Episode 371 - Phillip Gagnon, CEO 3 Data Pulse

00:00:00 - Phillip Gagnon

As I said, we had eight offices. We had a manager in every office. And every office was different. So some of them were really profitable. Some of them were losing money. Some of the managers were great at recruiting. Some of them were great at coaching. And so there was just a whole bunch of different needs in different places. And the truth was that nobody had ever been taught how to recruit, retain, or coach.

00:00:20 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast. And I'm your host. Bill Risser, executive Vice resident, Strategic partnerships with Rate, my agent. RateMyAgent is not just for collecting reviews. It's a suite of powerful tools and features designed to help improve your online reputation and visibility while making it easier for new prospects to find you and reach out. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 271 of the Real Estate Sessions Podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling your friends. And today we're going to be talking to somebody I met at the T 360 Tech Summit, Phillip Gagnon. Phillip is the founder of Three Data Pulse. What Phillip's company does is work on the three pillars that every brokerage needs to be successful. One, recruiting. Two, retention, and three, agent productivity. So very cool backstory with Phillip, we're going to get into that and we're going to talk a little bit more about how can you help a broker that's struggling with recruiting or retention. And we'll get some tips and tricks there. It's going to be a lot of fun. So let's get this thing going. Philip, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:35 - Phillip Gagnon

Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.

00:01:38 - Bill Risser

Oh, it's going to be a lot of fun. You and I, we connected just recently. We were in Texas. We were in the Fort Worth area, right? Yeah. For the T three tech summit.

00:01:49 - Phillip Gagnon

That's it.

00:01:49 - Bill Risser

Yeah. We should get that right? Because I have a feeling that'll matter to Travis for sure. Really a great event. It was. I got to see some cool stuff. Know AI is the buzword, right? It's all over the place. Everybody's talking about but, but Howard's presentation from follow Up Boss was pretty impressive with some really deep dive looks in some of the stuff that happens in that world. So I'm sure for you that's going to be a part of your world as well, right?

00:02:18 - Phillip Gagnon

Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, I did not get to catch his presentation that was main in the booth there. But no, AI is definitely a thing and people are starting to ask for it now is like, what AI stuff are you using? How are you using AI? It's almost pushing things that direction.

00:02:36 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I think it's the how you use it, right? It's not just chat GPT. It's so much more than that and so deeper than that. And it's going to be unbelievable in the next few years how fast things kind of start moving in that direction. It started already. Yeah. Good. Well, let's start the beginning because that's how you listen to the show a little bit. So, you know, I like to go back and I want to find out where people came from. I want to get a little bit of their background. You're based in Orlando, I know you went to UCF. Are you a native floridian am I talking to a native?

00:03:08 - Phillip Gagnon

I am, yep. I was born just outside of the one of the few, certainly one of the few when I was born down there. It's a lot more now than there were then, but yeah, I was born down in South Florida, lived there until I was about twelve and then me and my family moved to France, just outside of Paris. Really? Yeah.

00:03:26 - Bill Risser

Wow. So let's talk about that for a second. So I made my first trip to Paris this year was there actually for the French open. So we stayed nice. Yeah, we stayed on the west side of Paris because that's where the Rolling Garos is. But we traveled into the city a lot. So describe to me kind of geographically where you lived in relation to the city first. Yep.

00:03:47 - Phillip Gagnon

So we were to the west near Versailles. So if you're familiar with the Chateau Versailles, that's where we were, was like five minutes down the road from there.

00:03:55 - Bill Risser

So first of all, do you speak French fluently?

00:03:57 - Phillip Gagnon

I do, yep.

00:03:58 - Bill Risser

You do? Awesome. And second, I went to an all.

00:04:02 - Phillip Gagnon

French, all boy school in Paris for two years.

00:04:05 - Bill Risser

Wow. So there was no French as a second language class there. I'm just.

00:04:12 - Phillip Gagnon

Not so doing while they were taking English classes, I would go off into the library and take French classes.

00:04:19 - Bill Risser

Gotcha, gotcha get caught up. So was it one of your parents who had an opportunity?

00:04:25 - Phillip Gagnon

Dad. My dad got an offer to go start Era in Europe and the first country they went to was France.

00:04:32 - Bill Risser

Wow, that's great. And this is now things are tying together as some of the research I've done kind of lets me understand where we're going to be headed. So how old were you when you came back over to the States?

00:04:43 - Phillip Gagnon

1617 years old. We were there for like four or five years.

00:04:45 - Bill Risser

So you jumped right into high school here, returning from France. That had to be very interesting.

00:04:52 - Phillip Gagnon

That was quite the culture shock for sure.

00:04:56 - Bill Risser

And it was it Orlando area? Yes. Okay.

00:04:59 - Phillip Gagnon

I've been living here since 98.

00:05:01 - Bill Risser

And your dad was with Era for a long time then, it sounds like. Still is.

00:05:05 - Phillip Gagnon

Yeah, he's still the president of era France and era Europe.

00:05:09 - Bill Risser

We're going to talk more about that in a minute. Let me get your take. You've been in Orlando for a while now. You're still in that neck of the woods. It's known for tourism. I think it's one of the most visited geographical areas in the country every year. It's with all the parks and all the stuff and the weather. Tell me the biggest misconception about Orlando.

00:05:30 - Phillip Gagnon

Number one is that it's just Disney. Like, that's the only thing that's here that's all people see when they come. So that's probably number one. Number two, I hear a lot of people make comments about how backwards it is or they think it's backwards and it's really not. I mean, you get north because Disney's on the south side of town. You get to the north side and you get away from all the tourism. And it's just like anywhere else in.

00:05:49 - Bill Risser

The it talk about Lake Mary and start going north up towards the beaches.

00:05:55 - Phillip Gagnon

Orlando not even that far. I mean, really just north of Orlando itself because Disney's south of it. So like Orlando and north, it's just like anywhere else in the country.

00:06:04 - Bill Risser

I want to give a public service announcement. We're recording this episode late in 2023. And I've lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, for seven years now, and that freeway is finally done. And it is amazing taking I four through Orlando because it's been a nightmare.

00:06:21 - Phillip Gagnon

For it was yeah, the express lanes are a lot better and the beltway is almost done. That's going to change things, too.

00:06:30 - Bill Risser

Such a change. That's awesome. Yeah, I love that part. So you finish high school there, and I know you stay local for school because I've actually been to the UCF campus. It's really cool. It's really nice on the eastern side of the city, the UCF Knights. I have a quick question for you. I don't know if this is going to be good or bad for you, but just a few years ago, they went undefeated and were not in the football playoffs. And I think they beat Auburn in the SEC. Are you still bitter about that?

00:06:55 - Phillip Gagnon

Not so much. I think it just goes to show that no matter what system we come up with, it can always be improved. It can always be better. Definitely should have been in contention or they should have just given them the championship outright. I mean, they were the only undefeated team that year. We could have just skipped the playoff and just give them the trophy and be done.

00:07:14 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that was a big deal. There were some parades and events and some stuff, and I've got budies in the SEC who just couldn't it was just tearing them. Like, what do they think they're doing? I love that part of it. All right, so I'm just going to guess then, when you're in school at UCF, well, this could go one of two ways. One, you were predestined to kind of work in the real estate space. Or two, you were never going to work in the real estate which one which one did you have?

00:07:49 - Phillip Gagnon

It was kind of both. Early on, I had thought about going into politics, and so I was going to go to law school after college. I got the opportunity to go work for a congressman up in DC. And that fixed everything for me really quick. So we got out of thank goodness. Yeah. And then my first job out of college was actually at a mortgage company doing some stuff for them. Got to meet some interesting characters there that we'll I'm sure talk about in a couple of minutes as well. But that was my first job out up until they went out of business in was it 2008, 2009, something like that.

00:08:23 - Bill Risser

Okay. It wasn't with era, it wasn't talking to your dad or you obviously had an in if you wanted to kind of get right into something. So how does that happen? It wasn't really real estate coming out of school wasn't kind of maybe what you were thinking about, but it sounds like with going into mortgage first, it was pretty obvious you were going to go down that path. Yeah.

00:08:45 - Phillip Gagnon

When the company went out of business in 2008, 2009, whatever year it was, I then came really close to actually moving to Portland to go work for Nike and turned that down and ended up working at Erie Europe.

00:08:58 - Bill Risser

Okay. And your focus in school, was it on the tech side of things? Was it?

00:09:03 - Phillip Gagnon

Yeah. Computer science. Information technology.

00:09:05 - Bill Risser

Okay, perfect. Yeah. So I like that, the computer science information technology side of things. It's not just the coding and all that other stuff that kind of goes with it, but it's how to use that, how to be that liaison right. Between the two fields that are always in everyone's company. It's the leadership and then the tech people. You need that bridge. And that's kind of what you came out of there with, right?

00:09:26 - Phillip Gagnon

Yeah, pretty much.

00:09:27 - Bill Risser

Yeah. So let's talk about I think I can say this, I think you end up working with or for your dad because if he's running Europe era and you end up being the era Europe Director of Technology, let's talk about that for a little bit. One at least you spoke French. You're good to go. Yep. But look, they speak more than just French in Europe. So my first question is how did all that know?

00:09:53 - Phillip Gagnon

English is the international business language pretty much around the world. So the folks that I would be dealing with, for the most part all spoke English. And so that wasn't too much of a so the headquarters, without getting into too much of a tangent here, era Europe is not actually part of Anywhere or Realogy or HFS or any of that other stuff. They actually sold off Europe as what they call a mega Master franchise. So we were operating as a franchise that could sell Master franchises. So we weren't tied to Anywhere realogy any of that stuff. The headquarters for Era Europe is in Winter Park, Florida. Here in Orlando. So we would commute to Europe. My dad still does. As a matter of fact, he's there right now doing a three week tour of France. But I was commuting there probably about once every other month.

00:10:39 - Bill Risser

A real estate in every other country outside of the United States and Canada is radically different than real estate here as we go through our own little issues with real estate in the Europe. Yeah. In Europe, Australia, south America. I mean, it's so different everywhere else in the world. First of all, just kind of talk about that little piece of know, like, give us that quick summary of for an agent, listening to you right now would go, oh, wow, they do it that way.

00:11:11 - Phillip Gagnon

Yeah. I mean, there's so many crazy stories. First off, most countries don't have an MLS, so you got to take that off the table. So that dramatically changes things, number one. Number two, the licensing requirements are so different from one country to the next. Some of them, it's just like a business license. Like, you would go to your city and say, hey, I'm a business. Pay your $50, and now you've got a real estate license, and that's what you need to operate. Some of them require four year degrees. It's all over the place. And what's so crazy, and I think what's hard maybe for some Americans to understand is the distance that you would go. I mean, let's just say you're somewhere in New England. You could drive 2 hours in any direction, and with the exception of Canada, you're still in the US. And it's still basically the same stuff. But in Europe, you're going to go through three different countries that all speak different languages and all have different customs and different histories and ways of doing things and cultures, and it's just all so different within a very, very small geographic space, and then you get all the cultural differences that go into that, and it's crazy. One of the best stories that I heard was comparing the Swiss to the Dutch. So the distance from Switzerland to the is I don't know what it is in miles. It's very know. You can kind of cut through France and Belgium, and then you're in the Netherlands. It's right there. The Dutch are big into cooperating with each other, and they're very direct down to business. Like, we're going to do the deal. We're going to get things done. And the Swiss are a little bit more isolationist, and we see this in their politics, obviously, and they're more reserved. We see that in their banking system. So you got all these different things. And where all this comes from is from centuries of agriculture. So the Netherlands, much like Florida, is basically a swamp, right? You've got dikes and streams and stuff everywhere, levees to keep the country out of the water. But in Switzerland, it's very, you know, green pastures. Everybody's got tons of land. So in the Netherlands, if you wanted milk and you didn't have cows or goats, you'd have to barter with somebody to get that. But you had some other product that they needed. So there was a lot of this cooperation with each other. But in Switzerland, you had so much land, you had your own goats, you had your own potatoes, you had your own stuff. You didn't need anybody else. And so that's how business gets done now, is a lot of those same practices that have been going on for thousands of years.

00:13:27 - Bill Risser

Wow. I'm just trying to think of your role. Right. Director of Technology. And how long ago? What time frame are we talking about here?

00:13:34 - Phillip Gagnon

Roughly 2009 ish to 2016. 17.

00:13:41 - Bill Risser

Wow. So we're talking fairly recently when a lot of tech is exploding around our country here in the United States. How much of that were you able to pull in or that worked or that applied to that? I don't want to call it simpler, but was there less complexity with the technology in Europe than it feels like there is here in the States? Or do I have that completely backwards? You can be.

00:14:08 - Phillip Gagnon

So, you know, one of the issues is because there's no MLS, there's really no such thing as, like, buyer's agents.

00:14:16 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:14:17 - Phillip Gagnon

So the only way to do anything is to get listings. So that means everything that we had to do was listing focused, seller focused, and most of what goes on in the US is buyer focused.

00:14:27 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:14:28 - Phillip Gagnon

So it just meant that there really wasn't a lot of stuff that we could borrow from the US. We had to come up with stuff that would work in Europe.

00:14:36 - Bill Risser

That's unbelievable. Yeah. I work for Rate, my agent. We're a company that was born in Australia. Right. Heavy focus on sellers and listings. I think there's a couple of buyer agents floating around somewhere down there. We can't find them, hard to find them, but generally people show up and they do their own due diligence prior to writing the contract. They do all kinds of stuff. It feels backwards. I'm sure they feel we're backwards. It's the way it works. But yeah, very interesting. You end up leaving era Europe and you connect up with Robert Palmer. Now for those in Florida, we know robert Palmer, right? He's big on TV and radio. There was a arena named after him. I've seen him at events like Florida Realtors annual convention with who was there? Derek Jeter or a Rod. Remember those days?

00:15:26 - Phillip Gagnon

Yep, I remember that.

00:15:26 - Bill Risser

Yeah. So how did you end up connecting with the Robert Palmer really? Companies, I guess we'll call it.

00:15:35 - Phillip Gagnon

I laugh because that was actually my idea when I was there. So going back in time, my first job out of school was working for a mortgage company where I was working for Robert, and we were doing Direct Originations. So that company ends up going out of business, I go to Europe, he ends up starting his own mortgage brokerage, liquidates his four hundred and one K, and then becomes a lender fannie Freddie Seller Servicer, which became RP Funding. He had gotten into a spot because he was one of the first people to go direct to consumer with mortgages, and that rubbed a lot of agents the wrong way. And so he had sort of an image problem with agents because agents were starting to talk buyers out of using him and using their preferred lender, because they said, this guy, we don't know him, we can't help you with anything and whatever else they were making up. So he came up with an idea to start a marketing services company to help real estate agents as a way to get back in their good graces. And he had started that before I got there, and then he hired me to come in and run that company. And everything they had been doing up until that point was like one off custom things for real estate agents. And it was great, but it just wasn't scalable. I mean, you could service a maximum of 20 agents, but at that point the company, I think was in 15 or 20 states and growing. And you can't do that. You can't do custom stuff for every single agent. It doesn't work. So we came up with a series of templates and processes and systems which became listing power tools.

00:17:01 - Bill Risser

Yeah. What was the name of the company? Because I think I know. Did it have the word listing in it? Yeah.

00:17:06 - Phillip Gagnon

So the company was listing power tools? No, it was listing power tools and it was designed to help Realtors with listings. And there was a box and you did a whole unboxing thing. It became known as the pizza box.

00:17:17 - Bill Risser

Nice.

00:17:18 - Phillip Gagnon

Yeah, that was that.

00:17:19 - Bill Risser

Okay, cool. So you're there for a little while and then it's back to Era.

00:17:24 - Phillip Gagnon

Yes. I started working for actually an Era franchise here locally. So I was running that operation. We had eight offices, 250 agents, 32.

00:17:32 - Bill Risser

Full time employees, but ultimately we're going to get to the good stuff. Now I say the good stuff. You founded your own company. It's called three data pulse. First of all, usually when you're going to go take that route, we'll call it a startup, you're going to start your own company, you're going to do these things. You're solving someone's pain point. Let's talk about that piece of it. What were you solving for? I'm just going to throw a wild guess out here. People in real estate.

00:17:59 - Phillip Gagnon

So the platform now is designed to help brokers managers and team leaders recruit, retain and coach their agents. And the problem that I had. So being in era Europe and doing master franchise servicing and all of this stuff, I was sort of on the other side of the table. But now running a franchise, I was on the other side. And I had a very different view of what was going on and realized that a lot of the tools that I had even been pushing for years was not necessarily filling the need. So, as I said, we had eight offices. We had a manager in every office, and every office was different. So some of them were really profitable. Some of them were losing money. Some of the managers were great at recruiting. Some of them were great at coaching. And so there was just a whole bunch of different needs in different places. And the truth was that nobody had ever been taught how to recruit, retain, or coach. It was kind of like, hey, you've been an agent and you're good, and people like you. So now you're going to go do this and you'll be great, and you're going to love it's. Fun.

00:18:57 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Skill sets are so different, right? I mean, that's very much. So I'll share a quick story. I'll jump in real quick. It sounds like the title space for me back in the day. I was with Fidelity's family of title companies for 20 years, and the next Escrow officer in line when they needed to find a manager would become the new manager of the office. And that hardly ever worked. Right? Because never being a good escrow officer has nothing to do with being a good manager of people. So you can manage paper really well, but people are alive. Keep going. Yeah.

00:19:30 - Phillip Gagnon

So the big gap that I had was I didn't know how to best help my managers. And it became obvious, and I think most brokerages are guilty of this, is that they pour everything into the agents, but never into the staff. And so you're relying on the staff to develop these agents, to get more agents, to attract more agents, but their cups are empty because they're just drained, and there's nobody pouring into them. And that was the piece that was missing was, how do we help our people get better? Not because they're doing anything wrong or bad or whatever, but just was it? Richard Branson says, you take care of your employees, they'll take care of your customers. Same exact thing. We need to take care of our staff and let them take care of the agents.

00:20:09 - Bill Risser

Yeah. I'm always intrigued by names. So three data pulse. What does that mean? Yeah. What does that mean?

00:20:17 - Phillip Gagnon

So the three is the three pillars recruiting, retaining, and coaching our agents. You do those three things consistently and do them well, everything else kind of melts away. I can remember having conversations about market share and cancellation rates on contracts and stuff, and it's like, this is not what we should be focusing what we should be focusing on is making our agents more productive, making sure that they know what they're supposed to be doing, how to answer questions, deal with objections, and then things like cancellation rate and market share will figure themselves out.

00:20:46 - Bill Risser

Yeah. So you've talked to a lot of brokers then, in your new role here, owning this company. You've got to see probably I would imagine you might audit their company a little bit to say, what are they doing that helps?

00:20:58 - Phillip Gagnon

Absolutely.

00:20:59 - Bill Risser

Keep that recruiting going smart and down the right path, but even more importantly, retaining the people they need to retain. Can you think of a brokerage that you visited and you sat there and you went, wow, you guys are doing you're so close. You're like 95% of the way there. Because I would imagine that would be rare.

00:21:19 - Phillip Gagnon

You'll have different people and you get into bigger brokerages, and then you've got different people that are all doing those three things, but not the same person. But there's definitely companies that are great at recruiting. I mean, just unbelievable. And then there's other ones that are kind of sleepers that we've got one company that we work with that was a 7 million GCI company, and they recruited 1.3 million net GCI in twelve months. And I saw their stuff. It was fine. There was nothing wrong with it. But it wasn't like you read these emails and texts and conversations and say, wow, this is revolutionary, earth shattering stuff. It's like, no, it's just they're having a conversation with people. They're just doing it every day.

00:21:57 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Is culture a word you use a lot even though you're a data guy? And it's all about the algorithms are there and all this other stuff, but it's culture.

00:22:07 - Phillip Gagnon

The biggest thing that we do is sentiment analysis so you can look at data points. But what we're really looking to try and find is emotion because that's what makes people want to change. That's what drives human behavior. So if you think, I can't remember who it was that wrote the book. It's called Switch, and it talks about how people make decisions and how people change and why they change. And it's always emotion driven first and rationalized with logic after the fact.

00:22:33 - Bill Risser

So this is where I'm just going to guess AI is going to get super critical for your company going down the as we continue down this path. Right. Trying to really nail, like, sentiments, the kind of thing that AI is going to be really good at analyzing and going out and kind know, at least I'm just kind of guess here, at least going in and looking at an operation currently, how they work, and come back and say, here are six things, or three things. If you just made these small changes, this could have this kind of a big effect on the other end.

00:23:02 - Phillip Gagnon

It's really not even that granular.

00:23:05 - Bill Risser

Okay?

00:23:05 - Phillip Gagnon

That's very granular. It's really not even that the biggest challenge this is crazy to say, but the biggest challenge that I see companies have is they just don't want to talk to people. Just call your agents. Right. Let's say you haven't talked to an agent in 45 days. That's six weeks. Like a lot can happen in six weeks. What's going on with them? Do you remember their dog's name? Do you remember their kids names? Not that this is going to necessarily make their business better, but it's just that human connection that people are like, okay, I'm here, somebody cares, somebody's paying attention. And that right there is really the key to retention is keeping agents, is just talking to them, as crazy as that sounds.

00:23:44 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Think about all the tech that's dropped in front of the typical brokerage owner or franchise owner, all the stuff that they got to work on and take care of. And ultimately if they just had a system in place that made sure they talked to everybody every two and a half, three weeks or whatever it is, things would be much better off.

00:24:02 - Phillip Gagnon

Absolutely. And it helps everybody. I mean the agents don't feel like they're a line item on a PNL anymore. They don't feel like they're a cog in the machine. They feel like they're a person and somebody cares, number one. Number two, the broker is going to gain such incredible insights the same way I talk to brokers and it absolutely drives the direction of our business based on those conversations. So everybody wins.

00:24:23 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Don't overthink, huh? That's what you're telling me? Philip, just do the right stuff, be consistent, have a system. Yeah, that's great. There are companies out there, we know these new models, right? EXP real fathom United, these companies. That attraction is a big deal. I think they're moving away from the word recruiting. Right. And attraction becomes really important for this model. Talk about those, how you see those working, because the latest Mike Del Predi report, I don't know if you had a chance to see it, but it showed 12,500 agents leaving the big boxes going to the new models and that was very telling over the last twelve months. So what are your thoughts on that?

00:25:05 - Phillip Gagnon

So I did see that and I think what's most interesting in that graph is how many people left? Keller, Williams and I remember the exact numbers but it was something like 1500 people in one quarter left. Kw and the next biggest, pardon the expression, the next biggest loser I think was anywhere with like 500, which is that's a huge disproportionate difference. And I think what we are seeing is a little bit of shiny object syndrome and I think it's a lot know keller, Williams and honestly anywhere BHHS and I think Remax are all guilty of this is forgetting who they were. So when Kw started they were a training company. That was their mission. That's who they were. They had downlines. If you wanted to recruit agents into your team or whatever, they had all of this stuff and. Then they said, well, now we're going to be a leads company, and we're just going to hand out leads. And then that's when EXP started and said, yeah, remember all this stuff that you guys dropped over here? We're going to pick all that up, repackage it, and it's now EXP, but it was what Kw was ten years before, and then Kw says, okay, now we're going to be a technology company, which is just the worst idea because the average agent hates technology. So why you would want to be a technology company to agents does not make sense to me, but what do I know? But that's what I think we're seeing is that model was appealing and people put it down because they thought it wasn't working anymore or whatever, which clearly it did, and everybody's picking that up and running with it.

00:26:35 - Bill Risser

Yeah, it's very interesting to watch that. It'll be something to kind of really pay attention to, I think, over the next couple of years to see where that kind of ends up and goes. Right.

00:26:45 - Phillip Gagnon

And where they evolve.

00:26:47 - Bill Risser

Absolutely. What's the next thing down the road for those models, which there's always got to be something to improve and to get better and to fight off competitors and all that stuff that they have to do in this world to stay successful. Yeah. We have to talk about the lawsuits a little bit. I've been putting it off. I mean, this is actually the first episode I brought it up because I think I felt like it was too fresh to go out and talk to a couple of guests right after we learned a little bit. And it's not been very long. It's five weeks, six weeks. But how do you see the lawsuits? Kind of, first of all, do you think they're going to affect your business at all? Do you have to look at that and go, okay, well, I've got to watch out for these key things because that's kind of important to the conversations I have with people.

00:27:33 - Phillip Gagnon

So I wasn't in the courtroom, obviously, so I don't know all the evidence that was presented. So my comments are going to be somewhat blind, I guess. I would think that brokers and larger companies would want more documentation and proof as to what it was that they were telling their agents, because then when you do get into a courtroom, now, you have proof that says, this is what we said, this is what we told them. And that's a large part of what we do is you train your agents and here's what we trained them on and here's what we told them. Number one, so you can justify your value to them, but number two, from a CYA standpoint, say, no, I told them not to do that, and they did it anyway. And here's the three conversations where I told them not to do it and they decided to do it anyways. I would think companies would want more of that. I would think they would want more proof and they would want more stuff because I don't see, I mean, there's already been more lawsuits filed in this same vein and I expect they'll probably be even more filed in similar veins. So I would think that companies would just want to start documenting everything.

00:28:32 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I mean, you think about it, the latest suits are going after individual brokerages, not franchises, right. And teams, even down to the team level. So yeah, I think it's critical just document the training in place to not do those things that you can't do. Yeah, exactly. Makes perfect sense. Yeah. So Philip, for those listening, especially brokers and owners, recruiting retention really important. What are the biggest things you can do or what are the most important things that you do that really focus in and help them with those tools?

00:29:08 - Phillip Gagnon

Yeah, so the first thing that we do is we pull in as much information from as many different places as, you know, we'll connect to the MLS that'll give you production information. We'll go to your accounting platform, which will give you company dollar agent net, the ratio of their business that's agent generated versus company generated. Because it's important to remind agents of that because sometimes they forget where their business is coming from. But we'll even go a step further to programs like Agent CRMs and see how many phone calls did they make to get those appointments, to get those listing appointments, to get the pendings, to get the closings, all that stuff. Relocation platforms, are they updating the leads that you're giving them, that kind of stuff. So this way, as a broker manager, you've got one spot where you can see everything. You're not having to log into 20 different places to try and get the information. Did I forget one? Whatever. So we try and put everything in one spot, number one. Number two, because all of the communication is transparent across the staff, everybody can see what they told the agent. So I can see that this agent met with the marketing department and the marketing department was pushing this thing, whatever it is. How can I tie that into my conversation? So now the agent's not trying to make me happy by doing what I'm telling them to do and make marketing happy by doing what they're telling them to do. We're going to make everybody happy because we're going to do all of this stuff together. And how does reload tie into that and what does the accounting department need? So it's like one unified conversation as opposed to 15 fire hoses just shooting at the agent trying to get them to do stuff.

00:30:35 - Bill Risser

Yeah. It's hard to think highly of your company when it's kind of there's scattershot stuff everywhere. And that makes perfect sense, right. As an agent, you're thinking, oh my gosh, they're not even talking to each other. There's no way.

00:30:50 - Phillip Gagnon

How does this tie in with that? And where do I fit? Like what am I doing here? And so you spend all day doing all of this administrative stuff as opposed to talking to people and getting listing appointments and meeting with buyers and showing properties, the stuff that makes money.

00:31:04 - Bill Risser

And on top of that, they receive six calls from other brokerages trying to recruit them.

00:31:09 - Phillip Gagnon

On top of all. Absolutely. Yeah.

00:31:11 - Bill Risser

Absolutely. Awesome. Well, Philip, this has been great. I've had you way over me. Let me ask you the final question I've asked every guest. What one piece of advice would you give a new agent? Just getting started.

00:31:23 - Phillip Gagnon

I would say one piece of advice is number one, maybe two things. Number one, understand that this is not a quote unquote side hustle. If that's what you're looking for, then I think a referral company is probably the best way to go because then you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. So if that's what you want, that would be my recommendation. It's going to be cheaper, probably more profitable in the long term. So number one, understanding that this is a career, this is a job, number one. And then number two, having your own goals in mind, very clearly defined. So I want X after twelve months, I want Y after 24 months. I want this after five years. And then being very clear with the companies that you interview with, like how are you going to get me from A to B, from B to C and C to D? What are your tools and systems and processes? What does your track record look like? Have you done this with other people? And then are you going to be able to help me even beyond that? Are you great for newly licensed people, but once I become a top producer, I got to go somewhere else? Or can you help me through the whole lifecycle? What does that look like?

00:32:22 - Bill Risser

Man, that is spoken like a guy who's built a lot of tech stacks. That's awesome. That's a great response. That's very well done. Philip, someone wants to reach out to you. What's the best way for them to do that?

00:32:36 - Phillip Gagnon

Email? Phone? Website? Philip@threepulse.com, check out the website. I can give you my phone number as well. My personal cell phone. Call me anytime.

00:32:45 - Bill Risser

We'll put it in the notes if you want. It's up to you.

00:32:48 - Phillip Gagnon

Yeah, sure. It's on the website so you can find me. Not hard to find.

00:32:54 - Bill Risser

Well, this has been great. I'm really glad we got a chance. I think we hooked up at a bar. It's just the way it always works at those tech summits somewhere. Down in a bar watching a world.

00:33:02 - Phillip Gagnon

Watching game seven, I think it was.

00:33:04 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that's right. And the Rangers end up going on to win the whole thing. So Fort Worth is like the happiest town on earth. Good for them.

00:33:10 - Phillip Gagnon

Absolutely.

00:33:11 - Bill Risser

Well, I really appreciate your time today and really just what you're doing sounds super cool because I don't really know anyone else who's doing that. So, so good on you and continue the great work and best of luck.

00:33:24 - Phillip Gagnon

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

00:33:26 - Bill Risser

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