why you're going to do it. There's a lot of times I do things and I'm like, I'm just going to try this, like an AB test. I'm going to try this and just see if anything comes out of it. So I flipped homes to have an income, but I didn't realize it was building an education in my brain of what things cost. So now when I take first time, young home buyers such as yourself out and they're wide-eyed whenever we're going through all these houses, they go, Oh my God, I don't want to part with $125,000. I could tell them that the roof's in great shape, hot water tanks. You know, it's not good foundations. Great. So if I can go in there and kind of, if I didn't already have their trust, I'm going to gain their trust by like not being a salesman. I'm going to be like their father or their parents and say, that, you know, you guys look at the paint colors and see if your furniture fits. I'm going to look at the roof, windows, hot water tank, air conditioner, and foundation. Cause that's, what's going to cost you the most money. You know, the roof's more at the end of its life than the beginning of its life. So, you know, when you select an agent, I mean, there's no real way for a buyer to know that, but, I've always said it, hashtag who you work with matters and it really does. Watson: Absolutely. Well, Brian, this has been fantastic. I feel like I just, you know, rang all the juice out of a piece of fruit with all this wisdom that we got. So thank you for giving so much of yourself to this and so much of your time to us. I want to make sure that people can continue to learn from you. And so I want to provide the digital coordinates where they can best do so. Teyssier: Digital coordinates, Google pull up www.google.com and just search "Brian sells Pittsburgh" should be pretty simple. The brand is consistent across LinkedIn, instagram, Facebook and YouTube. It should all be Brian sells Pittsburgh. I mean, if you can't find me that way, get a new computer. Watson: Awesome. We're going to link that all in the show notes for this episode, goingdeepwithaaron.com/podcast is the easiest place to find it for this and every episode of the show or in the podcast app, where you're probably listening to this. But as we do at the end of each conversation, Brian, I want to give you the mic one more time for an actionable personal challenge for the audience. Teyssier: That's right. So I want to make sure everybody understands this. So whether you're a young person just getting into a business, getting a job, working out, or you're an older person that's maybe trying to rebrand themselves. What I find works for me the most is once I become comfortable, I become stagnant. I feel I become average. Average isn't necessarily bad. You can be making a lot of money and have a comfortable life as average, but if you're looking to be the best, if you were competitive, you have to get out of your comfort zone. What I mean by that is make yourself uncomfortable. If you wake up every morning, have coffee and your jam jams, watch TV, answer a couple emails. That's comfortable. Something that makes me uncomfortable like to share with the audience is public speaking. For years, I've had nightmares of, you know, being in front on a stage at high school with just my underwear and everybody laughing at me. So somehow that has made me uncomfortable with public speaking. So what I do is a couple of times a year, I'm offered to speak at Remax conventions or in front of other Remax people or other local agents. And I take that opportunity to sometimes create a presentation for them, or sometimes just sit on a panel where I will be in front of 250 other people . Or I used to be one of those 250, and now I get to give back and I just, my palms are sweaty. I've got to beat a sweat on my forehead every single time when I'm on stage or wherever it is in front of a whole bunch of people with hundreds of eyeballs, just looking at me, waiting to see what's going to come out of my mouth. Why I'm so scared of that, I don't know. But it's making yourself uncomfortable. When I'm done I feel like I threw on an extra layer of thick skin. You know how they say you need thick skin. I feel like I've got an extra layer of armor. I feel like I've grown from every time I accomplish that that fear of public speaking. Watson: I love it. Well, I'm glad that you can even push that edge because there's a ton of wisdom here for you to unpack and share with other people. Thank you so much for coming on Going Deep With Aaron Watson. Teyssier: I appreciate it. I hope people gotsomethinge out of it. Watson: Absolutely. Hope everyone out there has a fantastic day. 
Piper Creative Director of Operations Tori Meglio joins me on the podcast to discuss how Linkedin has transformed our business in the last year.
Here's our new podcast. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-piper-podcast/id1454137800?mt=2 
Restaurants are a brutal business. It’s worth studying those that succeed.
Nick Bogacz is the Founder of Caliente Pizza & Draft House. He opened his first location in fall of 2012 and has grown quickly to open four more locations. Prior to that, he spent over a decade in the industry, starting as a delivery driver in 1996. He went on to lead sales at multiple corporate pizza chains and learn the pizza business inside and out. His company now employs more than 185 people and has been recognized at the World Championships at the Las Vegas Pizza Expo. In this conversation, Aaron and Nick discuss how Nick earned his education in the pizza business, why Caliente also serves numerous craft beers, and the critical importance of experience. Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter. Nick’s Challenge; Make a pizza in your home. Connect with Nick Bogacz
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thepizzaequation.com pizzadrafthouse@gmail.com If you liked this interview, check out episode 365 with Jordan Robarge where we discuss buying a diner, employing marginalized communities, and starting a food truck. Books Mentioned Guerilla Marketing by Jay Levinson Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill The Pizza Bible by Tony Gemignani
Underwritten by Piper Creative
Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies. Our clients become better storytellers. How? Click here and Learn more. We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs. Sign up for one of Piper’s weekly newsletters. We curate links to Expand your Mind, Fill your Heart, and Grow your Tribe. Follow Piper as we grow YouTube Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay |
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