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Optimizing Your Real Estate Business with Clarity Now

• Courtney Twiss • Episode 22

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Ever wondered how you can transform your real estate business by focusing on net income rather than just sales volume? Join us as we sit down with Jeremy Herrman, an industry veteran with 18 years of experience and the innovative mind behind Clarity Now. Jeremy's journey is nothing short of inspiring—from getting his real estate license in high school to building a telemarketing empire in New York, all the way to becoming a sought-after real estate coach. His unique perspective on setting financial goals will make you rethink your entire approach to business planning.

Jeremy introduces us to the nuts and bolts of business planning and lead generation strategies that have propelled real estate teams to new heights. Discover the vital role of budgeting and economic models and learn how to break down annual goals into manageable quarterly targets, accounting for market seasonality. We also touch on the crucial aspects of team leadership, from managing rookies to seasoned pros, and the importance of identifying and refining key lead sources to continually improve your sales strategies.

In the final segment, we delve into the practicalities of real estate software, focusing on tracking and optimizing lead sources for profitability. Jeremy sheds light on the challenges of commission splits and the benefits of integrating various CRM systems like QuickBooks and FollowUpBoss, with upcoming support for Zapier. Learn how Clarity Now can streamline your data management, consolidate expenses, and keep your team transparent and efficient. We wrap up the episode with a heartfelt thank you to Jeremy for sharing his invaluable insights and a mutual appreciation for the hard work that goes into bringing valuable content to our listeners.

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jeremy@claritynowre.com

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Speaker 1:

Love the now Now.

Speaker 2:

That was all. My wife named it, so she gets all the credit. She did good, thank you.

Speaker 1:

We love. Obviously, the title or our podcast is Now and our Asian, yes, asian, yes, yeah.

Speaker 2:

A lot of synergy.

Speaker 1:

So welcome to the NOW Podcast, making Moves in Real Estate, episode 22. I'm Michelle and this is Courtney. Hello, hi Jeremy. Our guest today is an 18 year veteran of real estate in the real estate industry, top real estate coach, in fact, coaching some of the top teams in the nation. He's also the co founder of clarity now, which is a software that I've heard a couple times and had a brief demo, but I'm super excited to hear more about it. Please welcome our guest today, jeremy Herman. Hi Jeremy.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys having me on, so thank you for the opportunity.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we're excited to hear more about Clarity now. I guess maybe first things first. Why don't you just tell us a little?

Speaker 2:

bit more about your background. Yeah, so I got my real estate license before I finished high school. So I have an older brother that was a double major and did the whole college route and I just always knew that wasn't for me. I was always a salesperson. I always wanted to make money and at the time my best friend's parents sold real estate and I went and talked to them and I said can you guys teach me how to sell real estate? And they said don't come back and ask me again until you get your license. So I was the kid in class with my workbook like this and my real estate book in front of it and passed my test and came back a few months later and told them I was licensed and joined the team. So I've been licensed since I was 18, originally from Northern California in Sonoma County, sold real estate there for a handful of years.

Speaker 2:

I ended up moving to New York upstate New York where I built a real estate company of some sorts and really, in the telemarketing space, did that for a few years, learned a lot, but it wasn't for me either. In the meantime I had met my wife. Fun fact actually is I was living in Rochester in an area called Park Avenue, which is the fun place to live in when you're young, and this super cute girl moved in next door with. She was living with another guy and another girl and a couple, and that next door neighbor ended up becoming my future wife and my future business partner. The guy is the co-founder and the CTO of my software.

Speaker 2:

So super small world that that happened and my wife was working in sales and she was working for a local company where she would set appointments, go on appointments and get contracts signed and I had the background in real estate. So I suggested she try real estate. And she does phenomenal and she sells a couple hundred homes here in Rochester, new York, every year. Rochester and Buffalo Wow, and she runs that business all by herself. I'm not involved in that at all. And then I became a coach and coaching led me ultimately to creating Clarity Now. So I've done a bunch of different stuff within the real estate over the last 18, 19 years, but I actually didn't sell real estate for that long. I never, frankly, enjoyed selling that much, but I love the industry.

Speaker 3:

Well, that explains why your Clarity Now is so thorough. I mean it kind of encompasses all aspects of the business, which is really rare. You think of a CRM, or almost it's like you think of. You need a CRM, you need all these different dashboards, and I feel like Clarity Now has combined it all and it makes sense to me hearing your background and how you've been in all the different areas of the industry.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you, Thank you. That first company that I moved here to build was my first time really being an entrepreneur outside of selling real estate in California and where I learned how to make my own spreadsheets and I've always been more of an analytical person. And I found DeerPoint. Most CRMs have a couple features that's tracking or reporting but it's not everything that you need to run a business. So we found a gap and a little bit of a niche in the market, and that's the market that we chose.

Speaker 3:

I was going to say one thing. We were on a call with Jeremy earlier with our organization, and he had mentioned the problem that Clarity Now is solving is that real estate agents lack vision in what they're building. Why don't you tell our listeners what you've built? That is helping them clarify their vision.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I don't know if we so much help them clarify their vision, but we at least put a plan together to help them accomplish what they're trying to build. And what I mean by that is one of my pain points of being a coach in real estate is watching all these agents all over the country. They're building their goals based on either how many homes they want to sell, the volume or the GCI, and that's how they've always done it. If I ask 100 agents what's your goal, I'm probably going to get 100 answers. That's one of those three, right? And I've always felt that the goal really should be based on how much do you want to net, not what your volume or GCI goal is.

Speaker 2:

If I ask an agent you know what's your goal? They say I want to sell 15 million. And I say, great, if you sell $15 million, did you win? And they go? Well, hell yeah. I said, okay, you sell $15 million, but you only made 80 grand for your family. Did you win? And they go? Well, no, okay. So it's not about the 15 million, it's about the net, right?

Speaker 2:

So we're the only software out there where the business plan starts with what do you want to net, which I think is so, so, so important, and I mentioned a call earlier today that you know, listen, real estate is a tough industry. There's a lot of things to do. There's a lot of easier things to do. So if we're going to be doing this industry just to get by, I mean frankly, there's easier things to do if your goal is to break even in life, right, I mean, let's be honest.

Speaker 2:

So I believe that this industry is really just a tremendous funnel for creating cash. And then we can take that cash and we can go and build wealth and create the lifestyle that we desire and the cash and we can go and build wealth and create the lifestyle that we desire and the freedom that we desire and all those things. So creating your plan based on net should encompass what's it cost you to live, cover taxes, but then there had there be a lump sum left over for the life by design stuff. So to be able to enter a goal that says I want a net 400 grand, go through the math and have that say great. Based on that, your goal is 77 units or whatever the math ends up being. I think that's what you're alluding to. So I can't help you create your vision, but I, at least, can help you create a plan that generates the income that you need for that vision to come true true.

Speaker 1:

So you have in this platform obviously you know you have to have your vision and then it's going to be derived off what you want to net. So in the private scene, the whole thing, but it takes into account all of your expenses, I mean, or does it walk us through how it works?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it does. I would say we claim to be the number one financial and tracking tool in real estate. I don't think it's particularly close On the finance side. Obviously, you're starting with net in mind. I believe that every real estate agent knows that they should have a P&L, a profit and loss, for their business, and a very small percentage of people actually do so. Our software comes with the P&L. We have your transactional data, we know your income, we know the cost of sales, we know your gross profit on every sale, because you typed in the data right so for us to easily turn that into a report that shows your income, your cost of sale, gross profit, and all that's left for you is to enter your expenses, which is either through a form or through a QuickBooks integration, so you don't have to do any data entry on the expenses. Now, every real estate agent in the industry also has a live P&L that's based on real estate.

Speaker 2:

The other challenge I've seen with a lot of P&Ls in this industry is one they don't have them. But if you hire a bookkeeper, I think bookkeepers are great if they're providing you services, if they're actually educating you and they're holding your hand and doing payroll and doing other things for you. If all they're doing is simply providing you a P&L and that's it one, they're expensive. That's included in our software. But two I found this is certainly not true for all bookkeepers, so please don't put that umbrella over this. But a lot of bookkeepers they're starting the real estate P&L starting with the gross profit number, which is the money coming into the bank account. But a real estate P&L really should be starting at the top line revenue, the GCI, which includes the cost of sales. That gets to your gross profit and all of your expenses are based on that top line number. So I see a lot of agents who have P&L through bookkeepers that they're getting it a month late because they're waiting on the data. It's in a PDF versus software, right, so it's not as easy to look through and a lot of times they're wrong and they're expensive.

Speaker 2:

So, in Clarity, now we solve that challenge. We have great forecasting of cash, so I know how much money I'm making. And then the tracking and reporting, the business planning. There's no better software for business planning. You can track anything and everything in it. So it's not a sexy tool by any means. It's a business owner tool and our mission is really helping agents turn into better business owners. What was that? What did you say?

Speaker 1:

I said that's sexy to me.

Speaker 3:

But we are spreadsheet gals, so this is exciting yeah.

Speaker 2:

I'm still a spreadsheet guy for a lot of other stuff. But yeah, you have to want to be a better business owner to be a customer of ours. If you don't want to become a better business owner, don't sign up.

Speaker 1:

Does it allow you to do the budgeting too?

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, yeah, we do. Economic model, budget model and the lead gen model. The org model we don't have yet in there, but we will build that out at some point soon. It's just a little harder to build visual graphs in org charts, but the budget model, lead gen model and the economic model is all part of it. They all tie together and you can forecast right now, I think, up through 2027. So you can build out 2027's economic model today to see what the math money to look like, to net the number you desire, to how many agents you need to have on your team, et cetera. So now I know what to recruit to for the next few years too.

Speaker 3:

Will it take into account seasonality?

Speaker 2:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. I think that's another mistake I see agents do is they work all year to see if they hit the annual goal, but they don't chunk that down into hitting quarterly goals. So the whole system is really based on making sure that you have clarity on hitting your quarter goals. So yeah, all broken down by seasonality.

Speaker 3:

Okay, well, I was just thinking because typically the winter like January is very, very slow for most realtors. Winter like January is very, very slow for most realtors and so with your forecasting, would it include like the more data you put in, the more clearly it will forecast for you for the following few years, based off your patterns of? Maybe June through September are super busy or whatnot.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, a standard seasonality for a real estate business in most markets. This is not true for all markets, because some markets do have funny seasonality, but 20, 30, 30 and 20, 20% Q1, 30 Q2, 30 Q3, 20 Q4 is typically what you see in most businesses and you're right, though I mean I said earlier today too in the call that numbers tell the story right. So the more data you have in, the more that you can actually analyze your business and see what your seasonality is. Now, when you're building out your economic model for 2025, put you know 16, 24, 30 and 20, whatever, whatever's real for you. You kind of go in and adjust it throughout the year too. So, for example, if I said 20 Q1 and I ended up at 25, I crushed the goal. Go and change it to have 25 be Q1 to take some pressure off of Q2 or Q3. Or the opposite's true I miss Q1, throw some pressure on the back end in Q4 and make your seasonality in quarter four 24% instead. So you can't adjust it throughout the year too.

Speaker 3:

And if you're a team lead and you're using this to manage your team, then I imagine you could mess around with those based off if you have new agents versus seasoned agents on your team. Okay, good point.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, the team ownership part, the leadership part, is a whole other piece to it that I think is massively valuable. But as far as setting up the business plan, you're right. If someone's joining your team right now, I mean they're going to have 0% Q1, 0% Q2, probably 0% Q3, right, maybe a closing or two, with 90%, 95% being Q4, which also means that the goal in that case, the annual goal, is just how much money they want to make this year, not over 12 months, it's this year. So maybe the goal is to make 40 grand in 2024, right, and that's the goal. And then you just change your seasonality and get back in.

Speaker 3:

Okay, can we switch gears? You mentioned about lead gen. How do you help that Everyone wants lead gen?

Speaker 2:

There are improvement in it. Well, one, the planning part, right. So in the lead gen model, we believe that 90% of your business typically comes from five lead sources or less, right? So if I do my economic model and the goal is to do 100 sales, for easy math, then that means that my lead gen model, my business planning for that year, I should be able to point to the five lead sources that will generate 90 sales. Right, there's always gonna be the one-offs that equal the 10%. So the first part's that.

Speaker 2:

So, in doing the lead gen model and knowing that five or less should add up to 90% of your unit goal, that alone provides some clarity, right, it's crap. Do I have enough? Right? So I need to really focus on what's the next source or what do I need to double down on, or do I need to double down on, or do I have the sources available? So one's in the planning side. On every transaction you're entering your source. So we have lead source reports too.

Speaker 2:

How many units came from each lead source? Units, volume, gci and gross profit that's a big one. Specifically, if you own a team let's say you're using a Zillow or a Realtorcom as a business owner you probably want to get three to four times to one or two hundred money, if not more, if you can, obviously. So if I'm spending $2,000 a month, that's $24,000 a year, a four to one return. Rounding up, let's just say I need to do $100,000 to make that $25,000 investment work. The challenge is is a lot of agents they're doing that based on GCI, not gross profit, but they're paying a 50% split on all of that right. So I invested 24, but I really only made 50. Is that a lead source? You should continue, right? Or is there a strategy that you can do to double down to make that be more so? All the tracking is there for you too.

Speaker 3:

Okay, go ahead. Can you auto import some of your prospects and stuff from other CRMs, Like for example KVCore?

Speaker 2:

Right now we have two integrations, with more coming. We have a integration with QuickBooks, as I mentioned, for expenses, and we have a full integration with FollowUpBoss. We do have a few more integrations on the books that we're working on right now. One that we're almost done with is Zapier. So if you're a Zapier user, that will be out pretty shortly, and certainly one of the main goals of the company is to just continue to integrate, integrate, integrate as much as we can. People want to enter as little as possible, which I totally get, so our goal is to try to make that reality for you guys.

Speaker 3:

We're salespeople, right, we want to blow and go. What was the?

Speaker 1:

quote this morning. What did you say Multiple times? What was your quote?

Speaker 2:

The one about sloppy success, or that one? What did I say? Sloppy success is better than perfect inaction good one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, uh, are you able to um customize your revenue stream? So this is all like production geared, but can I add like um like rev share stock?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you can. Actually, the business planning is really based on GCI, right, net profit, gci units. But in the P&L section, in the financials portion of the software, you can enter expenses and you can enter revenue and you could call it profit share, you can call it rev share. One person they they asked for me, we put it in the system, even just like returns, and I guess this person returns a bunch of stuff, they. So they see the line item as the expenditure but they never see it come back in. So, okay, that's, it's an easy line item, that's not too big of a deal. Um, so yeah, so there are. Another big one is vendor distributions or contributions. I should say so if you're paying two grand a month for Zillow but a partner is giving you a thousand, it should say 2000 a month on the P&L, because that's how much you're investing into that software. But we do want to pick up the thousand dollars a month of vendor contribution to be included in the P&L. So that's a. It's a great question, absolutely, really good question.

Speaker 1:

Well, I reason. I asked that, yeah, cause I have, you know, multiple things that I use, right, so like a network track, net worth tracker, and then I've got my budget system, and then I've got my expense system. Um, then my CRM, like that's four things that I use Um, even half of that.

Speaker 2:

That's the goal. I love the idea of a net worth tracker too, because we are so focused on net. I wouldn't be surprised in the near future if we do add that in for the people that you know are interested in that, which hopefully is everybody. I think we all should be tracking our net worth, but I think you guys, and hopefully the listeners of this podcast, can tell that one of the main benefits with us and you know maybe another, a competitor or two is that we're clearly built by a coach right 19 years in the industry. I've been coaching for almost six years and I somehow stumbled upon owning a tech company. Uh, so all the nuances that you guys are asking we've thought of and it's in the software because 19 years in industry. So we're a little bit different because of that wow, wow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's the thing that's frustrating is like the, the software I use for my expenses at hurdler. Um, I can't budget on it. So it's great I get a P now, but all of that like that's awesome, but then I have to use something else for my budget, which is just annoying.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, it is, it is. You know it's. Have everything in one spot is super easy and you can give edit and viewer access to anybody too. So if your admin helps you with that, you can give edit access for free. We don't charge for editors or viewers, we only charge for agent seats. So, like your coach, obviously I built it selfishly for me as a coach so you can give viewer access to anybody. So now your coach has all of your numbers and all their reporting, with no cost to them and no cost to you. So, yeah, so you can add. Add whoever you want to help you with that too. That's awesome.

Speaker 3:

I know so great. I know, yeah, no, I think that's fantastic. I know we're fortunate. We're in an organization that is offering it to everyone in our organization, so anybody that works with Michelle and I are going to be lucky, like we are, and have access to these amazing tools, which is super exciting. But for those, you know yeah, I mean, it's such a great tool. I think that it's wonderful that you know our partners have made this investment. For others out there that are listening, what would it look like If they wanted to get more information about this? Would they set up like a demo with you? Go to your website, you know how would they?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, good question and thank you for asking.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, a few ways. So one you can always go to our website. It's wwwclaritynowrecom, so don't forget the RE now recom, so don't forget the re wwwclaritynowrecom. You can schedule demos there. You can sign up directly there.

Speaker 2:

Uh, we really have three offerings right now. We have an individual agent which is $79 a month, which is another key point. By the way, you know, there's a competitor out there that we have that is like four or five times costs and I think it's outrageously expensive and I want to help as many agents as possible. So we also really tried to price this that anyone that wants to become a better business owner can afford it, or hopefully should be able to afford it. So it's $79 for an individual agent. For a team it's only $129. So it's not. I think we priced it reasonably well. And then we also have an enterprise plan that you can contact us. That's what you're referencing.

Speaker 2:

You guys signed up with the enterprise plan for the whole eXp org. We have offices sign up, we have brokers or market centers or even companies sign up. Exp org sign up for the enterprise to offer it to everybody. So the way that looks is that we have one person who's the customer that's paying the bill for everybody to have access to the account. But what's really cool about how we set up the enterprise which is awesome is we built out the homepage specifically for enterprise accounts where they can offset the cost using sponsorships. So there's three sponsorships on the homepage. So ultimately you can add major value to the people in your organization. Go have some sponsors cover it and have it be a net zero for the enterprise customer. So either enterprise, individual or teams. You also can email me too if you'd like. My email is jeremy at claritynowrecom.

Speaker 3:

Awesome. That actually brings up one question I have with the team structure, because I have a production team. Would everyone on my team have their own dashboards and then I, as the team lead, can see it? And is that something through the enterprise as well, or is it all? We all have individual?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so on the enterprise, the enterprise you can view the people within your organization to have an account Specifically for the team. The way we built it is, the Rainmaker would sign up for 129 for the team functionality, right. So one account for the whole business. But then they can add their agents to have their own individual account. So every agent, in my opinion, is their own business and that's the I'm on.

Speaker 2:

A team status is one of my favorite statuses because I've actually found that and you guys probably have experiences too a lot of team members don't get the same tech or support that the rainmaker gets and it's almost just almost like forgotten about in a lot of ways, which I don't think is a good thing. So the way that we built it is, it's only 10 bucks to add an agent. So you'd pay 129 for the main account and then if you have four agents, you'd add $10 times four. So now that account would be what? $169. But everybody has their own full feature Clarity Now account. They're all linked together.

Speaker 2:

The Rainmaker can go to what's called their observatory and visually see all four of their buyers, agents or listing agents plug into their account, do their one-on-ones, do their goal gaps, see their economic models, see their pipeline, their lead gen and then easily go to the next account. That was a feature I built selfishly for me. So as a coach, I have access to like 50 accounts, right. So it's the same exact functionality to be able to hop in and out of accounts.

Speaker 2:

And the way team works too. Which is important is the way we built the team. Functionality is that all listings and transactions funnel out to the team members accounts. So team members do not need to enter in their own listings or transactions, for kind of two reasons One, we don't want them to register, focus on going to sell real estate. And two, though, if they do choose to, they'll probably screw it up more times than not with like splits, income and all that stuff. So it all funnels out to their account, so team members don't need to do any data at all as long as the Rainmaker is maintaining the main account.

Speaker 1:

That's super. I love the Rainmaker. That's great. Yeah, yeah, thank you. That's your job. It's going to be absurd. Love it all, all good terminology. You have a marketing genius somewhere in that brand.

Speaker 2:

We're trying, we're trying, we're giving it a go. Thank you.

Speaker 3:

Well, I'm really excited to start using your product. I think it's fabulous. We're going to be your super fans, if we aren't already, so thank you for joining us today and letting us know more about it, and I'm sure there's many of our listeners that will definitely have an interest in this, because we need to know where our money is going.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you to both of you too, because what you guys are doing and taking the time and energy to it takes a lot of time and energy to have a podcast to put on events to give back to others. It doesn't happen by accident and I know how purposeful the two of you are. So thank you for giving back to others and thank you for the opportunity to discuss clarity now. So I appreciate you both very much.

Speaker 1:

Thanks, jeremy, you have a great day. Good seeing you guys. Bye, you too.

Speaker 3:

Oh, it's like Siri's talking now too, bye.