195: MULTI 8 Figure SEO in 2025 and Beyond w/Andy Kolodgie – 8FE

Is SEO really dead… or are you just doing it wrong?

Andy Kolodgie has already built a multi–eight-figure business by mastering SEO in a space most people think is too competitive: real estate. And he’s only 29!

Andy started out wholesaling but quickly realized it wasn’t his game. With a background as a Navy software developer, he shifted gears and leaned into his strength – building systems that drive motivated seller leads online. That shift led to Property Leads, which now helps real estate investors scale through SEO.

In this episode, Andy explains why SEO for real estate is far less crowded than people think, how Google treats housing searches differently than other industries, why he refuses to scale anything that isn’t sustainable, how he measures lead quality, and what are the red flags he’s learned to spot in partnerships.

Have you written off SEO as too crowded… or maybe too old-school? Andy’s story will definitely make you rethink that.

Tune in and see why SEO might just be the biggest untapped growth channel left.

Inspiring Quotes

• “SEO is changing and evolving – but it’s not going to die tomorrow. ” – Andy Kolodgie
• “What I’ve always liked about SEO, compared to some other channels, is that you can really plant your seeds, grow them later, and they just keep growing and growing.” – Andy Kolodgie
• “Transactional queries will die and turn into paid ad slots. Because, the end goal of Google is to monetize every click as much as possible.” – Andy Kolodgie
• “The three pillars of SEO are brand traffic, content, and links – in that order.” – Andy Kolodgie
• “The earlier you get into anything, including SEO, the better you’re going to do at that thing.” – Andy Kolodgie
• “If you see a trait in someone’s personal life, you can expect it to show up in business.” – Brad Weimert
• “It takes you a lot longer to unwind a bad partnership than it does to wait for a good one.” – Brad Weimert
• “Broad strokes — I would never recommend starting a PPL company. We were lucky to have a ton of SEO leads coming in; they were effectively free, so it cost us nothing to create them. But if you tried to start one today, it’d take half a million dollars just to lose all your money, finally break even, and then go from there.” – Andy Kolodgie

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:01:44 Why real estate SEO isn’t as saturated as you think 
• 00:06:24 Real estate keywords confuse Google’s local vs national intent
• 00:11:50 The three SEO pillars
• 00:16:29 AI is killing click volume, but SEO still drives deals
• 00:21:26 Moving from deals to data
• 00:34:27 Warm transfers increase close rates and trust with clients
• 00:42:11 How to allocate time and resources
• 00:45:20 Ignoring early red flags leads to poor business outcomes
• 00:54:01 The role of ego in business
• 01:03:36 When people show you who they are, believe them
• 01:07:13 Advice for first-time entrepreneurs
• 01:09:29 How to connect with Andy

Brad Weimert 0:00
High Volume queries on Google no longer show you the top result. They show you AI, then they show you six ads before you get to the first result. If you want to show up in the

Andy Kolodgie 0:07
chat GPT season was actually workers, lots of sites talking about your site. Doesn’t really matter the quality of the site. They just need to talk about your site, and you’ll start to show up in the tools, regardless if it’s Gemini or chatgpt. What I’ve always liked about SEO compared to some other channels, is you can really plant your seeds and you can grow them later, and then they keep growing and growing and growing. There’s still a lot of untouched content, a lot of untouched words, a lot of low competition areas where the bar is just not that high. The three things that matter in SEO are land traffic, then content and links in that

Brad Weimert 0:35
order. Right now, when you started, you were a real estate investor. At some point, you shifted from deals to data. What was the reason for that decision? I was

Andy Kolodgie 0:43
really bad at doing deals.

Brad Weimert 0:47
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad Weimer, and as the founder of easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Andy, you went from writing code for the Navy to Wholesaling Houses to just generating leads for real estate investors, and you are charging through multiple eight figures right now. Welcome to the show. Thank you, man, Thanks, Brad, thanks. Yeah, it’s good to see you, dude. So I want to talk about a million things, as I do with interesting people like you, and I’m not going to prevent you from interviewing me also on the show, but we kicked it off and you were trying to interview me too, so we’ll see where this goes. Your company sells leads information for motivated sellers, and that’s kind of the whole business in a nutshell. What that means is, when people want to sell their home, you find those people, and you sell that information to a real estate investor that wants to sell them some shit. Yeah, exactly. You built your business through strong SEO, and I’ve heard you say that SEO is not saturated, specifically in a market like real estate, which is a super competitive space for most people’s perspective. Yeah, explain to me why you think SEO is not as competitive as everybody thinks it is.

Andy Kolodgie 2:33
Well, at the at the peak, we were doing probably 60 or 70% of the available SEO lead volume in the space, like we were either our sites that property leads, or through the agency, smrii, were curtailing all that volume, and so I had a really good visibility into what was working, what wasn’t working. And there’s a ton of people who are entering the space. And then six months, they’re generating 3050 leads a month. And if you’re generating 3050 leads a month, and you can run a really nice operation for yourself, you’re not building a $10 million business, but you’re starting out a six figure or seven figure company. And then from there, you can start to scale into other marketing

Brad Weimert 3:04
channels. When you say you’re generating 30 or 50 leads a month. So you’re talking about like a real estate investor that gets, or, let me, oh, I’m going to use real estate investor, but, you know, insert any business type here. You’re a real estate investor that wants to be able to flip houses or wholesale or whatever, and you want to find motivated sellers. What you’re saying is the path to getting 30 to 50 leads a month to do that is not that difficult.

Andy Kolodgie 3:26
Yeah, I don’t think it is in the SEO space. Now, of course, like I’m biased, I have a technical background. It’s easier for some people than others, but there’s a lot of available resources out there to learn how to do that SEO stuff. A lot of Facebook groups, a lot of guys out there who are giving away for free, and if you don’t want to do that, a lot of agencies that you could pay for to do it as well. What I’ve always liked about SEO, compared to some other channels, is you can, like, really plant your seeds. You can grow them later, and then they keep growing and growing and growing. And that’s something that’s really special about SEO. You don’t see anything else, not even direct mail or other channels where you have to plan a longer time horizon.

Brad Weimert 4:00
So okay, so let’s talk about that for a second. Because historically, I mean, I’ve, I’ve agreed with you for my entire career, which is, like, the people that put that plant the seeds for SEO, meaning they put content out for SEO early, benefit from it later. But if you fail to do it early, you’re kind of fucking yourself for I mean,

Andy Kolodgie 4:19
for sure, we were talking earlier about this, like, you know, Joe Rogan is a magnificent podcast, you know, host and stuff, and he’s been doing it for a really long time. And there’s probably a reason why he’s so good at it now he’s been doing it for 20 years. So, yeah, the earlier you get into anything including SEO, the better you’re going to do at that thing. But there’s still a lot of untouched content, a lot of untouched words, a lot of low competition areas where the bar is just not that high. You go look at the roofing space today, or you go look at plumbing or HVAC or something like that, the competition levels really high. There’s a ton of VC money flowing in, a ton of competition from marketing companies to build up these huge brands, and you just don’t see that in the real estate space, because there’s no roll up, right? Now, the biggest wholesaling companies that we hear of on the day to day are doing, you know, Max 10 million a year in revenue, maybe, maybe 20 there’s obviously, like the the wedgewoods and the new westerns and stuff. But those are, those are the oddball cases with very unique business models, rather than the average wholesaler and what they’re doing.

Brad Weimert 5:18
So, okay, so heavily dependent on industry. So when you when you say there’s plenty of opportunity for SEO in the real estate market, it’s predicated on the fact that, I think you you outline something really good. It’s predicated on the fact that there isn’t big money going into it to do roll ups.

Andy Kolodgie 5:37
So if you look at real estate as a whole, there’s big money in brokerages. There’s big money in SFR, institutional SFR, like, people buying up rental properties. And there was a big single family rental, single family rentals. Sorry, yeah, no, you’re good. And there was a big push at one point to try to roll up home flipping and I buying and stuff like that. And I think what we’ve pretty clearly seen is that’s a really difficult business model to scale nationally, even locally. And so until someone can figure out that model, if it’s possible, I mean, anything’s possible, but if it’s reasonably practical, given the gross margin constraints that you’d have running that kind of business, for as long as that is happening, the competition level in the space will be lower than every other space, and which is why this very low barrier to entry much easier to get into. Anybody can do it in theory, interesting.

Brad Weimert 6:24
So I look at one, I think that that’s a great takeaway, which is, if you are looking at the competition in a market, but specifically the competition to buy leads or find leads, whether it’s SEO or otherwise, if there’s institutional money in the space, it’s going to be way more competitive, for sure, because they’re just throwing way more at it. And when I say institutional money, you’re looking at venture capitalists. You’re looking at private equity companies, people that are coming in and have huge pockets to buy that stuff up. The other thing that I think about when I think about SEO with your space in general, is SEO in the local market versus SEO in the national market. I don’t know how you started the company, but I would imagine that you’re doing a shitload of local SEO and then replicating that across the board, that’s

Andy Kolodgie 7:09
your question. So we started doing a lot of local SEO. It was way easier to scale at the time. We had to learn a lot of really tough lessons about SEO and how SEO works, and that was some of our contributions to SEO community kind of came out through that that we started after that. We moved after that into national SEO, which for the business model that we have and the complexity of different lead gen channels, and kind of trying to pull everything together. You have to go national at some point. Otherwise, your entire business model is predicated on building really tiny websites, trying to get them to scale. And it’s very hard. It’s very, very difficult to do that. It’s not a scalable solution unless your entire team is built overseas and you want to build a really low margin business, is what we found.

Brad Weimert 7:50
So okay, so for anybody that didn’t catch that or follow that, so if you’re a mom and pop shop in Austin, Texas, let’s say you have a restaurant in Austin, Texas, ranking for keywords in the search engines is much easier. Let’s say you’re, you know, an Italian place in Austin, the keywords around an Italian Austin restaurant way easier than just Italian restaurant, which is what you would want to be doing nationally. That’s the nutshell of what you said, yeah, yeah. 100% but at some point, so what’s the, what’s the necessity to do the net to pursue national at some point is it just that you want to control the bigger keywords, and it just takes more time to do that if you want to scale the business.

Andy Kolodgie 8:27
It’s tricky in this space in particular, because, oh, what’s really unique about the real estate space, especially the investor space, is how Google treats keywords in the investor space is different than how they treat every other space. So Google looks at guns, gold, cars, houses, boats, the same. And so people search things like, we buy houses, we buy boats, we buy guns, sell my gun, fast, sell my boat, fast, sell my gold, fast, et cetera. And so those types of terms, if you search a generic keyword, like we buy houses, you’ll get a mixed result of local and national keywords. Versus, if you search like you don’t search Italian pasta, you search Italian place near me, so you’re always gonna get that local result. And so there’s no need for an Austin Italian restaurant to show up in San Francisco, versus in the real estate space, like you need to start to rank for the generic and the local keyword, to control both those parts of the SERP. And so the big thing that we worked on originally was, what we found was Google mixed, if you did like a sell my house, fast search, or we buy house, the search Google would mix the local, city based keyword and the state pages in the SERP if you wanted to rank in certain zip codes, even if that zip code was in Austin, Texas. The Austin Texas page on your site would be useless. You would have to have a Texas page on your site, and that’s how you would rank for those keywords. It’s getting really in the nitty gritty of SEO, and you have to start looking at like, okay, search this one keyword over every zip code in the entire state of Texas. What city pages are popping up here, what state pages are popping up here, et cetera. And then also on top of that, too. To You know, Google ranks different zip codes differently for different sites, even if it’s the same page. So for example, if someone’s clicking in one zip code and they click differently than a different zip code, it’ll rank differently. What do you mean they click differently? So, like, the common term might be like Pogo clicking or something like that. But basically, if I’m searching, we buy houses from Austin, Texas and the 7878704, zip code, and my site is the first result. I click it, great. Okay, now I move over to another zip code. Do the same search. My site’s first. I don’t click the first site, I click the second site. Google’s adding extra weight into that second site. For the next time, for some of the searches, go to the first result. And where you can run to this problem is you can have if you, if you do a search of that keyword across every zip code in the Austin area, or every lat long, because it gets very fine tuned, is you can end up with these black holes where you could be ranking number one in every single zip code, or most, almost every single zip code, but in a Few zip codes, you’re not ranking at all, and it’s because, it could be because of bots. It could be because a few people in that area just didn’t want to click on your site for whatever reason. And then you can start to lose lead volume, or really lose click volume in those zip codes. And that’s like there’s a tool out there that doesn’t exist yet that someone should go build that tracks this stuff. I never got into that part of the space, but it’d be really cool. Someone built

Brad Weimert 11:24
that, yeah, a tool that tracks sort of what’s getting clicked in different zip codes. And the comparison for it,

Andy Kolodgie 11:30
different zip codes and different lat longs, yeah, depending on the in different different like lat and longs like you, because you can get more fine tuned than the zip code, like Google. Oh God, looking at the lat long but they’re trying to but

Brad Weimert 11:41
latitude and longitude, yeah, latitude longitude. I was like, What’s he saying? Sorry, yeah, no, you go. So, just more specific than the zip code. Yeah, more specific, interesting. And so, okay, so ultimately, all of this is about intent of the searcher, yeah, theoretically, right. And so for Google in your space, when somebody searches, you know, buy house Austin, maybe they would also be willing to buy it in San Antonio, yeah, right, or Dallas or Houston. So Google is thinking, maybe we show them other things in Texas, and not just Austin. Yeah, that’s the idea in effect, yeah, yeah. Let me back out of this and apply this to non real estate people. What are the, you know, what are the tenets of SEO? If you’re thinking about, let’s say you’re a $5 million company right now, or a $1 million company right now. You haven’t started SEO, but your website’s been around for a few years. Where do you start with it?

Andy Kolodgie 12:35
I mean, the three, the three things that matter in SEO are links, content and brand traffic. And probably in reverse order, I’d say brand traffic then content, then linked. Than content that links in that order. Right now, brand traffic meaning people searching for your brand Google, clicking on your site, not even doesn’t. They don’t even have to click on your site, but ideally, they’re clicking on your site and definitely searching your brand and then come from a multiple forms, via Google Maps, via Google search, via whatever properties it it doesn’t have to actually be via searches either. It could just be via them going directly to your site. I mean, Google has a ton of data, and one of the, one of the data points they use, for example, is like Google Fonts, which is on every site. And they’ll, they’ll see, okay, how many times are fonts getting pulled on this site? And they can use that to pull in data, even if you’re not running Google Analytics or Google Analytics or Google Search Console on the site, so stuff like that. So those are all, like, the three. Those are the three pillars of SEO, regardless of where you live or what you do. That’s a great that’s a really, that’s a really detailed question to do it correctly. I don’t know if I can.

Brad Weimert 13:33
Like, well, let me, let me start with this. So like, and I don’t, we don’t need to get too granular on this, because I think most people, anybody that’s running a business, SEO plays some role in it, for sure, it’s just a question of how deliberate they are. But I guess if you’re like, if you’re starting to get serious about your SEO game, how much time do you spend on long tail keywords versus, you know, large direct things that have tons of volume?

Andy Kolodgie 13:56
It’s tough to give a broad strokes answer, because there’s a lot of nuances depending on the situation in real estate, specifically, the short tail keywords are going to be the only thing that really performs. I just know that from a lot of experience, but so

Brad Weimert 14:09
basically, the long tail keywords just give you trash for traffic. Yeah, long tail keywords don’t have high intent for people that are searching them. In theory, for

Andy Kolodgie 14:17
sure, is the best example I have, is like a for sale by owner. Search is like 120 clicks to a lead, and then it was like 40 leads to a deal. So you the volume and clicks you gotta get was insane, versus, like a semi house fast search was like five clicks to a lead, there’s like 12 or 13 leads to a deal. You know, broad strokes again, but I mean, that’s like a 400x difference in clicks, yeah, versus, you know, I can’t speak to Italian restaurants specifically, I, you know, I really don’t know Sure, but yeah, broad strokes,

Brad Weimert 14:50
yeah. So look for high intent keywords. And it’s more about the intent than probably short tail, long tail, for sure.

Andy Kolodgie 14:56
And I think also to like you. The World SEO is changing a lot, like the world’s moving towards there’s three types of searches, right? There’s transactional, informational, navigational, and SEO will continue to be around for navigational, so like Bank of America login, you’re trying to find a specific page on a site, it will probably die for informational, like information is kind of coming from chat, GPT or Gemini or whatever, you know, grok, whatever tool you’re using. And then transactional is going to change a lot, like there for probably the next 20 years, little 10 or 20 years, maybe they’ll continue to be some amount of transactional clicks, but over time, it’ll evolve into basically just paid ad slots. And so all transactional queries will die and turn into into paid ad slots. Why do you think that, if you’re Google, what is the what is the benefit to promoting a transactional query for free?

Brad Weimert 15:52
And can you define transaction query? House painter near me?

Andy Kolodgie 15:57
So like I’m searching for house painter? Why? Why would Google want to promote somebody for free if they don’t have to, and if. Now, for example, like with, you know how to find someone to paint your like, how to how much does a house painter cost? Right? That’s your back to informational. You know, they can run ads on that like, display ads on the side when you’re searching informational query. But the the end goal of Google is to monetize every click as much as possible. And so why, like, what would their incentive be to not charge for that over time, especially if people are willing to

Brad Weimert 16:29
pay for it too. Yeah, that’s interesting. And I mean, the evidence of that is right now, as of you know, September of 2025, popular high volume, high volume queries on Google no longer show you the top result. They show you AI, then they show you six ads before you get to the first result. Yeah, truly, yeah. Well, so let’s, I think really topical right now is how AI is impacting SEO today. And so, using your example of informational How much does a house painter cost? That might be a transactional search, and in fact, that probably is a transactional search, right? They are there. It’s information, but it is a, it is a sales question, right? They’re they’re going, they have intent. They’re trying to paint something. Probably, right. So right now, Google’s approach is to show an AI result and then show ads and and I’d like your feedback on this, but what we’re seeing, and I’ve seen across the board with tons of businesses, is search volume is still there, but clicks are like, 50% down because people’s searches are getting answered by AI and so we’re getting traffic from the from chat GPT, and that’s that’s our that’s where the source is now, and then our click volume through Google is way down because people see it, and maybe they got their answer that way. So what’s the intersection between these two things, and how should people think about SEO versus AI and how they work together right now?

Andy Kolodgie 18:01
If you want to show up in the chat GPT seasons, I mean, right now was actually working for chat GPT and a lot of that stuff, if you if you’re trying to show up in those tools, is just a ton of content about your site, regardless of the quality of the content. So tools like GSA are working really well. But if you’re more of like a business owner, like press releases really crush right now, lots of sites talking about your site. Doesn’t really matter the quality of the site. They just need to talk about your site, and you’ll start to show up in the tools, regardless of its Gemini or chat, GBT, etc, because they’re all pulling from the same same SERPs. What’s GSA? GSA is like a quaint Ukrainian tool for, oh, really, for creating, like, backlinks on lots of sites. It’s like a spammer tool. Basically got it. I would recommend it for garbage person. But if you’re, if you’re in an SEO you probably know what that is in your go after and

Brad Weimert 18:47
stuff interesting. Well, so that, God, I’m gonna get in the weeds here, but I can’t help it. So that brings me to sort of white hat versus black hat. Seo. Things are changing quicker than ever, but things have always changed with SEO and the fear of people that want to be in it for the long run is that you do something to game the system, and then the system gets mad at you and punishes you and said another way, you do some black hat tactic to get a bunch of traffic, and then Google, they used to call it a Google slap, right? And Google changes the algorithm and de prioritizes all the stuff that you not only de prioritizes but punishes you for trying to game the system. How do you feel about that relative to functionally gaming the AI engines?

Andy Kolodgie 19:32
I think it’s no different than any like industry or problem that you face. If your level of sophistication is greater than everybody else’s, then you can, you could do whatever you want. There’s no rules. But if you’re unsophisticated on that topic, then you know what would make you want to create that kind of risk and put your your business at stake in that way, to say it a different way, like, I really enjoy the airline industry. I love getting over booked, or I used to love getting over booked on flights and like getting the travel credit and stuff like that. I. I made a whole model out of that, and I’d love to do that, but I understood it really well. And for the average person, they wouldn’t, and they would just buy tickets and just get get toasted and stuff. So, you know, for me, black hat, white hat, it’s, it’s all irrelevant. It’s all the same to me. But for someone who’s running an Italian restaurant in Austin where their focus is Italian food, not SEO, then I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t mess with it.

Brad Weimert 20:22
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think about that a lot. I mean, my whole world is risk. And I think a fundamental principle that I hold, that you just articulated, is a lot of risk disappears with education, yeah, and in a lot of perceived risk disappears with education, and a lot of real risk too. Through that lens, what mistake Do you think most entrepreneurs are making today with SEO as it pertains to AI?

Andy Kolodgie 20:48
I think you know AI is coming around, but I think people are also over hyping the use cases of AI at any given moment. And so I think that extends to SEO, like SEO is changing and evolving, but SEO is not going to die tomorrow. And so a lot of people have throw their hands up, given up an SEO entirely, and have moved on to whatever greener pastures they think are out there. And, you know, Google still a large, multi trillion dollar company, or a single trillion dollar company, and, like, they’ve got a lot of time, a lot of flow, and it’s going to tend to be a lot of flow there. And so I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t throw your hands up just yet. I’d ride the train for as long as you can. Yeah, I love that.

Brad Weimert 21:26
Okay, let’s jump into your company, man. So you, you, when you started, you were a real estate investor. Most real estate investors obsess over deals, because that’s where they make money. At some point, you shifted from deals to data. What was the reason for that decision, and how did you approach that? I was really bad at doing deals.

Andy Kolodgie 21:51
That was not my strong suit. I mean, so for for complete context, I was a software developer in the Navy. Really tech oriented guy. Really like interested in that side of it. I really liked real estate. I want to get rid to get rentals. Wanted to build passive income, whatever that means. Like, I thought the best way to do that was to get into wholesaling. And what I realized through that process was I’m not a wholesaler. I am not good at, you know, chasing sellers and getting people to sign contracts and getting through title and like all that stuff. I’m really good at generating the leads and getting really high quality leads for really low price. And so eventually we just staked our flag in that in that goal, and through a lot of failed partnerships, a lot of problems, we started to grow the amount of SEO sites we had, the amount of registered partnerships we were doing, and eventually started just selling the leads directly to investors. What was that

Brad Weimert 22:41
arc like? And how did you start selling the leads like, how long did you How would you give yourself to fall on your face and decide I’m not going to wholesale until you shifted the model?

Andy Kolodgie 22:51
I was attempting to wholesale for a year, and failed for a year, and then we were wholesaling for a year, and then after that, we had a partnership breakup, basically, someone just took a bunch of money and ran off with it. Somehow, the title company was involved this whole crazy thing, but ran off with it. And at that point, we said, Okay, no more rev share partnerships. We’re just going to sell leads. And that was March 2022, by July 2022 we had launched the we launched property leads, or had our first customers, and kind of started from there, broad strokes, I would never recommend starting a PPL company. We were very lucky and very fortunate in that we had a ton of SEO leads coming in at the time. They were effectively free, and so we had no cost to create those leads. But if you were to go out there today and create a PPL company, at least our space, it costs, like, a half a million dollars just to lose all your money, and then finally break even, and then go from there.

Brad Weimert 23:40
So pay per lead company, yeah, pay per lead. So the general framework, correct me, if I’m wrong, is you are generating a bunch of leads on the back end SEO, and otherwise, I’m asking about that in a second, but you’re generating a bunch of leads in the back end, and then you’re selling them to people that don’t know how to generate leads.

Andy Kolodgie 23:55
Yeah, and a lot of them, I almost think that person misnomer, like a lot of people do know to generate leads versus the better marketing channel for them. You know, if you consider the cost of running a marketing channel, paying a management fee, managing the process, you still have to manage the manager the net, net cost of working through someone like us, especially when the risk profile is there, like, we’re the cheaper option because there’s no risk with us. The only risk is that, like, we run off with the money, but we don’t do that. So, you know?

Brad Weimert 24:23
Well, I think, I think that you made a really good point right now, which is a lot of entrepreneurs look at paying an agency or a third party to do something and see a high price point, and they immediately think, I should just figure out how to do that internally. The use case you just gave was net. Net. If you hire somebody, train them, have to oversee them and manage them. You’re going to end up paying more per lead than if you just paid us to do it, and you wouldn’t have the overhead for sure.

Andy Kolodgie 24:53
And I think the other part that people fail to realize is that we are so much more effective. Of generating leads than everybody else because of our scale that we can we can buy, we can effectively buy leads for lower than Ambit can generate them for. And so your, your actual cost of buying through us will be lower. Like we are a we’re effectively a bulk buyer. And there is some truth to be said that, like, if you’re spending, let’s say, a million dollars a month to Google, like you’re going to get a better deal than somebody spending five grand a month, or even 50 grand a month. Does that shed

Brad Weimert 25:25
light? Yeah, totally. I mean, well, I think that even without, even if you take the scale element out of it, there’s truth to it, which is, if you find somebody that’s good at what they’re doing, and they’re more expensive, yeah, it still is. You should it’s still worth it for most entrepreneurs, for all entrepreneurs, to do the math and say, Well, what if I have to have a manager? What if I’m paying somebody internally? And I actually break that cost apart and put it on top of the lead cost then then look at it and what’s the cost per lead if I do it that way? And I think I wanted to break that apart and talk about it, because it’s true of almost every part of business, right? It’s true of content creation. It’s true of outsourcing accounting, it’s true of outsourcing HR, all these different elements where you think, no, no, I want to have it in house. Now, of course, the other benefit to having something in house is you have more control over it, right? So you can do it however you want to do it, but you also might fuck that up. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And most entrepreneurs are not, you know, accountants and sales people and lead gen experts, et cetera, right? They’re figuring it out as they go. It’s difficult to vet external vendors. Specifically, if you don’t know the space, what do people look for to find a good lead gen person?

Andy Kolodgie 26:39
Testimonials work really well refund policy on the back end. Like, are they willing to refund for the response? Are they willing to refund for if they’re not selling their house? Or are they just, like, here’s your leads. You know, good luck. And like, let’s see what happens, type thing. You know, those are the things that I was looking for. I like to say we plant our flag in that as well. But you know, not everybody’s perfect, too. And I would say the other thing too is, what is the quality of traffic and quality of leads that they’re actually producing? Like, when you talk to other customers in the space, we talk to other people who are looking at external vendors, like, what are they saying about that person? I mean, referrals are always best, so we try to spread ourselves through referrals, if that makes sense,

Brad Weimert 27:21
yeah. I mean, I think that those are, yeah, referrals, testimonials are a good starting point, though. I definitely know companies that get referrals or testimonials from people early on in the sales exchange, and so you see big names that gave a testimonial that no longer think highly of them. So all the other elements I think are relevant and like, what are the what are the tells for people, you are selling data, so you said the quality of the lead it that’s a really relevant thing right now, because in, like, we’re talking about this sort of for a lot of people listening, if they’re not doing real estate, it seems like this niche element of real estate In its lead generation and buying leads. But the principle there applies to every business model on the planet, which is, how do you get your leads, how do you make your sales? And ultimately, a lot of that goes to data. And right now, there are all these companies that are doing data enrichment, and it used to be that you, you know, would buy data from some big data broker, and somebody, you know, these huge companies, would basically buy the data from retail, and then they would, you know, buy data from not Facebook, but from some online platform, and merge it. And they would try to, like, you know, cobble it together. But the data ended up being shitty, because they’d be like, oh yeah, this is Andy. And then they’d get a phone number from, you know, 2002 or an email address from 2012 Right? And, and also, you didn’t have a good way to quality check that today, if you’re looking at buying data or buying leads, is it reasonable to get a sample of the data to what? What is a refund policy like, what’s good, what’s bad? What are some of the granular things that somebody should look

Andy Kolodgie 29:03
for? That’s a great question. Yeah, we definitely, we definitely don’t do any samples. I’ve never that’s probably never gonna happen, but, you know, that’s interesting. Leads and data are different, also similar. I guess, when we buy data, and we buy a fair amount of data. We definitely ask for samples. Because you can sign a contract in a way where, like, you can’t actually action on the data without like, you can buy data to test it, to see how it validates, and stuff like that. But you can, you can sign a contract say, I’m not going to action on it. They can see that data to make sure you’re not doing that. Versus the leads, like, if I give somebody 10 leads, you’re gonna go call the 10 leads. You can’t do all these, like micro contracts with a bunch of people that we just met with, all these, like, very tiny transactions, tiny transactions being, like, 1000 $10,000 a month. So I don’t know, I don’t know how we would do that. I’ve never thought about that question. And maybe we don’t have the best process for you. In the direction you’re going, like doing better than just referrals, of better than testimonials and stuff. I think that’s probably a place where we have a gap to be honest. Yeah, that’s a

Brad Weimert 30:10
open, self aware answer. Yeah, I don’t know. I think, I think that there’s no question that guarantees seem to enhance performance of virtual offers. Also, you know, if you’ve been around long enough and tried to buy leads or data, you know that they’re shitty a lot of the

Andy Kolodgie 30:29
time, yeah. So, you know, every we do have, like, a soft internal guarantee that’s worked really well. But again, it’s a soft guarantee because there’s so many factors in it and that, like, we’ll look at the title transfer data of the leads we send out after three six months, we’ll say, like, Okay, well, we sent out 100 leads to this person, and none of them transferred title. Like, there was just, like, no, no off market transactions, and maybe a couple on market transactions. And, like, that’s on us. Like, we didn’t do a good job supplying new leads. We need to eat the bill. Like, we’ll, we’ll pay for the whole thing, and then we’ll give you another round, you know, another roll the dice and stuff. And we’ve done that one or two times, probably in the history of the company, and that’s totally fine when we do that, because with marketing that, it is a game of odds. And so the more leads you get, the more of the odds average out. And so we’re willing to eat the eat the ball on that, but more often not. What happens is we’ll send out leads. They’ll say all these were terrible, terrible leads, and then we’ll look at the data. And it was like, Okay, well, like 45 of 50 transferred off market like you. We can’t really do much better than that. That’s a really good you know, if you closed every single one of these, your cost per deal would have been $300 or something ridiculous. So I think that’s that. But again, that’s a soft guarantee, because it’s hard to say we guarantee you’re going to close the deal, because we can’t control the sales process or our what we can control is the percentage of leads the transfer title, and we can control the response rate, to some extent. That’s it. Okay?

Brad Weimert 31:53
So they’re going to be people that listen to this, that think or watch this and think, Andy’s smart. He’s right. I’m going to pay for a company to sell me leads in the future, instead of trying to do it myself. And then there’s going to be a whole shitload that are like, Yeah, fuck all that. I need to learn how to do SEO and do it myself, or generate leads myself. I know that you started by doing just SEO, or that’s how it began. What are the other mechanisms that you’re using now to get leads yourself internally, at scale, and then turn around, sell them. Yeah.

Andy Kolodgie 32:28
I mean, we if, if you can name a marketing channel, we’re currently doing it. Not to give a dodgy and unspecific answer, but I would actually say that if you’re, if you can think of marketing channel, we’re either doing it or have done it and found that it doesn’t work or it doesn’t scale. You know, Facebook is common. People get really scared of Facebook, you know, YouTube, Google, search, things like that. Those are all really common. We’re spending millions of dollars a month on advertising. So there’s, like, we have a lot of a lot of data on what’s working what’s not working. I can’t get into too much of the specifics, though, because, like, if I give away all the sauce, then all the other competitor companies will just do what we’re doing, and that’ll make our job even harder. And so we’re really proud of what we built on that side. And a lot of it too is, is ingrown special tech to be able to do some of these very strange marketing channels that are are really special as well.

Brad Weimert 33:13
Yeah. Okay. So without, you know, without showing all the tips to the competitors that are watching and are going to steal them, two things. One, when you say, when you listed a couple of those channels, Facebook, Google or YouTube, are you doing paid and organic? And then the other is, can you give me a bulleted list of some of the other things and whether they worked or not? Just what are the other channels that you looked at? Yeah, so

Andy Kolodgie 33:36
an example channel that that doesn’t really work is like Snapchat, for example. It’s very, very young audience for real estate in particular, for real estate in particular, instead of, just like not many people, you know, there are leads to be gone, yet to be, to be received on there, but the actual, the true. So we look at a couple of things. We’re going to look at cost per lead, we’re going to look at refund rate, we’re going to look at lead quality ratings from the investors and stuff. We’re also going to look at, okay, how many leads we have to generate to actually create an off market transaction, and is that? Transaction. And is that above an off market transaction? Because that’s the penultimate metric, right? Is like, how many did somebody actually sell their house? Somebody actually sell their house? That’s why I love real estate in particular, because, like, I can know I was a sale made. Was that sale made? I can know for for certain. Versus in the roofing space, you have to have a satellite that goes over the house, looks at the roof of the house to see if the shingles have changed. And that’s very difficult, possible, very difficult, which is like a whole nother rabbit hole.

Brad Weimert 34:27
But so hold on. So this is interesting. So the, basically, you have a very clear way to know if the if the quality of the lead is good, because you can track it all the way to the end,

Andy Kolodgie 34:37
yeah. So we’ll track it all the way the end now, like it’s funny, you’ll look at, you look at public companies like, open door, right? And that’s like, their bread and butter. That’s like, all they talk about is how, like, that’s what they do. They can track the sale from beginning 10, so they’re gonna create the best system possible. Well, you can skip 90% of the process and still know what happens, as long as you’re generating the lead and tracking title transfer at the end. Not to poop on Open Door specifically, but it’s like, there’s a lot of companies like that, like a home light or whatever that are that are have that same process. So yeah, I love to, I love to look at the title transfer part of it. The next thing that we’re working on we’ll be releasing the next two weeks, is warm transfers. And so are what transfers like, live transfers, warm transfers. So our goal next is to like, Okay, how do we get the response rate as high as possible? How to get as possible? How do we track the response rate and track the phone call the investors, happening with the the homeowner, so that, okay, we know they made contact six months later. We know a sale happened. I don’t know if it happened with this investor, but like, I know we got you in contact on this date six months later. This is the contract. This is the house that sold. Let’s put two and two together, like we gave you a pretty good opportunity here, or we didn’t, you know, maybe we didn’t do a good job.

Brad Weimert 35:46
So, okay, yeah, this is all super interesting to me, because we live in a an easy pay to act. We live in a digital, first world with almost all things, but then it completely goes offline, yeah? So all of our tracking gets fucked, right? So I feel like I’m heavy on the Fox today. So it’s digital all the way up to the application getting submitted with us, and then then it goes into different systems, right? Like, what? Like email and No, no, like the actual payment systems, right? So there’s, there’s public facing data and tracked around the internet, and what did the user do? And then they get set up with us, and they’re live. And then everything moves into our systems. So then we’re piecing things together to connect all the dots, and those are both like, sort of leads on the front end into actual transaction data later, and that’s without getting into the weeds of this stuff. It’s mostly just we have two different platforms, or seven different platforms we need to reconcile data with, wow, yeah. And e com is this beautifully simple system, because 100% of it is digital, and it’s also very competitive market, but e com is all digital, so, like, everything is straight through. They clicked here, they clicked here, they clicked here. Oh, they checked out. We know that that was worth this, right? They know what the checkout value is in the cart. But you articulated, and I think this is a really good lesson for, like, a ton of people that don’t have a simple tracking mechanism in their business. Most people selling leads, I would bet, are not going to the end result and saying, how good were these leads actually by tracking whether or not that lead turned into a sale? Yeah, no, and you are going through the trouble of saying, Hey, we’re going to track the whole process of generating the lead, but we’re actually going to then follow up and see if a sale was made by looking at all of the title companies, all of the public records for real estate transactions and who made them, and reconcile that with the leads that you generated.

Andy Kolodgie 37:38
Yep, 100% and you take a step further too. You can go as far a funnel as you want to. This was the ad creative, or this was the type of ad creative we used to get this off market, title, transaction, rate, farther down the funnel. And the longer and the more data you have doing that kind of stuff, it becomes a bit of a flywheel where it’s hard to catch up to that

Brad Weimert 37:57
for competitors, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s fucking awesome. You’ve made it this far, which probably means that you’re an entrepreneur, which probably means that you’re accepting credit cards and maybe ACH payments, beyond the fact that we can do a rate review to save you money, beyond the fact that we give you dedicated account reps, world class customer service, world class technology, and can actually optimize the way you accept payments online. Our average client saves year by working with us. If you want to find out how and get a free rate review from us, check us [email protected] forward slash, am you? You’ve grown pretty fucking quickly to multi eight figures. What do you say to the person that wants growth at all cause, at all cost, and does it in the face of sustainability?

Andy Kolodgie 38:45
Yeah, I would say I’m sustainability at all costs, over over growth. I would say there’s been multiple times where, and this is probably not I would not say this is the strongest personality trait, but I will choose not to do something until it’s until it is recurring and sustainable. I will wait because I don’t like, I really hate doing one off transactional stuff. It bothers me a lot. I like to there’s something I think this is, again, a bad personality trait. But I think there’s something special about recurring business and that, like, it keeps people very honest. It means you have to. It means you have to be doing a good job constantly, and you can’t. You can’t fail on your promises. Versus a transactional business, you can get a seller to sign up for XYZ contract and be a terrible person, but still make a lot of money. And so I try to stick within that buck as much as possible. With that said, there’s definitely been we’ve grown like this. We’ve like flat and then big spike, and then flat and then big spike, because we’re not, we just don’t do transactional stuff in the middle to even the curve, basically, good and bad sides to that.

Brad Weimert 39:53
Oh my god, yeah. Well, I love that, because I and you, you said a bunch of i. Um, things really well there. But if you put a bad system together, it’s very evident very quickly, yeah, that you just put a bad system together. If you have a bad transaction, you might have a good one next. And it might not be clear that the pattern that you’re running is good or bad 100% but if you put the system together, it’s pretty clear if it’s good or bad, yeah. So I think that that’s a really fun benefit. The question that I have around that is, how do you reconcile iteration and testing against I’m not willing to do it until I have a good system in place.

Andy Kolodgie 40:32
Again, this is probably a bad personality trait, but we tend to just custom build a solution to make sure we can do it scalably so. The example I could think of right now is like we needed call center. We needed a call center, an inbound call center, to pick up calls in less than 10 seconds per call, 10 to 12 seconds per call. And every call center under the world, in the world promises that it could do that, and then every single one fails to deliver that. And so what we did is we built system that calls a bunch of call centers at the same time and just sends the call to whichever call center picks up first. And now we can see the data, and we can see the stats, and it’s like very crisp and very clear, who’s performing, who’s not. We can cut off the low performers. We can add new high performers and stuff. And call centers go through these very interesting cyclical processes where they will ramp up agents still have great call times, and then they’ll try to ramp up client volume. When they ramp up client volume, college and pickup time goes really high up, and then you have to, it’s like this, you know, cat and mouse game. And so we tried to avoid that part, and we just tried to use as many call centers as possible so that we could flatten the curve. And so to go back to the original question, it’s like, well, we’ve been wanting to take in more inbound calls for a long time, but we could not do it because we did not have a sustainable method to do that. Now, we could have just hired a bunch of agents. We could have agents. We could have brought call center in house. It’s a very painful new business that you’re starting. It’s very transactional to do that, because now you’re doing a bunch of stuff to hopefully do this next thing, versus if we just build the software, it’s going to take some time to do it, but now we can set up all the call centers in the world that we want to and once we do it, it’s sustainable, and there’s very low effort, very low maintenance. We have to hire employees to be call agents and stuff that, for me, is the example of, like, I’m going for the sustainable route over the over the transactional

Brad Weimert 42:11
route. How do you know? I mean, you presumably spent a lot of time, energy and resources to create this call routing system. You also then had to set up contracts with 1000 call centers instead of one or two. How do you decide what task or issue warrants that a much, that much time and energy and what doesn’t? Because when you invest 2345, months on an initiative and it’s the wrong initiative, you’re just pissing money away.

Andy Kolodgie 42:39
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I would say again, probably a bad personality trait or probably a failure of the entrepreneur, but I would say gut instinct has been the factor that I’ve looked at. And so what I’m looking for is like, what’s the weakest link in the chain to go to the next revenue bump, whatever that might be. And that can be hard to articulate, because there could be, for example, for the past six months, there’s been like, five things in the way for us to go from x to y, and so we had to do all five of those things. And the order, I’m not sure if the order mattered too much. We had to do all five of them to go the next revenue bump, and we’re closing on the fifth one. Finally, I so I don’t have a great answer to be, to be super Frank,

Brad Weimert 43:26
I don’t know. I think that that’s okay somebody, I don’t think I’ve told this story before on air, but somebody told me I had a couple good friends that were maybe a couple good friends that are at a data analysis company. And one year I was having a it’s like, it was like, I think it was Christmas. For years I would just stay here, and my mom was like, why don’t you come back home for Christmas? And I was like, this is not fun. She was like, but it’s your family. You have to and I was like, nope, turns out I don’t. So I stayed here. And then, of course, as I get older, I was like, no, no, I actually just want to spend time with them no matter what. But for years, I was staying in Austin for Christmas, and I went to a friend of mine’s house, and we’re playing a board game drinking wine, and some question came up, and she responded with, oh yeah. It was just my gut feeling, this fucking data analyst. And I just looked at her blankly, and I was like, What did you just say? And she was like, yeah, it was my gut feeling. And I was like, that’s how it I just sort of started to mumble, and it didn’t make sense to me, and she said, Oh, my belief is that we ingest tons of data that we have not consciously made sense of, and our gut feeling is actually us processing the data internally. And so our intuition is not blind intuition. It is informed by the amount of data that we brought in, but not consciously processed, but subconsciously processed

Andy Kolodgie 44:44
100% I think something we’ve worked on a lot I’ve worked on a lot over the past year, is like when I have a gut reaction to something. I feel very confident about my gut when it comes to what we do today in the business, but I don’t always know why, and so trying to write down and articulate why is my gut saying this? Like why there has to be a reason why? And so if I cannot create a rule or a boundary around this in the future, then, like, I have learned a lesson. I’ve just, I’ve just done the next thing. Sometimes that matters more than less. Like, sometimes when you’re evaluating a person, you shouldn’t move on your life. Like, you just need to have a good reaction, you know, go to the next thing. But if it’s like a business decision or like something with a lot of emphasis, a new lesson can be learned. And I think that’s really

Brad Weimert 45:20
important. Can you think of a time when you had a gut reaction and made the decision it was the wrong choice?

Andy Kolodgie 45:25
Yeah, we had a really bad business partnership that, you know, narcissist scam artists is probably a gentle way to put it. And, I mean, sounds like fun, yeah, professional, professional narcissist, professional scam artist. I mean, it was one of those situations where I like this whole list of things I look for in people now, and if they cross any of the boundaries, then I’m just like, I’ll just go on the next person. But yeah, effectively, like, they had convinced us that he was this, you know, big guy that knew all this stuff about all these things, but we found out he didn’t know any of that stuff. He was a complete Fugazi, for lack of a better word, and he had us, you know, wrapped up with him for two, two and a half years. I mean, there’s a whole lawsuit, and, like, all this nasty stuff, just get him out of the company, where he didn’t do anything, and he was stealing assets out of the company and all this stuff. So I’ve got this, like, nice list now, happy to go through it, but this nice list of stuff where it’s, like, you know, if the person can’t give you straight answers to questions, you can’t truly articulate how they make money or how they’ve how they’ve done so well or haven’t done so well, like those types of things, then it’s time to run away as fast as you can.

Brad Weimert 46:29
Yeah, I think that I do. I want to double click on that and talk about it more, because it applies to interviewing, it applies to vendor selection, it applies to dating, it applies to any business partnership. The I was interviewing somebody recently for employment, and they were talking about how they didn’t trust their current boss, but they were debating on whether or not they should leave. And I said, Look, whether you work here or not, you should work for somebody that you trust. And this was now his second employment where he did not trust the leadership. And of course, if somebody has a trend of not trusting leadership, it also has a data point for maybe it’s them, but it’s a really good my my commentary to him was, if you are finding yourself in position when you don’t trust somebody, you should trust somebody, you shouldn’t be in that relationship. Period. A, life’s too short. B, your guts probably telling you something, yep. And C, it is at least a flag to look at the other points. So what is the list of other things for you that are total deal breakers, or at least sort of check marks? Of, I need to dig in further. I like my notes. Yeah, totally awesome. So I know for while you’re doing that, while you’re pulling it up, I know for me, one of them is value misalignments and so, and I don’t mean like you’re religious and I’m not. I mean the underpinning, how do you approach life? How do you treat people? How do you commit to the task that you want to execute on. How do you communicate? Like these are all fundamental things that if we do them radically differently, we’re not going to work well together. What are those values? Oh, well, for us inside the company, it’s do the right thing. Open effective communication. We make things easier as an easy pay direct one. Persistence and growth are ours. And persistence growth and open, effective communication and do the right thing are huge like and we make things easier sort of for us. What that means is, I’ll do it so you don’t have to, so I’ll take the extra steps you don’t have to. But that kind of is built into persistence as well, right? So if your response to something as I don’t know, we have a fucking

Andy Kolodgie 48:43
problem. It’s funny, I always just think the value stuff is really cliche when building the business.

Brad Weimert 48:47
I think, I think every entrepreneur thinks that the value stuff is very cliche until they hit a certain point and they realize that even though it takes longer to get right in the beginning, it is ultimately a tremendous shortcut.

Andy Kolodgie 48:59
Yeah, I agree. Okay, so ego, high ego, can’t independently verify things that they say early on in the relationship, what they do in their personal life is what they do in their business life. Irrelevant, name dropping, available money, slash asset dropping. Can I get a clear answer on how they make money or how they made money? Number inflation, not to be confused with rounding, but like, proper number inflation, taking a while to answer a question. When someone’s like, and they’re like, scanning your face, they’re like, looking for reaction. And then a risk factor, not a guarantee, but a risk factor is a tough upbringing. It’s been a that’s been a common trend, a common theme that I’ve seen. I’ve worked great people who’ve had a tough upbringing. I’ve had some really bad relationships. People have had a bit tough upbringings, but it’s definitely a yellow flag. So that list was all stuff that were deal breakers, yeah? Well, the last one not a deal breaker, but the first, like five or six were definitely deal breakers.

Brad Weimert 49:52
Yeah, pull that. Pull that up again. So number inflation, proper, number inflation

Andy Kolodgie 49:57
cannot get a clear answer on how they make money or how they made money. Well. Clear answer, period,

Brad Weimert 50:00
and thinking about the answer when somebody asks you a question, like not being clear. So a couple things, a couple of those things for me are like, if somebody does that stuff socially in the beginning, there’s additional context for me, which is, younger entrepreneurs in particular, do stuff like that out of insecurity, not out of malice. Yes, and so I think that there’s a distinction there that I’ve learned over time that I didn’t see when I was younger. Because I think almost everybody does it right. They’re insecure, so they inflate things, or they try to posture, not understanding that first of all, established people that are actually doing well see through that shit immediately, and it’s just fucking annoying. But in addition, the best way to build rapport is to show your vulnerability and ask for help,

Andy Kolodgie 50:45
for sure. And you know, to add to that too, and this is for you. Could extend this to maybe business partnerships versus, like, business in general, or vendors or et cetera. But like, working with new people who are not as well established as inherent risk. And so, like, if you’re working with somebody who’s doing the number inflation because of their posturing, et cetera. Like, there is inherent risk with that, or there has to be, right?

Brad Weimert 51:05
Yeah, track record, isn’t there? Track Record very important.

Andy Kolodgie 51:09
You can always, like, there’s always a second deal. You can always wait for the next one, and there’s no risk of not doing the first one.

Brad Weimert 51:16
Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s, it takes you a lot longer to unwind a bad partnership than it does to wait for a good partnership. 100% what they do in their personal life isn’t what they do in their business life or

Andy Kolodgie 51:29
or like, what they what they do in their personal life is what they do their business life. So they’re, if they’re, you know, if they’re borrowing money from their friends, they’re taking a while to pay, like, to the same thing in their business life. And like, why would you

Brad Weimert 51:40
it’s a sort of how you do one thing is how you do everything, yeah? Effectively, yeah. I have a I’m gonna get put on blast for saying the shit. But very overweight people, yeah, I have never had good success with working with them, because there is a lack of discipline somewhere. And so if you see, if you see a trait in business or in somebody’s personal life, you can expect it to show up in business? Yeah, it’s not really a maybe. It’s just, how is it going to show up in business? Where is it going to show up, and how big of a deal is it going to be? For sure, and there are certainly super successful fat people also, if they have a lack of discipline in some area of their life, it probably is going to show up in business.

Andy Kolodgie 52:22
Well, it’s also odds too, right? So like, there’s there’s successful everybody, there’s successful fat people, they’re successful then people, etc. But you know, the the odds of someone being successful, hyper successful when they’re large and over the east is is rare. It’s less and you only have so many opportunities in your life or any given thing that you’re doing. So like, why take the risk on that person versus another person? Just like, inherent gut reaction to everything in

Brad Weimert 52:47
life? Yeah, yeah. I think that, for me, that goes back to values too, yeah? So it’s not, it’s not actually that, you know, it’s not like I hate fat people, it’s that I when I see somebody that has an outward expression of value, yeah, then I question what the value set is, for

Andy Kolodgie 53:04
sure, and for context, I’ve been fat, like, I’ve been there, but, yeah, no more, you know, no more. How fat were you? You know, I was a kid. I was probably 170 but I was and how tall, like, four foot, 11. I was like, six, four, but it was, like, skinny, fat. So it was like, you know, I was like, or whatever. I and but I was not, I was not comfortable with my body at that time. I was like, a bigger kid, and I got into running, and then, you know, I lost a lot of weight really fast. Yeah, that goes typically,

Brad Weimert 53:33
yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know. Man, a lot of people run, and it just causes them to eat more, like they lose weight, but then they’re like, I’m really hungry. For sure, I know when I’m in extreme cardio mode, I just eat excessively, and I also use it as an excuse to eat. Yeah. Now, if you’re doing enough of it, then everything’s moot in terms of what you eat. But you know, like, case in point are the pro athletes that just eat trash, like NBA players that eat trash. But yeah, yeah.

Andy Kolodgie 54:01
I’m curious. What’s your what’s your thought on the importance of ego and the the importance and the failures of ego in business?

Brad Weimert 54:08
I think it depends on the role heavily. So I think if you’re looking at a partner, then it’s a potential liability. I think if you’re looking at a sales person that you’re hiring, sometimes you deal with not sometimes with really good sales people, you deal with varying levels of ego, and sometimes it can be really good if you’re willing to manage it. Now, my rule with sales is we have to be value aligned, and nothing is worth dealing with the bullshit of somebody that’s misaligned and values or has too big of an ego? Yeah, no, nothing’s worth it because I need systemic sales, right? I need a predictable selling system. I don’t need to your point about system versus transaction. I don’t need a independent salesperson that we’re betting on, charismatic as fuck, best salesperson in the world. Don’t care. I need a systemic approach to sales. Skills that we can replicate, right? Because it’s not sustainable. You got it, yeah, but with that, I think that it is a truth that there’s good with the bad, and vice versa. So all of all of the things that you like about a specific person is tied to some things that you probably don’t like, right? There’s a flip side of the coin. So I have a friend who’s married to a complete free spirit. What amazing, fun person to be around, delightful, energetic and as you might expect, she’s late to fucking everything. And the reason she’s late to everything is because, in order to be a total free spirit and be totally present in conversation and having fun, she’s not looking at the clock, yeah? And she let go of that, right? Those things are inextricably tied. And so I believe. And so I think, with a lot of sales people, you see ego pop up, and it’s the ego that allows them to drive and be confident and sell, yeah, and that’s how they use it. But also part of that is you end up with annoying conversations and weird internal office shit that you deal with as a sales manager, yeah? Which is also why a sales manager is a different personality profile than a sales person, most of the time, interesting, but as a business partner, yeah, I don’t need a big ego as a business partner?

Andy Kolodgie 56:21
Yeah, I’m curious too. Like, do you feel like everybody’s required to have some level of ego? I think

Brad Weimert 56:28
we get into weird conversation about how you define ego,

Andy Kolodgie 56:33
like statement Freud level or kind

Brad Weimert 56:35
of, it’s like, what do we mean by ego? Yeah, you know, is it just that? Is ego a belief that you’re capable of doing something whether or not you’ve done it.

Andy Kolodgie 56:46
I think so. You know, it’s funny, I probably should come to the conversation with knowing the actual definition of ego before I like tap it into it, but, but

Brad Weimert 56:53
I don’t think so. Man, I think, I think most words in life, we have shared meaning on whether or not it’s the act, you know, accurate meaning or not. But like, so I think it’s fine to do that. And I think our job as back to open effective communication being a core value for us. The job is to define where we meet with the expectation of what that word means. So as long as we’re sharing the meaning and people are clear on that, like, if Ego means that, great, but to you, what does ego mean?

Andy Kolodgie 57:18
Yeah, I think I echo that definition like something I’ve struggled with over past year. I would not describe myself as someone who’s ego like I would not I would not name drop. I would not flash money like that’s not my my thing. If someone’s ego flares over something that I know for a fact they do not know, or they’re not good at, or they are overextending their bounds. Let’s say I can feel like my gut reaction kind of flaring up, and I’m trying to, I’ve been trying to figure that for past a year. If that’s like, is that a good sign, or is that a bad sign? I think it’s a bad trait, but I can’t figure out what the right good trait would be. Would be to do nothing, would be just ignore it would be to move on, or would be to catch them while they’re they’re doing something, or would just be like, Okay, this is a bad person like going to the next next thing.

Brad Weimert 58:08
I tend to look at that very contextually, okay? And my historically, I’ve spent my life waiting for those moments and viewing them as a chink in somebody’s armor, and as soon as I found a chink in their armor, I would dismiss them as a qualified person, and I’d be like, Oh, found where you’re full of shit. I’m not listening to you anymore. Yeah, and as I progressed through more business, in business, specifically, because you get these cycles that move quicker than real life, where I would see somebody dismiss them and then watch them and be like, Oh, wait, they really know what they’re talking about over here. Maybe they’re full of shit in this one area, but they clearly have something to teach me in this other area. Yeah, and so I try today to and I think a lot of that comes from just self awareness and recognizing that we all have areas where we’re full of shit, or where we say things that we later are like, Why did I say that? Like, that’s not true, you know. Or that’s not totally accurate. As much as I try to be completely accurate, persistently, I still say stuff sometimes where later I’m like, what? Like, why did I say that? Why did I say that? Like, that’s not what I meant, you know. But then the moment passes and it’s like, It’d be weirder to correct it than to let it go. And yeah, so I try to sort of take the good and let the bad pass, okay? And then I think it depends on the type of person that you’re interacting with, whether or not they still fill a role in your life interesting. So there are some people where, like, there have been significant flags with bullshit, where I’m like, they’re they’re totally full of shit. Okay, I’m not going to do business with them, but I’m okay having a personal relationship with them. Interesting. Or the next scale down from that is I’m not going to do business with them, and this is a deal breaker for having a close friend, but I’m still going to be social with them. I’m not going to avoid them, you know, if I see them around, we I can still enjoy your company if you’re around, but I’m not going to deliberately allocate my own time to spend with you. Yeah, right. And so I kind of think of people in buckets from that perspective, that

Andy Kolodgie 1:00:13
makes sense. So that’s, that’s good feedback. I think, I think I’m, I’m trying to, I’m working to exit the phase that you’re talking about, there the chink in the armor phase. I think I’ve been quick to do that in the past. Not quick, but I’ve, I’ve been waiting to do that in the past for for some sort of circumstances.

Brad Weimert 1:00:29
Yeah, well, you know, I think life is a interesting journey. And I also think that sometimes back to sort of gut feeling, sometimes that chink in the armor is the gut response to Nope, we shouldn’t be working together. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you’re right, yeah, right. And so I think it’s a it’s not a simple question or a simple answer, but I’m trying to figure out what those things are consistently of is the is the gut response I’m having to me disliking your behavior, something that should disqualify you in business, in personal life, in social life, yeah, yeah.

Andy Kolodgie 1:01:06
I’m curious to maybe this is relatable. Maybe it’s not to your business, but like in the in the pay per lead business, the pay per lead companies never loved and enjoyed. Everybody hates the pay per lead company, because the leads are always, never good enough, even if it’s better than everything else out there. Everything else out there. It was like, literally the best thing in the world. They will have people who come back, and they’ll pick a 20x ROAs, and they’ll be like, probably really could have been better. You know, it’s like, okay, I don’t know. Is that the same thing that you deal with in the processing space where people are just never happy, and it’s just a fact of the business that you’re in or is clearly different,

Brad Weimert 1:01:47
yes and no from a service perspective, no. I mean, we have, like, raving fans awesome, and that’s usually a product of the service. It’s usually the product of, like, working with somebody on our team and how the experience was through it from a fee perspective, yeah, yes. Because from a fee perspective, the vast majority of the world doesn’t understand payments, nor should they, you know, like it’s it’s a very complicated space, very complex in the back end and sell now explain later is the most functional way to convert and help a business owner who’s trying to get set up to accept payments. Yeah, what you can’t do on the front end when somebody says, hey, I need to accept payments for my business and say, okay, cool, let’s spend a half hour so I can explain interchange to you and where Visa and MasterCard fit into the picture. Yeah, no. So as a product, like some, they’re just people are going to feel confused or blindsided or like they’re overpaying because somebody else is going to sell them some bullshit later. Yeah, yeah, totally. And we have so many dirty people in the payment space. Like it’s so common for people to lie to you up front in the payment space, to hide fees to nickel and dime, to increase your rates later, and it’s hard to compete against somebody who’s completely lying to you on the front end, yeah, yeah, and doing a good job of it, yeah, yeah, totally. We can be as transparent as possible. Somebody else just promises the world and there’s bold faced lying. How do you convince the other person? Damn, right, yeah, definitely. Come back, yeah. So I think, yeah. I think some of both in our space, yeah. So it is the was the choice of partner the biggest mistake through the escalation of the company, through the growth of the company, yeah, that was, that was

Andy Kolodgie 1:03:44
definitely the biggest mistake. I mean, we wasted like a year working on, like another business in a different space, because we couldn’t, I mean, we were gonna build a company that that person was involved in. So we went over to the to the roofing ppl space,

Brad Weimert 1:03:56
which is how you found out that it was expensive and tough, yeah, no. I mean, the

Andy Kolodgie 1:04:00
roofing space is great, just like it was. We were, like, building two businesses and finding a lawsuit, a very you know, some lawsuits are very simple. Some are very complex, very complex lawsuit. And that’s like, way too many projects for for, at least for me, I can’t, I can’t do that, and so I’m glad to have gotten out of that stuff. But, yeah, the the type of person you do business with is critical. I mean, there’s a lot of people out there. There’s always another one. There’s always somebody who has the same skill set as that other person. And in the end of the day too, like one plus one has to equal three. You know, in a partnership, it can’t just be like two people working together, making money together. It’s got to be more substantial than that.

Brad Weimert 1:04:44
To do it over. Would you choose to not have a partner at all?

Andy Kolodgie 1:04:49
No, I would. I would still have partners. I mean, we still, I still have three total partners within properties today, especially in a. A multi sided business where you’re selling on both sides. Effectively, you need to have multiple operational faces with investment. It seems like to be successful. I haven’t seen a lot of successful companies

Brad Weimert 1:05:16
do that without it, meaning split expertise in different areas. Special expertise. Like, I might have, like, an execution, yeah, for sure. So like,

Andy Kolodgie 1:05:27
you know, we’ve got software, you know, product, marketing, sales, and then marketing is also a product itself, because the what we do for marketing is not just the marketing for the lead buyer, but it’s also the marketing for the homeowner. And that’s, like, a ton of stuff as well, very, very split in different expertise. So I don’t know how to successfully do that by myself. I don’t know if I could have done it myself. You know, if this was like an agency, it’s like, I do marketing, I sell the product. It’s a lot there’s a lot less moving pieces.

Brad Weimert 1:05:58
Well, see, there you go. You didn’t throw out the good with the bad. Yeah, you had a bad partnership, but realize that partners are still good. Yeah, I’ve had a I have very few partnerships. I’m, I’m bullish on doing my own thing, and it’s, it’s to my detriment. I’m sure I would be doing more and better if I had partners that were also accelerating a bad partnership. You know, I think this is human nature, right? You take a data point of one that’s really painful, and it’s only one data point, but it’s really painful, and you’re like, never doing that shit again, instead of, like, maybe I should try to find a good one. Yeah, I would say I’m

Andy Kolodgie 1:06:34
definitely less prone partners going forward. Like, I’m very vigilant of what people are doing, and like, I’d prefer to work around somebody, or with somebody, like, sort of the most recent partner in property leads. Like, we were working alongside that person for probably a year before, you know, having them kind of come in and stuff, and their company, like, changed structures so they left. But like, I got to experience that person for a long time before, for for a decent amount of time before they started to come in. First of all, these other partnerships were just like, oh, we just met, like, a month later. We’re, like, in bed together, and it’s the whole thing. And I wouldn’t, I would never do that again. Yeah, that’s, that’s a bad mistake

Brad Weimert 1:07:13
outside of, be really deliberate about any partnerships you get into. What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs starting out,

Andy Kolodgie 1:07:22
do one thing, do only one thing, and be very thoughtful about the one thing you do. I guess if you’re if you’re starting out too, you have to take, like a you have to take a ton of action, and a lot of it’s give you the wrong action, and that’s okay. But I think the thing that I’ve seen kill the most businesses has been doing more than one thing.

Brad Weimert 1:07:40
Well, last question is, where do you learn? Man, where do you go to get information? Get better, get educated. I mean, you are you have deep expertise in a variety of things, to have a business that has multiple faces, books, podcasts. Where do you get educated?

Andy Kolodgie 1:07:57
I’m a big believer in just in time education. So I wait until I have a problem that I’m learning and I go try to find as much information as possible. So whether that’s courses or podcasts or books or whatever I will, I will take everything. I mean, the big thing we’re doing right now is, like, if I have a topic that we’re trying to learn about and there’s like a whole podcast on or like a person who goes on a podcast, I’ll just download all the episodes, transcribe them, throw them in open AI or something, and, just like, play with the system that way, because that’s a lot faster than listening to 45 hours of podcasts. But I wouldn’t say I’m a frequenter of any just like, podcast off the RIP, or any book off the RIP. I’m going to hermosi books right now he’s got really good content, yeah, super sharp. Yeah, sharp. God, but you know, nothing, nothing in particular. It’s not a great answer. I’m sorry.

Brad Weimert 1:08:49
No, it’s awesome. It’s an awesome answer. I think that also the the idea of just so just in time versus just in case, information, yeah, I love and I think a lot of the time people conflate education for information, for valuable information, and I guess I’ll say that more articulately, they conflate education with learning. Yep, right. And so there’s a big difference between just absorbing or just listening to bullshit and actually learning it. And the takeaway of not just listening to 1000 podcasts, yeah, but taking the transcripts, throwing them into an engine, and asking the questions that you want is is a huge takeaway, for sure. Andy kalaji, where do you want to point people? Where can people find out more about you or about property

Andy Kolodgie 1:09:34
leads? Oh my gosh, find me on Facebook. Facebook.com, Andy kalaji, yeah, that’s not super big on social media, but I’m, I’m on Facebook so beautiful. Appreciate you carving out time. Thank you, man, appreciate it.

Brad Weimert 1:09:48
That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Please subscribe and most importantly, leave us a review. It takes like 30 seconds, and it makes such a big impact. It helps other people find us. Also. You might not know. This you can watch over 100 episodes of beyond a million with guests like Grant Cardone, Wes Watson and Neil Patel at beyond a million.com.