The Importance of CRMS
On this episode of Next Level American Dream, Abigail and Sean are joined by Brandon Barnes. Brandon is a seasoned restaurant veteran turned real estate junkie. We are so excited for you to get a glimpse of his experience through our conversation about why Customer Relation Management Programs are so important and beneficial to businesses.
Key Topics
Brandon Barnes’ own CRM platform and use cases
Ways CRMs can help manage properties and investments
Connect with Brandon:
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
CRM, business, calls, people, tasks, database, American Dream, leads, couple, run, Brandon, customer, VA, investors, years, seller, talk, investing, person, process
SPEAKERS
Sean Thomson, Abigail Thomson, Brandon Barnes
Abigail Thomson 00:00
Welcome to the Next Level American Dream Podcast brought to you by Thomson Multifamily Group. Your hosts, Abigail and Sean will discuss how you can take your American Dream to the next level through real estate investing, business practices, and personal development. Join us as we share our experiences as a father daughter duo who are trying to accomplish our goal of financial freedom. We hope you learn more about how to define and achieve your American Dream. Here's another episode of Next Level American Dream. On today's episode of Next Level American Dream, we are joined by a close friend, Brandon Barnes, to dive into why customer relation management programs are so important and beneficial in businesses. Brandon is a seasoned restaurant veteran turned into real estate junkie. He has been such an encouraging person in the development of our company, and we're so excited for you to get a glimpse of his experience through our conversation.
Sean Thomson 01:06
Hi, Brandon, how are you doing?
Brandon Barnes 01:08
I'm doing well, Sean. How about yourself?
Sean Thomson 01:10
Doing good, but thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your knowledge with us and our listeners. If it's okay, we'll just jump right in.
Brandon Barnes 01:20
Yeah, man! I'd love to.
Abigail Thomson 01:21
So Brandon, I love your story and how you got into real estate? Can you kind of tell us about that a little bit?
Brandon Barnes 01:27
Yeah, so got into real estate almost four years ago now. And I was a food and beverage what I thought food and Bev lifer, meaning I was going to work in a restaurant manage it forever. And we ended up having our first kid Penelope, who you may or may not hear in the background at some point, because we're all at home, and that we haven't heard her. And we decided that the foondit lifestyle was not going to be a good fit for like kind of raising a family, at least for what we wanted. So we had a property that we did like a an owner finance on. And I guess it turned out to be an investment property, you know, looking back at it now. And we kept getting this check. And so I wanted to learn how can I get more of those checks. And so we kind of explored it, thought I should be an agent, I quickly realized that the the retail world is not something I'm interested in. And that's when we got started with a hedge fund, my old business partner of mine worked for our fund here in Charleston. And that was, that was how it started.
Abigail Thomson 02:32
That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.
Sean Thomson 02:36
So Brandon. We're going to talk a little bit about CRM. So you I know you work with the shrug meta and and are you simply and I know you've you've used and worked with a ton of different CRMs in your business and throughout your years of operations. So I really trust what you had to say about CRM, you seem to be one of the leading sort of experts in my circles anyway. And using those things. So can you just kind of tell us what a CRM is, is what it is and what its intention is or what it's intended to be used for?
Brandon Barnes 03:07
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And it's funny, because when I started the business, I didn't know what a CRM was. And the first two years that we operate our business, we had no CRM, and it ended up costing us I'm sure a ton because we had no database of all the people that called us. So basically, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Manager, or management. And it is a software generally like a cloud based software that you can store your database in. So if I send a postcard or a text message, or RVM, or something like that, and the person responds, then they're going to come into our database, and then my database will, will capture their information. So phone number, email, if they come in from the website, name property that they're calling about, and just any data that is left, you know, from them. And it allows you to go and do different things with it. So we use it for follow up sequence, keeping up with our offers and appointments and things like that. So just really helps you see who's responding to you, and how to stay in touch with them and understand what's going on in your business.
Sean Thomson 04:20
So it's a way for you to take your customers, list those customers in a database, and just keep track of the interactions that you have with them for whatever communications you have, or whatever the deal flow is. Yep, it's happening at that moment, right?
Brandon Barnes 04:37
Yep. Yeah, no, it allows you to, you know, from the from the time that they go in until the time that either you in your CRM or you buy the house or the market dead or whatever happens with it, they every piece of communication stays there, and it makes a really good especially as you have team members if you know Shawn, if you are a team member, and we were And you talk to somebody, instead of you having to go to Brandon saying, hey, Brandon, this is what happened is how it went, you just put it in the CRM. And so when I got to talk to the person, I know kind of how your last conversation was, I know what time you talk to them, how you talk to them text phone call, and then you know what the conversation was about.
Sean Thomson 05:21
Right. And so I guess the those are some of the benefits of having a CRM. And I guess, tell us sort of expand on that idea of what what what is the CRM benefits are for, say, a solopreneur, or small business owner, especially in the real estate space. I know we use these all the time with CRM. But there may be other people out there in business that need a CRM for their customer management. So just maybe just mentioned a couple distant but maybe some more benefits of having a CRM and and what that can do for your small business.
Brandon Barnes 05:55
Yeah, so one thing cool about it CRMs are a national product, it's not something that's real estate specific, most sales industries, your doctor's office, they have a version of a CRM, you know, they have a way to, you know, it could be a portal or something like that clients can communicate, they can schedule for the real estate specific kind of space for us. One thing that is really good for our CRM is allows us to track our numbers. So I can tell you how many leads or prospects are calling in or responding daily, it can keep up with your profit per deal. So when we, you know, assign a deal or flip a deal, and we close that out, it lets us know what our profit, it was, you know, versus what we spent, it allows our CRM allows us to manage our construction in there. So it ties into our checking account. And then as properties you know, become renovated, it ties it to it, we keep up with our budget. What else can you do in CRM, you can do a lot of them can do marketing for you. Now, a lot of them have SMS capabilities, RVM capabilities, email capabilities, I think some of them even start to have some dialer, cold call dialer, capabilities. So you can, you can essentially go from a very basic entry level, like just store database to a very intricate, you know, high level one that does your entire business operations essentially.
Sean Thomson 07:21
So let's dive deeper into some of those things. So let's talk about if, let's say we have a customer that contacts us. And that customer is going to go into our CRM somehow. So let's say we get a phone call, and it goes into our CRM. And then there's a sequence of events that you can sort of kick off with that action. So talk about talking about sort of how the CRM maybe flows, and maybe in your business or in some of the other real estate businesses that you work with. Talk about how that that flow happens. And how that helps you helps your your your business, keep track and to utilize that customer contact to its fullest and to it throughout the whole process.
Brandon Barnes 08:03
Yeah, so CRM will have a lot of them, once you kind of get past the entry level stuff, they will have ways to optimize kind of like action plans or follow ups or whatever you want to call them some form of a list of things to be done. So in our CRM, if you if you call and we don't answer, we have a category that says no contact made. And what it does is instantly sends out tasks for our inside sales person to know what to do, you know, so they'll send a or they'll call that person back. If the person doesn't answer on that phone call, then they'll send them a text message. And then the next day, it'll kind of repeat until we get that person on the phone. And if somebody calls in, and the inside sales qualifies them as somebody who is not interested in selling their house versus somebody who is interested in selling, we have different sequences that then fire off. And the next step from there is if they want to meet with me on to sell their house, so an appointment set. Basically, it starts the next set of sequences, it'll tell me that I need to go ahead and run my comps. I need to print my credibility packet for my seller, it will tell me to make sure that I drive through the neighborhood for 15 minutes and get some driving for dollars. Look at the comps. And so it allows me You know, we're a small business, just my wife and I are in a VA. But if I were to have acquisition people, my CRM would tell me Are they doing these things. And so then as you click on them, it releases the next kind of tasks. And so essentially, from the time somebody calls, to the time that we're done selling a flip, there's some form of tasks that can be done. So when a house is sold, for instance, we have one getting ready hit the market here in about two weeks. And when it gets sold, we have tasked to turn off the power or switch the power Turn off, switch to water, make sure all that stuff's out of our name, stop insurance, so that you completely Tie off the property. So you can, you can take it and make tasks from the very beginning, from the moment somebody calls to the very end when you sold the property and tied everything out.
Sean Thomson 10:17
So it allows you to take all the processes in your business, and, and sort of best practices that you'd like to apply. And it gives you a way to track those and to automate some of that stuff and to and to set tasks for all your team members. And just to activate all that process and best practices in your business, the CRM can kind of give you one location for all those things to happen, right? Correct.
Brandon Barnes 10:42
Yeah, so so my job as a business owner, is to log into my dashboard daily, and see what tasks need to be completed for the day. And so for our, the way ours is set up, I know how many phone calls my VA is gonna make, not counting, you know, new stuff that's coming in, I know how many text messages she's gonna send, I know if she's gonna do anything else with seller. So we have she runs our direct mail. So I know how many you know, how many contacts you're going to pull out for that every day. So I can kind of see what she's going to do. And if I look in there, and I noticed, she doesn't have a lot to do, then it lets me to know to figure something else out or call some more people or do something like that. And so it really allows me to manage the business overall without having to get in and ask a bunch of questions.
Sean Thomson 11:29
Yeah, right. So it's also a way for you to manage your team members, not just your own time and your own like business process. But you can also see what the team members are, are activating for your business that day, whether their workload is too heavy or too light, or you know, if there's some critical things that you need to make sure that you talk to them about, you can kind of see all that in your CRM as well. So it's a, it's a great way to not just manage the customer process, but also to manage the team members that you have working in the business at the same time. So if you have three or four people, it's a great way to have a communication device with everybody. And, and a way to just monitor what activities they have going on really quickly as well, too, right.
Brandon Barnes 12:10
Yeah, and you can and you can critique it some too. So like, you know, we all stack list and try to get our data to the the people that are the most distressed, well, if I go in that morning, and I see she has 100 phone calls to make, well RVA is not going to make 100 phone calls in a day, she we don't use a dial or anything, she manually dials through our CRM. And so what I'll do is I'll say, Hey, you know, take it and stack it to where we call our distressed people first, you know, if we have some people that are on five lists, four lists, three lists, whatever, make sure we get to them today, no matter what the people who are just absentee are just free and clear, you know, just kind of on one list, you know, those are the people if we have to push them, or if she needs help, then we can move them to somebody else. And so that that also gives you the visibility to understand and create, we want it to go Yeah, because if it's, if it's, you know, my VA doesn't work Saturday or Sundays, and if it's a Friday, and she has 100 calls to make, I don't want her to leave all these three, four or five, you know, motivation, list motivation, people over the weekend, I want her to make sure she calls them first. And then there's anything left over the weekend, I can call or we'll push it to Monday, because everything staggered on a daily basis. So some days, you'll have six calls. And then some days you have 100. And so we'll just kind of move stuff down the line based on motivation.
Sean Thomson 13:28
It allows you to set priorities and keep things keep things turning at the top level that you want to hit absolutely hit the most, that have the most important to your business and the most impact in your business. So that's Yeah, that's important as well.
Brandon Barnes 13:40
Yeah, that's it's it. I mean, it's when we ran our business, you know, for the first two years, we ran with our hedge fund, and we didn't have a CRM, nobody had any clue what was going on. I can't imagine how many team members never really heard. So I've never had visibility over my team members, you know, so they could have been stealing leads, they could have been not doing it, just, you know, and so you didn't know what anybody's doing or anything.
Sean Thomson 14:08
You're just hoping everybody just was doing what they're supposed to, right? Yeah. But the CRM it gives you as long as everybody's utilizing the CRM properly, gives you a way to sort of monitor your entire business. And like I said, before, you know, you really want to put processes and best practices in place in your business too. And a CRM kind of gives you that methodology to do that. And the tools that you need to kind of activate those things and automate what you let's possible, I think, let's also talk about the use of virtual staff, right? So with a CRM, it gives you the ability to not only keep track of customers and in the deal flow with customers, apply your best practices and processes in your business, monitor your team and your staff. But let's talk about how people work with the CRM virtually and how it's beneficial to have a CRM when you have virtual team members. Because you have that visibility, how do you use your CRM or What do you think is the best practices for using Bs and a CRM together?
Brandon Barnes 15:03
Yeah. So you know, the first the one of the hardest things about VA is it starts with communication. Because you can't, it's not like I can pick up my cell phone and just call them if I have a question. So the CRM allows us to communicate with each other based on leads, or just in general, it allows you to see how much work they're doing, you know, I can go in and look at the activity of my staff and say, how many calls that you do today. And I don't have to just take her word for it, which is really important, because when we first had VA s, they made calls in our CRM, but our CRM didn't track any of it. And so it's just kind of them saying, you know, Tally mark on their piece of paper, and they say, Oh, I made 40 calls, or 30 calls, or now, it gives me visibility, because they have to click a button, it gets registered to my CRM. And then I can go in and say, Oh, they did 40 calls, they did 50 calls, 20 calls, they set appointments, I can actually see filter based on the person how many appointments they set. And so it lets me know, you know, when they're working as well, because you can, you can see them start clicking buttons and moving and doing stuff. And if I don't see phone calls being made by you know, 1010, or I don't see certain things happening, then it lets me know, Hey, what's going on. And so I think your CRM, them having access to it, a allows you to communicate with them easier. And then B allows you to truly see what they're doing on a daily basis versus have take their word for it.
Sean Thomson 16:29
It also gives you a methodology to task them with things to do, right. So it gives you a central location where you can say, Okay, here's your list of things that need to be accomplished today. And here's what you need to do. And then and then once you have that sort of tasking done, you can monitor what if they're accomplishing those things? right?
Brandon Barnes 16:46
Correct. Yeah, so they have most of ours are already automated. But if we have certain tasks, like, if I talk to somebody and we need something else, I can manually give her tasks, and it lets me know that they're going through and doing them as well. So yeah, most of them are pretty much automated at this point where somebody calls all the tasks are assigned, but then allows me to manually do stuff as well, which is really nice.
Sean Thomson 17:10
You know, the other thing I like about the CRM in this interface is that if she does find a situation that isn't sort of in the processes, or in the protocols that we have set up, she can easily contact me with notes in the CRM to say, Hey, this is where this is the situation with this particular customer, what do you think, and you can interact really quickly and get things accomplished really, really quickly. So you're not having any delays with that customer flow to that's one of the things I like about using it.
Brandon Barnes 17:37
Yeah, because it comes straight to me. So if she tagged me in there needs me to directly at it sends me an email, I have the ability to respond to it immediately from in the field, or wherever I'm at, and I can, you know, help them with it. It just goes back to how important communication is.
Sean Thomson 17:55
I think a CRM, you know, we're in this Shelter in Place Order. And for me, at least not much has changed in my business. Because the way my business is structured, you know, I do things virtually, and I work in a CRM, you know, so working from home or working from various locations, those types of things that a CRM really kind of empowers you to be able to run your full business like that his talk a little bit about how the CRM, the power of the CRM gives you that flexibility.
Brandon Barnes 18:23
Yeah, I mean, you can travel, you know, I was in New York couple weeks ago, right at the tail end of I guess, when you're supposed to be in New York. And I think it was like, the last day they wanted people to be there. But you know, it allows me to be anywhere in the country. You know, we travel for mastermind, you and I are in a couple together, and allows you to work from there, you know, if I need to make seller calls, if I need to see what's going on, as long as I have, you know, an iPad, a laptop, some way to log on to the internet, I can, I can run my business from anywhere. And then you know, the other side of it is just if you have to meet with people or see houses, but that's such a small portion of this business is necessarily having to meet with sellers, when you when you think of all the marketing and outbound calls and processes and everything you have to do, you can run most of your business from anywhere. And so when you have times like right now where we're supposed to be staying at home, all we had to do is pivot just a little bit and change our conversation like hey, instead of coming to the house, let's just do this over the phone. And then nothing business just kind of stayed as usual.
Sean Thomson 19:30
Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, and I know you working with Sharon, and re simply. And I know Sharon has been developing his own CRM the sorry, simply version. Yeah. For several years, a couple years at least. Right. Yes. Talk to talk to us about what what caused him to, to think this was necessary, first of all, and then sort of his process of building it and what his thought process was for it.
Brandon Barnes 19:56
Yeah, so he's been programming it over two years now, and they've been running in their business for like a year and a half or a year. And just like he was just like every other investor, we all have all of these things that we have to log into, you know, you have Slack, you have Asana, you have your CRM, you have call rail, you have call tools, you have SMS platform, you have all these things that you have to log into, just to run your business. And so, you know, QuickBooks is another thing builder trend. And so basically, what he wanted to do was build something that was a turnkey package, because there really isn't a turnkey package on the market, anywhere, you know, there are people that do a lot of it, but don't have this and do a lot of this don't have that. And because it's difficult, because we are needy people as investors, you know, we all want something to be quick and be just this way. And so he tried his best. And I think he's done a really good job at building something that does all of it. So we've been partnered up for a couple months now, I've been using the software for a couple months. And it's taken away any of our management contract for contractors. So we put our scope of work together, we keep up with our budget in there, it takes care of our leads, it takes care of we just cancel QuickBooks a couple of weeks ago, because it transitioned all my books in there, it keeps up with all my vendors that so like, you know, you're out driving around, you see somebody who paints a house, take a picture of that, send it to your VA, we have all my my painting vendors, my flooring, my roof, let's see it keeps up with our leads that we're getting. And it truly has kind of turned keyed it for us, which has been really nice. And that was his. That was his passion. And that is his passion for doing it to continue. You know, every day, every week when we meet, we're talking about new features and what's coming. And our goal is to eventually encompass cold calling and texting. And we run direct mail out of there now. So the CRM actually is a mail house list stacking, trying to think, yeah, I mean, it pretty much kind of encompasses everything that we need in there right now.
Sean Thomson 22:13
Yeah, I know sir. rod is very methodical. He's very good at that I got when we're synthesizing the what's you know, what's critical in the business and the processes. And I know, he's really, really tuned in to just the step by step by step that a business needs to kind of work through a process. And so he him developing a CRM, I could see how the how he would, first of all, how you would want to have his own, and then how it would be something that is very powerful, and very, very well thought out. So I haven't used the army simply I should say, but you know, I've been on the same CRM for several, several years. So change at this point is a little bit difficult. But I've seen it and I've seen the power of it. And I do use a couple of the tools actually, that are in army simply I used the texting SMS platform. So I don't use it as my CRM, but I do use some of the tools that he has. So he has, you know, various so many various things on there that even a portion of it is beneficial to someone like me, but so anyway, so yeah, that's I can see us rod would be create something wonderful.
23:18
He's done a great job of his developers, he's done a great job prioritizing and listening to people that want to sign up. You know, it started as you know, we had some free users and just Hey, kind of get used to it. And then we started bringing on, you know, bigger investors that are doing more things and more markets and multiple, because then all of a sudden, you add multiple markets, you have zip code, you have different stuff that you have to kind of process in there. And so we've really prioritized what the general wants general public wants and are moving at pretty well. So it's been pretty good.
Sean Thomson 23:58
Yeah, good. Well, tell me tell me a little bit what's you know, and you were coming on the show? And I guess you kind of knew what we're going to talk about. Is there anything that that you wanted to make sure that everybody kind of knew about our topic today that you want to make sure that I asked about or that you want to convey to everybody? Because they're like, you might say, Hey, this is the one thing you need to know about serums?
Brandon Barnes 24:20
Yeah, I mean, I just think that it's something that if I could go back and and the almost four years that I've been doing it, the one thing that I wish that I would have gotten right out the gate was a CRM, and it doesn't have to be, you know, something that is as powerful as ours, even though ours is at a price point. That makes sense, but it can be something entry level, basic, you know, there's some, there's some free stuff out there. And the most important thing is if you're going to spend the money marketing, which is probably the most expensive piece of this business, capture your database capture your leads, because I did it for two years, and I have none of those people's phone numbers. I had none of, you know. So when you have a time like we are right now with staying at home, and people are cutting budgets and really kind of honing in on their stuff, one of the big things that we're talking to people about is go back to your old database. Well, if you don't have an old database to go back to, then you have to just keep generating leads right now. And so you know, thankfully for me, I can go back, I have hundreds of leads, I can go and recall all them read text them, you know, and figure out ways to communicate with them without having to spend more money to bring stuff in. So you know, that that I would give that to any kind of entry level investor, please make sure that you get something, obviously, I'd love to talk to you about it. But there, there's tons of stuff out there, there's there's entry level podio stuff for like 30 bucks a month, I think is what it is, now, it's not free anymore. And some other things, just get something to collect your database. And then for more seasoned investor, somebody who's has a big marketing budget and does a lot of stuff, make sure whatever you're doing can dial your numbers at you. So that again, when you come through times, like we are right now, I want to know what zip codes making me the most money, what list is making me the most money, what marketing campaigns making me the most money. And we can do that. And so this is where you can say, All right, I'm spending $30,000 a month, what's the best 5000 that I could spend if I targeted. So you know, that's the importance of having some form of database and CRM as you can capture your leads from entry level all the way to a seasoned ambassador. And then you can know what you need to be spending money on.
Sean Thomson 26:37
So you would encourage someone to think hard about investing in a CRM early on in their business, and find something that they can then grow with, but to get but to get something in place early, so that they have that data that they're capturing as their business starts to grow, or as they're starting to get get started. Right. So you would you would encourage everybody to, to take that step now, whatever it is, so that so that you're not losing that that work you're doing early on, right?
Brandon Barnes 27:04
Correct. Yeah, you don't have to go out like I see tons of stuff in Facebook groups, everybody's like, what's the best CRM, what is you know, what's going to do all these things, if you're just starting, just get something that captures your data, just gets something that you can take a phone number and and forward it to that phone number. And when that person calls, you get their phone number, that's it. And then the next step is trying to figure out how you can get follow up in there. Because I like to refer to my CRM as an employee, they should be texting, they should be, my CRM should be communicating with sellers while I'm sleeping or not working around a house or something. And then the third thing is your CRM should track your numbers, your date, your your marketing, spend your profitability and things like that. So you know, don't try to, as long as you can export information out of your CRM, it doesn't really matter where you start, the key is just get started. And then if you want to take some time to find a better version of one, then you can do an Excel export out of your CRM and import it into anybody else's database. You know, we take people from different CRM load all their leads, and ours, it's nothing difficult to be done.
Sean Thomson 28:12
Right? That's good.
Abigail Thomson 28:14
Yeah, that was awesome. I think that's gonna add a lot of value to not only investors, but business owners in general. And something that we have noticed in our business in our life is that the traditional structure of the American Dream, just doesn't really seem to be as successful as it once was. And that's kind of the purpose of this podcast is to educate people on how they can kind of just go to the next level and improve on that idea. But I want to know what you think the American Dream means to you and kind of how you're applying an altered meaning into your life in your business.
28:57
Yeah, so I mean, growing up the American dream to me was, work really hard, put it into some crazy account that you have no control over, and retire at 66, or whatever the age is and, you know, then hang out with your family. And that was the environment that I grew up in, my dad worked, he traveled so he was gone. five days a week, my mom worked two jobs. And so and it was all to retire one day so they can hang out with us. Well, what I learned through having our kid is that I don't want to wait until I'm 65 years old, and my kid doesn't want to hang out with me. You know, it's pretty cool that you guys are doing that together your age because when I was your age, I don't want to hang out my parents, you know, I wouldn't have done a podcast with my parents. And you know, but it shows the difference and you know, entrepreneur or somebody maybe that that is like hey, I'm gonna work really hard and then enjoy life. And so hanging out my kids if I can do something to hang out my kids everyday. That's it, but the American dream for me has altered a ton more last couple years, and it's nothing crazy, I'm a huge golfer, I want to be able to play golf every day, you know, nine holes, whatever. And then I want to hang out with my family and I want to be the place that other people come and congregate, you know that we're grilling out, we're hanging out a pool, whatever it is, and just getting to, like, truly enjoy moments without having to worry about, you know, all these other things that are going on in life. So, you know, it's not a financial number, it's not a, it's nothing, it's just Can I put stuff in place, whether it be passive income, or own businesses that create income or do something else, to where I can enjoy time with my family, because, you know, your kids grow up so fast. And to me that that is the most important thing. And and so that's, that's our dream, I see my I see my in laws, who I love to death, you know, she's, she's still working 50 hours a week. And, you know, and but it's all because I have to make sure that my retirement is going to be there, I have to, and I don't want to be that, you know, I don't have a you know, I've always you're going to retire at 40. I just means that I want to have my businesses built to where I can enjoy my family. But yeah, the dream for me is play golf every day, hang out with my kids and be a place that my family can congregate, come to our house, hang out and then throw in a little travel every now and then I guess if it if it means something, but pretty, pretty basic.
Abigail Thomson 31:31
Yeah, that's awesome. I think I have some very similar, similar ideas of what it means to me as well. So I guess our final question is, how can our listeners get in touch with you talk more about CRM things that you're doing in your business?
Brandon Barnes 31:46
Yeah, so from a social media standpoint, which I'm on there ton, you can find me @BBarnesREI, which is across all platforms, I have no problem giving out my cell phone, it's (843) 990-3409. And then as far as the CRM, my email is brandon@reisimply.com. And you can email me there, and we'd be happy to help you, with your CRM, show you what we can do? Or if I can just help you with investing our business in any way. Let's do that.
Sean Thomson 32:23
Yeah, thanks, Brandon. I want to do this to mention too, that you know, are you simply is owned, operated, built everything by guys who are investing today that you guys are you're using it in your business, you're you're deploying everything, every tool that the CRM has every day and what you do so that's that's something I think that makes a difference, you know, put the guys at podio are not a real estate investor.
Brandon Barnes 32:49
Now, the Citrix guys are not now we like Sharad has a large turnkey business out in Northwest Indiana and Chicago, my wife and I, we actively flip and wholesale here in Charleston. And we use the CRM every day, we're constantly trying to break it. So that we can learn how to make it better, you know, if I'm using follow up or tracking certain things, and it's not working, then him and I get on a zoom call and say how can we figure this out. And it's the whole idea is to make it so that investors are, you know, taken care of, it's easy for them to use, and it actually works in their business. I think we actually just launched an app this week, which goes on your mobile phone. So we're starting to play with that. So that will be one of the first one that has that. So we're pretty excited to start testing. I think we have some some beta testers using right now.
Sean Thomson 33:39
But yeah, but I think the fact that you guys are actually using it in your investment business every day, makes a big difference in the tool that you're using, and how just refined and powerful it can be. So anyway, yeah. Thanks for thanks for coming on the show with us. Uh, Brandon, we really appreciate it. I think that you gave a lot of people some good information, you know, see your AMS I know, our big question for everybody. No one knows what's the best one and no one knows which one where to go to get them and things like that. So I appreciate you coming on and kind of sharing some of the, the fundamentals on why you need one and then maybe give some alternatives to and hopefully people can reach out to you and get more information as well.
Brandon Barnes 34:18
Yeah, and there is no there is no like the best one. You know, everybody has different personalities, everybody has different businesses, you need to find one, like the way that I always try to do is find something that'll I align with the person who owns it or runs it or I'm going to be working with to make sure that we can communicate, I can get what I need, they can get what they need and go from there. You know, and that's, to me, that's the most important part about it. There's no, there's no best CRM, they're all good tools. There's tons of good tools out there. There's people that are successful on all platforms, you know, but to me, it's like who can provide you value in your business, who can provide you value in the software to get you what you need? And then Who do you want to be, you know, in business Right, your long term essentially.
Sean Thomson 35:02
Well, we appreciate you. We appreciate you sharing that with us. And we'll have to have you back on and talk about your know your investing business and tips and tricks. I know you've got, you've got a lot of insight into that stuff. So we'll have you back on for a couple more episodes, hopefully. All right.
Brandon Barnes 35:17
Anytime, man love to.
Sean Thomson 35:19
Alright. Thanks a lot for so much for being on the show and we'll talk to you soon.
Brandon Barnes 35:23
Sounds good. Appreciate it guys.
Abigail Thomson 35:24
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Next Level American Dream. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about today, want to contact a team directly, or interested in passively investing and being a part of our deal room, head over to our website at www.thomsonmultifamilygroup.com Before you go, please leave a review! Your comments help us create more episodes for you to enjoy.