Destroy Your Competition With the Best CRM for Investors in 2021 | Sharad Mehta

In this episode, Dalyn Hazell sits down with Sharad Mehta to talk about CRMs,  how to use CRM effectively, managing and closing lead.

Sharad Mehta is the founder of REsimpli, a very active real estate investor. Sharad has done over 400 deals in the last 6 years since he became a full-time real estate investor and over the years he has developed systems to automate many parts of his real estate investing. Sharad is a very active investor in the Lake County, Indiana market and he manages his entire business from Carlsbad, California, where he lives. Using the systems that Sharad has developed, he is able to manage 3-4 rehabs a month from a distance.

Key takeaways from this episode:

-How Sharad got into real estate investing

-Why did he develop a software program

-How a good CRM allows to efficiently follow up with leads

-Why is it important to have a CRM in your business

-How REIsimpli allows investors to beat out their competition in terms of follow up

-Why is it important to track KPI

-How important are tasks to a real estate investor

-How accounting functions and reassembly help real estate investors

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Connect with Guest, Sharad Mehta:

Website: https://resimpli.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharad-mehta-resimpli

Connect with the Host, Dalyn Hazell:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dalyn.hazell/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dhazell24/

Email: dalyndhazell@gmail.com

Transcript

Introduction  0:00  

This is the real estate investing for Freedom podcast, where we bring on the experts to teach you the golden nuggets of real estate investing, so you can escape the rat race and start living life on your terms. Now, here's your host Dalyn Hazell.

Dalyn Hazell  0:22  

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the show. In today's podcast, I sit down with Sharad Mehta, and we talk all about CRMs using your CRM effectively, and closing leads because the last thing we want to happen is to pay all this money in marketing to get the leads and then not know how to manage them or close them or follow up with them in a proper manner. So Sharad knows a lot about this. He's been a buy-and-hold investor for over a decade in the Chicago area. He was on the bigger pockets podcast before it blew up and got really big. And also, he is the founder of reassembly, which is an amazing real estate investing CRM that I use personally for the last about eight months. And it's allowed me to really grow my company and keep up with my leads. And this episode is going to be about you customizing your CRM and making it work for you rather than work against you. And we're not going to pitch you on reassembly, although we will talk about that CRM, whatever CRM you use, make sure you're using it to its utmost effectiveness. And that leads me into today's golden nugget of the day. Today's gold nugget is to make sure you are using your CRM to its full capacity. I had a deal recently close. That is pretty hilarious. Because we took in the call from the seller, the seller called in and immediately hung up or we just couldn't get it to an appointment and they ghosted us. And so, I tried to call back multiple times and couldn't reach her. Well, then I put her on an automatic text drip sequence, which if you don't know what that is, basically, I had created these text templates beforehand, that will fire off a text message to her at specific increments. And after I thought about the third or fourth text, she responded, what would be a fair offer?'' And that got the conversation going. And I would have lost that lead had I just given up and not had that automatic text sequence feature in there. So it turns out, we closed the deal at a price that was fair to both of us. And we sold it for a $30,000 wholesale profit. So we closed on it as a wholesaler. And then we sold it on the MLS for a $30,000 profit. So that feature alone in my CRM made me $30,000 Just right then in there. And so that's why today's golden nugget is to implement, implement, implement, and follow up with your leads in your CRM. Because if you are not following up consistently, or have some feature in place, to follow up with those leads, whether it's a person or automation, you're gonna miss out on big money. And I always prefer to have a person touching that prospect sequentially. But if you can't get a hold of the person, then you can flip on the automation, although automation is the last resort. And so, yeah, guys, I hope you gained something from that golden nugget of the day and you start implementing that process in your business. Because it sure was worth it for me. And that was just one instance of that. So with all that being said, I'm going to usher in today's guest, which is Chirag Mehta, he's talking all about how to destroy your competition with your real estate CRM. Thanks for tuning in. Welcome to the show. Sure, Rod, how are you doing today?

Sharad Mehta  4:05  

Good Dylan. How are you? Man? I'm so happy to be on the podcast. Yeah. Looking forward to talking.

Dalyn Hazell  4:10  

Yes, I'm very happy to have you on as well. I don't know if any of them but Schrott is the founder and owner of re simply it's a CRM for real estate investors. And we're gonna dive into that as well during the show. But before all that, sure, Rod, can you introduce yourself and give a little backstory on how you got started in real estate investing?

Sharad Mehta  4:32  

Yeah, absolutely, man. So I am Sharad. I live in Toronto, Canada, and I got started in real estate investing full-time. I bought my first property in 2010. And, I started right full time in 2011. I started out buying rental properties for a good two, three years and then during that time, I also started selling some properties to Australian investors especially because of the exchange rate, the Australian Dollar was super strong against the US dollar back in that time. And I was living in Chicago then. So I started investing in Northwest Indiana, right out to Chicago for anybody to start, literally 3045 minutes drive from downtown Chicago. That's where I live. So from there, I transitioned into fixing flip, investing. And then from there, we started doing some turnkey properties. And I started my own property management company not too long ago. And in 2015, I moved to San Diego, and I still had my business in Northwest Indiana. So that's when I started looking into the software I could use to manage my business. And that's when recently was born a couple of years later in 2017. So that's, what we focus on full time now really simple, and I still haven't fixed and flipped business in Northwest Indiana.

Dalyn Hazell  5:55  

Okay, so you started out in fix and flip. But then when you moved, you discovered, hey, I'm going to need the systems and programs in place to manage this business from afar. So why did you take the approach of developing your own software system versus just piggybacking off of somebody else's? I'm just curious there.

Sharad Mehta  6:15  

Yeah, absolutely. So I used to be an accountant before I left my job. So data tracking has always been a very important part of it, especially when I moved from Chicago to San Diego, I wanted to be able to make decisions based on the data in my business, and not based on my gut feeling when I would go and look at a property ever talk to someone, it was different, but I wanted to move away and take emotions out of it and just strictly be able to make decisions based on the data. And as I started looking at, what options I had, there was not something that was simple to use, , I would have to put a lot of things together in order to get the information I needed. And then everything else like managing my leads, managing my projects, and everything else related to it would be like multiple software pieces. So, that's why we decided to start recently, and it's gotten to where it has now, which is very exciting.

Dalyn Hazell  7:14  

Yeah, definitely, I think there are so many programs out there. And they all do different things. But if you can get it in one package, track your flips, track your leads, follow-ups, and so forth, which we're gonna get into, then you just save a lot of time and effort, and money really on subscriptions. So I want the main topic of the show to be how investors can beat out their competition with a good CRM, okay? Because a good CRM will allow you to efficiently follow up with leads, it'll allow you to save costs on subscriptions, it'll allow you to track your project projects all under one roof. So that's the main thrust of our show. So I just want to dive into how to do that? How does it, first of all, allow us to beat out our competition in terms of the follow up because I'm an avid user of re simply but I'm just curious, your take on that, how it allows investors to beat out their competition in terms of follow up.

Sharad Mehta  8:19  

Yeah, I think one thing that any investor noses and I'm sure they've heard tons of other people say this as money is in the follow-up, it does happen, every now and then you'll get a lead, you'll get a solid seller call you and say, Hey, Elena says, Joe, I have this property. I'm a motivated seller, it's worth 200,000. I'm ready to sell for 100, it does not happen to that extreme, but it does happen where the numbers just make sense. And you, go and buy that property. So I would say but less than like 15 20% but the big majority of your deals are coming from follow up, I always like to give an example of think about, let's say if you're not even in the market to buy a car but let's say you get a postcard from one of your local Toyota or a Honda dealership right once a quarter nothing. We just get a simple postcard saying hey, we have this end-of-year sale going on via Q one sale, whatever, holiday it might be to have a sale going. So you don't do anything. You don't pay attention, but you just throw it out. But let's say a year and a half down the road, your car breaks down and you're in the market to buy a car. What happens is, just instinctively you will think about that Ryota dealership or Honda dealership, if you're in a market to buy, car at that price point or whatever kind of car they might have. So they haven't done anything. . You didn't even need to buy a car a year ago, but all they did was just keep sending you a postcard. Right? That's what it is with the follow-ups. All you're doing is you're just playing. They proceed in the seller's mind saying, hey, whenever you're ready to sell your house, I'm here to buy that. So again, sometimes it will happen that they will call and say or taxi and say, Hey, I'm ready to sell, but most of the time, they're not ready. Sometimes they'll call you and say I'm not interested, you just put them on a simple drip campaign, it could be good to follow up with them. Through direct mail postcards,  what most of the people do is, they would put them on a text follow-up, and they would call them or RVM email depending on how much information they have. But just the simple thing is you're staying on their radar, that's it, you're just letting them know, Hey, Mr. Seller, whenever you're ready to sell, I'm here to buy, just let me know. And then, maybe we buy properties in Northwest Indiana, maybe in the summertime or early fall, people might not want to sell but they get a bad winter strong, their furnace breaks down, and then, there's water in the basement in the area nearby. And they're like, what I'm done with this, I'm gonna move down to Florida or wherever at a warmer place. And then a lot of things be noticed people would keep the postcard that we sent them, they would call that they would call us or we would keep sending them text messages or calls, whenever they're ready, they will call us back and say or text us back, Hey, are you still looking to buy the property. So that's a huge, huge part of buying properties is the follow-up and just staying persistent with following up with the lead? 

Dalyn Hazell  11:33  

Yeah, so much of real estate investing, at least off market transactions is follow-up. And I mean, a lot of investors should know this already. But only about 5% of your conversions, your sales are going to happen on the first touch. So if you give up a follow-up, and maybe you're just keeping track of it on a piece of paper, or whatever, and you're not effectively doing this, you're going to miss out on 95% of potential deals. So I think that's what's so great about your program. And we're not saying you have to use one program over the other, we're just saying get a program that does this for you, that allows for the constant follow up. Sometimes it's automated, like you said, an automated drip sequence text campaign. But we shouldn't. I know, we live in technological times, but we shouldn't expect the software to do everything. For us. It's great to have. But we should all also give that personal touch to everyone's wild, the manual phone call to check on our sellers and see if they are now interested in selling. And I guess I should have backed up at the beginning and kind of explained what a CRM is. I think a lot of people know by now, but it's the customer relationship manager. And this that's exactly what we're talking about. So one piece of that is the lead management follow up once another piece of at least your program that really set you apart in your market, was it the project management, there are so many pieces to the program, what are some other pieces that set you apart in your market when you started using your program.

Sharad Mehta  13:02  

I think there's a couple of things. One is everything that you need is built-in, our thought process was, like, we want to serve real estate investors, we want our users to focus just on real estate investing, we don't want them to worry about, integration, if they were using Podio, and any other program that they have to do this integration so that one piece we wanted to take out was just really real estate investors, just log in, do whatever you're absolutely best at which is closing deals, everything else on the technology side, we will take care of. So that one part is like Eli again, you don't need to call rail. It's all built-in, your phone system, it's all fully integrated, you just log into one, again, your lead management, your follow-ups, your direct mail, your less stacking, all of that is very tan. So it could literally be up and running in a minute. And then the other part is because of all of that the amount of data that we can provide you about your business. You were talking about how an investor, especially the market, stands out from the competitors. The simple thing is like the more data the more information you have about your business, the better decisions you can make. There's one thing people talk about, oh, I do million dollars in revenue.  Why is that great? But the question is, okay, you do million dollars in revenue, how much money do you actually make at the end of the day? , is it more important to do million dollars in revenue and only have a net profit of $100,000? Or is it better to only make $800,000 in revenue, but have $300,000 in net profit? , I would take that $300 net profit any day over million dollars in revenue $100,000 in net profit, and how we help investors do that is By tracking every single campaign in their business, so if you are, imagine if you're doing let's use ballpoint marketing and you're doing direct mail to your absentee lists and probate list, right, as your leads start coming in by setting up different campaigns,  exactly how many leads did you get from your absentee list? How many leads did you get from your probate list? And as you move those leads along the pipeline,  exactly how much money did you spend on marketing to that absentee list versus how much did you spend on your probate list. And once you sell the property, you will be able to know how much revenue is made from absentee and probate. Let's say you've done a couple of mailings, and now, once a quarter, once a month, or, every six months, you review your data and you say, okay, for every dollar that I spent targeting the absentee list, I made $4. But on my probate list, for every dollar that I put in, I made $7. So, if you have marketing money that you need to spend, then you would want to double down on the probate list before doing any more marketing to the absentee. So that's where we help really optimize on where you're spending your marketing dollars, and then where your revenue is actually coming from.

Dalyn Hazell  16:14  

Yeah, I love that. And it flushes itself out in the form of you have in recently you have the KPI screen so you can see where exactly that's coming from. So can you kind of explain you already touched on it, but further explain why tracking KPIs are so important. And maybe some other KPIs that you might want to track. I know we talked about a dollar in dollar out, but what are some other KPIs you want to track?

Sharad Mehta  16:41  

Yeah, I mean, something as simple as so let's say, going back to the example of mailing to the absentee and probate list, right, let's say you have 1000 people on your absentee list 1000 people on your probate list. Now, if you're mailing to the same list, let's say you put them on the same campaign, you just put them under a direct mail campaign, right? You don't break them out by absentee probate, you send these 2000 mail pieces out, you start getting calls, like, Hey, this is fantastic. I got 100 calls, I went on 10 appointments, I made five offers. And I got two properties under contract, which is fantastic, right? And you made money on it. Now, as you're doing a second round of mailing, how should you mail to the absentee or to the probate list, you have no idea if you're not tracking your information down to that level. So that's where we can help on tracking your data about each campaign. And also the other thing that you want to track, here are some of the lead sources that you have, for example, mailing to somebody that's just on a high equity list, right? Their homeowner high equity list, yes, you are going to get some deals out of them. However, the conversion is going to be very, very slow, you're going to have to generate a lot more leads to convert them into an actual deal. And then your timeline is also going to take longer. So that's another data point that's important for you to track. When you compare that to mailing to a probate list or let's say PPC leads, PVC leads generally tend to be more motivated. So you want to track, how many leads do you need to get from each lead source before or each campaign before you convert them into an appointment or offers or deal, then as you start looking at the data, and let's say you your business is growing and you bring somebody in your team, then the decisions that you want to make is that, hey, this is our historical data, for every 50 leads that we get from let's say, probate lists, we're able to go on 10 appointments, we're able to make three offers and get one deal, right, so you have that historical data. Now you have some sort of benchmark. So as you bring on a new person, you can compare their performance versus what you've done in the past. And you can see, typically, I'll give you, if you get 50 deals, you should go on so many appointments, and then you can see maybe on 50 deals, they're going on, 20 appointments, but they're still making to offer so that tells you maybe they're going on too many appointments, maybe the person that is making all those appointments, maybe they need to qualify a little bit more, because you're going on way too many appointments and not making enough offers. So that's another data point you want to track and other things you want to track as from the time the lead came into the pipeline, how long did it take for your team member to go on an appointment, from the time they go on an appointment? How long did it take to go on an offer like for us, ideally, in a perfect world, your appointment to offer ratio should always be one? It doesn't always happen but it should be pretty close to one because there's no point going on an appointment if you're not going to make an offer. So at least everyone when you go and just make an offer. The worst that's going to happen is to say no. But if you notice that you're going on 10 appointments and making one offer that tells you hey, maybe I'm somebody who is wasting too much time going on appointments. So that's another thing that you want to track in your business.

Dalyn Hazell  20:04  

Yeah. So we talked about KPIs and why it's important to track them. But furthermore, if you're not tracking these things, and you don't really know how to improve, it's great to take action, but I think the next level, once you have taken action, do some deals, it's time to start tracking and seeing what's working. And it'll also help you diagnose some problems in your business. So, for example, one of the problems that I've seen in my business is, if a lot of leads are coming in, but I'm doing few appointments, well, that means I'm not pushing the appointment farther. But if I'm doing a lot of appointments, and no deals, while there's something in my conversion, my conversion rate is low. So if you use software like this, or any software for that matter, you can diagnose that quickly. And, fix it yourself, if you're the one that's managing the business, or tell your team members how they can improve. So that's all wonderful. Any more points to add to that? drew?

Sharad Mehta  21:02  

Yeah, and then another thing that we have done, which everybody understands the value of having the data, but the challenge that comes in that I think we're trying to solve is to make it as simple as possible to track that data. There's one thing is, yes, your people understand the value, but what effort do you have to put in to get that data, I think that's where we've completely automated. So everything I mentioned is, nobody's going in and saying, Hey, let's calculate how many appointments we went on like the IT system tracks automatically. So just by one click of a button, you can see all the data that you need to say, so nobody is going in and updating anything. So there's no human error.

Dalyn Hazell  21:44  

Yeah, I mean, I know in your software, you can attach a lead to a certain campaign, and you can create campaigns out, you can create different phone numbers. So all of and then there's all of these funnels into your main page there. So it's like you said, everyone knows the importance of this, but actually doing it, you don't want to create another job or hire a person just to do this is somewhat automated. And I think you've done that quite well with your system, at least. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So one feature that I especially love of, of, your system is the tasks, creating tasks, and then either email reminders, or text reminders to my personal cell phone, so that I do not miss on that. How important are tasks to a real estate investor, when you maybe have 100-200 leads in your CRM, and it just gets lost in the shuffle? How important are tasks?

Sharad Mehta  22:39  

Yeah, I mean, they're absolutely critical, that's one big change we made with 2.0 was we made it very task-focused, so you're given time, okay, how many tasks do I need to do? Or any communication that you're having internally, with your team? people generally, if they have a checklist, then they get us, they get a sense of achievement by checking something off the cast list or a checklist. So I think that was important for us to create that checklist, and that feeling of, people coming in, we don't want them to be spending their time in our software, yes, we want them to get tons of value, but at the same time, we want them to be in and out and be mostly on the appointment. And, doing the more value-added stuff, then, like we want to automate as much as we can. And some of the things we do is like the task list, so you come in, okay, how many tasks do I need to do that I do, as of today, things that I need to be working on. And that, if you have five things you need to do, it just gets you very focused on what you need to do, rather than going through 100 leads and saying, Hey, wait a minute, did I talk to this lead? Let me see what communication that I have. So that really makes a big difference. And, you look at different professions also, there's been studied dance about pilots, the doctors, just by implementing simple things like checklists, that are held in, reducing the number of crashes that you might have, or then, some errors in hospital. So it's a simple thing, but it tells you, okay, this is my checklist. This is what I need to focus on. As long as I do that, then I feel like I'm making progress towards my goal.

Dalyn Hazell  24:26  

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so I've got that set up, and you can assign them to team members there. And it just keeps people accountable, because then you can go in, if you're the leader of the business, you can go in and see what tasks are being done, what tasks are not being done, and make some adjustments there.

Sharad Mehta  24:45  

And I think another thing is then, these people don't have a reason or excuse to say, Hey, I didn't know I was supposed to do this, it's like, Hey, this is a checklist that's assigned to you. And then that's your responsibility to get there. And so you're right, it definitely adds a level of Pull up accountability. So when you're doing your daily or weekly call with the game, you can go in and see, okay? You may not even be on my team when I'm talking to my team and say, Can you do this? I just say, Hey, can you just go create a check task for me recently? And then, when I check it, I'll know what I need to do.

Dalyn Hazell  25:15  

Yes, absolutely. I know, you also offer some accounting functions in reassembly. Can you explain why you did that? Because I know you're trying to make reassembly in a kind of an all-in-one, one-stop-shop. So can you talk about the accounting functions in reassembly and how they help real estate investors?

Sharad Mehta  25:35  

Absolutely. And so I used to work at Ernst and Young Sierra as a CPA working in Big Four in Chicago. So that was why, when we decided to create it simply, data analytics was very important, because, like accounting, the actual financial part is very, very important. So when I talked about every dollar that you're putting into the business versus how much you're getting back, that's actually down to the penny, from your bank statement, from your financial institution, it's not rounded up number, it's not an I spent, $100,000, and I made five, and now it's I spent $232,456.32, and I made 900. And whatever, it's like down to the penny. So what we want to do is, and also the other things that we're working on, that we're going to be rolling out in the future, the accounting piece is sort of like the heart and soul of what we're trading. And everything, especially the data analytics part is built around that piece of it. In a typical setup, what would happen is, let's say using Podio, like most of the investors that switched over to recently are coming from Podio. Let's say somebody is using a Podio. Right? They would have to use a different system called rail for the integration, and then they would use an accounting system, QuickBooks, a typical system would be you're going to call it, you set up all your phone numbers, and then the calls come in, and then your leads are actually in Podio. But then, if you want to see, okay, how many calls did I get from this campaign, then you're going in, calling it but it only tells you how many leads here, it doesn't tell you of those leads that came in how many of those were converted into appointments or offers. So you're looking at those two systems. And then if you take it further, if you sell a property, now you're going in and booking the revenue and QuickBooks for that specific property, but QuickBooks doesn't know which campaign it came from, so you have to go into Podio and update that number. But you're just putting in the revenue number only, you just put the revenue number and you will put the marketing campaign number, but it still doesn't match up with, hey, this property came from my direct mail absentee list. And then I sold it, QuickBooks doesn't know that this was my direct mail absentee less. So that's where there's a big disconnect between these systems talking to each other? Yes, I mean, you can, you can hire somebody to do all this manually. But it's not done in real-time. And there's always a chance of human error. But now what, in our good example of what happens in my business, my bookkeeper, she has access to the accounting feature. And recently, she goes in once a week, she updates everything, right? It's done in real-time. So I can go in if our project management meeting is every week on Thursday. So her job is to make sure she updates my bookkeeper update, excuse me everything by Tuesday. So if she has any questions I can answer. So everything be ready by end of the day Wednesday. So when we do our call, we can literally go through and see okay, when did we buy the property? How much did we pay for it? How much money did you spend on rehab? And how much are we looking at ourselves? What's the exact money that we spent on this property down to the penny? So based on that we can make decisions, okay, how it should be listed for and if you want a quick sale or whatnot, and we can see, what's our projected profit. And once we sell the property, all our KPIs on how much money we've made from each of our campaigns are also updated in real-time. 

Dalyn Hazell  29:05  

Yeah, I think that's great. And thanks for mentioning that just keeping everything organized. And their life's already complicated enough. We don't need more subscriptions or more programs if we don't have to, because that requires an additional learning curve. We have to train our employees on it. If we can just do it under one program that is all the better. So go ahead.

Sharad Mehta  29:29  

Yeah, I was gonna say another thing is like QuickBooks, it's not built for real estate investors, of course, you can use it as a real estate investor, but it's not there for real estate investors. , when you go in, you have to set up like a class, sportspeople enter a property address as a class and then they use customer features and whatnot. So that's, that's not even, the terminology that you as a real estate investor would use. So what we've done is, you can do all the same things very simply that you want to do in QuickBooks, but the blank which is very specific to real estate investors, hey, I made this money, what property Did I make it from? And, which vendor did it do, and which account should it go to? It's very specific to real estate investors. And it's not, it's just for investors. So if you have some other business, then you can really use it. I mean, you can use it, but it doesn't give you the data that you will get as a real estate investor.

Dalyn Hazell  30:23  

Yeah, I love using any program that's specific to real estate investors. That's another reason I use carrot calm websites because they know they speak the language of real estate investors, a lot like your company. And to be honest, even though some of these tools are paid, if you miss out on one deal, then you miss out on 357 years of subscription. So really, this subscription fee is a very, very small price to pay for the number of leads and information and, and headaches you're going to save. I want to talk about this entrepreneurial effort that you went into, which was designing software. A lot of real estate investors just stick to real estate, but you kind of forked off into this other venture, which was actually creating software for real estate investors. So for all those who are interested in maybe doing something similar to what you did, do you have any pieces of advice to share? For those folks?

Sharad Mehta  31:21  

Oh, yeah, I mean, for me, what happened was as I mentioned, in 2015, I moved from Chicago to San Diego for my wife's job. So I didn't have any plans. I didn't have any intention while I was living in Chicago to start a software company. But once I moved out of town, and United managed my business from 1000 miles away, that's when I realized, okay, I need some really good systems that can track everything for me. And, the decisions that I'm making are based on the data, people lie, but numbers never lie, so we want to make decisions based on the actual numbers in the business. And then as we started looking at different options like we saw a need, that we could fail, it wasn't even honestly, with the intention initially to, hey, we want to build this company, we want to do this, we want to do that it was initially hey, I want something for myself something simple that I can use, I started building it in 2017. And I don't think we even open it up for anybody for at least two years. So it took us like two, two and a half years before we opened it up for anybody like I was running my business on it myself. So, the first version of it was built based on my business needs, as I've never assigned a deal. In fact, I shouldn't say that we assigned a deal a couple of months ago, before that, I never signed a deal. So in the initial version, there was not even a column assigned to the buyer. Because I never did that. It was very, very specific for me. Because I figured, hey, I run my business in a very simple way, these are the things I want. Let's just do this. And then from there, as I started showing it to other people, it kind of grew. , we started adding more and more investors. But I think the biggest thing is to stick it out. Are you filling a need gap in the market? I think that's an important thing to look at as, like, what is that gap? Talk to some people and validate the idea on Hey, this is kind of what I'm thinking if there was a tool like this, would you pay for this? would it add value to your life, something like that, just to validate the idea. I think that that helps a lot, knowing just thinking about the long-term picture of where you want to go. Like for us, at least for me, when I was starting, it was very clear, okay, it has to be for me, it for nobody else, it has to be very data-focused. Like I have to know the numbers. It's just maybe because of my background, I have to know the numbers and make my decisions based on that. If it doesn't help somebody else, that's fine. But, it's helping me. That's good enough. And then as if you're building something that's adding value to you personally in your business, chances are it's going to add value to other people also.

Dalyn Hazell  34:12  

Yes, absolutely. I agree with that. So look for a gap in the market, talk with other folks and see if you can fill that gap with whether it's software or tool or whatever. What have been some struggles in scaling your software company and creating this, this effort that you've done, what are some struggles?

Sharad Mehta  34:35  

The struggles, I think last year was a challenge with COVID Initially, just getting used to the virtual world, especially like a couple of months with March, April, May, our development team, we're just getting used to working virtually and just working from there, home offices or hometown or whatever. So that was a bit of a challenge. Getting used to, do people still like figuring out this new reality? I think that was part of it. And, and the second challenge, which is actually a good problem to have is, we've grown faster than we initially thought. So that created some growing pains, which is always a good thing, where we've had to, like, work on more of our processes, and backend and system. So, initially, when we started out, it was just like an idea. But as you grow, it's, it's got to a point, okay, hey, we need to, like have some rating processor, we need to have some braking systems, that's something that's, that's been an interesting challenge on, like, getting people over from, hey, yes, this is how we used to do things previously. But, we've grown quite a lot, let's just have some formal processes of how we want to do certain things. And also, like, we've gotten to the point where we're going to ask feedback on Hey, this is kind of what we're thinking of doing. Initially, when we didn't have as many people using it, we could just throw out something and say, Hey, this is great. But I think now we need to just take a little bit more time processing the information like validating the idea, that's kind of what we're thinking of doing. And ask our customer base, what do you guys think, what adds value? , just because I think it would be something cool. We just don't want to roll that out. And just take a bit of time on. Like, people give feedback on that.

Dalyn Hazell  36:34  

Yeah, growing pains are difficult. And you always have to listen to your audience, your users. So good points there. Okay. Well, this is the next part of our show. It's called the triple threat. And I asked the same three questions to each guest. The first one is, and this is kind of an I already almost know the answer to this. But what has been the biggest tool or app that's been the game changer in your business? I'm not any other than recently, let's say.

Sharad Mehta  37:04  

I would say, Man, I'm a big pen and paper guy, even though I own a software company like this. This is a big part of my daily routine. Just it's it is a system, it is a tool. But yeah, I mean, this has been, I mean, other than that, like a technology tool, I would say Slack has been pretty, pretty awesome for just to kind of keep everybody in that company connected. I think that's a pretty bad zoom. Like, I'd never use Zoom. I do COVID started and then yeah, Zoom is pretty awesome.

Dalyn Hazell  37:34  

Yeah. The second question is what has been the biggest learning lesson for you in the last 12 months?

Sharad Mehta  37:41  

Man, that's a really good question.

Dalyn Hazell  37:43  

It could be a failure, or it could be a success, just something that you learn from and are now implementing going forward.

Sharad Mehta  37:53  

I would say when you are hiring, always take time and hire people not necessarily for their skill set or experience, hire people for their values and character. , you can teach somebody a skill set, you can have them, go take some course and learn that skill or gain that knowledge. But, you cannot really change somebody's values or character, like, say somebody is, prone to stealing, for example, you can tell that person, hey, can you please stop stealing? , can you go to this course, and learn how not to lie or how not to cheat or stuff like that. So, I would say, hiring people for the values that fit with your company with your long-term vision, and not for the scale has been an important lesson.

Dalyn Hazell  38:46  

Yeah, that's great advice. Question number three is our podcast is all about helping others achieve freedom with real estate investing, whether that's a financial lifestyle, or otherwise. So what does freedom mean to you?

Sharad Mehta  39:00  

Freedom to me means like, at this point in my life, I am extremely happy with what I'm doing, like every day I get up, wanting to do what I'm doing. To me that freedom, Freedom doesn't necessarily mean, I want to be at the beach for 40 hours every day because I'm not going to enjoy that freedom. To me, it means like I'm doing what I want to do, rather than I'm being told what to do. And it's different for everyone. A couple of things that happen in my life are like, I'm not active on social media. I'm not at all. So we have a Facebook group for recently, and I have it bookmarked on my browser. So when I want to go I just simply click on that. I don't look at anything else on my Facebook feed. Just because it's so hard not to get sucked into that world. You go into Facebook and you see people posting the highlights of their life and you gently compare it to below moments in your life and then  It's hard not to do that comparison. At least it was for me. So I've just completely moved away from that. And I've, I've realized things that are important to me, are important to me, it might not work for somebody else, but what I am doing absolutely works for me, and that's what I need to focus on, and then that's, that might mean something different for somebody else, I love doing what I'm doing. I want to be able to get up and then do what I want to do, whether it might be like, I'm taking Monday off to spend time with my son and my family, we're going to like a local amusement park. , that's, that's the freedom to me.

Dalyn Hazell  40:40  

Yeah, you have to know that on a personal level and be self-aware enough to decipher that. And it sounds like you've done that. And it's definitely not the same for everybody. Certain people want to be on the beach for 40 hours a week, and then certain people want to be head down in their business growth and multiplying their money 10 fold constantly, so and then certain other people are content with just an ordinary average life. So there's no one size fits all. Absolutely. Well, thanks for sharing your expertise about software development, and, lead follow up and just all the wisdom you shared. Now, where can listeners learn more about your software?

Sharad Mehta  41:25  

I mean, they can learn more on REIsimpli.com. And then they can reach out to me through that. And all the emails that are for me, get filtered down to me all the contact information. And then I personally reply to those emails. Or if I need to jump on a call, I jump on a call with those people.

Unknown Speaker  41:58  

Yeah, and I will include a link to your software in the show notes. It is an affiliate link, but just a disclosure there. But again, thank you and me, I wouldn't recommend a product that I'm not using and I have been using reassembly successfully for a good six or eight months and I love it. So

Sharad Mehta  42:06  

Thank you, man. Thank you so much. That means the world to me.

Dalyn Hazell  42:10  

Have a wonderful day. Sure. Thank you.

Sharad Mehta  42:12  

Thank you, Dalyn, and thank you for having me.

Outro  42:14  

Thank you for listening to the real estate investing for Freedom podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave us a review and tune in next week for the next episode.