Real Estate Sessions Rewind - Jay O’Brien, Co-Founder and Chief Day Maker – Client Giant

00:00:00 - Bill Risser

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another Real Estate Sessions rewind episode. This week, we're going back to November of 2022 with Jay O'Brien, the Client Giant founder and chief daymaker. If you're looking for a way to deepen relationships with your clients and drive, unparalleled, repeat, and referral business, you've come to the right place. Enjoy.

00:00:18 - Jay O'Brien

And I'd say when things are going really well, very important to not just ride that wave, but double down and invest in your people. And on the other side of things, when things aren't going so well, it's natural to claw back on expenses, right? I encourage everyone, whether it's Client Giant or anything you're doing, taking care of people or like charities you're donating to, whatever it is, I really encourage people not to claw back there because it's not an expense. It is an investment in so many different ways. And the solution to saving your business during a downtime is not abandoning your customers.

00:01:01 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast. And I'm your host, Bill Risser, executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with RateMyAgent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. 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 335 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As I always say, thank you so much for tuning in, and thank you so much for telling a friend today I'm going to be talking to Jay O'Brien. Jay is the co founder of Client Giant. I saw Jay speak at an imminent event back in 2018, and he talked about how he's providing seven star service in a three star world. And a big piece of that was really taking care of the customer in a very consistent way by delivering value added items to the transaction. I'm telling you, you've got to hear what this is all about. I'm not going to spill the beans here. I'll let you listen in and hear Jay's take on how to take care of clients, how to provide exceptional service, and how to get them talking about you without you even really trying. So let's get this thing started. Jay, welcome to the podcast.

00:02:17 - Jay O'Brien

Thanks for having me, Bill. I appreciate it.

00:02:19 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I met you well, I take that back. I learned of you in August of 2018 when you were doing a presentation for Inman, and it was a really cool presentation. I was an ambassador at the time. I know. I tweeted out a bunch of stuff about it. I thought it was very cool, and we'll get back to that. We will talk about that. I'd love to start, though, at the beginning with my guests. And for you, it's going to be I know you're based in Southern California, more specifically Orange County. Are you a native of SoCal?

00:02:52 - Jay O'Brien

I am. I've never left. If I ever leave it'll be to Hawaii, but I was born here in Orange County, and, yeah, I've never lived anywhere else.

00:03:01 - Bill Risser

Wow. I got to ask you this question, then. Dodgers or Angels? Because you're really close to the Angels, but the Dodgers have a thing.

00:03:08 - Jay O'Brien

Bill, you're not going to like my answer. Oh, no, but the answer is neither because neither of those teams play golf. I'm not a sports guy. I'm not a big fan of either. If I had to choose one, I'd say Angels because I grew up going to Angels games and stuff. So I enjoy going to a hockey game, a baseball game and what have you, but I couldn't tell you what's going on unless it's like the World Series or something got you. And even then it could be dicey.

00:03:40 - Bill Risser

Okay, well, let's switch then. Golf. So you played, like, in school, that kind of golf?

00:03:47 - Jay O'Brien

No, in fact, I used to play once or twice a year, like, on vacation, and it was fun enough, you have some beers with your friends out on a golf course, but in 2020, it was one of the few things you could go do. So I got very addicted to it, and now I play like, three times a week.

00:04:03 - Bill Risser

Nice.

00:04:04 - Jay O'Brien

So I'm addicted to the sport now.

00:04:07 - Bill Risser

And there's some great courses up your way, so I'm sure you've had some fun.

00:04:11 - Jay O'Brien

Yes, absolutely. Beautiful courses.

00:04:14 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Let's talk about a little bit just a little bit more about me because it is its own unique place. It's not La. It's not San Diego. It's Orange County. Besides, well, the amazing weather that Southern California enjoys. Tell me, what do you like best about where you grew up?

00:04:33 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah, one of the reasons it's hard to leave I mean, obviously the weather is the easiest one, but the convenience, I mean, I could go to an Angels game and then be home in 15 minutes. I could go to Disneyland, be home in 20 minutes, san Clemente, La, Long Beach, really all over the place. And in Orange County, it's kind of got the best of everything, especially in the last, I'd say, ten years. There's a big food scene that's popped up, so you don't need to go to La. To get the best restaurants or anything like that. You got great cocktail bars. Everything is really here, great beaches, but it's also very close to Big Bear if you wanted a mountain kind of vibe as well as the desert, like, it's it's so optimized that it's hard to leave it.

00:05:27 - Bill Risser

Well, you got to talk about Balboa Island then. If you're talking about a place that's kind of cool and got some great stuff and really just blown up over the years. Right? Yeah, that's a cool place.

00:05:36 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah, Balboa Island. And also, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Lido Marina in Newport Beach, but that area, it's one of the few harbors I've seen that is just, like, really beautiful. And they did a great job with this one stretch that used to be kind of desolate and blown out. And they did a whole development there. And they've got great restaurants, great shopping. All the stuff right there on the marina. So, yeah, I mean, if you're in Newport Beach, you grab a Duffy, you out with your friends. It's good living.

00:06:04 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I like that. Well, let's talk about business a little bit. You become a realtor around 2010, I think, looking at your history, but you had to be doing something before that. It seems like real estate is always a second gig, or sometimes third gig for some people. What were you doing before?

00:06:21 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah. How much time do you have?

00:06:23 - Bill Risser

As much as you need.

00:06:26 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah. I mean, I've kind of always been addicted to work. I'm a type A personality through and through, so anything I do, like golf, I just go nuts for. So my first job ever, you're going to laugh. I was nine years old, no bullshit. So I went to my local video store, the video rental place, and I begged the owner, Kevin, to give me a job. And he told me a million times, you're too young to work. You can't work here. I was like, I'll work for free. I just want to work here. And eventually I brought my mom in, and she's like, Look, I don't know what to tell you. He wants to work here, he'll work here. He'll do everything he's got to do, and he'll do it for free. And so that entire summer of my fourth grade summer, my mom dropped me off at 09:00 A.m. With a sack lunch. I did everything. I took money in the cashier. I built these cardboard cutouts. I was a full time employee. I worked till 05:00 p.m.. My mom would pick me up, and I did it five days a week, all summer for nothing. He would buy me lunch sometimes or let me take Nintendo games home, but I was just addicted to the work. And so when I was actually able to work when I was 14, that was the first job I could get with a worker's permit. I got a job as a caterer. So those jobs were brutal because there's a lot of manual labor, loading, like, semi trucks, going to company picnics, unloading, doing the whole setup, doing the lunch gig, packing up. So my mom would drop me off at 06:00 A.m. Placentia, and then she'd pick me up at 09:00 P.m. On the weekends. So I'd do that in my freshman, sophomore year of high school, and that was brutal, but I was working, and then from there on went Dairy Queen, Best Buy valet, and I never, ever had a gap in employment. Fast forward to college. I got my bachelor's degree in economics and business administration, and I left eight year tenure at Best Buy, went through their management program, everything great company and lots of good learnings from that company, and decided I wanted to get into corporate America. So 2010, I did that, and it was the only job I needed that required a college degree. And it was the worst job of my life. Wow. It was the most toxic, gnarly environment. I mean, just like backstabbing. I've never seen anything like it. And at that point, I'd been around the block. It wasn't like a green dude from college like, oh, what's this all about? I knew this is know, I stuck that through for about a year and a half. I was interviewing other places, and I got turned on to a lot of authors at that time from a buddy of mine that I was working with. Gary Vaynerchuk, Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, you know, who were just coming out, really, with their first books at the time. Probably not Seth Godin. But I got addicted to the idea that maybe it's not that I have the wrong job. Maybe it's that I don't want a job. Maybe I need to create a job for myself.

00:09:43 - Bill Risser

There you go.

00:09:44 - Jay O'Brien

And one of the easiest paths I shouldn't say easiest, I should say the lowest barriers to entry to do that is real estate. It's one of the few occupations that you can get into for very little money in terms of getting a license and getting up on your feet. You can do a lot of the grind through your hard work as opposed to needing money to get started. And what I did was I got licensed. A friend of a friend who survived through the recession was opening up a remax brokerage. I talked with him, and I became his very first agent. And basically I knew it was going to be a grind to make that jump. And so I left my corporate job to go back to Best Buy, which was very humbling. And the reason I did that was because if you work retail, you can work all hours, right? You can work super early. You could work really late. So I could still get 8 hours a day, five days a week with a super flexible schedule while doing real estate 8 hours a day. So that's what I did. I started the day at 06:00 A.m.. I worked about till 02:00 P.m. Doing real estate. And then I'd go to Best Buy and work there until ten or eleven at night. And I did that for eight months until finally it got to a point where I had closed, I think, three deals in those eight months. And so I had enough to say, okay, I'm going to make this leap. And then in the next eight months, I did like 14 deals. So it made a lot of sense to take that time and put it into real estate. And that was 2011.

00:11:33 - Bill Risser

2012 ish nine year old Jay came back and decided to do whatever it took to get it working.

00:11:41 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah, I'm no stranger to the hard work. That's awesome.

00:11:44 - Bill Risser

I love that. I want to bring up that inman Connect again. It was in August. Was it in San Francisco, or was it the first one in Vegas? It might have been San Francisco.

00:11:54 - Jay O'Brien

The last one, if you're talking about August 2018, that was San Francisco, and I had done another inman Talk prior to that January 2018 in New York.

00:12:04 - Bill Risser

Okay, got you. So I think it was the San Francisco one I saw. And yeah, first of all, how did you get the gig to give the Talk at? I mean, it's not a closed space, but they don't put out know calls for speakers. Generally. Somebody knows somebody. How did you get that connection first?

00:12:25 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah, so this path was basically this kind of all ties together. So I'll rewind when I became a full time real estate agent. You do everything you can. You do anything and everything for a deal, right? I mean, I was going back to the nine year old Jay, like Grinder. I would go on Craigslist on Friday nights, and I'd look up every garage sale in the area, and then I'd run those addresses against tax records to see if that person owned or rented their house. And then I'd just say, hey, if they're having a garage sale, maybe they're looking to sell their house.

00:12:56 - Jay O'Brien

And then I'd reach out to all those people and doorknock them and just see what I could shake loose. Now, nothing ever came of it, but that's not the point. The point is you have to try everything, right? So I was trying everything, doing everything. And like many people do, once you close a deal, you ask for a review, hopefully you post that on your website, it goes on yelp, Zillow, whatever.

00:13:18 - Jay O'Brien

And after a couple of years of this, it was about 2013, 2014, when I think a lot of agents I mean, not just agents, people in every industry, people in life suffer from imposter syndrome, right? So even when you're doing well, you think, yeah, but I'm not that great. I'm going to get figured out. You know what I mean? And for me, it was very real, because at the end of the day, if you said, why hire Jay instead of the agent down the street? You could say whatever you want, I'm more knowledgeable, I have better service, whatever. But it's like, yeah, I mean, to the layman who's just online, you're the know, and you might never even get to have that conversation, which is, I guess, even more of the yeah.

00:14:07 - Jay O'Brien

So I started to comb through these reviews, these five star reviews on Zillow of myself, right, to see what are people saying? Is there anything unique in there that they actually do perceive to be different above and beyond the competition? So there's things that are commending me for how punctual I am organized knowledgeable about the area, and I'm like, Shit, man, I'm in trouble. Anyone could do those things, right? So it really kind of put things to the test where I was thinking, okay, well, what are things I can implement that are going to make my business truly defensible? Where not only can I grow the business and sell more homes every year and see success there, but be defensible so that some of these tech companies that are coming in aren't going to wipe me off the face of the planet. And it ultimately came down to remembering my first real estate experience, which was awful. And it just boiled down to customer service.

00:15:08 - Jay O'Brien

When we go to an insane hotel, like an Amon resort or like a Ritz Carlton or something, where they see every detail, montage, where there's gifts in your room when you get back from the pool and they've just covered every little detail. It makes you feel special. It makes you feel a certain way, you remember it. And when you're made to feel special, you'll tell anyone who will listen. And I figured, well, I already do that in a lot of segments of my life. I'm a very philanthropic person. I believe overly generous with my time and money, and that's just in my nature. It's how I was brought up.

00:15:45 - Jay O'Brien

And I think I'll just double, triple, quadruple down on that in the real estate space. So I started to dissect, what would that look like? What would it look like to just have an insane experience? And I started to write down pain points. What sucks about moving, buying moving boxes sucks when you go to U Haul or Home Depot. That's annoying. It's costly, but it's more annoying. It might not even fit in your car. Transferring your utilities and your forwarding of address and all these things and the stress that it carries all the while while the loan's going on, all these things.

00:16:19 - Jay O'Brien

So I just started thinking, what are ways to fill the pits and raise the peaks through a customer journey with me when they hire me? And so I started to implement a lot of those things. And so there'd be things going out to my clients constantly. None of it had any marketing that would tie back to me. None of it had any branding on it. It was just genuine, thoughtful things. The way I would treat my friends to help the experience be amazing, like a montage. So fast forward and this starts to really pick up steam. And my clients are posting all about it on Instagram and social media tagging me, and I'm talking 30 days post close.

00:16:58 - Jay O'Brien

They would get a call from my favorite local restaurant. Hey, congratulations on the sale or purchase of your home from 30 days ago. Jay wants to send you and your husband, you and your wife, you and whoever, dinner for two on him, round trip transportation included. When can you come? And that would all get done in 30 days. Post closed. They're taking pictures of themselves having dinner. Tagging me all things I didn't ask for, because I just really wanted to make the experience amazing. But it doesn't take a genius to know that what goes around comes around. And pretty soon, this was fueling an army of repeat and referral business from Raving fans. Raving fans that turned passive referrals of what once was probably, yeah, you should use Jay. He was great.

00:17:40 - Jay O'Brien

This is the only guy you should call. If you're thinking about working with someone else, you're wrong, hire him kind of stuff. So that helped thrive the business. This is all a long winded way of getting to answering your question. No worries. So in 2015, that kind of put a few things on the map for me, and I was named 30 under 30 by the National Association of Realtors, summer of 2015.

00:18:02 - Jay O'Brien

So with that, there's more articles going out, interviews, podcasts weren't so heavy back then, but lots of panels. I was asked to be on lots of panels. I kept sharing my story and basically just giving everyone the playbook. This is what you should do. This is what I do. And people would write it all down. And pretty soon, I forget how Inman came about, but they asked me to be on a panel.

00:18:29 - Jay O'Brien

So I did a panel in 2016. Then I did another one, then I did another one, and then I finally said, hey, let me get the stage. I want 15 minutes uninterrupted to talk about this. And that was in January 2018 when I did one in New York called delivering. Seven star service in a three star industry and still on YouTube, and I break everything down. And it was actually in that moment on that trip, that I realized I've been talking about this on panels for so long.

00:19:00 - Jay O'Brien

I've been sharing this with at that time, I was a co owner of a Remax franchise with, like, 20 agents. So I was telling them everything to do, and I was like, you know what? You could tell anyone how to get a six pack, right? But they don't have one.

00:19:16 - Jay O'Brien

Not because there's a shortage of information. It's a shortage of execution, right? So in thinking about that, it kind of just dawned on me, like, what if we just did this for people? What if I could automate this for people and they would never have to think about it? Because I believe that most people, if they said, yeah, I love everything you're doing, if I could press a button and it would do it, I would do it. And that's how Client Giant was born. So it was all a byproduct of everything that had been done years prior, right? So then In Min asked me to come back again in August 2018 to do another solo speaking gig.

00:19:54 - Bill Risser

Wow. Let me see how good I am at remembering because, look, I was one of those people who was blown away by what you were doing and really just how sincere and authentic you were on stage about it. This is not some gimmicky thing, and you better be really damn consistent with what you're doing because if someone's going to rave about you, they're going to be expecting those same things right. When they get referred. I know there was a bottle of wine when you're pretty sure the deal was going to go all the way through moving boxes. The emergency moving kit. Dig that. That was toilet paper towels, a Domino's gift card, if I remember right. Sweet.

00:20:35 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah.

00:20:36 - Bill Risser

And then there were some things that happened. I thought these were amazing, a handyman showing up when they're moving in or right after they move in to see if they could do anything. A gardener that you worked with to help kind of clean up the place if they needed any help. There the mobile car wash. I mean, these things are amazing. And as you're laying them out, me, much like most people in the audience, are probably just running a little tab on how much all that costs.

00:21:02 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah.

00:21:02 - Bill Risser

And talk about that because you had.

00:21:04 - Jay O'Brien

A very clear yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah.

00:21:06 - Bill Risser

You had a very clear message about where you spend your money for marketing or where do you spend your money as a realtor.

00:21:14 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah. So first and foremost, I never spent any money on the cold marketing, so I didn't do the flyers, the postcards, the just sold the cold leads for a few reasons. One, lots of it's a waste of money. Works for a lot of people, whatever. But two, and probably more importantly, is I didn't want them. I don't want the cold leads. Honestly, I don't want a hot lead of someone who I don't know because there's a huge chance they're going to be a royal pain in my ass. Right. And they're just going to grind me on commission right out of the gate. Challenge my knowledge. It's not an enjoyable phone call. What I want is your best friend Bill. You know what I want? I want built in forgiveness right out of the gate. I want that validation and trust where your friend just goes, look, I don't want to do the shopping. Bill said, you're the guy, so let's get it going. That's what he wants and that's what you know, the thing is we forget is that clients, they don't want to shop either. Like, the last thing I want to do is shop for a right. Or a new couch or anything. I want someone to be like, this is the couch to buy, this is the GC to hire. And I don't want to shop anyone because I just want it done. So if the client wants that and if your favorite source of business are referrals, what are you doing for that. So I knew I'm happy to put the money there. Now, I think it's easy to say for those because this is like nationwide, right? And so people go, okay, here's a real estate agent from Orange County, California, talking about how good he is at taking care of clients. It doesn't take a genius to realize he's got the money to do it. That's wrong. So here's the deal. I was never a luxury agent or anything like that. In fact, my specialty was really buyers and first time buyers. So back in 2015 I mean, go back 2012, 2013, I'm talking I was doing $140,000 condos, $300,000 houses. A big deal for me would be something over five. But here's the thing is, like, on a 500K deal, if you're going to get $12,500 after split, maybe it's 910, whatever, still $9,000, right? So it's like, to me, will I drop $1,000 into a client that just made me ten every day of the week? I will not even think twice about it.

00:23:30 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:23:31 - Jay O'Brien

And most people don't operate from that space because, holy shit, that's $1,000. And there's no certainty there. I know well enough that on the macro level, if you did that 100 times, you're going to make way more money than what you put out. So I was happy to do it, and all of those things left an impact. So now if someone's going to go look up something, they're not getting their cars washed and a handyman at their house and all this luxury concierge service from just the next guy down the street.

00:24:02 - Bill Risser

That's awesome. Let's talk about Client Giant. You walk away from this experience. You mentioned knowing, wow, this is a pain point I can solve, which is what every entrepreneur is looking for, right. How can I create something unique that has an audience? It's been around since 2018. 2019 ish right. But you're also doing more than just the things we laid out for realtors. You're also doing some things in other verticals or also annual kind of things. Talk about the different I'll call them flows, right? That client Giant has.

00:24:39 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah. So Client Giant, when we launched, which was in the middle of 2018, it was a client care automated system, so primarily comprised of a two pronged approach and heavily used by real estate and mortgage professionals. One of those was called, and still is to this day, real estate transaction packages. That's what delivers the experience. So everything we've talked about, like the moving boxes, the dinner, all the stuff that's happening on a cadence of touches throughout a deal, that would be a transaction package.

00:25:11 - Jay O'Brien

So that was one series of services launched, and the second one is for client retention. So what about all the past clients? What about all the people that have already trusted you? What are you doing with them? Most people are doing like, a market update or whatever, which there's nothing wrong with that. That stuff's actually great, but it lives in a different world. It lives in a marketing bucket, right? You're sending out marketing materials, which are great. People appreciate them, but what I'm talking about is a hospitality bucket. What are you doing to just show people you care in a selfless way that does not point back to you? Again, something I did since 2012, quarterly gifts to all my clients.

00:25:51 - Jay O'Brien

Not little chotchkis, not little pop buys actual gifts. So, like, the first one I ever did in January of, I think, 2012 or something, was an umbrella. So it went out to, like, 50 past clients and just said it was in January. And it's like, hey, if you don't have an umbrella, keep this in your car.

00:26:10 - Jay O'Brien

If it rains, you're set. And if you already have one, if you catch someone out in the rain without one, pull over and give it to them. And I used to keep dozens of umbrellas, and I'm in Southern California. It rains like, twice every two years. And you should see the look on someone's face when you pull over and hand them an umbrella. They honestly think you're about to stab them to, like it's sad.

00:26:30 - Jay O'Brien

No one thinks that, oh, my God, this person is going to give me something I need right now. So that part of Client Giant is called Top of Mind, or Top of Mind Plus, which is what I call plugging your active leaks. If it's conceivable that anyone you've worked with in the past could hire someone else, unbeknownst to you, that's a leak. You need to plug it every three months, drip on them with something authentic, and that will take care of itself. So that's how Client Giant came out of the gate in 2018. And since then, yes, a lot of it has evolved. So there's all kinds of stuff in the world of real estate. We've got the looking box for people who just signed up a new home buyer, the listing package for anyone who just got a listing, one off gifts.

00:27:13 - Jay O'Brien

One of my favorite ones is Situational gifting, meaning once your clients are imported in the portal, everything's designed to be, like, one touch, because your payment information is in there. We curate the gifts, we write the messages, we know the address of the client. You don't have to do anything. There's no e commerce checkout like you're used to. You literally say, Bill just had a baby. One click, new baby gift, and you don't have to think about anything. Oh, this person got COVID. One click, get well soon box goes to their house. And so that came about. And then a ton of different series of client retention plans for the legal space. Medical, nonprofit, financial services.

00:27:49 - Jay O'Brien

It's all on there. And now there's an entire division of the company that is from employer to employee. So that really hit during COVID when people were deemed essential or nonessential couldn't. Go to work. There was a lack of connection with their employers, and this was a way to stay connected and show them that you're thinking about them. So employers started gifting their employees, and now if you go to the clientgiant.com website, you'll see a client care section of everything and employee happiness section of love.

00:28:22 - Bill Risser

I would guess that you've got some case studies about the success of client giant. I'd love to hear one of your favorite success stories, like an agent who had come back to you to say, thanks, Jay, for doing this. Guess what happened to me.

00:28:37 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah. So this is interesting because when we came out of the gate, we said, hey, we're your secret weapon. So we didn't expect people to want to talk about know, because if I was using a service like this, I might not want the competitor down the street to know. I think it's safe to say that for the most part, that hypothesis was wrong because people share us all the time and they're happy to tell people and share the love of what their secret sauce is. So that's been cool because it has triggered a lot of member case studies, member testimonials, and a lot of shared client reactions. So what is the recipient doing? How are they reacting? That will get shared with us. And we have these on our website. It's a bottomless. If you scroll, you could scroll forever and see client reactions and then a ton of member testimonials of people that we don't really reach out to them. They say, oh, my God, this changed my business. It saved me so much time. Or my ROI on top of mine alone is like 2000%. That's no exaggeration. I hear 1000, 802,000% more often than I hear, like triple digits. I hear four digits. And it doesn't take a genius to see it because if you did the math, if I'm making $10,000 on a deal as a real estate agent and I put 100 people on top of Mind for $99 a person, that's $9,900 I'm spending call. Ten grand, that's going to get 100 people that know me, like me, and trust me, one gift every quarter, that's 400 unique touches. What do you think is going to happen every quarter when 100 people get a random gift? You think your phone's going to ring, you think some things are going to happen? Let's say that 399 of those touches went terribly wrong and only one generated referral. You broke even. Right. So it's very hard to lose money on top of mind. Yeah. As far as cases, one of my favorite ones actually came in yesterday. Let me read it to you. Internally, we have a slack channel here, and we have a shout outs channel, and it's just constantly posts of shout outs from people. And yesterday one just came in while you and I were on the phone. Two came in while you and I were on the phone. This one came in yesterday, by the way. Close. This is from a member of ours, by the way. Closed a deal last week off a Client giant recipient about one hundred K in revenue. Thank you. Client giant. That's in the financial services space. They're bottomless. They're all over the place and they're all over our website, too. And there's not like a ton of them because we probably should do a better job of asking for them. But they're the ones that people email us with something like this. And we go, hey, are you cool with us putting this on the site? They go, yeah. Then it's on there.

00:31:25 - Bill Risser

Wow. Jay, I'm just going to guess that this strategy works in every possible market, right? We're shifting right now. We came out of this crazy pandemic market that Hoop could have predicted, and now things are changing. I would assume this is important in all of those.

00:31:40 - Jay O'Brien

It is. I'm happy that you mentioned that because at the end of the day, no one ever went broke from giving, right? And I'd say when things are going really well, very important to not just ride that wave, but double down and invest in your people. And on the other side of things, when things aren't going so well, it's natural to claw back on expenses, right? I encourage everyone, whether it's Client giant or anything you're doing, taking care of people or like charities you're donating to, whatever it is. I really encourage people not to claw back there because it's not an expense, it is an investment in so many different ways. And the solution to saving your business during a downtime is not abandoning your customers. That is not the solution. So we have a mixed bag there. I think when people join Client giant, it's sometimes for one of two reasons. The first is my least favorite reason, where it's nothing but selfish and it's a campaign. Okay, so here's the deal. We're going to put 100 people on this. We're going to measure it for six months. If we don't hear back from these people, this and that. And I'm like, dude, if you hear from them or you don't hear from them, you're making their day. And you can better believe they're talking about you in a certain way. Whether you hear about it or not. The way I compare it is like, who's your favorite author, who's your favorite musician of all time that has changed your life? Have you ever written them a letter and told them probably not, but you're probably telling everyone who will listen about them. So that's my least favorite reason is the selfish one, but it happens. And then the second one is people that are like, I don't really care how it comes back, I just want to do it because that's just who I am. What ends up happening is once someone uses Client giant for a while, they start seeing the effects of both. They start to see the selfish outcome of the inevitable ROI you are receiving from it, as well as how good it feels to be taking care of people. So, yes, to answer your question, Bill, very important in every market, okay? I don't even sell real estate anymore, right? Those clients I've told you about from 2012, when this all started, I was doing it manually. I have all of those people still on top of Mind, and sure, I own the company, but it still costs me money, and it costs me a lot of money. Right. I'm still sending them stuff, and I don't even sell real estate anymore.

00:34:11 - Bill Risser

Jay, this is great. It's time for the final question. I asked this of every guest going back to summer of 2015, one of your landmarks milestones. But the question is, what one piece of advice would you give a new agent just getting started in the business?

00:34:30 - Jay O'Brien

This is a question that I didn't read, Bill. There's so much racing through my mind right now, but this is probably going to be a ton of things instead of one thing. But one of the first things I would say is that if you want to follow successful people, one of the very first steps people take is to say, I'm going to do what so and so did, because that's what they did when they got started. That's what I'm going to do. I would challenge that advice a little bit, because times change, right? So if you talk to someone 30 years ago, they're like, you need to be out there flyering your farm every Saturday. That's how I got my and it's like if you follow those footsteps, you're probably never going to pierce through the noise. Right. For me, and to this day, the way I sell is the way I want to be sold to. So you can find people that are making 2 million a year calling expired listings, right? And you can find people doing fizbos and all these different things. But I would highly encourage people to test the waters and lean into what they like to do. Because if you don't like to do it, it is not going to be sustainable. Just like a diet that gets cheated on, right. You really need to get comfortable in a way that you feel like, this is me, this is my personality, and lean heavily into that. So if you're not a doorknocking kind of person, don't doorknock. Find something, though, that is effective, that you enjoy, that's not ultra passive, and get into it. And the other piece of advice I'd give is throw yourself into the fire sooner rather than later. You're never going to have all the information, so stop it with the bullshit trainings and the webinar after webinar after webinar. The only way you're going to get ready is to throw your ass into the fire and to just get in those uncomfortable conversations where you have to say, I don't know, or I will figure it out. That is the expedited way to get closings.

00:36:30 - Bill Risser

Wow, Jay, this has been great. What's the best way for someone to reach out if they wanted to get in touch with you?

00:36:38 - Jay O'Brien

Yeah, so I'd say the best way for Client Giant is to go to the website Clientgiant.com. There is a live chat feature on there. We have the best customer service that I've ever experienced, ever. You will get a live person inside of 1 minute during business hours. I'm not on any social media bill at all, haven't been for years. So to get a hold of me, I do have a LinkedIn and I check it infrequently, but I do check it. So Jay O'Brien on LinkedIn. You can find me there, and we can do a special little promo for your listeners, too. So if you sign up on Client Giant, you schedule a call with someone, or they call you. Here's three options for you on Top of Mind. What I recommend for agents is get started immediately on Top of Mind to plug your Active leaks. Right. That's very important. I recommend being bullish with this sample size the same way I use the 100 person example, and very difficult to lose on that. Think about that. Think about what market you're in. Think about what a referral is worth, and think about how you want to lean in. If you're going to put ten people on top of Mind, don't expect it to work straight up. I mean, it might work, right, but it's like sending out ten postcards. You want to lean pretty heavily into it, have a good enough sample size. And if you do that and you plug your Active leaks, there's a couple of benchmarks that we'll do for your audience. So at 25 people put 25 people on Top of Mind, you'll get a free Top of Mind plan, a 26th for free. Okay. If you put 50 people on, you'll get a free gold package. That's the transaction package I was referring to, where there's a series of touches that go throughout the whole deal. We'll do a gold package, which is $349, by the way. We'll do it for free, and that's six touches on that, and then 100 or more. We'll do a platinum, and the platinum is really cool because there's a touch in there that's called a gift, catered to your clients interests, meaning the gift that goes out to them is specifically to them. So Bill would probably get some padre stuff, and you see everything well in advance. You get a two day notification prior to every touch, but that one is $599. So you put 100 people on top of Mind, which you should do anyway. You get $600 to try out a package for free.

00:38:50 - Bill Risser

Nice.

00:38:51 - Jay O'Brien

Just mention Bill riser's name.

00:38:54 - Bill Risser

Awesome. First time I've ever had that happen I love that. Jay, thank you so much for your time today. Really enjoyed the conversation. And I just can't stress enough how I think you just hit it out of the park at Emmin. It was just fantastic and it was my first chance to see you one on one. And it was what a great job and continued success with client Giant moving forward.

00:39:17 - Jay O'Brien

Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it.

00:39:18 - Bill Risser

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