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How I Built Multimillion Dollar Businesses Through Real Estate | Stephanie Betters Podcast

How I Built Multimillion Dollar Businesses Through Real Estate | Stephanie Betters Podcast

In this episode, I talk with Stephanie Betters.

Stephanie is a nurse practitioner turned real estate investor and serial entrepreneur that has founded three multimillion-dollar businesses.

Stephanie shared HR journey from a rewarding nursing career to real estate and business.

She also discussed the costs to starting a business that nobody talks about a how solving problems within her business lead to other lucrative business opportunities.

At the end Stephanie shares something that you don’t want to miss if your married or value the relationships with those closest to you.

Watch this video to learn more and be sure to subscribe!

Transcript:

Stephanie Betters

I think we’ve been really, really blessed along the way. But had I had started over, I would have been perfectly happy, you know, continuing to work as a nurse practitioner and then just like slowly buying rentals and kind of adjusting expectations as far as like what we could achieve. But on the other side of the coin, like we’ve had the most incredible experiences I’ve we’ve accumulated more wealth than I ever thought was, was possible.

Chris Bounds 00:25

In this episode, I talk with Stephanie betters, Stephanie is a nurse practitioner term real estate investor, and serial entrepreneur, this bounded three multi million dollar businesses, we discussed the journey that she took, going from a very rewarding career in nursing to a real estate investor and business owner, the costs that come with starting your own business that nobody talks about how solving problems in her business led to several other very lucrative business opportunities. And at the end, Stephanie share something that is absolutely vital. And you do not want to miss if you’re married, or if you value the relationships that you have with those around you. So I hope you enjoy now to the show. How are you doing? 70

Stephanie Betters 01:08

Oh, great. How are you?

Chris Bounds 01:09

Good, good. Glad to have you on. It’s been a long time since we’ve been in the same room. We’re in the mastermind together, but seems like you’re doing really well.

Stephanie Betters 01:20

Yeah. Thanks, Sam. Same same for you. Okay, you.

Chris Bounds 01:23

You’re, you’re a bit of a serial entrepreneur. But it didn’t really at least I don’t believe you started out that way. Is your professional career really started in the medical field, right?

Stephanie Betters 01:36

Yeah, yeah, my. I’m a nurse practitioner. My background, my specialty is cardiothoracic surgery. So that’s kind of where I, that’s where I started. And I was really intended to stay to be honest.

Chris Bounds 01:48

So how did you go from that? Which it takes a lot of work to get there. So how did you go from that to? I want to start a side business? Because I would imagine that not only does it take a lot of work, but also takes a lot of time commitment. It’s not like just a very simple skill set and job that that you do. And then you wanted to go out of business on onto that. So how did how did that play out?

Stephanie Betters 02:17

Well, so it wasn’t my idea, I will definitely give all the credit to my husband, Zach. Really, we got our first taste of business and real estate when, when we first graduated undergrad, you know, Zach and I got married right after college. I was 21. He was 24. Like no money kind of debt, trying to figure out where to live. And you know, this was back in 2007 and 2007. Right now we look back on that, like, whoa, we found a foreclosed house. And he’s like, this is what we do. Like we flip it, I saw this show on TV. And this like always works out. You just gotta buy a foreclosed house.

So we move into this thing, we renovated it ourselves. We sold it literally at the peak right before the crash, thank God and made a nice profit, and then went to grad school. And while we’re in grad school, you know, he was like, I want to do that again. That was really good. And I was still recovering from the sheetrock PTSD of living, living in a flip. And I was like, okay, we can do it again. But not until like we’re settled, and we don’t have to live in the property again. So very long story short, we moved to North Carolina, had a couple more babies started our careers. Zach’s a physician assistant, and I’m a nurse practitioner, I’ve got my that my dream job.

And, you know, he kept he kept talking to me about, you know, working the rest of our lives and building something alongside us, and how do we earn freedom and, you know, medical career? It’s kind of it’s crazy now that I’m out, and I can look back on it. Like, nobody works like that, like you’re on call all the time. There’s, it’s never like, you don’t you hold your bladder for 17 hours. I mean, it’s just insane work. And you don’t really realize I get like, wow, this is a complete hamster wheel. It’s super rewarding. And I love it very, very much. I don’t want to minimize that. But like, it’s extremely hard work. And that’s the only way you’re earning money is by working like that.

So he kind of got me when he was like, you know, we can really do some wealth building by buying more real estate. And it was kind of the timing because I found myself, you know, three kids 30 years old, dream job. I achieved everything I had thought I wanted to achieve. And I was 30. So I was like, What do I do now? Do I just maintain this and maintaining that’s difficult and exciting and fun. And but it was kind of entering into a maintenance stage. And I was like, I’m probably too young for this. I don’t know what I do. But I do when I have I got the thing I dream for.

So so that kind of all hit me at the correct time. And I was like okay, I think I think you know we’re relatively settled now. We have some equity in our house that we were living in Let’s take a HELOC out and let’s let’s do this thing. You know, the idea initially was just to buy rentals. But we had found that, you know, with our, with the income we were making and the student loans we were paying back like it was really, we really weren’t going to be able to buy more than one property a year. And even that, that’s an achievement, of course, but the goal was essentially to be able to have rental properties that would support our children’s college.

And we’re like, wait a minute, the math doesn’t work out here, we’re not going to be able to buy enough property in the next 10 years to be able to do that. So we have to buy more, how do we buy more, you know, we got to flip. So we flipped houses, we decided we’re gonna go to buy houses to flip instead of for rentals, so we can get more profit to buy rentals. And that led to wholesaling and quite honestly, a complete five year detour. Because instead of buying rental properties, we were building a business. And we had this kind of point in that journey where we decided we had to decide, you know, do we want to own a business?

Or, you know, and hire it out and own that thing that’s producing revenue? Or do we want to stop doing that and just buy rental properties. And we had gone so far and had success in building out our, the, you know, the investment company for flips in rent, and wholesales or like, you know, owning a business sounds pretty good, too. I mean, that’s basically like owning rentals, right? It’s an asset that’s producing income. Let’s go that route. So we did, and it took about five years for that to spin off extra profit enough to start buying rentals. And along that way of building that company, we ran into other problems. And this is kind of where you feel like, oh, serial entrepreneurship.

Well, once you figure out how to run a business and solve problems, you find more, we kind of see it all over. So, you know, we ended up starting off a spin off company for Facebook marketing for real estate, for real estate investors looking for motivated sellers. And also probably the most successful spin off was our CRM that we built to help us run our business, Salesforce ended up noticing that and asked for partnership and now left main was born and 2020.

And that that company has been extremely busy and exciting. And it allowed me to retire from medicine between those two ventures, mostly because I needed more more time. So as much time you can spend doing all these things and work at the hospital running businesses. So I did all that alongside working in medicine for a long time, before I finally was able to let go that part of my identity and it take the choice of running the businesses, but yeah, solving one problem often leads to solving others.

Chris Bounds 07:40

Yeah, it’s the scratch your own itch. And then that’s how a lot of small businesses are born. Do you feel like the the identity of being a nurse practitioner? And And was there a certain level of like mental pain, letting that go? Or at least not necessarily pain, but just really wrapping your head around? Like, Is that who you are yourself? Are you someone bigger like that? That was a like a role that a certain season within your life? How did you? How did you approach letting that go and being comfortable to let that go? So you can go pursue bigger and better,

Stephanie Betters 08:19

better goals? I mean, I think pain is the correct word. It was very painful to even consider leaving. It mean, I literally planned it for two years. Because it was that difficult of a of a transition for me. I think it really made me look at why I felt so closely tied to that identity, and really try to distill down what what that feeling was. Because it’s more than just the like the school investment and the time and money investments so much more than that. For me, it was just my way of, of helping people. Like, in the end, I really was so rewarded by having an answer for somebody and being able to fix somebody’s you know, health problem.

Surgery, by the way, super rewarding, because it’s very short, you’re like, Oh, that hurts. I’m just gonna fix that, you know, you dropped along, I’m gonna put a chest tube in there and fix it. It’s very cool in that sense, because it’s very, like quick feedback loops where medicine by the way, it’s very real estate and business is very long feedback loops. But that really is what it boiled down to was like I love taking care people. I love the complexity, and I love the the just the dynamics with, you know, implementing care and choosing different medications and writing out those algorithms and working with other colleagues and kind of this complex environment and just solving complex problems is so rewarding, you know, so, but that’s what it came down to is like, Okay, I learned that I was like, I like hard problems.

Unfortunately. That’s just the reality. And I really like Helping people. So, really, it took me a couple years to kind of peel that back a bit. Okay, I don’t have to just do that with medicine. You know, that’s kind of like the quickest path that I was on at that point, like, okay, that’s very measurable, I can see that I’m helping people, I can see that I’m solving problems. But that’s not the only application of that. So that’s what helped me be able to separate my identity from being the nurse practitioner. And the other thing sounds kind of silly.

But like, the intro, like, when you meet somebody new, it always comes up like, Well, what do you do? I have to kind of practice what it is, I’m going to say, yeah. Like, I don’t know what I do. I do a lot of things, you know. So that was also really hard. Because whether we like it or not, we all kind of want to label and that was convenient. That’s all it was practitioner and cardiac surgery. Now I say, you know, I’m an investor. And people are like, oh, what does that mean? And that actually ends up having a lot of really fruitful conversations, by the way, raising private money getting other customers or clients. Interesting. But that’s what I say now. And that helped me separate myself from identity of just like, how I quickly introduce myself.

Chris Bounds 11:07

Yeah, I mean, like Jamie and I, we’ve talked about that a lot. Because she’s a, I’m a born entrepreneur, and like, she’s a born teacher. That’s just who she is. And then when she quit her job, and we were working real estate, full time, we had employees, she was able to use those skill sets in, in training and more of it, like an HR team building role. But also, she was our project manager and all that. But when we shifted away from flipping like that problem, it really arose if that’s if that’s a word that resurfaced and it was that identity that she was struggling with.

And she ended up coming back teaching, because we’re very passive now. And when we were building a different business, but we don’t have the hands on employees, we don’t have five, seven different projects going all the time, and it was keeping her busy. So she came into that identity. Almost like in that little identity crisis and what she was doing, and it’s definitely important to realize that about yourself, and what brings you value and making sure that you’re, you’re pursuing that. So now, do you feel you started out wanting to buy rental properties, ended up moving into flipping and wholesaling?

We took that same path into building a business around it, which I think you kind of alluded to, it was a little bit of a detour on the wealth building side. Do you feel like knowing what you know, now, you probably could have gone in to the just straight into the wealth building the building the actual rental portfolio, the passive income and not going into the flipping or wholesaling business? Or, or, like, in a lot of this is hindsight, but would that have been a better decision at the time? Or do you feel like, it definitely was the best decision because it’s led to these other things?

Stephanie Betters 13:06

Yeah, it’s such a such a hard question to answer because I wouldn’t trade where I’m at right now. Or, or anything and the journey, although extremely difficult, I learned so much and had other opportunity that I never thought I would have, you know,

Stephanie Betters 13:22

if I could go back and restart, first of all I would want to know, like, but it all turns out, okay. Yeah. Because when you’re going through it, you’re like, This is This is hell, this is really hard. And you’re so all in like, everything is all in your your, all your personal finances are intermingled and families on the road with you going to these things. So I would love to know, like for sure that would have been okay. But I probably wouldn’t have taken such the detour with building the business. I think I probably would have just been slower and buying the rental properties and kind of slowly chugging away when I if I’m totally honest, it’s like the emotional cost that it like it cost it cost me something, you know,

Chris Bounds 14:07

are you saying instead of and I don’t know what your volume was, instead of flipping or wholesaling? 10 a month doing the three to five a month and holding half that kind of thing? Or?

Stephanie Betters 14:19

Well no, because I don’t even think that that’s really and this is just my opinion from my experience, but I think it’s actually harder to do three a month than it is to do the 18 month because there’s that like middle piece that really sucks you know where you don’t have enough volume to support staff but he’s not exactly but you have enough volume that like you’ll die by yourself you know like it’s just it’s such a you can’t do it that part halfway. I think you either do it very low volume to a year or you go high volume and do the do the go through all the you know, the brain damage to get there.

Chris Bounds 14:55

Yeah, for us. It was for more than four that was the cause We went through that and we went to death zone and I read it in a book, I forget which book it was. Yeah. I think it was simple numbers. Profit, there’s profit first and simple numbers love both those books, but I think it was Dad with talks about that depth. So on your, your small, but it’s you then you scale.

But the problem is if you don’t scale big enough, and you stay in that death zone, like you have a choice, you either run off the cliff and die like your business dies, or you get to, you know, scale back down and rebuild. So, like for us it was that room for a month. Because we never really scaled much more than seven a month that we were in that death zone. We ended up just pulling back. But I’ve seen others explode past that and do 1020 30 deals a month a lot more than that and do very well.

Stephanie Betters 15:53

Yeah, yeah, I think you kind of have to find yourself making that choice while you’re growing. And I don’t know, I think both I think both work out. I mean, I’m sitting on the other side of it. Now. It worked out great. It worked out immeasurably more than I thought it would. And that’s not I don’t think that’s from my own contribution, or is that I mean, I had, I think we’ve been really, really blessed along the way. But had I had started over, I would have been perfectly happy, you know, continuing to work as a nurse practitioner, and then just like slowly buying rentals and kind of adjusting expectations as far as like what we could achieve.

But on the other side of the coin, like we’ve had the most incredible experiences I’ve we’ve accumulated more wealth than I ever thought was, was possible. And being able to own different businesses that diversify that that income, like looking at owning a business as far as passive income versus owning a property as passive income. That has been amazing, you know, and so I recommend the journey for people who know how hard it is, I don’t recommend the journey for people who think is going to be easy. So and in the beginning, you’re like, you’re doing it because you’re like, I can do this, like these other guys are doing and I can totally do this, too.

So it’s kind of conflicting advice. I think you I think, I wish I had understood how hard it would have been, because I would have felt more normal during the process. That would that was the hardest part of just being so all in and just be like, Why is it so hard? Is it supposed to be this hard? The answer is yes. The answer is definitely yes. And, you know, confronting the choice that you make, like I, I sacrificed time with my kids, I sacrifice sleep, I sacrifice my own health. Like, I wouldn’t do that again. But doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it once.

Chris Bounds 17:46

The one thing that you don’t have to worry about now is being ad and then 40 to 60 years of your life having the what if question, right and just you just not knowing not even though it would work out, but you just never even tried. So you don’t have to worry about that. But it’s very, very true that not everyone to manufacture. Most people are not designed to equipped emotionally or even with skills to start a business and they really don’t need to just because it’s all over the internet doesn’t mean everyone needs to do that. I love it.

You know, we’re kind of the opposite. Like, she’s cool, like working within it. But she hates the ups and downs. Like I take it with stride. sucks, but I’ll take it with the stride. But for those that do want to just keep their job. Yeah, you could buy one rental a year, one runner a year, do that for 10 years, you’re a multimillionaire, just gonna let your tents pay off. It’s it’s a pretty simple, boring process. But if you really want to go for it and build a business, that’s a lot more cost a lot more game potentially. Right? Certainly gonna cost you more.

Stephanie Betters 18:55

Yeah. And it’s funny, because I’m grateful that I did it. And I have 00 regrets. The journey was amazing. The payoff was received. But now that I’m here, I definitely wouldn’t go all in like that again. So that’s what I mean, like, I will do it once, but I wouldn’t do it again. I’ve learned enough now that to know what I’m willing to invest in the process. And I think that’s a huge gift. Because, you know, my personality is to be the workhorse Right? Like, if I believe in what the vision is of what we’re trying to do, like, I will do it. Like at my own expense, like I will do friggin what it takes to get to the goal. And now that I’ve learned about what that really means and feels like, I feel that I can make better decisions of what I want to invest my time in.

And I’m more I’m more aware of what my effort can result in when measured carefully, like so now I approach I approach opportunity in a different way. Okay, what is this going to take? I really I know understand what that’s going to take Am I willing to do whatever it takes to get the results that I want. And generally that effort is not like my entire life. Right? It’s like, okay, I can commit to doing this for 10 hours a week. And you know, I have these resources that I can put into play to get to x. Is that investment worth it? Is that like time and staff investment worth it? Yes or no.

And so I feel like I’m a lot more measured in that instead of just like running headfirst off the cliff and building the parachute as I fall now, again, so I’m grateful for the lessons and just business ownership and entrepreneurship and being a CEO and making those decisions. That life experience has been immeasurable, and that personal journey of knowing, like what, what my effort can result in if I’m really effective, you know, so, yeah.

Chris Bounds 20:51

That’s led you to solving a couple other problems. So social media came along the way and I guess, maybe, let’s start there. And then we’ll go into software, which is completely different business, but didn’t have the social media, how did you end up building that business?

Stephanie Betters 21:10

Well, you know, competitive world, you know, we we really formally started our investment company in like, 2014, if we’re going to be like, really real on the dates. And, you know, we were just trying to find a competitive edge and try not to spend a lot of money and in 2015, or so we started marketing on Facebook and had success. And funny back in 2015, not that long ago. Everybody thought we were nuts. Right? Like Facebook marketing doesn’t work, or avatar homeowners a 66 year olds aren’t on Facebook, you know, we’re not it’s not gonna succeed.

No, it is, is that it’s working. And we were able to reproduce our, our results really kind of accidentally, because we had a local friend who’s like, Hey, we’ve got a list of homeowners in Pennsylvania, do you think we can dispo some of these deals? Or I was like, Sure, we’ll try it. Maybe we’ll just put our our Facebook ads there and see if we can drum up some, some homeowner business and some buyers there. And we hope we did.

And then other people that we were, that were in our network and in a mastermind was like, Hey, I see that you’re doing that, like, Can we try it too, and we were able to reproduce it. And 2016 Social media area I was born and we started the Facebook marketing for motivated sellers and have been doing so ever since.

Chris Bounds 22:22

And the social media marketing game has changed dramatically over the last like, two or three years. So I, I was late to that game. And we were on social media, but it was more of an organic, which is fine, like, but knowing what to do now, man, I wish I went like 100x on that. But the advertising like how easy and you really like it was the Wild West, which was got pretty much all all of those platforms and a lot of trouble. But if you’re a savvy marketer, like you could just rake it in with very, very little cost.

Stephanie Betters 22:57

It’s crazy. And we’ve got leads for a couple bucks. You know, now it’s different. Now it’s more expensive per lead, but still not crazy. You know, maybe you spend 60 bucks a week. 100 bucks a lead, depending on your market, California. That’s a wild west right now, you’re going to spend a lot of money in California. But yeah, it was cool. And you know what, I got all jacked up, you know, talking about it, because that was innovation at its finest, right? Like, we see like a potential here and like, let’s do it. I see it, it’s gonna work. And being first to market is super exciting. You know?

Chris Bounds 23:27

Yeah, I really don’t think people have the perspective from a marketing standpoint of that era, like the maybe 2012 to whenever the, you know, the government started coming down on Facebook and Google for their Yeah, it was like termination targeting and all this on 18. Yeah. So that era, like from the had never existed before and marketing, it was just always so so difficult to actually pinpoint and target the exact avatar that you that you want it. So and now it’s not that you can’t do it. It’s just it’s a little bit more generic. And you got to get to be more strategic about it.

Stephanie Betters 24:05

Yep, yeah. Oh, yeah, there’s still ways to do it. I’m still successfully doing it. It’s just yeah, you have to be very strategic. And you need further integration, like you need to connect to offline event data, your CRM data, you need to have lists and get around look alikes. In a more closed vested way me like your data, you right now, to successfully market, you need to have data that you’re putting into it, that we don’t have this long learning curve of trying to get leads in, but that you can cultivate that now quickly, if you have some data to contribute to the to the algorithm.

And that’s, that’s how we’re successful with it. Now, you know, we do a lot of offline event data directly from CRM. So you know, if you came in as a homeowner lead, we would retarget you and people just like you on Facebook, and I know everything about you because you came into my CRM so you know where you live, what your phone number is, what your email is. doesn’t connect that that’s one of the best ways to do a look alike.

Besides buying a list, the trouble of buying a list is God only knows what email address you used for Facebook, right? Or if that, you know, if you’re in the location where the home is. So it’s still really, really good. But the offline event data is kind of the secret sauce. Yeah.

Chris Bounds 25:19

So speaking of CRMs, you’re, you’re involved in that now. CRMs are very complex. And I’ve seen people try to some successful software developers, even investors turn software developers or software developers, term investors who try to scratch that edge. I’ve seen it and I’ve seen it not work, you took a little different approach, which I think is a lot smarter. And that’s more of the innovative approach to something that already exists, and was already very successful. So what made you get into CRM development? And how did you end up pulling that off?

Stephanie Betters 26:01

So I mean, again, from my own pain, you know, while we were running better path, homes or investment company, we kind of got to this point, this was in 2018, where we were spending a lot of money on marketing, and our CRM, we had done Podio, we had switched to a another one that was kind of privately owned. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t giving me what I needed in the sense of like organization or data or like productivity with staff. I couldn’t, I was paying VAs to scrape the CRM to put it in a spreadsheet and then look at the spreadsheet and have the spreadsheet be wrong or not make sense? You know, like we said, the purpose of the CRM CRM supposed to have that. Exactly.

So I was just, I mean, we were spending $100,000 a month, like, and we weren’t taking a huge profit, like we were barely paying ourselves spending all this money on marketing and have no, where’s this money going? What is working? I couldn’t I found myself not being able to answer like the really basic question about what happened to the money, like what is working and what is not working. So and then anybody who was back on the day, like, Please Podio went down for like a week. Oh, I like snapped. I let I it was not pretty I lost my mind. I really did. I was like, this is absolutely ridiculous. Like, I never

Chris Bounds 27:21

got on the Podio train, like I, I know, it was so popular because they had a free version. And it was so light and cheap. But when I looked at it, it was like, this thing is ridiculous and clunky. And I just approached us like, look, am I going to be in business for a couple of weeks or for 10 years plus, like, if I’m going to be in business for a long time, like, we just need to start with someone we can grow, you know, a platform we can grow with. So now you’re you’re in that situation where you’re basically locked out your data, or it’s useless.

Stephanie Betters 27:55

It was the worst, it was literally the worst feeling ever. Because it really at that time, like you’re just so all in I didn’t have that margin, I literally did not have that margin. And quite frankly, we would still feel the pain. Now if our system went down for a week, like I don’t think anyone can really afford that. But anyway, I just your

Chris Bounds 28:11

backups just in case. Oh, of course not have those backups.

28:15

Right now we do learn that lesson. Experience can have a very expensive tuition. But yeah, I mean, so there was other CRMs available. And really at that time, there were these kind of like privately developed a, you know, single server type type CRM systems that had a really heavy marketing in our space, but really not a lot of operation, like support or background or even longevity. So I was like, Okay, I was just like, I’m done. What’s the number one CRM in the world?

I’m going and doing that? Like, that’s what I’m getting? And indisputably Salesforce, I mean, trillion dollar worldwide company number 1000s of servers, I mean, it right. It’s like, it’s the number one. So I told Zach I was like, Listen, I’m doing this. I don’t know how much this is gonna cost. It’s probably gonna be like 20 or 30,000. I don’t know. But we’re doing it. And he’s like, Oh, God. Okay, so I went through this whole process with Salesforce. Because Salesforce out of the box is like, industry agnostic. I mean, from it’s a blank

Chris Bounds 29:20

sheet. They always say it’s a canvas. Exactly. And that was the one thing Podio had for you is it was pre designed for wholesaling, or I guess we’re flipping those. I think there’s the one thing that really had for it, but the greatest thing about Salesforce is and also, you know, those type of high level CRMs that they’re typically they do everything and anything you want. The problem is you have to tell it to do that. But the engine behind it is absolutely

29:53

incredible. Right the engine is indisputable, and it’s extremely reliable. So Oh, that’s what I was looking at. We’re just gonna do that. And I went through the very long process with Salesforce because again, their industry agnostic, they have no clue what first of all real estate, they don’t know anything about real estate, the salespeople at Salesforce and the developers, they knew very, very little about our use case. So that was a little bit daunting. And I went through, you know, seven, one hour meetings with people like through the discovery and what we need and better. And we got to the end, and, you know, to the to the, quote, delivery, there’s like seven people on this call.

And I’m like, Okay, I’m like, I’ve spent a lot of time on this, like, hopefully, this is a solution now, right? And they quote me $100,000 In a six month build, until I can log into the system. And I was like, which that’s really just the starting point. But I’m just logging in, and then they’re like, and then we’ll do phase two. And I was like, what? I mean, again, I would know, I wish I had that Zoom recording it probably live somewhere. But ever run for office that that is definitely going to like, surface this video because I lost it on this call. I was like, What do you mean? What? What?

I was flabbergasted like, this is insane. How could anybody afford this? Like I went through all this time, and you guys drop a six month Bahmani 100k. That’s what I’m gonna end up spending a million dollars on this thing. Oh my god. Anyway, I lost it. And I was like, at the end of it, I’m just gonna do it myself. I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna code it myself. And then those poor souls, they laughed at me. And I was like, Okay, now I’m really gonna do it. So I ended that call. I was like, screw this. I spent the next three months like straight, taught myself how to code on the platform, taught myself the entire platform, built it and went live a better path in about three months. And I was like, Okay, we did it. This is cool. This is amazing thing was singing out. My staff loved it. I could see my dad, I was like, Yes. And then Salesforce, you know, about a month or so after we went live?

They followed up with me. And they’re like, I had to give up. How are you doing? I built it. It’s done. And you know, taking up your drip sequence. Like, I’m cool. Now. I don’t need anything. I might add. Ali was like, really? Can I Can I see it? I was like, fine. I’ll show you in the Zoom call. If you do, like, if you like when you leave me alone. So I showed her and she was like, Oh, my God, like, this is something do you know that this is something and I was like, I don’t know what that means. She’s like, Do you think anyone else in the industry would want this? And I was like, maybe Yeah, I mean, we really need a better tool. And she’s like, I’m going to introduce you to our partner team.

So I mean, just kind of like this amazing moment of just like, a lane opening up that I didn’t even understand or realize was, was there. Again, okay, I call these little things like little God moments, because I would never have even dreamt of this. So anyway, I, you know, got introduced to the partner team, you know, their, their Salesforce and very serious and, and they’re like, you know, do you think there’s a market for this? And I said, Absolutely.

And we started talking about pricing. I was like, Listen, I’ll tell you exactly why, like Salesforce sucks at real estate. And if you are interested in not sucking it, real estate, I’ll be interested in working with you was like, It’s too expensive. There’s too much development time, like you’ve completely out priced an entire market. And if you want to do something together, like it’s got to be affordable. So like, I’m like, I want licenses at 50 bucks. The standard license is $150 a user? I mean, I mean, just like these companies can afford it. What level on the development?

Chris Bounds 33:32

Team? Three to five.

Stephanie Betters 33:35

Right? Right. So I was like, This is what I want. And they’re like, it’s funny, because I have nothing to lose, like, I really didn’t like, whatever, if you want this great. If not, I’m gonna go run my company and be just fine. And they were like, Okay, let’s do it. And we signed the deal. And in 2020, it went through this big security process, they tried to break, but I did, and it passed. And it was great. And we went live in 2020. And we had this little grassroots development, and then, you know, really the end of 2020 it just kind of went viral. And we’ve brought more real estate professionals to the platform on Salesforce in the last two and a half, we’ll call it two and a half three years than Salesforce has in 25 years.

That’s incredible. It’s crazy. It’s crazy awesome. In the timing, it was really incredible. In 2020, when this launched, I was actually stepping out of better path I was a CEO and we just hired somebody to take my role and I was just going to be you know, I was going to work in medicine and you know, kind of consulting our own company and be in the owners box and then left main when I was like okay, I can do left meanwhile, like now I have time you know, I’ll do it.

And then with main took off and now I run that business full time as the CEO and have more team members there the better path has been it’s kind of been its own like tree where I thought it was going to be a branch it became its own tree, and we’ve developed it You know, way beyond what the initial launch was, and of course, better path Holmes has has been, has been, you know, positively affected by that. And then the rest of the real estate professionals have come on. It’s been a wild ride. It’s, it’s been amazing, very, very challenging. Because tech moves blazing fast.

I was not I was not prepared for how quickly tech can grow. But it’s been it’s been incredible. I love being on the forefront of, of innovation. And I love bringing a tool to us in our industry, because we are, we are we are classically so behind the times, I can’t tell you how many people are using, you know, spreadsheets and paper

Chris Bounds 35:41

real estate, so archaic? No, I feel like they they’ve done a lot of catching up over the last couple of years and various tech companies and investing and brokerage space, but um, it’s still very archaic, because I have the same problem. Like when I had the blank slate and like, but I didn’t have a business at that point, or very little, I think we were probably doing a couple of deals a year. Yeah. And so I just paid someone, when I moved from Excel to a CRM, there was there was a service this lady, some wholesaler out of like Arizona, or whatever, and I think it’s like 500 bucks to get me set up.

And then I’ve probably put 1000, maybe 2000 hours and edits over over the last 10 years. Right, um, you know, further customizing that. And I’ve always thought it was like, because right now, it’s very clunky. But it works for what I do. And I’ve always thought about, Hey, should I like, know what you did? And I don’t know, I’ll never do that. But I think my pain point was, it’s not where yours was. Now, if I had to go rebuild it. Like, I can only imagine what that looks like. So that’s awesome.

Stephanie Betters 36:54

Yeah, it’s yeah. So here, I find myself serial entrepreneurship, and I love it, and solving complex problems and helping people and that’s kind of how I deal with my identity stuff and, and get that reward, you know? Yeah, full circle. Um,

Chris Bounds 37:12

are you still doing any volunteer work or any web work with, with nursing?